Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 4 Day 200
“It is true that the commandment to be holy is exorbitant, and that our constant failures and transgressions fill us with contrition and grief. Yet we are never lost. We are sons of Abraham. Despite all faults, failures, and sins, we remain parts of the Covenant. His compassion is greater than His justice. He will accept us in all our frailty and weakness.” (God in Search of Man pg. 378)
These words above lay out the challenge and the hope, the reason that “despair is alien to the Jewish faith”, and the learning of what unconditional love is. Unconditional love, as I hear Rabbi Heschel this morning is not allowing us to do what ever we want and say ‘I’m sorry’ only to do the same things over and over again. It is not, as I am processing this concept today, whitewashing the errors of self nor of another. It is holding ourselves responsible “to be holy”, exorbitant as it may seem. It is to acknowledge our “constant failures and transgressions” so our “contrition and grief” bring us to a new understanding of how to be human and improve our actions. Unconditional love, as practiced by God is to be found in the last two sentences above; when our “compassion” for ourselves and another(s) “is greater than our justice” and when we can accept “our frailty and weakness” and those of the people around us, we are living unconditional love.
This is the challenge for all of humanity since the beginning of time, of our evolution/creation. Yet we seemed to have stopped evolving, we seem to enjoy returning over and over again to our animal instincts, to relish in the fact that “our thoughts are evil from our youth”. Rather than take on “the commandment to be holy”, knowing we will not be perfect and we are on a continuum, We the People seem to have jettisoned any feeble attempts and keep rolling around in the mud of autocracy, the quicksand of cruelty, and we dive headfirst into the deceptions of people telling us good is evil, evil is good, truth is fake and fake is truth, etc. REALLY?! Seeing the world through the eyes of the autocrat, the grifter, it is easy to pick the pockets of We the People because we would rather be deceived, we would rather have someone else to blame than be responsible for our “constant failures and transgressions”. So when Trump blames “the democrats”, when Bibi calls us to hate the Palestinians because they all want us dead, people of little sophistication, people who give lip service to “the commandment to be holy” rather than engage in the depth of what it takes to be in the holiness arena, believe and follow. This is the part of We the People that spurns the unconditional love of God, that is not filled with “contrition and grief” over what they have done, what they have wrought. Au contraire, they rejoice in their cruelty, they throw a party for their transgressions of “the commandments” and their actions totally deny: “we are never lost” because their actions deny the Abrahamic creed, their actions deny Jesus’ teachings, Moses’ exhortations to “CHOOSE LIFE”.
Humanity has learned nothing, it seems, from our experiences up until now. We do not “love the stranger because we were strangers in the land of Egypt”. We do not “proclaim freedom throughout the land and to all its inhabitants therein”. We have failed to “have one law for the stranger and citizen alike”. We continue to proclaim “America the Beautiful” and “The People Israel Live”, while our actions deny both statements. The People Israel cannot live when the People Israel go against the teachings, the lessons, the paths of holiness and goodness, the ways of “contrition and grief”, the commandments to be holy and to do T’Shuvah. America is not beautiful when it practices cruelty-be it towards the Native Americans, the Chinese, the Irish, the Italians, the Blacks, the Jews, the Hispanics-cruelty is never beautiful and Trump and the part of We the People that follow him like lap dogs are telling us that cruelty is beautiful and holy! We have so-called religious leaders praising cruelty as commanded by God both here in America and in Israel-is it any wonder why some of We the People believe destruction is once again upon us because of our own actions. It is the “enemy within” that is destroying us-both the internal evil inclination gone riot of the individual and the external evil being lauded by our elected officials.
The greatest cruelty and the height of denial of God comes from our unwillingness to be in “contrition and grief” over our failures to “be holy”, over our insistence on denying our “sins and transgressions” by justifying them, by proclaiming that ‘our justice’ is greater than our compassion and that we have ‘a new covenant’ that enshrines white people to be the top of the food chain. Rather than engage in T’Shuvah, in repentance, in amends, in seeing the truth, these PAGANS are reveling in their evil by saying “Jesus told me to do this”, “This is the will of God” otherwise it would not be happening, and other such bullshit. We have lost the moral high-ground of our ancestors, we are pointing our internal moral compass in the wrong direction, and the rest of We the People have to get off our asses and not “fiddle while Rome is burning”. We the People are being called, hell we are being commanded to stand up, to speak up, to shut down the evil that is running rampant in our streets, to tell ICE to end these Gestapo tactics, to tell Miller that he has to go to Alligator Alcatraz because his ancestors were not born here, tell Vought he has to face a Religious Court for his Sins against Christ, tell Lutnick that he has to face a Rabbinic Court for his sins against Adonai, tell the rest of We the People that we are not going to take their lies and bullshit anymore. We the People have to demand “contrition and grief” from Bibi, Donny, and the rest of their thugs, We the People have to teach our children unconditional love, how to do T’Shuvah, how to strive towards holiness, how to fail and get back up(resilience), and how to have “compassion be greater than justice” and “accept our frailty and weakness”.
This is the daily task I engage in and I continue to work to “be holy”. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark