Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 4 Day 256
“They are moved by a responsibility for society, by a sensitivity to what the moment demands…It is more accurate to see them as proclaimers of God’s pathos, speaking not for the idea of justice, but for the God of justice, for God’s concern for justice.”
Rabbi Heschel is speaking about the prophets in the words above and his description/definition of what makes a prophet gives rise to the idea that prophets did not end with Malachi - a blasphemous idea to many and yet, when we consider some of the great ‘seers’ of the Common Era, maybe not so much. The Rabbis of the Talmudic period were afraid of the prophets and, for many of my colleagues, still are today. A prophet is unruly, not cautious, doesn’t ‘read the room’, is not able to be bought off, in other words, a prophet truly sees himself as on a mission from God and no human can deter them from delivering their message. What is truly amazing is that prophets are not killed by the powerful and the priests whom they oppose, at least until they have delivered the main theme of their message. Be it St. Frances, Thomas Merton, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Baal Shem Tov, Buber, Rev. Martin Luther King, Rabbi Heschel, et al I am calling modern day prophets, spoke truth to power, were “moved by a responsibility for society, by a sensitivity to what the moment demands” and did so without fear nor favor, really without concern for their own safety, as we see in the case of the Archbishop, MLK, and so many others.
A prophet’s role is not so much to tell us the future as it seems to be to tell us what our erroneous behavior is in the present and how to return to decency, justice, kindness, truth, love, etc. Yet, We the People throughout the ages, whether we killed, exiled, or just shunned these messengers from God have not heard, listened, nor understood their simple message found in Deuteronomy 16:20, spoken by the first of the prophets, Moses: “Righteousness, Righteousness you shall pursue” (some translate as Justice, Justice, you shall pursue). This is the greatest error We the People continue to make, over and over again throughout the millennia-not living into the SHEMA that is being broadcast 24/7 from Mount Sinai, it is at a higher megahertz than normal speech, it does need to be heard by one’s soul, one’s higher consciousness, and it is discernible whenever we turn to hear it, make a decision to listen and engage in understanding what the next right action is in this moment. We the People seem to constantly forget, ignore that debt that we owe to the universe for being alive, life is not an entitlement, it is a demand, a gift, a debt and when we live in this manner, hearing the Voice from Sinai is as natural as getting out of bed in the morning, as powerful as saying our gratitude prayer for being alive, and caring about, following the commandments of “the God of justice” rather than trying to make “justice” bend to our will.
We the People, once again, are being asked, called, pleaded with to SHEMA the message of “justice” and live into it. We the People need to hear the Voice from Sinai lovingly call us back to living from the inside out, transforming our negativity into a force for good, using the energy of our Yetzer HaRa to enhance and fuel our Yetzer HaTov. We the People are being asked to embrace “God’s concern for justice” as our own, whether we feel it or not. We the People are descendants of the prophets and, being sensitive “to what this moment demands” means We the People are being called to speak to those in power who are not concerned with “justice”, who do not care about the stranger, the widow, the orphan, the needy and call themselves ‘good christian folk’. “Sensitivity to what this moment demands” is calling upon We the People to forgoe our selfishness and greediness, to live into being a “light unto the nations”, to remember our ancestor Abraham-from whom all three major Western religions come from- who called God out when he said: “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do justly” (Gen. 18:25)! We the People, when we SHEMA, we know in our souls that our job is to stop going along to get along, it is to end this madness with the hatred of the stranger and the alien because We the People were “strangers in a strange land”, in Midian, in Canaan, in Egypt, and, at least in the beginning, we were treated with kindness and, life-saving measures. These ‘good christian folk’ must be reading a different Bible than the rest of us because Jesus loved the stranger and the needy, in the 1st 5 Books of the Hebrew Bible, loving and caring for these powerless and voiceless human beings is mentioned at least 36 times, so their hatred of the stranger, their sending troops into American Cities to shoot and kill, to get training in warfare, shouts their not being interested in what the Voice from Sinai has to say and We the People have to stop them NOW!
I am so knowing the plight of the prophets, I know the alignment with divine pathos, with “the God of justice”. I know the pain of this alignment as well as the deep wound that “sensitivity to what this moment demands” causes. I know the fear that is caused by being so “responsible for society” and I know how the shouting from the rooftops, the calling out of the powerful and the rich, cause so much trouble for a prophet. I am in simpatico with the prophets because I live like them, I see what is and what could be, my prior unjust behaviors make me super-sensitive to injustice before many other people can even see what is coming down the pike. Knowing the Jews are aiding and abetting the mistreatment of the stranger here in the U.S. and in Israel enrages me and I will not stop speaking out, I will not be silenced even if no one is listening. This is the call, the demand I hear and, while it gets me into trouble because I have no filter, I have to do this because otherwise I could not get out of bed in the morning. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark