Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 4 Day 161
“Modern man may be characterized as a being who is callous to catastrophes. A victim of enforced brutalization, his sensibility is being increasingly reduced; his sense of horror is on the wane. The distinction between right and wrong is becoming blurred. All that is left to us is our being horrified at the loss of our sense of horror.” (God in Search of Man pg. 369)
One has to, or needs to, be shaking one’s head at reading, re-reading these words from 1955! 70 years ago Rabbi Heschel and many other philosophers, historians, clergy were bemoaning the callousness of human beings, not just the Germans who helped, participated in, or were willfully blind to what the Nazis were doing. The callousness of Europe to not stand up “for the Jews”, the callousness of Cornell Hull in denying entry to the St. Louis when it was refused entry to Cuba, because of Hull’s lobbying Cuba to refuse entry! The callousness of the “America First” campaign that Lindbergh, Father Coughlin, Henry Ford and Senator Hamilton Fish and others waged against “going to war to save Jews”, not wanting to help England in their fight against Hitler’s Nazi Regime. The callousness of Neville Chamberlain in ‘giving’ Hitler what he wanted in his ‘peace’ deal with him, not caring about the freedom of another country, the sovereignty of another people-just wanting to appease an insatiable person. Re-reading these words today, when we have Putin, Orban, Erdogan, Bibi, Ayatollah, Kim, Xi, MBS, Trump, Miller, Lutnick, Holman, Noem, Bondi, to name a few and watch the people genuflect in front of them or when their names are mentioned makes some of us, (especially me) want to throw up!
How has this come to be our state of affairs, how has cruelty, hatred, callousness infected the American Public so intensely that goons are being sent to beat people up who may or may not be here illegally, who have not committed any felonies and they are rounded up like Jews were in Germany in the 1930’s and 40’s and put into “detention centers” with them being sent to God knows where, not their country of origin, maybe the Sudan, maybe El Salvador to languish in the worst possible conditions. Some of those rounded up are American Citizens who are being kept incommunicado and ‘lost’ in the system. This is being done by the Country that has as its welcoming Lady Liberty the words “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”! WTF?!?!
Are we really so callous? Have these thugs been so victimized by “enforced brutalization” that their “sensibility is being increasingly reduced”? Are We the People so blind to the horrors of these policies, the brutality being practiced by our government in our name? Are We the People so unwilling to realize the “catastrophes” of what is happening and what has been happening to the soul of our nation, to the souls of our neighbors, to our own souls? Are We the People so immune to “evil” that we think these are good practices, “they deserve this way of being treated” as Stephen Miller, Tom Holman, JD Vance, Trump believe? Are We the People, as Jews here and in Israel really willing to call the Palestinian people sub-human as Ben G’vir, Smotrich, the Likud Cabinet and Netanyahu do? Are We the People willing to go along with MBS because he gives money to Kushner and Trump so we forget his brutality in the matter of Khashoggi and others who he has killed, jailed so he could consolidate his power grab? Are We the People willing to be ‘good germans’ and march lockstep with ‘Der Fuhrer? The answer, of course, seems to be yes, unfortunately. Rather than follow the Bible’s dictates that evil begets evil, that we should Choose Life not death, we should Be a Blessing not a Curse, We the People have a history of hearing and following those who want chaos, callousness, hatred, brutality, to be the way of our world! Unbelievable and True!!
HOW DID WE GET HERE? We the People find ourselves in this position 70+ years after Rabbi Heschel wrote and spoke the words above because we are “stiff-necked” and we are envious as Cain was, we are worried about “not getting ours” as Joseph’s brothers were, we are scared when things don’t happen in our time frame like the Israelites did with the Golden Calf, we think our shit doesn’t stink and we can take anything we want like King David took Bathsheba. These ways of being, though frowned upon in our Bible, though not permitted by our Mitzvot, seem to have a longer shelf life in our subconscious, a louder voice in our inner life than the stories of what happens when we are “stiff-necked”, we lose everything even the Temple, even our homeland.
HOW DID WE GET HERE? We the People have forgotten the arduous journey of our ancestors, grandparents, parents to get here, the “brutalization” they were victims of ‘in the old country’, the rape of the women, the beating of the men, the forced labor of the children and inscription into the Armies of these nations only to be brutalized more. We the People have become so entitled that Howard Lutnick seems to have forgotten that his ancestors came from the Ukraine, Poland? Stephen Miller seems to have forgotten that his Great Grandfather came here from Belarus and his Grandfather would have been conscripted into the Army if the family had not left ‘without papers’! We the People who are applauding the THUGS and “brutalizations” happening in the streets of Los Angeles and other cities are being willfully blind to the journey of our ancestors so we could “breathe free” and no longer be “tempest-tost”!
HOW DID WE GET HERE? We the People have become so “entitled” and so spiritually bankrupt that we need someone to “blame” for our inadequacies, for our inabilities to make a better life than our parents had, to take the responsibilities of our “missing the mark” off of us so we put them on “those people”. We the People are in this place of “callousness” precisely because we are spiritually bankrupt because the truth of our Biblical Wisdom has been co-opted by ‘those good christian/jewish/muslim” PAGANS!
This is my life-long quest; to speak truth to the souls of another human being, to help myself and you stay in the wrestling match for the goodness of our being to prevail, “to do and then understand”, and to live a life which is compatible with “do justly, love mercy, walk humbly with God”. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark