Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 2 Day 42
“The world is in flames, consumed by evil. Is it possible that there is no one who cares? (God in Search of Man pg.367)
These two sentences of Rabbi Heschel, published in 1955, when everything was ‘so good,’ reflect the unspoken fears of many of us. We are watching, today, the world in flames in the Ukraine, the price gouging of the Saudis’, the authoritarianism of Orban and, here at home, the violent rhetoric of one political party that has been hijacked by the MAGA message. We are witnesses to the worst evil possible, as M. Scott Peck describes: the using of the vulnerabilities of a person against them. We are witnesses to the lies and deceptions of people who say one thing to get a vote all the while using the slight of hand of a 3-card monte player.
We are a world that has always had fires going in different parts of the world. Remember, Judaism is the only civilization to transition from antiquity to present day. Rome burned, Greece was destroyed, the Assyrians are no more, Egypt was drowned, Spain, England, France, all have had their heyday and fell from grace because, I believe, the fires they lit and fanned through the ways they treated the stranger, the poor, the needy caused them to rot from within. Evil will consume the perpetrators as well as the victims and we forget this truth believing we can master the evil we bring to the world. We erroneously believe we can be saved from ourselves, from any consequences because we are ‘in charge’! History teaches us the fallacy of this thinking and, yet, we ignore the lessons of history in favor of our superior ways.
The United States was/is supposed to be a beacon of light for the stranger, the needy, the poor as evidenced by the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor. Yet, the prejudice displayed at Ellis Island reminds us of a promise unkept. Quotas to keep our Jews, Muslims, Irish, Italians, and others from entering is another example of not fulfilling the promise of Lady Liberty, not fulfilling the intent of the Founding Fathers (and Mothers). Yet, people went along with these policies because of the evil that flourishes within each of us when left unchecked, when left unresolved, when not overwhelmed with awareness, commitment, spirituality, and direction from God/Higher Consciousness. We are still facing this problem/issue today in America, we are still electing people to our Congress who want to perpetrate evil on citizens and strangers alike when they don’t agree with them, when we stand up and say no to their evil ideas, to their eye diseases of prejudices and to the cancer of the soul they try to spread to everyone with their racism, xenophobia, anti-semitism, etc. It is time for us to wake up, it is time for us to stand up, it is time for us to do the inner work so we don’t buy into moral equivalence like Trump used at the Charlottesville “Jews will not replace us” rally, the naming of the people who attacked our Capital as patriots exercising their right of dissent, their right to bear arms, all poppycock to foment an armed rebellion and Republican leaders like Mitch McConnell, Mitt Romney, stay silent and watch Adam Kissinger and Liz Cheney be threatened, ostracized for speaking truth. Rather than being like Nathan Hale, for whom no military bases are named, they are like the Confederacy that began and lost the Civil War. Maybe the lesson is that the evil of slavery, the evil of prejudice, the evil of hatred, the evil of fear-mongering never left us, it went underground and found ways to worm itself into the fabric of our society.
“The world is in flames, consumed by evil” is a descriptor that needs to shake all of us to our core. We have to stand up to this evil, we have to denounce it, we have to do a deep dive inside oof our self to see the insidious ways we have succumbed to it, how we go along with evil without being totally aware of it and how we go along with it in the name of getting along, in the name of not wanting conflict, of not wanting to lose, of wanting to be on the winning side. The BIG LIE is that evil wins! The BIG LIE is that we cannot fight it, we cannot rid the world of it. The BIG LIE is we are powerless over the evil that lurks in our hearts, minds and gets perpetrated in the world!
Recovery is the denouncement of these BIG LIES! Each day we gather together, people in recovery, to help one another raise our self up from these BIG LIES, each day as the Buddhists teach we engage in “noble speech” and “noble listening”. We have a motto in recovery: “Say what you mean, mean what you say and don’t say it meanly”! We also are deeply aware of how much we owe back to the world because of our prior evil ways, for the evil we put into the world prior to our recovery.
I find my self inquiring how am I helping to fan the flames of evil and how am I extinguishing these flames. Of course I do both, as does everyone. My main paths of extinguishing these flames is this blog; to say hello to everyone I see in stores, on the street; to watch my words more and to keep advocating for the souls of the people who seek me out. I am extinguishing these flames of evil through studying with people, through keeping in touch with people, through connecting with people transparently and authentically. I am more focused on extinguishing these flames of evil because I have dealt with the ways I fan these flames by working very hard to keep myself in proper measure, to breathe before I respond, to respond rather than react and to feel divine pathos for people who are still stuck in fanning these flames while doing everything I can to stop them. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark