Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Day 114
“God is of no importance unless He is of supreme importance, which means a deep certainty that it is better to be defeated with Him than be victorious without Him.” (Man is Not Alone pg.92)
Absorbing myself in the first sentence above, I remembered a comment Rabbi Heschel made to Carl Stern in the interview he gave just before his death in December of 1972. In it, Carl Stern asked Rabbi Heschel: “What made the Vietnam War a religious issue?” Rabbi Heschel replied: “Of course it’s a religious issue, for what does God demand of us primarily? Justice and Compassion..”(Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity pg.400) While it is easy to talk about separation of Church and State, which is necessary for a free democratic state, it is more subtle and difficult to jettison the morality of religion, the morality of our inner lives. What can be more spiritual, as Rabbi Heschel goes on to say in this interview, than human “justice and compassion”? To make God of supreme importance means that justice, compassion, connection, kindness, love, truth, treating all people with dignity and seeing one another’s uniqueness, have to be the foundations we build our society on, the measuring stick for all of our actions.
The Prophets, according to some people, meddled in the affairs of Israel and Judea back in antiquity, what right did they have to bring God’s word to the ruling class, to the wealthy class, to the priestly class? Because these classes forgot that God is of supreme importance and without this way of being; ego, fear, power, slavery of another, justice denied and bastardized, marginalize ‘those people’ and senseless hatred and mendacity become good things to do. While these religious, wealthy and ruling classes deceived themselves that they were serving God, God was not of supreme importance to them as evidenced by the fact they would not heed the words and directions of the prophets who came as messengers of God to save the people by having them return to their roots, to their foundational inner life of service, love, justice, compassion, kindness, truth, caring, etc.
God is intimately involved with the human being in the Bible, Hebrew and Christian, yet we have regulated God to spirituality and prayer/study in a vacuum. We have allowed the so-called ‘religious’ people who go about preaching hatred, intolerance, one-way to God, those who cozy up to power just as the priestly class in ancient Israel did, to be the spokespeople for religion and for morality? I hear Rabbi Heschel, Pastor Niebuhr, Rev. King, et al, calling out to all of us and demanding, disturbing, disrupting our ‘serenity’ to unmask these liars, these charlatans who are only serving themselves, they are not making God “of supreme importance” they are making themselves supremely important and getting into bed with other charlatans, other power-hungry, insecure, mean, unjust, uncaring, unkind, mendacious, deceiving, unloving haters!
We, people of faith; whether religious faith, spiritual faith, moral faith; must do as Rabbi Heschel taught us at Selma, Alabama-pray with our feet! We must turn the moral compass of our country, our states, our cities, our communities, our families and our self towards God and Godliness. Remembering that holiness is an everyday/all day action and way of being. It is not some saintly way of being-it is simply “love your neighbor as you love yourself”. It is happening in our country right now, we have to support this groundswell of activity in any and every way we can. Covid-19 has shown us the inhumanity of people towards another person AND it has shown us the heroes of our healthcare systems, the heroism of people to stand up and get the vaccine, wear a mask, honor the humanity and dignity of another human being and their own humanity. We saw the change in the 1960’s from slavery/inequality to freedom and voting rights, civil rights-we have seen the overturning of these God-given commandments/laws since then and it is time to stand for, with God and make God “of supreme importance” in all of our affairs. We have the power, the technology, the inner strength and the moral demand as well as the mental capacity to rise above our self-deceptions and the mendacity/deceptions of these charlatans/elected officials and “religious leaders and followers” who actually are trying to destroy Godliness and Holiness rather than promote it.
The third step of Alcoholics Anonymous says: “made a decision to turn our will and our life over to the care of God…”. This step, so early on, indicates the “supreme importance” of God to us recovering people. While we are never perfect in the actions of turning our will and life over to God-we are human after all and fallible-we make a statement of clarity for our self. We are clear that to recover our dignity, our humanity, our passion and purpose, we must become God-Centered instead of Ego-centered. This step is a statement that we are acutely aware of our need to reconnect with God/higher consciousness in order to live a life of morality and decency. In recovery, we know if God is not “supreme importance” we will substitute some idol in God’s place and fall out of recovery and deep in the holes we are recovering from.
Please begin to and/or continue to follow my friends and teachers: Dr. Susannah Heschel, Pastor Ed Treat, Rev Mark Whitlock, Rev Najuma Smith Pollard, John Pavlovitz, Rabbi Aryeh Cohen, and whomever else you know who disturbs your status-quo. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark