Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 2 Day 73
“Thus there is a holy spark of God even in the dark recesses of evil. If not for that spark, evil would lose its power and reality, and would turn to nothingness.”(God in Search of Man pg. 370)
Rabbi Heschel’s teaching above illuminates our challenge, our problem and is very disturbing. He is reminding us to stop living in the either/or of devil and angel, of all good/all bad. If, as people of faith believe, everything comes from God, God is everything, then there has to be “a holy spark of God even in the dark recesses of evil.” This is troubling for most people, even people of faith because we want to separate God and evil, we want to hate evil and love God. Elie Weisel once told me that he can’t even hate evil because hate leads to unspeakable horrors and destruction, as he experienced at the hands of the Nazis. In the Bible, God tells Moses “Come to Pharaoh”(Exodus 10:1) teaching us that God resides in people that do evil and unspeakable things. Without God being in Pharaoh, Pharaoh would cease to exist because once the spirit of God leaves us, we die.
God’s call to Moses teaches us that we should always seek to find, relate and call to the spark of God that resides in people we would consider evil. It further, as I understand this teaching today, calls to us to remember that no person is totally evil, just as no person is totally good. We have to stop even separating ‘good people’ from ‘evil people’ and, as we learn from so many spiritual disciplines, to “hate the sin and love the sinner”. It is imperative, if we are to harness the power of evil and use it for the sake of good for us to see the “holy spark of God” within it, to stop labeling people, to stop blaming people, to stop committing a great evil ourselves: denying the evil that resides within each of us.
Hanukkah is the celebration of the victory of the Maccabees over the Greeks ostensibly. It is also a story of the same senseless hatred of Jews by other Jews. It is a story of a civil war as well as a war for the sake of heaven. While the miracle of this victory is a testament to the power of spirit, it is also a cautionary tale to all of us, I believe. It cautions us to not kill one another because we differ in how to serve God, it is a story that, hopefully, causes us pause before we label ourselves good and ‘those people’ bad. Given the wisdom above from Rabbi Heschel, it reminds us to see the spark of holiness in each and every person, to remember that God resides in whomever we want to designate as the Pharaohs in our lives. It also reminds us that we have to harness our own evil so it doesn’t turn to serving our selfish and self-serving desires, our inauthentic needs, the nuanced path of going against the very forces of good and God that we say we are seeking/following. This is the challenge that we face each and every day because we have both the good inclination and the evil inclination within us.
As we rededicate our selves to serving God, to seeing and creating the miracles of returning to our basic goodness of being and to decency; we have to remember to stand up for justice, to practice being merciful, to live in and always seek truth, to engage in loving actions no matter how we feel, being compassionate with our self and another for our sorrows and foibles. We are in dangerous times right now, we are finding out whether the lessons of our earlier errors that caused the Civil War, that gave birth to the Klu Klux Klan, that promoted Anti-Semitism and love of fascism in the 1930’s and continues to this day will be learned and we will return to our own basic goodness of being, we will stop needing a ‘bad guy’ to hate, we will accept one another as equals, we will remember we are all created in the image of God, we all have a spark of God within us or continue to practice the evil ways of our history and believe that we are “doing God’s work” by hating and killing another(s), figuratively and literally, because we perceive they are evil and the cause of everything that is wrong and bad? This is, to me, one of the questions Rabbi Heschel’s teaching is asking us.
In recovery, we begin hearing the phrase “let us love you until you can love yourself” and it feels uncomfortable and phony to many. Yet, it also feels welcoming and belonging at the same time. “How can anyone love me with all the terrible things I have done, how can they love me when I am so evil”, many of us say to ourselves. This phrase, I believe, has its roots in the wisdom of Rabbi Heschel above, it speaks to the ability of people in recovery to see the “holy spark of God even in the dark recesses” of another person because they see this “holy spark” within themselves since we immersed ourselves in our recovery.