Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 4 Day 309
“There is happiness in the love of labor; there is misery in the love of gain. Many hearts and pitchers are broken at the fountain of profit. Selling himself into slavery to things, man becomes a utensil that is broken at the fountain.” (Thunder in the Soul pg. 57)
Each morning as I read the passage I am about to write on for this/that day, I am overcome with a spiritual upheaval, a tingling throughout my body that goes directly from my soul to my head and I am at once; excited, angry, bewildered and calm. I speak often of shuddering upon reading something and I wanted to give you my complete experience. I realize as I write these words that the anger and bewilderment is from the inability of We the People to learn from the prophets, learn from the Bible, learn from teachers like Rabbi Heschel, Rev. King, Pastor Niebuhr, Christ, etc and, instead, continue to do what caused, causes destruction and ruin to countries, to communities, to individuals, to self. The excitement and calm come from a ‘seeing’ what God is saying to me/to us about how to change, how to live better and the confidence, trust that God has in us that we can and will return!
The first sentence above is calling we the people to rise up and have “love of labor” in serving something greater than ourselves. To realize how much “love” the spiritual world has for us by giving us the opportunity to do the Mitzvot, to help another human being, to leave the narcissistic tendencies of our youth, to rise above the xenophobia of political discourse, to ‘see’ what is needed in the world and what part of us can fulfill the particular need we are created for. “Love of labor” has nothing to do with making money, it has everything to do with making a life. When we are miserable at our jobs, when we feel under appreciated and under valued, when we are seeing everything wrong with our lives, when it is all about the Benjamins, we have lost the spiritual connection to something greater than ourselves, we have lost the joy of service, we have lost the ability to love. I say this with the knowing of watching people claim they love their children, their spouses, etc and are unable/unwilling to speak truth to them, they believe they can ‘fix’ them and if they can’t-then it is the fault of the other person. So they bring them to the Doctor of the body, of the soul, they send them to rehab and get “fixed”. This is NOT love, this is self-centeredness, this is worry about optics, this is a denial of responsibility, this is using the vulnerability of another against them, this is, in fact, evil! Yet, be it to a doctor, a Rabbi, a Priest, a Minister, an Imam, God is blamed for the ills of the world by ‘non-believers’ and the representative of God, the clergy person, is the brunt of the wrath. In politics, people in power who are beleaguered usually blame ‘those people’, the ‘vermin infecting our country’, the ‘democrats’, the Jews, the Blacks, the Hispanics, etc. All of this because we the people, in our smallness, in our ugliness, in our wanting to be seen as ____(fill in the blank) because optics is important. When asked “what will the neighbors think” when my father was angry about some injustice, he said-“I don’t care, what is right is right!”.
Because “getting mine” has become so ingrained in people, we are witnessing the grift of a millennia, the theft of the centuries, by the people who are supposed to “uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States”. While there are many who envy the money, power and prestige of the rich and famous, We the People, when we are in our proper place/lane and not giving into the smallness of pettiness and pride, KNOW the misery the flaunters, the grifters experience. We can see it in their defensiveness, in their blaming, in their abuse of power and abuse of people. While we will probably never know the truth of what happens to people in the quiet of their homes, in the “dark night of the soul”, history has shown us the “misery in the love of gain” that other people have had and, in pursuing it, many of We the People experience! Trump, Kushner, Vought, Lutnick, Patel, et al may seem like they are ‘on top of the world’, and, as Jimmy Cagney found out in the movie White Heat and said before the tank he was standing on exploded. The issue for We the People is the collateral damage that happens when the lies, the falseness, the house of cards that so many of the MAGA followers are living in and standing on explodes and there is no one to lend a hand, no one to trust, no one to “fix Humpty Dumpty”.
Hence the importance of SEEING the Truth, of HEARING the Truth, of KNOWING the difference between fact and fiction, between reason and wonder, between Truth and Mendacity. We the People can only know, see, and hear what is true and good, what is real and kind, what is holy and necessary when our, like Joseph in the Torah Portion Vayigash, the one we read this week, We allow us and the Bible to “speak into our ears” and when, like Judah in the Torah Portion Miketz, we can say: “she is more right than I”, and when, like King David, we can hear the indictment against us and know we are wrong and have to do T’Shuvah for our wrongs. This takes Spiritual Maturity, this takes knowing our “Soul’s Code” the book by James Hillman, it takes We the People studying our holy texts, immersing ourselves in the words of the Bible, the commentators, the spiritual teachers from the prophets till now, both Jewish and non-Jewish. We the People are going to live in misery without growing our souls, without gaining Spiritual Maturity and we will continue to fuck up the Garden that God gave to us.
I know the truth of what I write because in my pursuit of “gain”, I was miserable, in the pursuit of gain of many people I have encountered, they are miserable. I know my inability to truly love came from my loving my misery so much, I would not change. This is one of the biggest amends I have made, disliking misery so much, I enlarge my capacity to love. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark