Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 4 Day 277
“The prophet disdains those for whom God’s presence is comfort and security; to him it is a challenge, an incessant demand. God is compassion, not compromise; justice, though not inclemency. The prophet’s predictions can always be proved wrong by a change in man’s conduct, but never the certainty that God is full of compassion.” (Thunder in the Soul pg. 31)
In a world filled with so many versions and conflicting visions of God, these words above can come to remind all of us that God is NOT HUMAN! God is the wind, the spirit, the Ineffable and to define God is humanity’s way of trying to control people. God’s spirit, presence is throughout the Bible and in our lives today-the difference between King David and today’s oligarchs and MAGA’s, Bibi and Putin is King David knew God’s presence, knew God’s compassion, knew God’s “incessant demand” for justice, kindness, compassion, truth, and love. The aforementioned people seemingly do not! Listening to the Fire and Brimstone Preachers, the Prosperity Gospel Preachers, the “it is written” Rabbis, and every other fundamentalist can bring We the People to an erroneous conclusion, image of God. Their vision of God is one of either ‘just have faith and your actions don’t matter as much cause you are going to heaven’ or ‘you are born in sin and you live in sin and you will die in sin and go to hell’ or ‘it is written in the Torah and we have to do everything that is written, so I have to do nothing but study and you have to pay my expenses so I can study and tell you how to live’! In other words- We the People have been fed so much bullshit by ‘those righteous people’ that we have come to rely on someone else to tell us what God is saying, what we are to do, think, feel about God and about how to live-BULLSHIT!
“God’s presence” is both “a challenge, an incessant demand” and “comfort and security” to those of us who seek to respond to the “challenge, the demand”. Without experiencing “God’s presence”, those of us who ‘know’, would be lost and wandering, ready to assimilate and give up, become like the “lost tribes of Israel”, roaming the earth looking for the place where we belong. The prophet’s “disdain” is because the Bible is replete with stories of arguing with God, wrestling with God, with the growth of our relationship with God and God’s relationship with human beings. Living with “God’s presence” is never easy, nor comforting in the ‘it’s okay baby’ way. The comfort comes from knowing one belongs in one’s skin, one is capable of living a life compatible with being a partner with God, with experiencing one’s purpose and passion, meaning and unique talent/gift. And, this “comfort” is the cause of great consternation, great distress when we shirk our responsibility to live our authentic life rather than the one that is expedient. It is distressing when a human being witnesses another so lost that they believe the lie is the truth, the evil is the good, cruelty is kindness, slavery is freedom, etc. When Ron DiSantis claims slavery was good for Black people and this should be taught in Florida’s schools and claims to be a ‘good christian’ who ‘reads his bible daily’, we know how far down the rabbit hole he has fallen and, so have all the people who support him, who agree with him and who give him power. The same is true of good old Mike Johnson who makes false claims about the Bible daily and has no compunction about lying, cheating, stealing, treating the stranger, the poor, the needy with disdain, hatred, cruelty-which is the EXACT OPPOSITE of what the Bible teaches.
The prophets spoke truth to power in their day and it is high time for We the People to do the same in our time. We the People, are being challenged, not by God, by the idolators, the autocrats, the Pharaohs of our moment to stand up for what is true and good or to sit down, take the shit they are throwing at us and hope for some scraps, some hand-me-downs from their grift, their theft. We the People have to say NO to this bullshit, We the People have to clean out our clogged ears, clear out our noisy mind that is listening to the bullshit and believing it, do angioplasty on our spiritual arteries so our soul’s voice comes through and SHEMA, listen, hear, and understand the “incessant demand” of the Voice from Sinai. The Rabbis were afraid of the prophets, even though they quoted them, sort of taught them, they were afraid if the prophets were taken seriously, the people would revolt against them, would reject the dogma they were pushing and have their own experiences of “God’s presence” and follow their calling rather than the calling of the Rabbis, rather than the calling of the people who wanted power. The same is true of Christianity and Islam-it is the people who fucked up the beauty, the truth, the knowing of the Bible and their faiths, not religion itself. We the People have to take back the spirit of the Bible, the visions of the prophets and the Word of God in our own unique fashion, like the Israelites did after crossing the Red Sea and at Mount Sinai. If we are to survive this crisis of idolatry being perpetrated in the US, in Israel, across the globe, We the People have to live into our inheritance from the prophets.
I ran from the “challenge”, the “incessant demand” and had to drink myself into oblivion to be able to ‘rationalize’ my evil ways, my turning my back on truth, justice, etc. I know how incessant the Voice from Sinai is and it took me 20 years to finally surrender to it, to allow “God’s presence” to envelop me, to change me, to point me in the direction I was meant to go in. Since that moment in Dec. 1986, I have lived with an “incessant demand” within me to seek truth, to speak truth to power and to do so without fear nor favor. I have not always been right and I have waded into areas blindly because injustice, mendacity, bullshit drive me nuts. I no longer need to seek solace in booze, I find joy, meaning, love, connection and belonging in the presence of God and those whom I share life with, friends, family, fellow learners, community. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark