Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 4 Day 133
“We must act even when inclination and vested interests would militate against equality. Human self-interest is often our Nemesis! It is the audacity of faith that redeems us. To have faith is to be ahead of one’s normal thoughts, to transcend confused motivations, to lift oneself by one’s bootstraps.” (Insecurity of Freedom pg. 97)
These first two sentences above describe a reality that Paula Cain-White, Joel Osteen, the Republican Congress, the ‘good christian folk’ that promote ‘prosperity gospel’, who denigrate Jesus as he works his wonders in the Gospels as ‘liberal bullshit’ need to hear, heed, and live into! The question I have is what happened to these ‘people of faith’ that they can so blithely and easily betray everything that True Christian Faith holds dear? What happened to a Stephen Miller, the grandson of Holocaust survivors that he hates immigrants so much? What happened to Steve Bannon that he wants to take down the very system that gave him power? What happened to poor Elon Musk that he needs to defame, debase, ruin the very place that gave him the opportunity to be the richest man in the world? The traumas they must have suffered and the rejection of faith and spiritual healing is quite evident in their actions.
A more personal question is what happened to the people who still support these assholes, these PAGANS that they would jettison everything they know about their faith, about Jesus, about Moses, about the New Testament, the Koran, the Bible in favor of their ‘vested interests’ being protected by a liar, a man who shows no loyalty in return for the loyalty of another(s), a man who surrounds himself with idiotic sycophants who can’t get the job done and will not uphold the constitution, the ways of Jesus, the dictates of Torah, they only worship power and money. What happened to the people who worship at Trump’s feet that they would let go of their faith, their spiritual corpus colosseum would become so split that they celebrate cruelty, violence, hatred, forgetting they were strangers in Egypt and the call to love the stranger, care for the stranger, to love your neighbor as yourself, to proclaim freedom to all the inhabitants of this country, etc?
The demand of Rabbi Heschel above was made regarding treatment of Black people in the 1960’s, it holds true today for everyone who is not “in Trump’s club” and this includes the poor schmucks who voted for him, went to his rallies and will get screwed over by his ‘big beautiful bill’. The word “militate” is defined as “a powerful and/or conclusive reason to prevent something”. We all have self-interests, duh! Yet to be human means we can choose to prevent our self-interests from denigrating another human being, from enslaving another human being, from treating any human being as if they do not matter. Rabbi Heschel is calling upon us all to do this, to remember that every human being is created in the image of the divine, each one of us has infinite dignity and value, each of us is unique and has a particular plot of the garden to tend, grow, nurture, and share with the rest of us. The words above are a call to action, to stop our incessant need for more, more, more. Each year at the Passover Seder, we say Dayenu! Enough! Well isn’t it time for us to say ENOUGH to our “vested interests and inclination” towards evil?
While one can point to self-interest bringing about great things, when it is only self-interest we witness the bastardization of these great things. Take Facebook, Meta for example-a great idea to connect people, to give people an online community to learn and share. Because of Zuckerberg’s greed, self-interests, and inclination towards evil, he built a marketplace and a gathering place that promotes lies more than truth, that sells anyone’s shit whether they deliver or not, that takes advantage of people’s vulnerabilities, etc. All in the name of ‘doing a good thing’. His self-interests (and that of Sandberg, et al) has brought about an upheaval of how we treat the stranger, how we buy into Russian propaganda, how we vote against our self-interests and the needs, interests of our neighbors by electing people who want to tear down our Constitution, who see the Declaration of Independence as weak and stupid a document as the Gospels of the New Testament. And they did this by believing PAGANS will care about their interests, they bought the bullshit of the rallies and the Social Media lies as well as the mendacity of right-wing podcasts that electing people who want to deport the immigrants, who want to have the ‘white man’ always in control, who believe the rich should be richer and fuck the poor in their ass is in their self-interest!
We the People must take a stand TODAY and every day to honor the principles of the Torah, the Bible, the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, to honor TRUTH, JUSTICE. MERCY, as we are called upon to do by the prophets. The “human emergency” is happening right here, right now and We the People cannot wait for some ‘savior’ to help. Just as when we left Egypt, just as when we stood at the Red Sea, We the People have to take the first step, We have to live into the commandments of “you shall not murder” so We cannot go along with anything that harms another human being, that robs people of dignity and value. Living into “Don’t whore yourself”, We cannot continue to sell our souls for our “vested interests”, “do not steal” causes us to no longer take advantage of the most vulnerable as God lives among them. “Don’t LIE, forces us to be serious and deliberate in discerning truth from lies, fact from fiction and doesn’t allow for alternative fact bullshit! “Don’t covet” calls upon us to stop being so greedy, so unhappy with what another person has, as Ben Zoma says, “who is rich, one wants what they have” rather than having what they want. Coveting is the worst because it causes us to never accept Enough, to never say Dayenu. Yet, We the People can say NO to ourselves, can accept Enough, can live the 2nd 5 commandments of the Big Ten. Will we, is the question the sentences above ask us.
I have lived in both arenas and found when I only in my interests and inclinations, shit goes really crazy! I have also found when I speak, live, act in ways that promote equality, that promote the commandments, many ‘good people’ oppose me because I am not a Bibi lover, I am not ‘politically correct’, because I have no patience for mendacity and I get volcanic when a person is disrespecting towards people who deserve respect and whom I love. I still seek to live in the proper measure of self-interest and knowing the interests of another is my concern! A tall order and I am still figuring it out God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark