Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 4 Day 123
“God had to bury truth in order to create man. How does one ever encounter the truth? The truth is underground, hidden from the eye. Its nature and man’s condition are such that he can neither produce nor invent it. However, there is a way. If you bury the lies, truth will spring up.”(Insecurity of Freedom pg. 22)
The first sentence above refers to a Midrash that talks about the ‘war’ that ‘raged in heaven’ between the Angels who wanted humans created and those that didn’t who all made their ‘case’ to God. The Angel of Truth was the most vehement against creating humanity because the Angel knew that humans would lie and bastardize the truth. So, the Midrash goes on to say that God buried “truth” in the one place humans would ‘never’ look-in their inner life, in their soul. This midrash speaks to the high value the Rabbis, the spiritual world places on “truth” and the reality that humans have, throughout the millennia, spat on “truth”, bastardized “truth”, misused “truth” and, most of all, ignored “truth” whenever “truth” becomes inconvenient to feed their greed and their avarice.
This problem, of how human beings can stand for, with, and in “truth” especially when in becomes inconvenient has been with us forever. We see this in the stories of Sarah and Hagar, of Jacob and Esau, of Rebekah and Isaac, in stories throughout the entire Bible. Rather than learn from their errors, the Rabbis, the leaders of the Church have canonized these stories and turned them into ‘good things’, lying to one’s husband becomes for the ‘sake of heaven’, abusing someone who did as you asked, bore a son for your husband, becomes ‘righteous’, tricking one’s brother and never reconciling with him is seen as a good, smart move-all leading to the lies that help to separate us one from another today. Maybe this is the reason that the fundamentalist practitioners of the different faiths have embraced the LIAR in Chief, Donald Trump, and his band of thieves, liars, and practitioners of visiting evil and cruelty upon human beings just because they can.
From Adam to King David and beyond in Jewish history, we have been stymied by our refusal to “encounter the truth”. Nathan the prophet, upon hearing King David’s outrage at the story he was telling him, pointed his finger at David and accused him of being the demon of the story. David immediately agreed and sought to reconnect with God. The Second Temple was destroyed because, according to the Rabbis, of senseless hatred amongst the Jews of the time. This senseless hatred has continued to this day and it hinders our ability to “encounter the truth”.
Senseless hatred is used as a political tool and no one has done more with it than the Republicans and Trump. These ‘good christian folk’ keep lying and lying, bastardizing the “truth” of Jesus’ teachings and the moral foundations of Christianity and calling everyone else liars, grifters, etc. They are following the Goebbels teaching:”accuse another of that which you are guilty of” to a whole new level. They are masters at this, Trump sells these lies like hotcakes, he is a great salesman to people who want to be deceived and lied to. We are in a time where self-deception is at an all time high, I think. We the People seem to have made a choice to stay willfully blind, to violate the “Holiness Code” found in Leviticus 19:1-18 with reckless abandon. Rather than “honor your mother and father”, children are “divorcing” them, cutting them off and out. Rather than leave the corners of the fields for the poor, people are harvesting every inch, rather than rebuking someone when they are doing wrong, people are lauding Trump’s every act of sin, every act which makes fun of another, blames another, degrades another human being. Rather than pay a worker his wages every day, employers seek to find ways to exploit their workers, putting stumbling blocks up for the blind and cursing the deaf are everyday occurrences rather than NOT doing either of these actions. Suspect your neighbor is the way of the world instead of Love Your Neighbor in today’s world. This is the tragedy and trauma we are living in today, all because of our aversion to “truth”. All because we are unwilling to, feel incapable to “encounter the truth” each and every day.
Human hubris contributes greatly to our unwillingness and inability to “encounter the truth”, I believe. As the next sentence above says, “he can neither produce nor invent it” and this is too much for most humans to bear. We the People have to come to terms with our own limitations, with our own dependency upon our “intuitive mind”, our need to live in higher consciousness each and every day. We the People are being called by the writing today to reprioritize our thinking and our relationship with “truth”. We the People are being reminded that we are not as all-powerful and all-knowing as we think we are. We the People are being called to account in the words above for our hubris, for our using our rational mind to deny what “truth” is, to lie about the need and call of every human soul to live into “truth”, to enslave people with the lies and the subterfuge our elected officials are using to usurp the Constitution, to destroy the underpinnings of our democracy, to set up their new “1000 year fourth Reich” as some of Trump’s advisors, cronies are calling it. We the People know where this type of talk leads, We the Jewish People know what living under ‘christian nationalism’ is like and how demeaning, how dangerous it is for Jews, Muslims, etc. Yet, jews, muslims, christians, even some catholics, all are embracing Project 2025, loving what Netanyahu is doing in Gaza and the West Bank, believing that ‘might makes right’ even though the prophet Zechariah says: “Not by might, not by power, but by My spirit…”(Zechariah 4:6). I just keep wondering what Bible these ‘good religious folk’ are reading-certainly not the Hebrew Bible nor the New Testament of Jesus’.
I am hyper aware of the subtle lies that swirl around in my head and from the mouths of another. Because I was a liar and a con, I am ultra-sensitive to them upon hearing them, perceiving them and I erupt like a volcano when people spout them. I can’t stand what passes for spiritual sustenance today, how Rabbis and Preachers, Priests and Ministers are willing to give comfort the comfortable and afflicted the afflicted with their words of encouragement rather than afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. In sermon after sermon, it seems the majority of clergy are content to ‘not rock the boat’ for fear of… FUCK FEAR! Speaking “Truth” is our only job, as clergy and as human beings. Silent acquiescence is the path to slavery and destruction-we have been there before. “Truth” no matter what is our path! God Bless sand stay safe, Rabbi Mark