Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Day 38
“It is a useless endeavor to fight the ego with intellectual arguments, since like a wounded hydra it produces two heads for every one cut off. Reason alone is incapable of forcing the soul to love or of saying why we ought to love for no profit, for no reward. The great battle for integrity must be fought by aiming at the very heart of the ego and by enhancing the soul’s power of freedom.”(Man is Not Alone pg.141/2).
Continuing to immerse ourselves in Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom above allows us the opportunity to take stock of how we use our egos; do we use them to serve ourselves and/or do we use them to serve our souls and God. Ego, used in the service of our soul and in the service of God is the proper way to live, as I am reading Rabbi Heschel. To give us his wisdom, to give us the example of his way of living, to fight for rights and dignity of the needy, the stranger, etc took a healthy ego being used by his soul, in my estimation and experience. We can see how our egos serving our souls propel us to greatness, to joy, to wisdom and to action through so many examples of people like John Lewis, Rabbi Heschel, Brene Brown, Harriet Rossetto, Father Greg Boyle, John Pavlovitz, Dr. Lisa Miller, Martin Luther King Jr., the Freedom Riders, Billy Planer, Greg Asbed, and 1000’s more people of fame and who live this path and are unnamed and unnoticed publicly.
To live this way, we have to let go of our need to be run by reason, for as Rabbi Heschel teaches: “reason alone is incapable of forcing the soul to love”. We are a society that believes Descartes: “I think therefore I am” rather than ‘I am therefore I can think’. I believe Rabbi Heschel is reminding us that our reasoning cannot connect us with God, it cannot even connect us to our souls and/or our inner lives. Reason ends at some point and living by reason/ego alone stunts our humanity and our search for knowledge, hence the need to live in radical amazement. We, as a society, have become obsessed with using reason to prove points, to win power and to control another(s) human being. We buy into the lies our egos tell us and we follow any path that we can make sense of, any path that feeds our insatiable egos in order to fulfill the lies we tell ourselves. We encourage another(s) to feed our egos, we use the fears of another(s) to feed our egos, and we subjugate another(s) in order to prove we are the best and brightest.
Reason and ego in service of our souls, in service of God, is a totally different experience. It is an experience of living from the inside out, an experience of knowing the next right action to take in order to serve God, another and our authentic self. We do this by maturing, growing and engaging in our inner life, our soul’s life. Rather than keeping our souls imprisoned, rather than shutting off our inner voices, we participate in the inner dialogue that is constantly happening. This is not the same as a mental dialogue, it is listening to our bodies, it is listening to the call of our souls, hearing and respecting our “gut instinct” and the churning of our stomachs in our daily living. We have to continue to seek our God/Higher Power/Higher Consciousness often throughout the day through prayer, meditation, study and by being immersed in the moment we are in. We have to set our goals on serving God, caring about the interests of another(s) and fulfilling our passion and purpose. Each morning reminding ourselves of how grateful we are to be alive, knowing that today is a new day, knowing we do not have to be weighed down by the past nor fearful of the future, and excited to use our knowledge to learn more today. When we use reason and ego in service of our souls and in service of God, we ask ourselves the correct questions for the experience we are in and find new and exciting responses, we see each experience during the day as a new opportunity, we see life with new/fresh eyes and we experience connections to God, to another(s), to life and to our true self.
In recovery, we are aware that our ego’s can and often do Ease God Out of our lives. We are aware of how often we did this prior to our recovery. We engage in connecting to the Higher Consciousness we get from engaging with another human being and with a group of people, we are deeply committed to letting the reasoning that leads us to seek false goals through false means go. In recovery, we know that serving God, serving another and serving self begins with shifting the locus of control from ego and reason to soul and higher reasoning.
I have wrestled with my ego forever. I have always been in a war between the false ego of pride, being right, ‘don’t you know who I think I am’ and the false ego of ‘I am nothing, what can I offer, I am no good,’ etc. In my recovery, I have been engaged in the war of using my ego and reason to serve my soul, to serve God through serving another human being. I know I have won many of these battles and lost some as well. I also know that the war doesn’t end! Each morning I gear up for this wrestling match with prayer, with study, with writing, with Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom. I know that my soul is the arbiter of my living most of the time and when my soul is in charge, I am safe, secure and able to deal with everything that comes my way. When my ego/reason is in charge, I am anxious, angry, bewildered and hurt beyond repair, until my soul takes over and I am calm, in sync, aware and healed. I write this today as I am about to turn 70 years old tomorrow and I am entering a new phase in my life, retirement from Beit T’Shuvah and hello to my next act. Thank you for being on this journey with me, God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark