Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Day 47
“It is the sense of the ineffable that leads us beyond the horizon of personal interests, helping us to realize the absurdity of regarding the ego as an end.”(Man is Not Alone, pg. 142).
Many people, over these past 33 years, have told me “I don’t believe in God” and therefore, whatever I am saying they feel they can tune out and doesn’t apply to them. So many people according the latest Pew Study, are unchurched and don’t believe in ‘the God of the Old Testament or the New Testament’. Here is the war between mind/ego and soul/spirit being played out within us and we use the hypocrisy of a few Religious Zealots/fundamentalists to help our minds/ego win the battle. In the face of this, comes Rabbi Heschel’s words, teachings and we are confronted with a deep truth that we know in our soul and our ego/intellect vehemently denies.
Ineffable comes from the latin meaning not able to describe, the English definition is to great or extreme to be described. In Hebrew we use the phrase “Ein Sof” as a Name of God, meaning without end; so, we can read the sentence as it is the sense of the Limitless One, too great to describe, that leads us beyond the horizon of personal interests… Sense comes from the Latin meaning to feel, so only the feeling of the Limitless One, too great to describe, can leads us beyond the horizon of personal interests. I am overwhelmed with this statement because belief in God is not crucial to see the truth and wisdom of Rabbi Heschel. Most of us, scientists, clergy, atheists, agnostics, etc know that there is more to the world than humans, that we did not create this world, that there is an energy beyond our comprehension and description, aka black hole, so sensing this energy can come with or without belief in God.
Getting back to the wisdom, when we refuse to sense the Ineffable, when we decide that everything can be explained with our intellects and our egos need to be served first, last and always, we are stuck in our personal interests and live a very small and shallow life. We may be President of the United States, President of Russia, Hungary, Turkey, Syria, etc, we may run one of the Fortune 500 companies, a Senator, Representative, another elected official, yet “when we refuse to sense the ineffable”, when we are stuck in our egos and intellects, when power and money are what we worship, we live small lives, we live lives of opulence on the outside and decay on the inside. Furthermore, living a small life as described and being in any kind of power from child to parent to co-worker to employer to boss to official to lobbyist to power broker, etc we impact the lives of a few to the many negatively and, sometimes irreparably! We see how the poor are treated, we see the hatred, the racism, the anti-Semitism, the lies we are being told, the anti-muslim, the anti-anything other than me ism and these are all indicators of how large our egos have become and how stuck in serving them we are. We are experiencing a resurgence of xenophobic behavior as well as the behaviors above which leads to war, death, destruction and, as Afghanistan has pointed out, senseless loss of life on both sides. We need to restore the sense of the ineffable for us to have a chance at changing what is and fulfilling the basic need of all people; believers, agnostics, atheists; Freedom.
We can never be free as long as we are stuck in ego and, Rabbi Heschel is saying the way out of the slavery of the ego begins with the sense of the ineffable. There is more to this world than me, there is more important activities than constantly feeding my/our ego. Yet, we seem to have forgotten this, we seem to be stuck in the collective ego, the fantasy of America, the ‘good old days’ when men and were men and women knew their place, etc. Without a sense of the ineffable, we fall into depression, anxiety, addiction, physical illness, possibly even somatic illness’. It is not that difficult to find proof of the ineffable, science does all at the time, whenever they get stuck, stopped in their desire to explain how things work, which is a noble and necessary endeavor, IMO, they are content with ‘I don’t know’, which is another name for ineffable, maybe. When we see all the things that we did not grow, we did not have a hand in making, mountains, lush valleys, forests and deserts, we have ‘proof’ of the ineffable because we cannot describe what we are experiencing , when we are sensing. This is how we can begin to nurture and grow a sense of the ineffable that will “lead us beyond the horizons of personal interests.”
In recovery, we do an inventory of our behaviors and we realize how stuck on me we were and the only ‘cure’ for this self-centered, harmful, not seeing/caring about another human being is “a sense of the ineffable”. Without a larger purpose than our own selfish needs, we will sink back into old behaviors and return to a way of living that is harmful to ourselves and to so many people. We readily admit that going “beyond the horizons of personal interest” is the only way to freedom.
I am overwhelmed by this sentence fragment. I sense the ineffable every day, every hour, and I know this is what gets me “beyond the horizons of personal interests”. Each day, I am given a new lease on life and joining my energy with the energy of the Ineffable imbues me with a spirit to serve, to create and live a little better today than the day before. More tomorrow. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark