Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Day 17
“Human is he who is concerned with other selves. Man is a being that can never be self-sufficient, not only by what he must take in but also by what he must give out… Always in need of other beings to give himself to, man cannot even be in accord with his own self unless he serves something beyond himself.”(Man Is Not Alone pg.138).
How appropriate to be reading these sentences at this time. Rabbi Heschel is reminding us that being a Homo Sapien is not the same as being human. We confuse the two all the time. One is a scientific classification, the later being a spiritual experience, an experience of how we live, not the classification we are in compared to plants and other animals.
In this first sentence, Rabbi Heschel is declaring a known fact that, as R. Moshe Luzzato taught, because it is so agreed upon and apparent we tend to forget it, become oblivious to it. We see this in life everyday, people who are forgetting how to be human, people who are oblivious to the need to be “concerned with other selves”. The issue, to me, is that society is celebrating these people! Tik Tok is a concern with self, Facebook is to get other people to be concerned with us, Instagram, etc for a majority, not all, of their users/subscribers. Even the words we apply to ourselves and to another(s), users, subscribers, customers, etc, betray a distancing of ourselves from one another. Have you called a customer service lately? If we hear one more time “your call is important to us… your wait time is 2 hours, if you want faster service go to our website”, some of us might scream(I know Harriet Rossetto will)! Why do they want us to go to their website, so there is no human contact nor connection. So the company and their employees don’t have to be concerned with any of us. Is it any wonder why we are in the state we are in?
Since we can’t be self-sufficient, even the ‘self-made man’ needed a lot of help to make it, what is the gain/reward from buying into the lie of we must be self-sufficient? What is the reward from being miserly in what we give out and gluttonous in what we take in? Do we really believe that everyone is here to serve us without any reciprocity? It seems this way, if we watch the news, the social media, etc. AND, we can change these behaviors by no longer giving them oxygen, no longer subscribing to anything that wants to turn us into users/objects for someone else’s wealth or power. We can choose to give to another what they need and receive from another what we need in partnership, with kindness and gratitude for receiving and gratitude that we can give out to another human being. We can make a profit and a living doing this, some of you will get rich doing this, and all of us will be given the full measure of our humanity! No one will be treated as “the other”. The “eye disease” of prejudice will be cleared up and the “cancer of the soul” that prejudice is will be cured.
While the news, whether in the papers, online, radio an/or TV seems dire, while there are many people who want to tear everything our ancestors, my father and uncles fought for in wars against enemies foreign and domestic, while 68 million people want to buy into the deception that Trump won the election and it was stolen from him, we can stand up and call out to the spirit that drives all of us, that we can appeal to these 68 million to release their need to be angry, release their need to be right, release their need to live in mendacity. We can appeal to them to begin to be in accord with themselves, continue to grow and mature their inherent spirituality, have different opinions and be open to dialogue with another person, we can engage with them at the level of serving God together, differently maybe and together. We all need to realize that none of us has the corner on TRUTH, we all can contribute to one another’s lives when we agree to serve the Ineffable One/something beyond ourselves. We have to all stop lamenting about “the other side” and start reaching across all the divides - both ‘sides’ have to do this, otherwise we are in danger of losing what makes us human and from their we have destroyed God’s world, not served it.
In recovery, we work each and every day to give out, to be grateful that we can and, we know, we must be service to another human being. We leave the self-centered path we had been following prior to our recovery and each day we affirm our need, God’s need and the needs of another to the gifts, the hand, the aid we can and do give out and the gifts, the hands and the aid we receive from so many. In recovery, we continue to carry a message of hope, willingness, joy, strength and possibility to everyone we meet.
Reading the first sentence above gives me pause, gives me trembling, gives me a bad conscious (which Rabbi Heschel always does:)), and it gives me hope, joy, a path and reaffirms by basic beliefs, taught to me by my parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles and, which I pray, I have taught to my daughter, my nieces, nephews, and all the people I have connected to over the years. The pandemic and other events have been obstacles that I/we have overcome and, while many of the humans for whom I have had concern with don’t/haven’t had concern for me, I believe in Rabbi Heschel’s words and I continue to be concerned for them and everyone else I meet. I write everyday to remember how to be human and concerned with more than myself. I am in accord with myself today are you? Stay safe and God Bless, Rabbi Mark