Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Day 111
“God is not an explanation of the world’s enigmas or a guarantee for our salvation. He is an eternal challenge, an urgent demand. He is not a problem to be solved but a question addressed to us and individuals, as nations, as mankind.” (Man is Not Alone pg. 92)
We are failing in our response to the eternal challenges and urgent demands that God is presenting to us, as individuals, nations, human beings. We can see our failures in the number of unhoused people there are in the United States and beyond. We can see our failures in the number of incarcerated people and formerly incarcerated people there are in our country. We can see our failures in the amount of anti-depressants that are prescribed in this country daily. We can see our failures in the way we treat strangers and poor people, like criminals! We can see our failures in the ways we bully people into our way of thinking. We can see our failures in our need to deceive our self and everyone else as well as our need/desire to be deceived. We can see our failing to respond to God’s challenges and demands in the way we treat each other with disdain, mistrust, uncaring.
Every one of us has been called out by God’s demands, the demands of our higher consciousness for those who don’t believe in God. There are people who suffer from illnesses that we could find a cure for, develop a treatment for but the pharmaceutical companies don’t think they can make enough of a profit on the drug/treatment to warrant the cost of research and development and their Boards of Directors agree, ‘take care of the shareholders, not the people’ seems to be their mantra. We see this in their advertising, we see this in other business as well. Shareholders are more important than the general public, profits are more important than people’s lives. This is an accepted practice in our world and this is a failure to respond to God’s demand and challenge to treat each soul, each person with dignity, respect and reverence.
We are engaged in senseless hatred of one another because there are people who believe if they can find a scapegoat for people to blame all their troubles on, these so-called leaders can control the masses and amass power for themselves. We see this in politics, we see this in business, we see this in religious charlatans as well. When a person of the cloth preaches hatred, bigotry, anti-semitic tropes, fear of “the other”, they are engaging in and promoting this senseless hatred. As Rabbi Heschel said in 1963, “prejudice is an eye disease, a cancer of the soul” and there are people right now, who are the victims of this eye disease and this spread of cancerous poisons. Yet, people are wiling to go unvaccinated, blame the government for some unknown control that is in the vaccine when it was developed under the watch of “their fearless leader”! This is the power of mendacity, the power of deception, the lure of self-deception. This is the power of senseless hatred, the need to blame and shame another person and the inability to be responsible for our own actions, our part in this drama called living.
We are able, however, to respond to these challenges and demands differently. We have the power, the inner strength to be respond in the ways Rabbi Heschel responded. He left his study to advocate for the “mission to the Jews” be taken out of the Catholic Catechism teachings and was successful. He was a friend of and to Rev Martin Luther King Jr and left his study to speak at conferences, march in Selma and speak at Rev King’s funeral. Rabbi Heschel left his study to protest against the Vietnam War and remind us that “some are guilty, all are responsible”! He did this as a Polish immigrant fleeing the Nazi war machine, he did this as a Jew who knew he couldn’t pray to God if he couldn’t see the Tzelem, the God-Image in another human being. We have the same opportunities, we have the same wherewithal as Rabbi Heschel, as Dr. King, as Moses, as the Israelites who left Egypt, as the runaway slaves, as the survivors of the Holocaust, as the survivors of the Rwandan Genocide, as… We have to begin to respond to God’s demands and challenges with Hineni-Here I am instead of hiding and lying and deceiving.
In recovery, we “turn our will and our lives over to God as we understand God” very early on and then we begin to learn and differentiate our will from God’s will. While nothing ever happens in God’s world by accident, we also know that not everyone is living in God’s world nor are we all the time. In many ways, like the Israelites at Mt. Sinai, in recovery we make the commitment, take the action and then we understand both the logic, the reasoning for the actions and this illumines the path in front of us a little more. In recovery, we are constantly seeking to respond in a positive manner to God’s call, demand and challenge.
For the past 33 years, I have heard, sometimes clearly and sometimes not so clearly, God’s demand and challenge for me. I have answered this call all the time, sometimes in ways that are not easily accepted by another(s) and in ways that harm God’s message to another(s). For these times, I am deeply sorry and remorseful. Mostly, I have responded in my unique manner and brought a message from God, a challenge to all of us, including me and I do it without prejudice, without a need to be right, without a need to deceive and with a passion to help, save, and care for my fellow human being. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark