Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Day 278
“The man of our time is losing the power of celebration. Instead of celebrating, he seeks to 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)
Today is Tisha B’Av-the 9th day of the Hebrew month of Av where we commemorate the destruction of the Temples, the loss of Jerusalem and many other tragedies that have befallen the Jewish people. All of these losses are, however, losses that we ourselves caused by turning away from God, away from celebration, towards amusement and entertainment. We are warned of this happening exactly because we wanted to entertain ourselves or be amused by another and the consequences are prophesied in the Torah, yet we failed to heed the call, the demand of the Ineffable One. After these traumatic events happen, we ask “how could You let this happen” and other God-blaming questions. We do this because we are afraid, too embarrassed, too stubborn to admit our responsibility and our errors. We do this rather than wear the sackcloth, fast and repent like the people of Nineveh in the story of Jonah. We do this because our addiction to amusement and entertainment could be the longest and most pervasive addiction humankind has engaged in.
Our insatiable need to be amused, entertained, which leads us to destruction and ruin, leads us to a natural and, for a long while, invisible descent. We go to entertainment to escape the real world we are living in, and the real world we are living in is constantly seeking to amuse the powerful, entertain the ‘masses’ so they go along with ways of being that harm themselves, their families, their cities and their country. We see this all the time with Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity, they are not commentators or newscasters, they are entertainers playing to a large audience to serve a very small audience. What is their payoff for their entertaining ways? They make a lot of money, they get a lot of attention and they participate in the evil of indifference, the evil of destruction, the evil of standing “idly by the blood of their brothers/sisters”. And the ‘masses’ lap it up, swallow their mendacity and entertainment as truth and gospel. This allows these ‘masses’ to storm the Capital, elect people who want to overthrow democracy in favor of authoritarianism, and to engage in senseless hatred towards ‘the rest of us’. These ‘masses’ are amused by their actions, entertained by the ‘celebrities’ who ‘fire up the base’ and applaud an authoritarian who is bigoted, prejudiced, hateful! Viktor Orban received a standing ovation at CPAC in Dallas, embraced by conservative Republicans?! He entertained his crowd with rants against anyone who wasn’t White, Christian, like him-he was celebrated as the one of the two last bastions of hope for White Europeans, the other being Vladimir Putin! Entertainment and amusement has rotted the souls of these ‘masses’ and made it impossible for them to distinguish truth from lies.
Tisha B’Av, commemorating our errors is a day of mourning. It is not, however, as I immerse myself in Rabbi Heschel’s teaching, a day of mourning our losses, it is a day of mourning our errors, our senseless hatred, our need to be entertained at the cost of the dignity of another human being, our need to amuse ourselves by destroying truth in favor of ‘alternate facts’, by playing with the minds, hearts, and souls of people who are desperate to hold on the “old order” for fear of change. Caring for the widow, the orphan, the stranger, the poor, the needy is spoken about 36 times in the first 5 Books of the Bible, yet it is the commandment we trample the most in our search for entertainment and our engaging in amusement. Jews will be in Temple today as they were last evening, they will chant the prayers of sadness and loss, they will not put T’fillin on till this afternoon, and most of our people will not consider their perpetuation of the ways and actions that brought about the destruction we are commemorating. We can and must take note of, be responsible for, make amends for and change these paths of murdering the soul of another and ourselves.
In recovery, as with so much of Rabbi Heschel’s teachings, we are acutely aware of the distinction between celebration and entertainment/amusement. We destroyed our lives and the lives of our loved ones and the lives of people we don’t even know through our race to be entertained and amused. We used people as means to our ends without caring what being used did to them. In recovery, we engage in celebration and connection, building and re-enforcing, truth and joy.
I am blessed to celebrate the milestones in my life in recovery with people I love and I am beyond grateful. I am blessed to celebrate milestones with many other human beings in their recovery. I am blessed to celebrate with family and friends their milestones. I am blessed to be able to celebrate the lives of people whom have died at their funerals and beyond. I work hard to stay away from amusement, from entertainment as Rabbi Heschel is describing above for fear of the addictive power they both have. I have created my own destructions, I have done things that allow people to amuse themselves at my expense and then point their fingers at me rather than be responsible for their part; each Tisha B’Av I remember these moments and commit to not repeat them. Those who are entertained by my errors, my ways I say: “God Bless and stay safe” Rabbi Mark