Daily Prophets
Day 69
“At night I yearn for you with all my being, with all my spirit I seek You. When You judge the earth all the inhabitants will learn righteousness. But when the scoundrel is spared, he doesn’t learn righteousness; in the land of integrity he deals perversely and ignores the majesty of God.”(Isaiah 26:9,10).
Isaiah is portraying the contrast between one who learns and one who doesn’t. The contrast here is crystal clear and we all have to make this choice. Each evening before we fall asleep, many people recite the bedtime Sh’ma, ending with Adon Olam prayer where we say we entrust our spirit to God and are not afraid. We wake in the morning and thank God for returning our soul to us, the Modeh Ani prayer.
I yearn for God to clean my soul, have me dream/nightmare what I have to get out of my system so I can better serve God and then return my soul to me so I can get on with God’s business today. Without the spiritual connection to God, I would only get on with my business. We need to yearn for God so that we strive to connect to God and learn from God.
Learning righteousness is only half the goal. The prophet had enough faith in humanity to believe that if we learn righteousness, have gone through affliction, told the stories of our ancestors’ errors and the afflictions they caused, we would automatically practice righteousness. We need to both learn and practice this righteousness, otherwise we will be the scoundrel, the wicked, that Isaiah speaks about and to in verse 10.
The people Isaiah was speaking to had become so comfortable with deceit and mendacity that they didn’t think they were scoundrels or wicked, they were just doing what everyone else, especially their leaders and power brokers were doing. They had bought the lies they told themselves and others told them. I would say they depict the inner war of the “Rasha” at our Passover Seders.
Rabbi Heschel, in teaching about Verse 26:10, says: “it was a major enigma that confronted the prophet: How is it possible to not see the majesty of the Lord…? What we call the irrational nature of man, they called hardness of heart.”(The Prophets pg. 189). He goes on to teach: “Obstinacy in the hour of imminent disaster is uncanny, irrational.”(ibid pg.91). These two teachings remind us of our nature to be irrational and obstinate in the face of God’s call, God’s plea and God’s outreach. Even before we were so “sophisticated” as we are now, humanity was obstinate and irrational in the face of disaster and doom. They were, as Rabbi Heschel teaches elsewhere, willfully blind.
Speaking of obstinate, irrational and willfully blind… Our Senators have to take off their blinders, end their mendacity, stop being irrational and obstinate and see what is happening in our country and the world. We can no longer wring our hands at mass shootings like Boulder and Atlanta, Newtown and Parkman. We, the people, have to demand righteousness or ouster to the people who keep lying, taking the bribes of lobbyists from NRA, engage in obstruction of just and kind ways of being, deny the rights of the victims to “certain unalienable rights” as our Declaration of Independence declares. These Senators, like Joe Manchin, are FOS, full of sh*%, in their care and concern-if they actually cared, they would do something. All of these “good people of faith” are actually scoundrels who do not see the majesty of God nor the majesty of God’s creatures, human beings.
In recovery, we have been afflicted, we have experienced our irrationality and obstinacy in the face of God’s calls and the disaster that we caused and experienced because of our irrationality and obstinacy. We know that we can no longer be the scoundrels we were, we are acutely aware of the ways we stray into negativity, to being wicked, when we are practicing mendacity and when we make mistakes. We know that we tried everything else but connection to God, to spirit, in order to get over; to no avail. We realize that we suffered from a spiritual malady and without reconnecting to the source of life, we would die with and from this spiritual malady. Each and every day, we surrender to God, join with God and walk the world doing God’s Will to the best of our ability.
Having been a scoundrel, I know that difference between being a scoundrel and an error in judgement of what the next right thing to do is. In the last 33 years since God opened my soul up to yearn out loud and with all of my being for God’s teachings, I have made errors in judgement and never been a scoundrel. I am still learning how to do and live righteousness and I will till the day I die. I have also seen the scoundrels in our midst and I have called them out, as Isaiah teaches us to do in today’s verses. It has helped most of the time to change outcomes and it has hurt me many times because people did not believe me. Rather than going with substance and truth, people buy lies and mendacity so they don’t have to see their own lies and mendacity. Learn righteousness or be a scoundrel-what is your choice? Stay safe and God Bless, Rabbi Mark