Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 4 Day 274
“However, an honest estimation of the moral state of our society will disclose: Some are guilty, but all are responsible. If we admit that the individual is in some measure conditioned or affected by the public climate of opinion, an individual’s crime discloses society’s corruption.” (Thunder in the Soul pg. 54)
These words written and spoken at various events in the 1960’s were dealing with discrimination, which we will see in tomorrow’s quote. AND, they apply to every aspect of living. “The moral state of our society” is always what drives communities to doing good or doing evil, respecting the infinite worth and dignity of every human being or weaponizing religion, the law, Congress, the military to do the bidding of the autocrat, of the “wolves” as David Brooks writes about in yesterday’s NY Times OP-ED section. Rabbi Heschel is reminding us that We the People are just as responsible for the hatred and evil as the perpetrators! An outlandish statement and a truthful one. “But its not my fault, I am powerless, I didn’t vote for them, etc” are the outcries from many of We the People, and they are lame excuses for the “moral state of our society” that we have allowed to flourish.
Tevye says it in Fiddler on the Roof: “If I were a rich man…they think you really know”. Society’s obsession with wealth and power for the sake of wealth and power has been going on for the millennia and We the People have fed into it. Anti-Semitism has been around forever, the precursor to all other forms of racial, ethnic discrimination, to the hatred of foreigners, etc. Knowing this has not stopped “the South” from their “rise again”, knowing the spiritual and moral destruction that slavery, that racism, that anti-semitism brings to a community and country has not stopped some of We the People from voting into office the most hateful, power-seeking, money-grabbing administration in American History. Why would people not steal and rob when the “grifter-in chief” is President and has never been held accountable for his myriad of thefts, lies, treatment of his workers and sub-contractors? What is really insane is that if you don’t steal enough, if you are not brazen enough, then Trump and his cronies label you a thief, a criminal; if it is big enough and another administration put you in prison or convicted you, then a Pardon, Clemency, etc are in order from this administration! This is the way We the People have chosen to “disclose society’s corruption” without any shame apparently. How tragic, how sad.
The people committing the crimes are absolutely guilty and responsible and should be held to answer for their crimes-trust me I know this. The society in which these behaviors flourish, as in America, also has to be held accountable and realize their guilt in creating, allowing, not stopping “the moral state of our society” to become so rotten, so immoral, so tilted to power, wealth, status that anything goes as long as you get one of those three. Yet, the MAGA crowd doesn’t do this, the Far Left crowd doesn’t do this, the Republicans don’t and the Democrats, too often, just admit their errors and quit. We the People are being called to FIGHT THE BLIGHT of our society, to END THE CORRUPTION of our society, to hear the call of the Voice on Sinai calling us to “righteousness, righteousness you will pursue” Though it is in the future tense, it is an action that has begun and We the People need to participate and then today is one of the days leading to us healing our societal corruptions, our societal immoralities, our societal crimes.
Immersing myself in these words and this thought, I am brought back to the days of my youth, when rich people were revered in public and denigrated in private. When the words of Tevye were so prevalent (as they are now) and all that mattered was how much wealth you had, how great your business was doing. When asked “Vus Machs Du”, Yiddish for What are you doing, the response was “Macht a Leiben”, making a living which was a slight bastardization of the Yiddish, it really means doing life. We the People have been so confused and corrupted by our ancestors that we no longer understand the difference between living life and making a ‘living’, between being decent and being a bully, between doing the next right thing and doing the next expedient action that serves the self, etc. We the People need to revolt against the Clergy who preach a Christian, Jewish, Muslim Nationalism, who seek to denigrate those ‘not our kind’, who use the Jews, people of color, ‘those people’ as their scapegoats, who seek “the rapture” the destruction of the world because they refuse to do their own Accounting of their souls, they refuse to do an Accounting of the Societal Soul - hence their blame of everyone else. We the People can and must say NO to this way of being and YES to the pursuit of righteousness.
This idea is dear to me because it is what happened to me, not blaming anyone else for my actions and I am acknowledging “society’s corruption” played a role in my descent into a criminal lifestyle. I was always loud and argumentative, I was always fearful of not being accepted for who I was/am, and when I found that stealing made me feel okay, that money in my pocket gained me some respect, I got “hooked” on it. When I could be appreciated by my mother for helping out, when I knew my brother depended on my financial support, I felt like a big-shot and this added to my engagement with “society’s corruption” and my moral state, which my father tried so hard to mold and shape into a strong morality, fell into disrepair and I fell into despair. I am not proud of buying the lies, of rebelling against the societal structure that spread the disease of wealth means power, rightness, and I did. The past 38 years have been about healing myself and another(s) from this disease and returning to the morality of the Bible, of my father, my grandfathers. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark