Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 4 Day 163
“Let us labor under no illusions There are no easy solutions for problems that are at the same time intensely personal and universal, urgent and eternal. Technological progress creates more problems than it solves. Efficiency experts or social engineering will not redeem humanity. Important as their contributions may be, they do not reach the heart of the problem.” ( God in Search of Man pg. 372)
The “problems” are what to do with the evil that is in the good and the good that is in the evil, I believe, as well as what to do with the human beings that purport to care and love in order to ‘get theirs’ and then, when in power-be it in business, politics, communal institutions, families-they revert to their insatiable desires for power, wealth, cruelty, etc. These “problems” have to be both “intensely personal and universal” otherwise there is no avenue for solutions because if it is just “intensely personal” then most other people will not care. If it is just “universal”, it becomes too big for an individual to handle so leave it to “them” to handle it. Both the “personal and universal” have to be present in our being for us to be forced to find a solution with another(s).
Which brings us to the problems of laboring “under” “illusions”, a major flaw in the character of humanity. Throughout history we have seen good people enhance the evil done by Kings, autocrats, despots, dictators, Pharaohs because they are laboring “under” the “illusions” that these are ‘good christian folk’, ‘good jewish people’, ‘serious muslim adherents’ rather that see the evil that radiates from their aura, the cruelty that brings smiles to their faces, the ‘all I care about is me’ policies they follow and invoke-from Trump to Bibi, from Bezos to Miller, from Lutnick to Ben G’vir. Yet, when one buys into the lie “there are good people on both sides”, the illusion becomes the reality that people buy into and life is lived through the prism of smoke and mirrors. Once that happens, which I fear it is both here and in Israel, everyone is tainted and more easily corrupted.
This way of being that humanity has practiced for the millennia may be what is meant in the 6th Chapter of Genesis, verses 5-6: “God saw the evil of man was great in the land and all of thoughts of his heart was evil continually. God regretted that God made man”. This is later refined in Genesis 8:21: “I will not curse the ground anymore for man’s sake, for the thoughts of man are evil from his youth; nor will I destroy every living thing as I have”. Evil is not something which comes natural to us, is how I understand these verses. It is something that WE LEARN! Babies are dependent and need touch and love, so too do we all as we grow. It is not inherent to our nature to do evil, love cruelty. Yes, we have within us the “evil inclination” and we are taught: “the good inclination is good and the evil inclination is very good” As it says in the midrash: “were it not for the evil inclination a man would never build a house, get married, have kids, engage in commerce, etc”. So to ‘blame’ God for installing the “evil inclination” in human beings is another subterfuge and controlling activity by people who want to, enjoy and relish in creating and reveling in evil ways. This is what makes these “problems” “eternal”. They have been with us forever and our ‘job’, the call to our souls, the demand of our intuitive minds is to be engaged in the solution for the evil that exists and procreates seemingly on its own. To be sure, however, it procreates through human beings who are either indifferent to “evil”; take things for granted and say why bother; people who engage in cruelty because it gives them the “warm blanket effect”; people who are oblivious to an authentic awareness of that which is because they go along with societal norms and mental clichés. Is so past time for We the People to wake up; to hear the 4-alarm fire happening to us, because of us and with our permission; to stop being enamored by the fires that we have set to burn up “those people” because ‘Jesus’ told me so or ‘Moses’ teaches us this in the Bible and other such POPPYCOCK, aka BULLSHIT.
We are in a time of great evil, as Harold Hill says in The Music Man: “we got trouble, right here in” our cities, our states, our communities, our homes, our country, our world. “Trouble with a Capital T which rhymes with” E, which stands for EVIL. It is in our mouths, in our news, in our streets with ICE and the military being stationed in our cities, it is in the White House and the Halls of Congress, it is in the voting in of ‘progressives’ who are as regressive as the ‘conservatives’ who want to deny equal rights to all, who want to have one law for the citizen and another for the stranger, who want to abolish the Constitution so “retribution” can rule. How much more urgent can it get??
It is not just outside of us that “evil” is personal, universal, urgent and eternal. It is the inside untreated, immature inner life that contains this “evil” and the transformation of our “evil inclination” is urgent and eternal, personal and universal because without doing this, we add to the “evil” rather than subtract from it. We the People are the great hope of God to turn things around. We the People are the great hope of the poor, the needy, the widow, the orphan, the stranger to fight our inner “evil” urge to dominate and instead practice random acts of kindness, infuse spiritual wisdom in the powerless and hear their wisdom, give voice to the concerns of the voiceless and give them a platform. We the People are being called by the Voice on Sinai to “To dream the impossible dream, to fight the unbeatable foe… to right the unrightable wrong.” These lyrics from the song “the Impossible Dream”, are examples of what is so urgent and universal, how the “problems” of “evil” manifest and, as Rabbi Tarfon says in Pirke Avot, 2:16: “it is not your duty to finish the work and neither are you free to neglect it”.
I have been dealing with these problems my entire life. As a youth, I pointed my fingers at everyone else, I was a victim. So, as is wont to happen, I became a victimizer, I was not going to be anyone’s fool so I became my own fool. While I paid a price, I know other human beings paid as great, if not greater, price. This is what my recovery is all about; repaying the debt I owe because of my past behaviors. It is not living in the past, it is recognizing the “urgent and universal” struggle to transform my “evil inclination”, it is knowing the “intensely personal and universal” consequences of the outcome of my inner and outer wrestling. It is being immersed in “wrestling with humans and God” when “evil” is happening and knowing when to obey and when to disobey. It is hard, it is exhilarating and I would not want it any other way. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark