Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 4 Day 258
“The prophet is a man who feels fiercely. God has thrust a burden upon his soul, and he is bowed and stunned at man’s fierce greed. Frightful is the agony of man, no human voce can convey its full terror. Prophecy is the voice that God has lent to the silent agony, a voice to the plundered poor, to the profaned riches of the world. It is a form a living, a crossing point of God and man. God is raging in the prophets’ words…” (Thunder in the Soul pg.49)
Too often “prophecy” is assumed to mean the telling of the future, what will happen in “the end of days”, I understand and experience “prophecy” in the Bible to be about a message from God, from a higher consciousness than our reptilian brain. In reading the embolden words above, I hear the power of God, of a higher consciousness at work in the words and deeds of the prophets. I hear the call for We the People to be “the voice that God has lent to the silent agony, a voice to the plundered poor, to the profaned riches of the world”! Yet, we seem to be unable to sustain this “voice” that we are gifted with, that we have examples of, that we inherited from the prophets because of fear, of jealousy, of binary living. We are watching the reptilian brain play out in our lives everyday, from Washington DC to Jerusalem, Israel, from the marketplace to our dinner tables. Whenever we have an ‘us versus them’ mentality, we are in reptilian brain, ie friend or foe. Whenever we need to ‘make a killing’, we need to ‘beat their pants off’, ‘kill off the competition’, etc we are living in our reptilian brain. The issue is not that this part of our brain is bad, it helps us see real danger, the problem is that we have not matured nor grown this part of our brain since Cavemen/women days so we are unable to discern friend from foe, we have sunk into a ‘with me/agin me’ way of understanding and living in the world, which has brought us to today-an ignoramus authoritarian in the White House who is being used and we are being abused by Lutnick, Miller, Vought, Bondi, et al.
When are these ‘good christian folk’, who wear their crosses prominently, who ‘truly believe in the Bible’, who, like Mike Johnson says, if you want to know my politics, read the Bible, going to read the prophets?? When and how will these wanna be gangsters and real life thugs hear “the voice that God has lent to the silent agony”? What will have to happen for these idolators and charlatans, these grifters and thieves to hear the “voice” and tend to “the plundered poor” instead of being the plunderers of the poor? PROBABLY NEVER!
This is the reason these words are so important, the prophets left us not only their words, they left us a legacy of speaking truth to power, of rising up against those causing the agony, saying NO to the people who plunder the poor by raising their health insurance costs by 20-30% for the middle class while giving bigger tax cuts to the wealthiest people. This is how “riches of the world” get “profaned”. Being rich is not a crime in the Bible, it is not a bad thing, it is not necessary to denigrate the wealthy. What is a crime is when the rich don’t give their fair share to Tzedakah, what is a bad thing is when the rich don’t pay a living wage, when they cheat their laborers, when they don’t loan money to those in need, when they get drunk on their own wealth and seek the power to do whatever they want so they get more and more-THIS IS PROFANE- not the riches, the ways we get rich and the things we do once we are.
When one reads the prophets, when one immerses oneself in the prophets, the demand to take an action is obvious. The issue for most of We the People is that we don’t read, immerse, discuss the prophets at home, in school, in religious schools even. The Rabbis of old were afraid of the prophets, they believed the prophets were too demanding and unrealistic as to the capabilities of the human being, maybe. I disagree! We the People are more than capable of living into the prophets call for JUSTICE, their haranguing of us to CARE FOR THE POOR AND NEEDY and their demand to LOVE THE STRANGER. We the People know the silent agony that God lend “a voice” to, we are living in it as I write, We the People are well aware of how the poor have been used and abused, how the poor and the needy in material and especially in spirit have been plundered to provide riches, glory, cult worship of all the things that the prophets, and by extension God, rail against in the Bible. Isn’t it time for We the People to keep the pressure on those in government who want to take away our freedoms? Isn’t it time for We the People to rise up as We the People did on Saturday and declare NO KINGS IN AMERICA day everyday? Isn’t it time for Mike Johnson to shed his lies and his idolatry, isn’t it time for those cross-wearing women like Bondi and Leavitt to stop hiding behind the symbol of truth, goodness, love while they practice hatred, indecency, and mendacity? Isn’t it time We the People demand a new government, a new Supreme Court, that We the People demand that the Constitution be abided by, that the grifting end, and that those who still want slavery to be ‘legal’, those who are insisting that Lincoln had it wrong-there should be no “government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from this earth”. They believe that only the rich shall govern and the rest of us be enslaved.
I get so inspired by the prophets, I get so outraged by the lack of attention given to them, precisely because I did not pay attention to them for 20 years. I gave into the prevailing winds some 60 years ago and I am fanatical about not doing this again. So, I rant, I rave, I keep speaking truth and I am welcomed and unwelcome, I am appreciated and I am unappreciated, I am loved and I am unloved. It used to hurt and now I see it as a validation of me, of my devotion to God’s “voice”. I live life as a descendant of the prophets and with meaning and purpose. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark