Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 2 Day 47
“Modern man may be characterized as a being who is callous to catastrophes. A victim of enforced brutalization, his sensibility is being increasingly reduced; his sense of horror is on the wane. The distinction between right and wrong is becoming blurred. All that is left to us is our being horrified at the loss of our sense of horror.”(God in Search of Man pg. 369)
I understand a Prophet to be a person who can hold humans and God in one moment at all moments. A Prophet is also a person who can see what is happening right now and warn the rest of us as to the dangers that lie ahead if we don’t change our ways. For me and many people, Rabbi Heschel was more than a descendant of the Prophets, he was a prophet himself. The words above, as so much of what he teaches and reminds us of, are the reason I am confident he was given to humankind at a time when we most needed to hear truth and not get too full of ourselves. Like Dr. King, Rabbi Heschel not only spoke truth to power, he spoke truth to the powerless, he spoke warnings to Presidents and to Popes as well as to all of us. Yet, his words still have not landed with enough force to change our ways. These words were published in 1955, written before, I am sure and they are as true today if not truer as they were then.
Ten years after the end of WWII, ten years after the discovery of the depth of the depravity of Nazi Germany, ten years after hearing excuses from Nazi Soldiers and Officers of how they loved their children and music and were kind-hearted men and women who perpetrated horrible and despicable acts upon human beings who were ‘not like them’; Rabbi Heschel is speaking to us about callousness and catastrophes! Unfortunately, not even the Jewish world took his words and warnings seriously enough to stop the callousness and see the catastrophes.
The root of the word callous in the Latin means ‘hard-skinned’ and the Hebrew is the same word as describes Pharaoh in the Book of Exodus. Rabbi Heschel is calling each of us out to face our inner Pharaoh, to see how, where, and when we are ‘hard-skinned’, stubborn, so full of our self we are blind to what truly is. In 1955, we thought everything was wonderful, yet the Fellowship Foundation, a Christian organization that promotes false images of Christ, pushes a Christian Nationalist agenda within Congress, began in 1953. While we celebrated Ike as our President, a good man, we were beginning to get involved in Vietnam, we were continuing to be in Korea, we had killed the Rosenbergs even though the Government knew Ethel was completely innocent! McCarthyism had run unabated for 4-5 years and, finally, Joe McCarthy was censured in 1954; not before he and his ‘guy’, Roy Cohn, had ruined the lives of so many and killed the Rosenbergs. Yet, even then, people were becoming callous to these catastrophes because they were being told this is what was necessary to deal with the catastrophes ‘those’ people were causing. Sound familiar?
Today, we are dealing with callousness, we are dealing with the effects of people in Government, in business, in the Church, Mosque, Temples, in the Eastern Spiritual traditions who are being callous and using God, spirit, the American Flag, Apple Pie, Motherhood, etc to validate their actions. President George W. Bush promoted a “compassionate conservatism” and, having met him a few times, I know he believed this was possible. His program to help faith-based and community initiatives was bold, spiritual and compassionate and, of course, it was fought against by people who did not want the ‘church’ to be involved with Government-these same people who attended the National Prayer Breakfast and took money from Lobbyists and from the Fellowship Foundation were against Pres. Bush’s initiative because he wanted to give aid and comfort to the downtrodden, the people in and who needed recovery, and knew faith-based and community programs were better suited to deliver what was needed than the government! We are dealing with the callousness of Tea Party from 2010, from the America First’s since the 1930’s, with the liars and cheats who want to investigate anyone and everyone but themselves. We are suffering the catastrophes of their behaviors and many people are so ‘hard-skinned’ themselves they don’t realize what is happening and they even applaud these actions!
In recovery, we are dedicated to piercing the ‘hard-skinned’ we put on so many years ago. We are engaged each and every day in opening up our minds, hearts and souls to welcome and engage in spiritual, moral ways of dealing with life as opposed to the callousness of ‘dog eat dog’, ‘where’s mine” we used to live. We do this by living according to Spiritual Principles and we no longer worship idols, we serve God by serving humanity.
I think of the callousness and the Pharaoh-like ways I lived prior to recovery and, truth be told, even at times in my recovery and I am sad. I see the catastrophes before, during and after they are happening and, I have committed myself to looking deeper when I am ‘sure’ I am not engaging in any callousness. My loud and abrasiveness has never stopped me from seeing the soul of another in my recovery and I am grateful to those who point out to me when I am being callous and causing catastrophes. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark