Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Day 78
“What is the hope of man with his faithfulness being so feeble, vague, unstable and confused? The world that we have long held in trust has exploded in our hands, and a stream of guilt and misery has been unloosed which leaves no man’s integrity unmixed. But man has become callous to catastrophes. What is our hope with our callousness standing like a wall between our conscience and God?”(Man is Not Alone pg.147)
Immersing ourselves in Rabbi Heschel’s teaching above allows us to truly see ourselves and our current life situations, personal, communal and worldly, in a different light. While yesterday I wrote about the economic despair, the split between groups of people, today I am struck with both the inner and outer faithfulness that is “feeble, vague, unstable and confused”.
Our faith in our self is called into question each and every day. We face a crisis of faithfulness every time we make a decision during the day. Yes, we have the science, the history, the facts, and we have to make an inner decision to follow what we ‘know in our kishkas/guts” is the best choice to make. We are being confronted with the lies, the deceptions of ‘alternative facts’, prejudice and hatred, while always under the surface, has erupted and becoming accepted as okay by police, Governors, state legislators, even a former president and his cronies/stooges! I am not going to delve into the psyches of these UnGodly people, I am struck by the feeble and confused faithfulness of their followers, their defenders, their soldiers who carry out their commands to hate, to enslave, to see the color of someone’s skin, the religion someone practices rather than the content of their character.
The people who follow these authoritarian hate-peddlers are the ones who’s faith is feeble and confused and have become an unstable source of good for God. There is no way they can be confronting their inner self, their soul, their higher consciousness and continue to proclaim that God wants them to control another person’s body (which is a lie-Scriptures doesn’t mention this), discriminate according to a persons skin color (God brought the Jews out of Egypt as a statement that slavery is inhumane), make excuses for inhumane treatment of another human being because ‘my friend’ did it; MBS killing Jamal Khashoggi (God tells us: “Do not murder). Because we do not exercise our inner life and continue to grow it by following blindly along with whatever our ‘leader’ tells us, our faithfulness has to be “vague and unstable”. People go to fundamentalist thinking because they are unwilling to engage in the inner wrestling, inner conflict that mature faith, stable faith, strong faith calls for.
I hold the spiritual and political leaders responsible as well. We are not educating our children to ask questions and challenge ideas and events anymore. We are giving them the facts to memorize, be it in secular or spiritual classes, and reward them for regurgitating these ‘facts’ back to us. Jewish Education is meant to engage in the questions our ancestors encountered and yet, our kids are not given the proper tools nor the permission to disagree with “our sages” in some cases and in others to only disagree with them. We are not giving our children nor our adults the proper tools with which to confront the Spiritual texts that should be and need to be the foundation of our faithfulness and wonder why faithfulness is so “feeble, vague, unstable and confused”!
We need a renaissance of learning, wrestling and engaging. We need to strengthen our faithfulness with dialogue not diatribe. We need to learn about our own faith traditions (religious and/or secular) and how to find the path to our souls, our inner wisdom, our inner conflicts. We need to follow these paths and engage in the battle for our souls, the battle for our ability to take the next right action and go beyond our lower logic, our fundamentalist thinking, our narcissistic concerns. We have to begin to engage with people who are not like us so we can build better bridges, build smarter and more robust solutions and see the humanity, the faithfulness and the strength of another human being. It is time to stop isolating, it is time to stop killing our own souls/selves, it is time to stop going backwards to ‘the good old days’ that were actually demeaning, enslaving and hate-filled. It is time to be faithful to the principles that have sustained the world’s existence, that are responsible for the founding of the US and have continued the spiritual quest for freedom begun so long ago in Egypt by the Israelites, Moses and God.
In recovery, we are constantly studying the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous and other spiritual texts to learn more about our own self, our way of being and a new way to be in the world. We know we have to work everyday to strengthen our inner voices, to engage with life in ways that honor the faithfulness God has in us and the trust we need to reciprocate to God and to another person. We do this because it is a living amend to all the people we were unfaithful towards.
My education and pathways to my inner life have not stopped nor can they. Rabbi Heschel keeps me on my toes as do the people around me, the news I encounter, the texts I read and the prayers I engage in. I am constantly seeking more and more education to better understand and respond to the call of my inner life and the call of another human being as well as the call of God. Without a stable, strong, clear and purposeful faithfulness we can’t do this. Stay safe and God Bless, Rabbi Mark