Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Day 83
“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)
Today, the 49th Yahrtzeit of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, I am going to immerse us in the last sentence of this paragraph. This is the question and the solution to our hopelessness and our callousness. As I am hearing Rabbi Heschel, he is teaching us that hopelessness is related to and informed by our callousness. Having never thought of this relationship, I am realizing how true Rabbi Heschel’s words are. We are told in the Torah to “circumsise the foreskin of our hearts” not just to let Torah in, as I am understanding it now, it is also to let hope in and cut away the callousness, aka, the hardened skin around our hearts, our minds, our souls.
Rabbi Heschel is correct, duh, in reminding us that our hardened skin, our hardened hearts, create a wall between what our souls are telling us and what God wants from us-which are the same messages. This wall has been lauded by many as the reason for great thoughts, etc and in reality, the wall has prevented people and humanity from learning from our past, seeing what is in front of us, looking ahead to the future with hope and a plan for growing rather then what we have now; a plan for going backwards, a vision of humanity as the end all/be all, a hope by some that climate change, war, etc will create Armageddon so they can go to heaven and be saved, a hatred and suspicion between people, judging people based on the color of their skin, their political leanings, their religion, etc instead of raising the content of everyone’s character to the level that Rabbi Heschel has set for us.
This callousness prevents us from learning and seeking new ideas, new solutions, new experiences. We are stuck in one way of thinking, one way of acting and purity is the litmus test for answering the question “are you with us or against us”, calling for an either/or reaction leaving no room for grey, no room for having a both/and response. Our callousness has not only led to hardened skin and hardened hearts, it has led us to be hard-headed as well. We are not able to use our gift from God to reason and seek solutions when we are so hardened, so calloused that we continue to spout a party line that offers no real connection to what God wants, to what our souls are calling for and what another soul needs us to help them with. Our callousness leads to the hopelessness of ever believing anyone else truly cares, it leads us to the hopelessness of believing that nothing will ever change and nothing will ever get better, the hopelessness of ‘I have to protect mine because they are coming to take it away’, all the while the people we are following are lining their pockets, being mendacious with us and feeding our self-deceptions!
We see this on a grand scale and we also experience it on a cellular level. Think about the times our callousness has used another person for our own gain, not for their best interests. Think about the times we have engaged in deceitful gossip just to feel better about ourselves. Think about the times we have put down the ideas of another, like Rabbi Heschel, underhandedly by agreeing with the concepts and never following through on their implementation. Think about how we have turned a deaf ear to the inner calls of our spouses, children, parents, siblings, etc and blaming them for our callousness. While we can see the callousness of another, Rabbi Heschel is calling on us to see how our individual callousness has created a wall between us and God and this wall creates the hopelessness we are experiencing.
We begin our recovery by acknowledging our callousness towards another human being and towards God. We begin our recovery by turning towards God/Higher Power/Force of the Cosmos and acknowledging how we have used the gift of mind, intuition, spirit, to create walls between us and everyone else. We acknowledge how we have lost hope and faith in our own humanity and the humanity of another human being. We begin to chip away at the wall we have created through fellowship, service and introspection allowing us to see the light that glows within us and the light that glows within each and every human being.In recovery, we get to break down walls inside of us as well.
I understand the words in Torah where God commands Moses to “Come to Pharaoh” in a different way using Rabbi Heschel’s teaching. Moses is God’s light and is to bring the light into Pharaoh’s darkness and try once more to light up his mind and his soul. It doesn’t work and that doesn’t mean we don’t keep trying. I have been engaged in bringing light for most of my life, my Hebrew name, Meir, can be translated as bringer/causer of light. The light I was growing was walled off by me as a response to life’s occurrences as a young teen and the walls came down in 35 years ago in a jail cell and learning Rabbi Heschel in the prison yard. Callousness still rises up in me, it is a fleeting experience rather than a way of being. I am hopeful all the time because of the teachers who continue to open my heart and show me my light and the way to light up the path of another. It just doesn’t get any better than this. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark