Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Day 15
“Indifference to the sublime wonder of living is the root of sin.” (God In Search of Man pg. 43).
Today I am going to write using ‘not deferring’ as the definition of indifference. Rabbi Heschel’s quote haunts me daily. He is speaking to us not only about our inability/lack of showing deference to God, to life; he is speaking to us about our inability to revere as well, I believe. Deference to God entails more than fear of punishment which is what a lot of clergy and parents preach to us. God is not going to make me burn in hell, God is not going to send fire and brimstone because I made a mistake and missed the mark. God is giving us breath each and every day, we thank God for waking up each morning, for returning our soul to us, for being faithful, for the food we eat, for our bodies working correctly (or semi-correctly). Yet, do we continue to show reverence and deference to God during the rest of the day? Do our actions reflect the words we speak in prayer? Unfortunately not. God, life doesn’t need our lip-service anymore, God needs our action, life needs our action, and another human being needs our actions.
It is part of our human condition, unfortunately, to think we are smarter than everyone else in the room and/or the most important person in the room. We defer to people who have ‘greater knowledge’ than us at the same time we try to be bigger than them. We have an emotional and intellectual bias towards ‘feeling less than’; which causes us to act ‘better than’. This back and forth is, in my experience, a root cause of our lack of reverence and deference. We are in a constant war with ourselves and with another human being, and, truth be told, with God. We are afraid to defer and revere God in the ways we are being called upon to because that would mean giving up some autonomy and putting our self-interests off in order to serve the greater good/God. There are many people who are deluding themselves into believing they are serving God through their hatred of the poor, the stranger, a person who worships differently, a person who votes differently, a person who is inclusive and a person who believes differently than they. What rubbish, what a lack of reverence and deference to God, to the radical amazement that we celebrate each time we pray, each time we wake, each time we breathe. Yet, these charlatans, these People of the Lie, as Dr. M. Scott Peck labeled them in his book of the same name, seem to have a hold on us all.
When we immerse ourselves in this teaching of Rabbi Heschel, we can see how most of our troubles, personally and professionally, between groups, in our government, between nations comes from a lack of deference and reverence. Being unable to hear the words of another person because they are “different” is a lack of deference to God as well. While we don’t have to agree with everyone, we are called upon to listen to another(s) to learn, to debate, to argue, to agree, to find compromise, to seek the best solutions possible in the moment. We are also called upon to rebuke our neighbors, to not hate them in our hearts, to not bear guilt because of them and to find ways to love them as we love ourselves. These are the ways to defer to the grandeur, the beauty, the elegance, the radical amazement, the wonder and the joy of life. In the Torah, 36 times we are told to care for the stranger, the widow, the orphan, and the poor- this is the path to deferring to and revering God and another human being.
We are all created in the Image of God, not just the ‘chosen few’! When we dismiss another, we are practicing indifference, when we put people in ghettos, we are practicing indifference, when we regulate a person/people to a certain position based on the color of their skin, their religion, their country of birth, we are practicing indifference. We are being called out by Rabbi Heschel to take a stand, he was after all an activist, for the human spirit, for the soul of another, our faith, our country and ourselves. We are being called to stop with our pettiness and pride, envy and enmity and live a life of deference and reverence to God, to our fellow human beings and to our soul’s calling
In recovery, we have learned how to defer to people who have more experience than we, how to defer to God’s wisdom and how to defer to ourselves in the areas of living that we are experienced in. In recovery, we are constantly learning and growing and we are deferring to the wisdom of another without giving up our vision, our beliefs and our knowing. When we know something in our gut, we learn to trust it, defer to it and revere this knowledge. In recovery, we are constantly seeking to honor, revere and show deference to the “sublime wonder of living” so we can grow in wisdom, connection, and joy.
All of my troubles have come from either deferring to the wrong people/message or not deferring to the correct people/message. This is crystal clear to me, I even know the reason for these actions: fear! I was afraid of being broke, of being laughed at, not seen, etc. I realize that when I didn’t defer to the wisdom God was giving me and sending me and I always ‘stepped in shit’. Yes, I also have deferred to and revered God, the grandeur of life and taken many good and holy actions and these far outweigh the negative ones. Each day, I defer to and revere the sublime wonder of living a little more. God Bless and Stay safe, Rabbi Mark