Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 4 Day 333
“We have learned to listen to every “I” except the “I” of God. The man of our time may proudly declare: nothing animal is alien to me but everything divine is. This is the status of the Bible in modern life: it is a sublime answer, but we do not know the question anymore. Unless we recover the question, there is no hope of understanding the Bible.” (Thunder in the Soul pg. 66)
I am taking this paragraph in 2 days as I find it so rich in meaning for this moment, for the way we move forward, for the way we raise our children. “What the mind can conceive, man can achieve” according to Napoleon Hill from his book Think and Grow Rich. Unfortunately, too many of us have bought this terrible lie and will do anything to achieve our inauthentic as well as authentic needs/desires. In fact, as Rabbi Heschel says in his book The Insecurity of Freedom, our culture has become so obsessed with needs/desires that not fulfilling them results in some mental disorder. I would tell my mother the reason I was so bad was because she didn’t send me to Summer Camp! Because of our incessant desire to fulfill our desires no matter the cost to another human being, no matter the cost to our own souls, the truth of the second sentence above is painfully without question.
We the People have become a problem-solving machine, believing every situation, every problem, every interaction can be solved by us alone. We the People have bought into “survival of the fittest” mindset as well. Both of these beliefs leave God out, minimize the importance of the Bible, and leave us bereft of authentic connection and interactions. Too many of We the People are wearing masks, false facades so there cannot be authentic interactions. We are too busy trying to win, seeking the upper hand, being the smartest person in the room, etc, hence our inability to be real, our fear of being found out, our bluffing and bullying of another to prove how strong we are. This is NOT the way of the Bible, no matter what the Christian Nationalists say, no matter how many Clergy of all faiths proclaim the opposite: Abraham, Moses, both fought for the little guy, all opposed God when necessary, said NO to the bullies in Sodom, in Egypt and lived to tell about it. Proverbs tells us to feed our enemies if they are hungry, The Torah tells us 36 TIMES to LOVE THE STRANGER, nothing else is mentioned this many times in the Torah, I believe. The psalmist, King David, is constantly calling out for help from God to overcome his enemies, internally as well as externally. Hence the mendacity, the audaciousness of society to proclaim: “what the mind can conceive, man can achieve”!
The masks we wear, the facades we put up have reached such a crescendo that we see Masked Men in the streets, breaking car windows, smashing in doors, pulling people out of cars, beds, schools without any due process, without checking anything, without listening to the pleas, the truth people around them are speaking and the ASSHOLE in OUR WHITE HOUSE- NOT HIS, proclaims this is good and right, his holy and sacred duty and, worse, the lying Clergy who go along with him to give him time to do more damage to the poor, the needy, the stranger, the widow, the orphan-all of the people the Bible says to care for, all the people Jesus hung out with, fed, protected. WHAT THE FUCK PEOPLE???!!
Without “understanding the Bible”, we are left to our own devices and this is DANGEROUS! We have the history of the devastation of Attila the Hun, of the Greeks and Romans, of the myriad of empires that have risen and fallen throughout the dark and middle ages. We have the lessons and the testimonies of the people who went through World War II, we have the records of the Warsaw Ghetto, done in an amazing documentary by Roberta Grossman, called Who will Write our History. Yet, We the People seem unable to learn from the lessons of WWII, Trump is making deals with Putin and Xi rather than with NATO countries, he is invading and talking about invading Latin America and Greenland to show his power and to get the American People to stop seeing what is truly happening. His GOON SQUAD is more hateful and despicable than any Mafia Family ever in the United States, his disdain for the Constitution drips from every word he speaks and the abject HATRED AND DISOBEDIENCE of the Bible is appalling and being co-signed by his buddies over in the Churches and Synagogues around the U.S. and by those ‘fine religious folk’ like Ben G’Vir, MBS, the Emir of Qatar, etc!! The speech of Mark Carney of Canada at Davos is an example of one who hears the call and lives into the “sublime answer”!
Of course the Bible gives us a “sublime answer” and it is NOT HARD TO REACH. As we are told by Moses in Deuteronomy 30:14: “It is near you, in your mouth, in your heart for you to do”. I know the simplicity with which one can ignore the truth that is within us-I did it for almost 20 years and I was the most bereft and inconsolable during those years. Once I heard “the Voice”, once I found the “sublime answer” to the RIGHT question, I began this journey that I have been on for 39+years. It is a hard journey in many ways, it is difficult to see the errors of my ways and repair the damage to the best of my ability. Since the first call from Sinai came, I have been seeking the right questions for the moment I am in, I keep asking what is the question this experience is the answer for-something I learned from Rabbi Jonathan Omer-man. I keep improving my hearing, my vision, my passion, my purpose, my kindness, my acceptance and my surrender to a power greater than me. This is the path to finding the “right question” I believe, it has worked for me and allowed me to help so many other human beings. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark