Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 4 Day 128
“The way we act, the way we fail to act is a disgrace which must not go on forever. This is not a white man’s world. This not a colored man’s world. It is God’s world. No man has a place in this world who tries to keep another man in his place.” (Insecurity of Freedom pg. 96)
Realizing these words were spoken in January of 1963, at a time when ‘white supremacy’ was being threatened James Meredith had entered Ole Miss, 6 months later George Wallace would lose a confrontation with the Kennedys over the integration of the University of Alabama, and we are still fighting the truth above to this day. Since Brown v Board of Education people are using unique ways to stop integration in schools, now we have the “vouchers” for private schools, including Religious Schools which will help indoctrinate young people to a certain ideology, teach them the “other” or “those” people are ‘not like us’ and need to be managed/controlled, as was the case prior to Brown, prior to the integration of colleges in the South.
This “is God’s world” is so hard for people to accept ever since Mount Sinai. While the people who left Egypt, including the non-descendants of Jacob, all said “we will do and then understand”, they never fully embraced nor lived into this agreement, this covenant. Yet, God has not, to this day, destroyed the world, there is still Oxygen in the atmosphere, no matter how much we fuck with the Ozone, there is water in the earth, no matter how much we try and contaminate our lands with nuclear waste, like what happened at Brandeis Bardin Institute in California, etc. Yet, Trump, Vought, Miller Lutnick, Kushner, still believe that this is “a white man’s world” even though the last 3 would not be considered “white” by the other 2 and their white supremacist cronies. These 5 and the multitude of their followers and adherents want to take us back to a time when it was ‘whitey’ who made the rules and the rest of YOU had to follow them, Jews were good for collecting and lending money, the poor were good for farming the land, doing menial work, the ‘darkies’ were good for slave work and screwing their women, etc, etc. This is not the way to live in “God’s world”!! It is so bad, some 62 years after this conference, after these words are written, that in Israel, Netanyahu was elected through his call to his people to stop the Arabs from voting him out! He used racist language and played on the fears of people in order to stay in power. For a Jew, how disgusting, what a display of Avodah Zarah, idolatry!
What makes it so hard for all of us to accept, embrace and live into the truth that “it is God’s world” we are living in? It comes from our need for power, control, and certainty being “out of proper measure”. Instead of our realization that we are powerless over people, places and things, that everyone is to be “free” and that God’s ways (plural) are ways of pleasantness and all of God’s paths are towards wholeness, we, especially men, even more precisely white men, continue to attempt to exert control over our surroundings, other people, and, under Trump, even other countries-which he is failing at, which we are laughing stocks because of his stupidity, his greed, his being Trump The CHUMP to the world leaders he is calling his ‘very good friends’. We know he has nothing but disdain for the Arab leaders he is ‘making deals with’ because he hates anyone who is NOT WHITE and these Arab leaders are making him look like an idiot as they take advantage of him, make deals with China to share the wealth of AI chips Trump the CHUMP is giving them, etc.
We the People are being called both by the words above and by the call of the universe to return to a way of being that is in concert with being a partner with God in creating the world. While the bones and structure were put into place, it is up to We the People to implement the myriad of ways to “love your neighbor as you love yourself”, to “proclaim freedom throughout the land and to all it’s inhabitants therein”, to “love the stranger because you were strangers in the land of Egypt”. The last commandment is an interesting one, Egyptians enslaved us, according to the Torah, yet we have to remember they took us in when there was a famine, because of them the descendants of Jacob grew and grew, it was only when we grew “fat” as Moses teaches in Deuteronomy, that we became enslaved. Our world today may be reflecting those times once again: “A new king arose who did not know Joseph”(Ex.1:8) and today, Trump “did not know” our allies and our enemies, he only knows the grift and the greed. This is NOT the way of God’s world! This is the way of the “white man’s world”, the “black man’s world”, in other words, this is the way of a world without the spirit of God in it, it is a world where the laws of how to live together and have respect for the dignity and worth of every person is missing. It is way past time for We the People to restore the ways of holiness code to our modality of life. It is way past time for We the People to demand of the supporters of Trump, of Netanyahu, of Putin, Orban MBS, etc to stand for GOD not PAGANS! The choice is truly this simple, not easy, and simple. Either We the People are going to finally heed the words of the Bible, of the Civil Rights movement, of the great Jewish thinkers past and present, of the great Christian theologians past and present, the Buddha and his adherents like the Dalai Lama, or We the People will continue to follow the Liars, the Deceivers, the PAGANS to our own enslavement and ruin, just as Jacob’s descendants did in Ancient Egypt.
I found myself facing this dilemma in 1986 when I was arrested again. My troubles were of my own making, no one else’s! I could blame a myriad of circumstances and the truth, that I had to face that day in December of 1986, sitting in a jail cell in Van Nuys California, was that I was where I was supposed to be because my choices led me to be locked up. It was on that day that I chose to live in God’s world, not mine and I have been moving forward in this quest each day, little by little. It is a hard road to travel, I have made many a wrong turn and detour along the way and I know I am closer to honoring more and more of God’s ways than my own. I am lean more to helping my neighbor, my friend, my family and even my enemy than not, I am more than 51% living under the ways God teaches us, loving the stranger, jettisoning cruelty, welcoming and accepting the T’Shuvah of another human being, being more aware of the things I need to do T’Shuvah for and accepting the denial of connection from those who choose not to accept my T’Shuvah. Each day, when I thank God for being alive, I remember and commit to being at least one grain of sand more into God’s world than mine. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark