Daily life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 3 Day 13
“Judaism in its very essence came into being as an act of dissent, dissent from paganism, as an act of nonconformity with the surrounding culture. And unless we continue to dissent, unless we continue to say NO to idol worship in the name of a higher YES, we will revert to paganism.” (Essential Writings pg. 106/107)
The last sentence above describes our choices today as they have been throughout human history. Hamas, their funders, their supporters are prime examples of people who do not dissent, who do engage in idol worship, who are engaged in paganism, all under the guise of ‘religion’. When we hear their propagandists blame Israel, blame the U.S., blame the Jews, declare their intention to rule the area “from river to sea, from sea to sea”, there can be no doubt of their desire to annihilate Jews and remove Israel as the only democratic state in the region. Iran, Hezbollah, and their allies claim to speak and act in the name Allah, while actually engaging in idolatry.
We are witnesses to “idol worship” often, we hear people speaking in the name of God while showing no mercy, no justice, no love for their fellow human beings they have deemed ‘different’. We are witnesses to people demonstrating in favor of Hamas, revering and celebrating the terrorists and the terror attacks in Israel, in the United States, and across the globe. In our own House of Representatives one party is unwilling and/or unable to come together with the rest of Congress, the Executive Branch, and the majority of people in the U.S. to support the democratic country of Ukraine, which is their way of supporting Vladimir Putin and the authoritarianism of Russia! There are people who believe banning books is the way to God, it is a ‘religious’ action-forgetting the actions of the Nazi’s in Germany who banned books, who denigrated Jews in order to appeal to latent anti-semitism, the inner fear of someone different than themselves aka ‘the other’, of the German people, of the Polish people, even of the American people who were not going to “fight a war to protect the Jews”. All in the name of being ‘good christians’!!
We see “idol worship” happening on College Campus’, in the streets of our cities and towns, we stay silent in the face of prejudice and hatred, we stood “idly by the blood of our brothers and sisters” when Black people were hung from trees in the South, we cheered when Billie Holiday was persecuted and banned from singing “Strange Fruit” for fear of her galvanizing white and black people to rebel against this paganism of killing our neighbors instead of loving them. We watch in horror, hopefully, we watch in support, some of us, we watch in silence as LGBTQ+ people are vilified, as the truth of our history as a nation regarding slavery is denied, as our Supreme Court, which is about justice and ensuring the constitutional freedoms embedded in our Declaration of Independence, our Bill of Rights and in our Constitution, becomes more and more politicized and engages in “idol worship” and “paganism” rather than justice and mercy.
There is no perfection, there is no one side of an argument nor disagreement that is 100% correct. We know this, in our Bible, we learn of the evolution of our relationship with God and God’s evolution of God’s relationship with humanity. We are taught to keep learning, to see each case on it’s own merits, to use precedents and not be bound by them, to live a dynamic, ever-changing life, to be moral, to be merciful, to “not hate our brothers and sisters in our hearts” and we are all brothers and sisters because we are all ‘children’ of God. We are taught to see the Divine Image of each human being, to see the infinite value and dignity of everyone, and to witness and honor the uniqueness of everyone!
We are in desperate need of recovering our voices of “dissent”, recovering our ability “to say NO to idol worship” to the myriad of ways we “revert to paganism”. We have the ability, we have to find the will and the strength-which is what Judaism, the Prophets, Christianity, Islam, Eastern Philosophies all give us. Rather than bastardize these teachings and ways of Truth and Holiness, we have to see ourselves in these teachings, in these ways. We are being called by Rabbi Heschel, by our Holy Texts, by God, to end our “idol worship”, we are being called to recover our Authenticity, to be Responsible, and to be Transparent, to live a life of ART so we can end the mendacity, the self-deceptions, the deceptions of another(s) that seems so alluring we are willing to be pagans, we are willing to support terrorists, at home and abroad, we are willing to go along with liars and thieves because we think it will enhance our bottom line. Our bottom line is not the number on our bank statement, it has to be the ways in which we live morally, decently and spiritually. God Bless and stay safe, please pray for Israel, the hostages, and a new beginning in the Middle East, Rabbi Mark