Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 5 Day 29
“God is One, and His glory is One. And oneness means wholeness, indivisibility. His glory is not partly here and partly there; it is all here and all there But here and now, in this world, the glory is concealed. It becomes revealed in a sacred deed, in a sacred moment, in a sacrificial deed.” ( Thunder in the Soul pg. 91)
This is the 4th day of Passover, it is Easter Sunday and we the people are still unable to notice, recognize, reveal “God’s glory” because of our misguided belief that “God is on our Side” as Bob Dylan sings about, because in our hubris, we the people believe that there is “my god” and “your god” and “your god” is not as good, strong, real, etc as mine, ergo: I have to kill you and “your god” to prove it! Hegseth not allowing Catholic Mass at the Pentagon and JD Vance, that “good Catholic convert”-just ask him and his new book- saying NOTHING!! Jews like Kushner who think they and their Rabbis know it all and there is no other interpretation than theirs which could be correct because “only I know what god wants”. I am putting God in small letters because, as we can see from the quote above, anyone who bifurcates God, anyone who claims “only I know” cannot be correct because God is “all here and all there”, God is “unknowable” and therefore any claim to pigeonhole God, any lie that says “Christ/God wants us to kill”, any claim of “those people deserve death” has to be A LIE! Being a person of faith, being connected to something greater than oneself and listening to the rhetoric, the bullshit, the deception of these ‘good religious folk’ like Kushner, Vance, Hegseth, Ben G’Vir, et al makes We the People of faith, We the People who are searching for Truth, We the People who want God to find us and continue to, in our imperfect ways, try to reveal “God’s Glory”, WANT TO PUKE!
When cruelty is celebrated, when war is waged for the particular good of Oil Companies, of politicians, to deflect from the truth, to conceal the rot at the top, how far has our society progressed from the time of Jesus, from the times of the Prophets, from the destruction of the 2 Temples??!! NOT MUCH! Yet, we the people in our idiocy, in our willful blindness, in our desire to be fit in, to ‘get ours’, go along with this cruelty; “stand idly by the blood of our neighbor; make “one law for the citizen” and another for the stranger; “hate our brother, our enemy in our heart”, “scout after our heart and eyes whoring after them”. All of this in direct opposition to the commandments of the Bible, to the words and deeds of Christ and we the people then try and proclaim our allegiance to a god that is not in the Bible, the New Testament, the Koran. So, we the people who is Full of Shit? Not We the People that are calling out this bullshit like Pope Leo, not those of We the People that are proclaiming NO KINGS, not those of We the People who can hold that Iran is a bad actor and Trump, Hegseth, Rubio went to war to get Epstein files off the front page, Bibi went to war to get away from being held responsible for Oct. 7th and the aftermath. Yet, these are the people who declare they are doing this for “the Glory of God” when in reality, they are doing what they do for the Glory of SELF! This is the worst idolatry of all: making oneself synonymous with God, selling the LIE that, with their ‘spiritual advisors like Paula Cain White, compares Trump’s trials and tribulations to Jesus’!! WHAT THE FUCK?!?!
How can God’s glory be revealed when only god, the idol, is being revealed and God stays concealed, irrelevant, and wholly bastardized? It can’t until We the People stand up and engage in teaching our children that God is everywhere, “all here and all there”, the immanence and transcendence of God is as real as the nose on one’s face. Teaching our children so We the People re-learn the truth of God’s “glory” that is revealed every time We engage in a sacred action-like welcoming and loving the stranger, because as Passover teaches, “we were strangers in a strange land” and Egypt-at least at first-took us in. The “all here” of God is revealed every time we “love our neighbor as we love our self”, every time we “proclaim freedom throughout the land and to all its inhabitants therein”! The call for Freedom was known so long ago by Moses, by the prophets, by Jesus, and we the people still buy the LIES of the autocrat, the dictator,’ like the people of prejudice have done throughout the millennia to Jews, to Christians, to Muslims, to anyone they thought they could overpower and be lord and master to? WHEN WILL WE THE PEOPLE stop this way of being?
ACTION STEPS:
1) During your morning meditation, make a plan of the “sacred deeds” you will carry out this day
2) Seek out ways to draw near to another human being and God through an act of service(aka sacrificial deed)
3) Make a list of the ways you desecrate God’s Name by separating ‘your god’ from God
4) Make a list of the ways you brought Oneness into your life and the life of another(s)
GOD BLESS and STAY SAFE, Rabbi Mark