Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 4 Day 335
“As we have seen, religion is not a feeling for something that is, but an answer to Him who is asking us to live in a certain way. It is in its very origin consciousness of duty, of being committed to higher ends; a realization that life is not only man’s but also God’s sphere of interest.”
Reading these words, seeing what is going on in the world, realizing these words were written in the shadow of the Shoah, some 75+ years ago, I wonder at the poor eyesight we the people suffer from that we are unable to get fixed! In today’s world, just as it was in Rabbi Heschel’s time and throughout time, the people running the religious life of individual churches, mosques, synagogues, were bastardizing the “certain” way God was “asking us to live in”. Rather than understand and appreciate the “duty” we are being asked to be in service of, humanity today, as it always has, is constantly manipulating our Holy Texts, our rituals, our prayers, to determine the “certain way” society/the leader wants to live and then attributing these lies to God!! The wars fought in God’s name, the cruelty done in the name of God, the senseless hatred of one another done in the name of God, the hatred of the strangers, the belief that Jesus was white, that only white men can and should be in charge, all are LIES! Yet, we the people seem to keep buying this bullshit, lock, stock and barrel over and over again throughout time immemorial.
Be it the Roman soldiers, the Assyrian hordes, the Babylonian army, the German Storm Troopers, the ICE Marauders, it seems as if in every generation there comes to be a group calling themselves loyal to ‘their god’ who use their ‘god’ to validate their cruelty, their power grab, their disrespect for the laws of the land, their utter disdain for people ‘not like them’, and their resorting to any means, even killing innocent people, to achieve their goal of dominance. Their motives are not for God’s Dominance, it is for them to be worshipped as a ‘god’, for them to be seen as the incarnation of Jesus’ servant, all the while going against everything Jesus speaks about in the New Testament, going against everything the prophets railed about in the Hebrew Bible, and utterly desecrating God’s Name, God’s Will, God’s Way!
That in the United States of America we see thugs on the street arresting American Citizens without warrants, without cause, breaking into homes, violating many of the the Constitutional guardrails against such actions including the Bill of Rights, the subsequent Amendments, is BEYOND anything we could have imagined 60 years ago while basking in the light of the Civil Rights Act, having our eyes opened to the dignity, worth, brilliance of the Black People and their deserved equality in all ways American. Yet, here we are, the KKK, the South, the haters, the white supremacists have RISEN AGAIN and they truly believe they are heralding the 2nd coming of Jesus!! Or at least most of the followers of the interlopers, the idolators, the scam artists, the grifters believe this while the leaders couldn't care less. Their attitude is how do we get the most people to buy in, stay in the ‘pink cloud’ of getting ‘those people’ until we get so much money, power, longevity and then we can screw them over! What is happening here in America, over there in Israel is in direct violation of the words above, in absolute conflict with “a realization that life is not only man’s but also God’s sphere of interest”! Until We the People come to “being committed to higher ends”, until We the People accept and live into “a consciousness of duty”, nothing will change, the world will keep going through these cycles of cruelty, of idolatry, of bastardizing the Word from Sinai, using peoples vulnerabilities against them-the ultimate evil according to Dr. M.Scott Peck- and will continue to cut God out of God’s “interest” in humanity and our deeds/way of being.
The “consciousness of duty” is at the essence of being obligated to serve God, which We, people of faith accepted at Mount Sinai when we said-“we will do and then we will understand”. Yet, we seem to have lost our commitment over the years beginning with the Priestly class from at least the time of Eli in the book of Samuel! This consciousness of duty led the Maccabees to fight the Greeks and the Jews who wanted to become totally hellenized, only to lose it when the sons themselves adopted Greek names, usurped the Priesthood from the descendants of Aaron, hence We the People are being called by the words above, being cajoled by the Voice on Sinai, being asked by the spirit of God that “hovers over the face of the waters”, being demand by the words, stories, experiences of the Bible to reverse the errors of our ancestors, do TShuvah for their mistakes as well as ours: repair the damage done to those who have been oppressed throughout the millennia, acknowledging how we the oppressed, have, when in power, done what was done to us to another-in other words; gone against the wisdom of Hillel the elder-“what is hateful to you do not do to another”. After doing this repair-which is always ongoing, we the people have to recommit to the “consciousness of duty” that our ancestors committed to for us, and were committed to themselves-knowing we will always err and the our Return to God, to this “consciousness of duty” will keep us coming back. Finally, our inner call to have a new way of being, a different path to living is the third leg of the stool of TShuvah-and this is where we become “committed to higher ends”, the “ends” of God, the making of our corner of the world better because We The People made a decision to “lift up our eyes and see”, to throw off the YOKE OF SLAVERY, SELF-DECEPTION, and MENDACITY!
This is the formula I have used to return from the depths of depravity, to bring light to the world to reject the BULLSHIT of the ends of the continuum, the lies of the ‘religious’, and live in the light of God. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark