Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Day 196
“We must burn the cliches to clear the air for hearing. Conceptual cliches are counterfeit preconceived notions are misfits.” (Who is Man pg.109)
The choice of the word burn above evokes in me the experience of sacrificing on the Altar of God in the Holy Temple. Without cliches, as I am understanding Rabbi Heschel this morning, we will be able to hear, to hear the call, to hear Truth. Without burning these cliches that prevent this from happening, we are stuck in conceit, ego, ignoring, ignorance, power for its own sake, eschewing our indebtedness and treating one another as objects to serve ourselves.
In light of the news about the Supreme Court and Roe v Wade, it is time for white men to burn the cliche, preconceived notion that they can control another human being, an entire gender, anyone not like them! We have become tone deaf, unable to hear the call of the Universe, the call of our neighbor, the call of our loved ones, the call of our souls because we are so filled up with these counterfeit cliches, these misfitted preconceived notions. The word cliche comes from the French meaning to stereotype, how appropriate for our world today and in every era. The dictionary goes on to say it “betrays original thought”, another hallmark of what is happening here and in the world. Abortion is not a religious question, in Judaism abortion is not outlawed and it is not in the New Testament either as I have been told. This decision is about control, it is about slavery, it is about these justices trying to repay the indebtedness of these ‘god-fearing’ white men and, unbelievably, women and their own by enslaving, controlling and imprisoning women, men who help women, etc.
Without the burning of these cliches, we will never be able to truly serve God/Ineffable One/Higher Purpose/Prime Mover. Holding onto these stereotypes does not allow us to see and experience what is happening in this moment, in this place and with these human beings. Living by cliches is about as inauthentic as one can get and it is impossible for these charlatans, these Anti-God, these UnHoly people who do not “love their neighbor as they love themselves,” to be authentic which in turn leads them to serve their idols, their false gods, not the God of Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, not the higher consciousness of the Buddha. Yet, they hold on for dear life because people who need to stereotype, people who live by cliches, are too afraid to be in truth, too afraid of acknowledging how they have compounded their indebtedness by destroying the lives of another group of people, by enslaving the people they are afraid of, like Pharaoh did in Egypt. The people who insist on bringing back “the good old days” are people who want to return to the way it was in Egypt, return to the way it was in Canaan. Both of these ‘ways’ caused the downfall of both countries and they never recovered from their utter defeat through to today!
Yet, these wise people of Chelm, (read about Chelm on the internet) continue to engage in their cliche-driven lives, continue to try to enslave their neighbors instead of loving them, continue to raise the Bible upside down like Trump did because they are reading it and living it upside down. Christ never spoke of controlling women, in my limited understanding of the Gospels, he never spoke of taking advantage of the poor and the needy, he spoke of love, of care, of kindness, of truth. The Torah is a Book of caring, not vengeance as some people like to say, it is a Book of love and kindness, it is a Book of Instruction, hence the word Torah meaning teaching. It is way past time for our leaders to offer their cliches, their stereotyping on the Altar of God, make their amends to all of us and begin to repay their debt to God, to society, to the ones they have harmed and to their families and friends for leading them down a false path.
In recovery, we don’t burn the cliches enough, I believe. We often quote chapter and verse without engaging in the depth of meaning that the Torah, the Bible, the New Testament, the myriad of books on Buddhism, etc are giving us. We seek, at times, to find the easier softer way of recovery-wrap ourselves in cliches to prevent us from being truly engaged. In recovery, we have to burn the cliches to ensure that we are not being counterfeit, to make sure that we are not stereotyping ourselves and everyone else, to commit to no longer ‘go along to get along’.
I have never loved cliches because they do stop original thought, they do not acknowledge the nuance of the experience I am in, rather they reflect an earlier time. Cliches are like, to me, conventional wisdom and neither one allow for original thoughts, seeing the current challenge/experience through the new eyes of the moment nor experiencing the humanity that is at stake in this event. I realize with profound regret the times I gave into both the mental cliches and the conventional wisdom brought by another. I have profound regret because being in either of these false, counterfeit ways prevented an authentic awareness of what is, prevented my seeing a path to respond to the call and the task of that particular moment. When I am frustrated, over the top reactive, I am living in my own mental cliches of ‘how it should be’. When I respond with the proper force for the particular moment to ‘how God says it should be’ and this is a truly better way for me to live and for everyone else around me. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark