Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Day 73
“It is as easy to expel God as it is to shed blood. And yet even when He hides, even when our souls have lost His trace we may still call Him out of the depths: out of the depths of all things. For God is everywhere save in arrogance.” (Man is Not Alone pg.145)
Reading this paragraph/teaching each day for the past 4 days has impacted me greatly. Our calls to God never go unanswered, we just have to attune our hearing, clear out our inner chaos enough to hear God’s response. As the last sentence says, “God is everywhere save in arrogance.” What a brave statement to make and I believe this goes a little unnoticed about Rabbi Heschel, his courage and his bravery under fire. True, he did not serve in the military and he was a general, strategist and foot soldier in the war for the soul of Jews and the soul of America; at a time when the rest of the Jews and the rest of America was not even aware of the onslaught against their spiritual foundation.
Arrogant comes from the latin: “to claim for oneself”, which validates the truth of Rabbi Heschel’s teaching above. We are so enamored with the Greek civilization and it has become such an insidious part of societal norms, we think nothing of claiming for oneself things that don’t belong to us, things that we are a part of and not the entirety of. Plagiarism is such a behavior and while it is condemned once known, the fact that it is done so often and with such impunity is a sign of the arrogance of our current state. The College Admissions Scandal is a sign of arrogance of the wealthy and the con man. William Singer took advantage of the arrogance of wealthy people and then took advantage of them again by ‘rolling over’ when he masterminded the whole scheme! His arrogance is mind-boggling as well as the arrogance of the wealthy involved in this scandal-God was not anywhere in this experience because arrogance and God cannot co-exist. Singer, et.al. claimed for themselves the ‘right’ to do whatever they wanted to because they were wealthy and he was ‘smarter’ than everyone else.
We see this arrogance in some of our Spiritual Leadership today. “Come to me/us-we have the answer to your problems” “Come to us/me and I will tell you what God is saying” “Come to us and you will be saved” “Come to us and we will show you the way (there is only one and it is ours) to God, to serenity, to wealth, etc.” are all slogans we hear from churches, mosques, and temples of all different spiritual and religious traditions. How arrogant is this! God is infinite and we are finite, hence it is impossible for any human to make these and other statements. Of course we know what God wants: decency, justice, kindness, caring, love and truth; yet no one knows the totality of God nor can anyone point to only one way to understand God much less serve God. Yet, we hear all the time, Spiritual Leaders, Religious leaders claim for themselves God’s mantle and knowing. Instead of rejecting these charlatans, we follow them even to our physical deaths, we follow them to rejecting vaccines, we follow them to hate another group of people because they are not like us. These are not God-fearing people acting in this way; these are people who live in such arrogance that God cannot dwell within them, within their community and mendacity and self-deception.
We see this with our political leadership as well. We have so many people who don’t care about what is best for all/a vast majority of people event their own constituents, they care about being seen and being an obstructionist. They cater to a Religious intolerance and deception as well as to the prejudices and vulnerabilities of some people. Being judgmental about the poor and the needy: it is their own fault after all because God doesn’t love them as much as the rich and powerful according to the mendacious prosperity gospel being preached; making the stranger an outcast: after all the problems we face today are because of them as some of our elected officials and citizens like to say; are two of the ways of claiming for themselves what God means when 36 times in the first 5 Books of the Bible we are told to care for the poor and the needy as well as the stranger because we were strangers in a strange land! All of these lying deceptive arrogant people forget they were immigrants here as well. They do not care that their constituents and their congregants are part of the poor and the needy!
It is sad that even people who don’t have the same views, who are not so arrogant, respond to these liars and engage with them on their level instead of engaging with them on God’s level. Every compromise that keeps God out of the picture, that doesn’t uphold the principles of justice, truth, kindness, compassion, love, etc falls into the category of arrogance as I am experiencing the teaching above today. We have to look at our institutions, our families, our relationships as well as to see our own acts of arrogance and our ways of expelling God, of not crying out, not hearing the cry of another and not hearing God’s response.
In recovery, we are constantly seeking to improve our conscious contact with God, knowing that God/the Ineffable One is so beyond our comprehension we can only stay clear enough to hear God’s call back to us and to respond to the call/cry of another human being.
I know I have been arrogant and expelled God and each day I strive to do this less and less. Stay safe and God Bless, Rabbi Mark