Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 4 Day 121
“Tragic is the role of religion in contemporary society. The world is waiting to hear the Voice, and those who are called upon to utter the word are confused and weak in faith. “The voice of the Lord is powerful; the voice of the Lord is full of majesty” (Psalm 29:4). Where is its power? Where is its majesty?” (Insecurity of Freedom pg. 21)
OY! Reading this today, knowing when these words were written and spoken for the first time is depressing. Religious leaders were warned of the impending danger of the cultish faux-religious groups sprouting and about to sprout up. By now, the National Prayer Breakfast had been started and those ‘christ is the lion’, ‘live like King David’ people were worming their way into government, foreign affairs, etc. The KKK was alive and well so ‘christ’, according to their theology, was a white supremacist, and Nixon’s lies, Falwell’s ‘moral majority’ (which was anything but moral), Gingrich, Tea Party, MAGA, Prosperity Gospels were yet to flourish, though they were beginning their climb to the ‘top of the heap’. Yet, our religious leadership, as great as they were, failed to inoculate the faithful against the hypocrisy, the idolatry, the PAGANS who were in our midst!
How could this have happened? Fear-full stop! Religious people were afraid to ‘be on the wrong side of…’, they did not support MLK and Civil Rights for a long, long time and some, especially white southerners, never have as we are witnessing a return to a Jim Crow type era. Religious leaders forgot that they serve God, they serve something greater than their paycheck and whenever they gave into to the “Board”, they lost their voices and their power-which comes from God. These Clergy people decided their livelihood was more important than serving their calling, their souls’ knowing and the greater good of humankind. How fucking sad!! It is enraging that the people who were to teach us the moral solution to the problems all humanity face, compromised themselves for the sake of a paycheck, for the sake of a job. All Pulpit Clergy should have been marching with John Lewis, Rev Martin Luther King, way before Selma and they didn’t because they didn’t want to upset the power structure of their congregations, the power structure of the white racists and they did not want to face their own inner racism. For Jews, many were happy that the Blacks were being discriminated against as the quotas on Jews in Graduate Schools had recently been lifted, the memory of Nazi Germany was fresh in their minds and, heaven forbid, they did not want to “rock the boat”!
How utterly disgusting for our Clergy to shrink in the face of their fears, of their prejudices, of their bastardizing of the moral foundation upon which every spiritual discipline stands! The more I think about what was happening, the more angry I am with what passed for ‘religious observance’. There are not enough “hail marys’, “our fathers”, “chest pounding” to redeem what We the People allowed and fostered to happen in our religious institutions. Yes, We the People are at the heart of this dangerous drama that has been playing out for the millennia since the times of antiquity, when humans were tools if they didn’t have power, since the times when the Priesthood in Ancient Israel was for sale and controlled by the King, since the times of the Prophets who railed against such behaviors, since the time of Christianity spreading hatred of the very people from whom Jesus came from, since the time of the Rabbis working hard to mitigate the rage and the abject despair of the prophets over the People’s wanton disregard for God’s pleas to return.
The tragedy we are part of today, in America, in Israel, across the Globe lies at the feet of the so-called ‘religious leaders’. These pagans, these mendacious masters, these PROSTITUTES have whored themselves and their religious institutions to suck the dick of Donald Trump and Steve Bannon, in order to get them to do what they want, believing they are in control of everything. They forget the lessons of history, they forget the experiences of the people at Mount Sinai, with everyone having their own experience of God both there and at the Red Sea, with each individual being talked to in their own way-remember the commandments are in 2nd person singular. Smotrich, Ben G’Vir, Cain-White, Osteen are merely representatives of the ROT and DECAY that has infiltrated the ‘real jews, real christians, real muslims’ as these whores call themselves.
Yet, We the People, at least 40-45% of us still believe in the Grifter-In-Chief! More than 40% of the people still applaud the charlatans who are making money off of God’s name-isn’t this the ultimate breaking of the 3rd Commandment-“Do not take the Name of the Lord in Vain!! More than 40% of the people are seeking and supporting surrendering to Russia, becoming serfs to Trump and his WhoreMongers, spewing racial hatred and antisemitism throughout the land instead of Freedom! How is this possible? It goes back to the opening sentence above, it goes back to the clergy of the time not heeding Rabbi Heschel’s words. It goes back to We the People wanting to control the clergy, have power over the word of God and the works God commands us to fulfill. It goes back to the spiritual bankruptcy that We the People were suffering from and the lack of effort on the part of the Clergy to help us identify and heal our spiritual maladies so what we have today could not happen, so what we experience today would not have been given the ‘shade’ to grow in such darkness and overwhelm the light. Where the FUCK are the CLERGY of TODAY when Rev William Barber is arrested for praying in public to JESUS??
Having been raised in the 50’s and 60’s, knowing how much I really wanted to learn more than the Hebrew Alphabet and how to read the Torah for my Bar Mitzvah, and being thwarted by the ‘established’ modes of Hebrew School, I am grateful for the first sentence above because it describes my experience at that time and, in some ways, added to my disillusionment with the world after my father’s death. Spiritual needs were relegated to lifecycle events, and, while my shul did a good job of creating community, the deeper study and solutions to the issues facing us at the time communally as well as individually, were never addressed. Fast forward to my Rabbinic studies, spiritual counseling was not high on the priority list, “see someone twice and then refer them out” was what was being said. The tragedy continues. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark