Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 4 Day 324
“The sense for the sublime, the sign of the inward greatness of the human soul and something which is potentially given to all people, is now a rare gift. Yet without it, the world becomes flat and the soul a vacuum.” (Thunder in the Soul pg. 62)
Reminding ourselves that “sublime” is defined as elevated, grand, heroic from the Hebrew, these words are making me shudder, helping me to wake up and use my 5 senses to appreciate, live into, and respond to the “sublime” that is surrounding me at all times. At stake right now, as it has been in the past, is “the inward greatness of the human soul”, the living into the potential we are all created with by having the our souls blown into us by God, as the 2nd chapter of Genesis teaches. This is the challenge for all of us!
We the People are being bombarded by bullshit and mendacity, by subterfuge and cons, by Ponzi schemes and brazenness at the top of our ‘food chain’, our Federal Government from the President on down the line. There is no one in this Administration that believes in the Constitution, that believes in the Oaths they have taken, and, by extension, they help to promote a “the world that becomes flat and the soul a vacuum”! When the President of the United States says about The Civil Rights Act that “White people did very badly…and they were not invited to go into a university or college”. “So, I would say in that way, I think was unfair in certain cases.” WHAT THE FUCK!! The Civil Rights Act was a path to right the WRONGNESS of the UNFAIR TREATMENT of Black people for 200+ years here in the “land of the FREE”! Rather than acknowledge the “inward greatness of the human soul” of people of color, of Jews for a time, of every ethnic group that came here to escape persecution or poverty, these ‘POOR WHITE FOLK’ like Donald J. Trump, JD Vance, Russell Vought, Stephen Miller, Jared Kushner need to only acknowledge “their kind” as having any greatness, as having the right to do as they please. These words have to enrage We the People because they deny the truth, they skirt the issue, they use subterfuge to cover the ways the Civil Rights Act sought to elevate the plight of the Black Person, sought to end the SENSELESS HANGINGS of those ‘fine white southern christian KKK members’ that Trump thinks are “good people”.
I am railing about this because if I don’t We the People may become immune to the lies, immune to the hatred being spewed and confused because there is a grain of truth in what President DRUMPF(his real name) said; namely the universities and colleges started to admit more people of color, the job market opened up to more people of color, the wages of people doing the same job became the same for people of color as they were for white people-these are all terrible things for a Free Society to do, right!!??
We the People have to regain our “sense for the sublime” in every thing we do, this is the core aspect of the Mitzvah, the basic tenet of Christ’s teaching as I understand it. We say a prayer before we eat to express gratitude, to acknowledge that on our own, we could not have prepared “this meal”, “this bread”. Then, as Jews, we say a prayer after eating to express satisfaction, to express joy, to remember to Whom we owe our gratitude. With each action we take, from waking up through going to sleep, we say some prayer acknowledging the action, reminding myself of the obligation, and growing our“inward greatness of the human soul” within us. Each prayer, each mitzvah, each action either retards my march to growing and living at an “elevated” state, to living into the “grandness” of our being, to being an example of “heroic” to our children, family, community. This is the challenge of the words above, are we going to buy into the mendacity, approve of the grift, the graft, the theft of money, of people, of property this government is engaged in or are we going to STAND THE FUCK UP FOR THE TRUTH, THE CONSTITUTION, LOVE, KINDNESS, ETC? Are we going to STAND AGAINST THE MENDACITY, THE HATRED, THE AUTOCRACY these people who are “flat” and whose souls have become “a vacuum?
These are a few of the questions facing We the People in this moment. I have seen this movie before, I have hear the testimonies of people who survived a moment like this in the past, I can give testimony to what it was like for a black man to be dehumanized by having to be paid less than a white man for the same work because I heard it directly from the black men who worked for my father and who praised him for raising their wages to be equal when he took over the business! I can testify to the dehumanization of a Jew in Hungary when the Nazis came and the Hungarian government was so happy to fulfill the call for more Jews to be gassed, for Jews to be shot in the back of the head and fall into the Danube after their shoes were taken from them because I heard the testimony from survivors. I can attest to the discrimination against Jews in the Armed Services during WWII, and in America as well because my father was subjected to it and he stood tall, he would not give in to changing his name. I can attest to the emptiness of life when my “soul” was “a vacuum” and I was a flat two-dimensional being. I refuse to live this way, I refuse to be ignored, I refuse to stop my goal of reaching you and me so we can grow our “sense of the sublime”, so we can live an “elevated, grand” life. This is the heroic task that we are presented with in this moment, to fight these autocrats, the senseless hatred being spewed by this government and to say YES to the teachings of Christ, YES to the teachings of Moses, YES to the Call from Sinai. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark