Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Day 281
“The man of our time is losing the power of celebration. Instead of celebrating, he seeks to be amused or entertained. Celebration is an active state, an act of expressing reverence or appreciation. To be entertained is a passive state-it is to receive pleasure afforded by an amusing act or spectacle.” (Who is Man pg.117)
In his interview with Carl Stern, Rabbi Heschel speaks about reverence in different ways, his reverence for his relatives, his community who taught him of the importance of the inner life, his concern over whether his living is worthy of his daughter’s reverence, the reverence for truth, for love, for humanity, etc. I am concerned as to what we revere today, in our fast-paced, get it now, need more likes, celebrity adoring ways of being. It seems we are willing to revere mendacity and deception more than we are willing to revere truth, God, love, human beings!
We are in desperate need of a Spiritual Revolution. We are in desperate need of some “Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity” as Rabbi Heschel said to President John F. Kennedy. We are in desperate need of an exodus from the slavery of lies, of deception, of self-deception, of idol-worship, of bastardizing the Holy Texts that are the foundations of democracies, of decency, of growing our inner life! We are in need of more than a Moses or Jesus or Mohammed or Buddha, we are in need of a spiritual awakening for all of us. We are being called to throw off the yoke of mendacity; get out from under the burden of “optics”; the harsh labor of “being like everyone else”; the false need of having what someone else has rather than being content with what one has. We are in need of a leader, the question is: would we follow one, would we leave the Egypts we find ourselves in, especially if it means going against the grain, being maladjusted to the “conventional wisdom” of our day? I am not so sure we would.
My skepticism arises from our inability to use the lessons of the past to leave these slaveries we find ourselves in. We have been at the edge of the Red Sea and, unfortunately, more people have turned back to slavery than willing to cross the Red Sea into the unknown of freedom. A commentary on the Bible says only 20% of the Israelites left Egypt, if only 20% of us were willing to leave slavery today. The far right and the far left are making so much noise that the 80% of us who are ‘in the middle’ can’t even hear ourselves think and so we just give up and go along with one extreme or the other knowing it is wrong and just too tired to fight.
Hence, Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom above, our revolution begins, our exodus happens when we begin to revere truth, have appreciation for the struggle of freedom that has been with us forever, revere our teachers, revere the wisdom of the Bible, of the Constitution, understand our Holy Texts and our foundational principles in light of today. We are being called upon to live in this moment, to follow the elders and wise people of today, to Choose Life! It all begins with us rising up to the level of Moral Grandeur without heeding our baser instincts that ask “is it good for me” and instead asking “is this the next right action to take”. The frauds that were perpetrated by people in regards to the PPP money during the Pandemic, the frauds around Unemployment Money, the frauds of Congress and the Supreme Court that are still being engaged in all happen because the people running these institutions and/or having control/power in these institutions are asking “is it good for me”. Instead of Moral Grandeur, they live in Moral Ignominy!
We, the People have the power and the call to extricate ourselves from these ways of being. We have the strength, the numbers, the path to leave these slaveries, these oppressive paths and patterns as well as these authoritarian leaders. What we need is the will to do this. Rather than clap for these liars who say Jesus was the Lion who devours people, rather than cheer on senseless hatred, rather than “stand idly by the blood of our neighbor”, rather than wring our hands, we have to DO something to end this charade by these charlatans. Kevin McCarthy has told us if he is Speaker of the House, the people’s business will come in a distant last to his need to humiliate the people seeking truth about what has been going on in government recently. His actions show his disdain for the Capital Police who protected him and gave their lives, their bodies for his safety on Jan. 6th! To defeat the Kinless Kevin we have to have the WILL to rise up and speak truth to the people who want to live in deception. We have to have the will to rise up and say with our actions: “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore” as Howard Beale declared in the movie Network.
In recovery we know we can only have a personal exodus from the slavery we have willingly marched into when we take action on the demand, the call of freedom, of family, of the universe. Our actions and our lives become testaments to Howard Beale’s words and to the uprising of, as Rabbi Abraham Twerski told me, true faith in action. In recovery we do not know exactly where we are going or how we are going to get there, we only know we are marching towards living a life of Godliness, of decency, of a richness of our inner life that propels us forward each and every day. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark