Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 4 Day 158
“The experience of the easy and endless opportunities for evil and the awareness of the dreadful danger, threatens to outweigh all delight of living…This essential predicament of man has assumed a peculiar urgency in our time, living as we do in a civilization where factories were established in order to exterminate millions of men, women, and children; where soap was made of human flesh. What have we done to make such crimes possible? What are we doing to make such crimes impossible? (God in Search of Man pg. 369)
The last two questions above are haunting me and I hope you as well. In this moment of cruelty and hatred, of lies and deceptions, of grift, graft, and taking advantage of the poor, the needy, the stranger, the widow and the orphan, have we considered these questions that Rabbi Heschel posed some 70 years ago? We have the attack on Iran by the U.S. against our own intelligence and Iran is a BAD ACTOR-full stop, we have the Marines patrolling the streets of Los Angeles and soon to be other cities where Democrats are mayors, governors, because there are no illegal immigrants in Florida, North Carolina, Georgia, Louisiana, Alabama, etc!! We have the cruelty of dismantling USAID, which brought many people to be allies of democracy and the U.S., we have the assault on Medicaid, Social Security, Medicare by the Republicans, and the tearing up of the Constitution by both Trumpism, MAGAworld, and, sadly, the Roberts Supreme Court. John Roberts is distinguishing himself as the first Chief Justice of The Supreme Court to destroy the Constitutional Rights of Article 1, the Bill of Rights, the rest of the Amendments. All of these horrors are being done in the name of Jesus?? All of this cruelty is done because ‘the Bible tells me so’ according to Mike Johnson. In Israel, Bibi is telling the Israelis-‘see I told you I am the only one who knows how to handle the Americans to get what I/Israel wants’. What he says in English and what he says in Hebrew are two different things, and his Hebrew speeches are full of ‘hidden’ messages that English speakers would not catch!
“What have we done to make such crimes possible”, We the People have been asleep at the wheel, We the People have been so whipsawed from one extreme to the other, We the People have allowed hatred, racism, to grow within our neighbors and ourselves, We the People have lived in comparison and competition, We the People have sought fame, fortune, power for their own sakes, not for the sake of a greater purpose and We the People have continued to live in a binary world of either/or. We the People have worshiped at the Golden Calf of money and power, We the People have abused the great works of the Bible, New Testament, Socrates, and forgotten the repeated experiences of what happens when people refuse to learn from the errors of another. We the People have accepted and bowed down to the “conventional norms and mental cliches” which, as Rabbi Heschel teaches, is “the greatest hinderance to knowledge”. “But Jerusalem grew fat and kicked. You grew fat, gross and coarse” is Moses’ prophecy to the Israelites in his last speech (Deut. 32:15) and this happened in 586 BCE and 70AD to the Jews and throughout history to all of the ‘powerful’ dynasties. Yet, We the People, through our self-deception, our lies, our inauthentic desires, continue to repeat this behavior and it didn’t work out so well for Germany, it hasn’t worked out so well for the Russian People, nor any other people.
“What are we doing to make such crimes impossible” is a soul question that We the People seem to be unable to respond to. “Now is the time for all good people to come to the aid of their country” is the sentence I learned to type at the beginning of learning how to type. As my fingers fly over the keyboard, I am sad that We the People have failed in this task so badly. There is hope, however, in the “No Kings Protests”, in the protests against what these GOONS and THUGS of ICE are doing to our cities and our neighbors, in the actions of some, unfortunately not enough, of our elected officials. What we need to be doing is to improve our spiritual maladies that are listed above. We the People need a program of recovery, a spiritual discipline that restores our “basic goodness of being” and puts our rational mind back in its place as a servant to our intuitive mind, as Einstein teaches. It is time for We the People to engage in a study of our Holy Texts, be it Jewish, Muslim, Christian, Buddhist, Philosophical, and follow the promise of the people who left Egypt: “Na’Aseh V’Nishma” , we will do it and then understand it. Rather than sit around and argue over what something means, rather than waiting till we understand something to take action, follow the wisdom and the actions of our ancestors who came to America for a better life, who came here for religious freedom, for freedom to speak their minds, for freedom of the press, for freedom from being locked up on TRUMPED up charges, for a way of being and living that was different than having to listen to the ramblings of King George, the mad king, and his bi-polar whims(sound familiar)??!! We the People are being called to step up, stand up and show up for our selves, for our children, for the next generations to come so that “this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom-and that government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from this earth”. This was the promise of Abraham Lincoln, the promise of the Statue of Liberty: “give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”, and to ensure that the divine promise as manifested in the Exodus from Egypt- tyranny will not endure forever; becomes our new reality.
Each day, as I see how We the People are going against our inner truths, acting in concert with evil actively, passively, indifferently, I wonder what has happened to the soul of America, to the soul of the individual. I know what it is like to be spiritually bankrupt, I know what it is like to go against what I know to be the next right action, I have a PhD in this-even at times in recovery. I also know that living into the spiritual power of the universe, clearing away the schmutz and lies, the obliviousness and the inauthentic desires gives me the opportunity to see the world through the “maladjusted” lens of radical amazement which puts on me the obligation to live decently, to live with passion and purpose, to know that my destiny is to serve, my joy comes from wanting what I have rather than being in the low-grade misery of wanting what I don’t have. I am writing every day, I have 2 books waiting to be published, I enjoy a life beyond my deserving with the wonderful Harriet Rossetto, my daughter Heather and grandson Miles are joys, I have the love of my siblings and family as well as friends. To pay it forward, I have to honor the spiritual truths I know and seek to uncover the ones I am still hiding from. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark