Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Day 35
“The self is not evil. The precept: “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself,” includes the care for one’s own self as a duty. It is as mistaken to consider the duty to oneself and the will of God as opposites as it is to identify them. To serve does not mean to surrender but to share.” (Man is Not Alone pg.141).
I find myself being so immersed in Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom that I have to engage in the same few sentences over and over again. This is how I first began to read Rabbi Heschel, I would read a page, turn to the next page and have to turn back to re-encounter the mind-blowing, soul-opening wisdom of Rabbi Heschel. I hope you keep turning these pages over and over.
In the second major idea of this paragraph, Rabbi Heschel is again blowing up so many peoples’ ideas about the duty to oneself and the will of God. He is reminding us that caring for our self is following the will of God. This does not mean that our will is God’s will, that selfish desires, power plays, deceptions, denials, mendacity that we as people engage in daily, weekly, sometimes minute by minute, are God’s will. Rather the duty to oneself, the obligation we have to care for our self: not our false egos, not our prestige and power, not our money-hungry deceptions, rather our true and authentic self. While we cannot say that our self is the same as God, we can say we are reminders of God, we are created to fulfill a divine need, we are capable of “nullifying our will before God’s will so that God’s will becomes our will” as we are taught in Pirke Avot.
Caring for our self is so misunderstood by most people. I believe Rabbi Heschel is speaking about physical well-being for sure and, more importantly spiritual and emotional well-being. Using the phrase above about loving one’s neighbor, speaking about life being holy earlier on the same page, all point to his deep concern with our spiritual life, our inner life and, if we are not duty bound to care for our spirit, our soul, our inner life, our emotional life, then we will sink into an illness that no pill can bring us out of. We see this all the time with people we know and love, people we have never met and, in some cases, the people who lead cities, states, our country even.
The illness of which I speak is the illness of mendacity, deception of another and self-deception. Just as someone of medication who is feeling better will decide to go off their medication and then all hell breaks loose, so too when we stop caring for our spiritual life, our inner life, does all hell break loose inside of us. We begin to blame everyone else for our issues, we point fingers at another(s) without taking responsibility for our part. We engage in the depravity of willful blindness about our self, we engage in the misbelief that something/someone will fix us. We are stuck in a bottomless pit and we seem to be incapable of getting out of it so we sink further and further into the mud of retaliation, being deceived by another and ‘victim’ mode.
When we are not caring for our inner life/our spiritual life, the rest of us begins the descent into the hell of selfishness, the descent into the purgatory of blame and shame, the descent into the ruin of losing our humanity, our ability to see the worth of another person as equal to our own. We see these descents all the time, we hear the words of the people who are suffering this spiritual/inner life sickness and we do nothing for them because we are afraid to, lest we have to deal with our own. Actually worse than doing nothing for another person who is suffering from these spiritual/inner life maladies, we extol them, we buy into their mendacity, we follow them, make them our leaders as well as make them our followers. We have perfected the art of hiding so well from our spiritual/inner life maladies that we make fun of, demean, take advantage of those of us who wrestle with them every day. How sad, how terrifying.
In recovery, we are aware that ‘our recovery is dependent upon the nature of our spiritual condition’. Each and every day we wake up, grateful to be alive, we write/think gratitude lists, we let the people around us know how much we love them, need them and shower them with the love they deserve and need. Each day as we start and continue on through the day, we “turn our will over the care of God…” so we stay out of self-centerness and self-obsession. We say the serenity prayer often during the day to remind ourself of our powerlessness over people, places and things so we can add our unique gift from God to our current situation and not need someone else to ‘do it our way’. In recovery, we know that our will isn’t the same as God’s AND caring for our self is part of God’s will for us as well.
I know this teaching from both sides of the coin! I have made the mistake of identifying my duty to myself as God’s will by caring only for myself pre-recovery. I have made the mistake of not considering “the duty to one self” by caring too much for my job, the people I was/am helping, etc. What I am sure of is that I have not stayed in self-deception nor mendacity once my eyes were opened by me, God and/or another person. I have been blinded over the years by the duty to help another, more than the duty to my self and this has been a disrespect of God and me. I am not the center of the universe and no one is more valuable or less valuable than me. I have been gifted with a connection to God, an ability to hear Rabbi Heschel and Torah speak to me and honoring this as well as my spiritual life/inner life is the way I repay God for all the gifts I have received. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark