Daily Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 2 Day 76
“The dreadful confusion, the fact that there is nothing in this world that is not a mixture of good and evil, of holy and unholy, of silver and dross, is, according to Jewish mysticism, the central problem of history and the ultimate issue of redemption.”(God in Search of Man pg. 371)
Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom above is reminding us to not be so sure of our rightness and our righteousness. While there is much talk of being “on the right side” of an issue, the teaching above calls to us to not be too satisfied with our opinions, our actions, and our tribe’s use of power. Throughout history people have waged wars; in actual battles, in politics, in religious beliefs, in families, etc, believing they were standing up for THE TRUTH, and they had the corner on what God wanted/wants, what is/was moral, etc. Rather than living with an open mind, a curious mind, humans have and continue to have a desperate need to be right, to make arguments for how and why their actions, their thoughts, their beliefs are the only ones that are good, holy, silver while everyone else’s are evil, unholy, and dross.
We are in the ending days of Hanukkah and soon will be celebrating Christmas and Kwanzaa. All of these holy days coincide with the winter solstice reminding us that at the darkest times in the physical world, we can find the light of our souls, the light that all people can shine, our equality as humans, our celebration of the miracles of life and be grateful to our Higher Power, Higher Consciousness, God, the Ineffable One for our ability to gather together in prayer, song, celebration of lifting our souls and the souls of all people up rather than sink into the despair of the darkness of our physical world. Yet, we have bastardized these spiritual events and commercialized them. We celebrate victory over the Greeks and Syrians and yet, the people who were victorious took on many of the ways of the Greeks. We celebrate this victory over an outside enemy while trying to hide the inner war between Jews who were fundamentalists and Jews who weren’t. Christmas has become so commercialized that many people forget the celebration is the birth of Christ, who is thought to be the Messiah by Christian people. It is the celebration of hope, of faith, of who, what and how we can actually be holy, good, and silver in our everyday living. Many people put Kwanzaa down instead of realizing it is a holiday celebrating and committing to community, to spirit, to love, to self-determination.
Yet, we are still arguing with one another over who’s way is best while the words of Rabbi Heschel remind us to stop deflecting ourselves from the real issue: how do we separate the good from the evil, the holy from the unholy, the silver from the dross. This is our great challenge and we are too focused on proving the rightness of our ‘position’ to engage in the real war, the true struggle. I believe this deflection happens because we know we will never be able to completely separated these pairs that go together and we can’t face our inability to ‘win’. Instead, we find lawyers that suborn perjury from a 26 year-old young woman so ‘the boss’ will not look bad nor be charged, we find Congressperson-Elect winning by lying about their history, we watch in horror as the Ukrainians fight for their democratic way of life and government while a strong minority fight for authoritarianism to take over our country with Kevin McCarthy, Jim Jordan, Marjorie Taylor Greene being in charge. We are watching racism and anti-semitism and other prejudices become commonplace, mass shootings get headlines one day and gone the next without any serious action on how to keep our fellow Americans alive, etc and call these ways good, holy and silver! How ridiculous and, sadly, through their mendacity, their deception and our drive to live in self-deception, how scary and how powerful these liars have become, how dedicated to their deceptions and the lies they tell themselves they have become to the point where they actually believe they are pure and have solved the problem Rabbi Heschel gives us above.
Engaging in this struggle is what everyone in recovery does rather than believe they have the way, the only way, the pure path, the power and “God on My Side” as Dylan put it in his song. We are acutely and chronically aware of how deceiving this mixture can be, how easy it is to make evil into good, unholy into holy and pass dross off as silver. We did it for so many years.
I was a PhD in contributing to the “the dreadful confusion” Rabbi Heschel is speaking about. I have spent the last 36 years (2 of them in prison) trying to, and succeeding much of the time, separate the dross from the silver, the unholy from the holy, the evil from the good. While I can attest to my inability to fully achieve this separation, I am content to say I am in the struggle, I’m aware of and know that I have to stop allowing my mind and emotions to rule me and, instead, give my soul, my intuition a louder voice. I also know that my soul and my intuition are not fully mature so I also need to seek out people who can help me mature more in these areas and whom can advise me as to when I am mixing up good and evil, etc. Having a daily spiritual practice of prayer, meditation, immersing myself in Rabbi Heschel gives me a start to the day and I know my goal is to be one grain of sand better today than yesterday. God Bless and stay safe this holiday weekend, Rabbi Mark