Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Day 79
“What is the hope of man with his faithfulness being so feeble, vague, unstable and confused? The world that we have long held in trust has exploded in our hands, and a stream of guilt and misery has been unloosed which leaves no man’s integrity unmixed. But man has become callous to catastrophes. What is our hope with our callousness standing like a wall between our conscience and God?”(Man is Not Alone pg.147)
Continuing to immerse ourselves in Rabbi Heschel’s words and teachings forces us to look at how “the world we have long held in trust…” and not hide from what reality truly is. We are living in a time where some people both in and out of powerful positions are trying to hide the truth of this teaching and Rabbi Heschel said it 70 years ago; when everyone thought things were so wonderful! To see what “has exploded in our hands” we have to ponder and realize what we had/have and what happened to it.
We had/have a promise; from the time of the Exodus from Egypt to the American Revolution to the Emancipation Proclamation the promise from God and/or the universe is that slavery is not forever and slavery will end for every group at some point. It has been a difficult promise to make into a reality from the time of Pharaoh till now, yet we in America kept our Declaration of Independence near and dear as the Spiritual goal of our revolution and the underpinnings of our nation. We have fallen short forever and, until recently, we were making progress towards seeing each human being as a worthy, dignified and important. Under our former administration, we joined with the likes of Putin, Orban, MBS, etc to move to an inauthentic, mendacious authoritarian way of living-celebrating hatred and prejudice rather than healing it, promoting the Big Lie rather than refuting it, and using the poor and needy as pawns rather than helping them as the Bible calls for us to do.
70 years ago Rabbi Heschel told us this was happening and we did not listen, we laughed at these words and ignored his prophecy because we did not want to face ourselves in the mirror. We humans are constantly afraid to see what is and our part in it because we want to hide our imperfections and guilty actions, we want to explain them away and/or blame another. We have believed we can hide our heads in the sand and be okay, forgetting that the world which has been entrusted to us needs to be nurtured and grown in order to become the world God and we believe it can be and have envisioned it to be. We have been asleep at the wheel of this vision, this trust account that God/universe gave us to manage and now it has exploded and continues to explode “in our hands”.
This experience that Rabbi Heschel describes 70 years ago was never taken seriously by enough people to make the necessary changes, hence, the “stream of guilt and misery” which has been unloosed has overwhelmed us to the point where we believe the lies, the deceptions of these charlatans, these authoritarians who keep saying they are fighting for American ideals and our willingness to be deceived causes people to go along with this subterfuge.
We are suffering from a loss of integrity on the world stage as well as on the personal stage. “A man’s word is his bond” no longer applies we say one thing and do another all the time. We say what someone wants to hear to get what we want/need. We see business as war, we profess covenantal relationships with another while using them as transactional ones to get over/look good. We are willing to sell another person ‘down the river’ and/or enslave them/abuse them to attain our personal goals and perceived needs. We continue to impugn our integrity while living in denial of this truth believing we are living lives congruent with our faith, our higher thoughts, our higher consciousness, etc. We are continuing to deceive ourselves into believing it is ‘the other’ person who is in denial, who has no integrity, so we don’t have to look at ourselves. Our loss of integrity and our denial of this loss has caused us to see the world and another person as dangerous because we don’t want to be found out for our guilt, misery and shame over our current situation. More on Sunday!
In recovery, we are slowly working on recovering our integrity as every person in recovery knows. We do this “one day at a time” knowing it takes much longer to rebuild integrity than it did to tear it down. We are continuing to look ourselves in the mirror and face our guilt and misery with the commitment to use them to move forward instead of staying stuck and enslaved. In recovery, we know our forward motion is based on our daily spiritual condition and without growing our integrity one grain of sand each day, our spiritual condition suffers instead of grows.
On my 33rd Recovery birthday, I see the times/experiences where I missed the mark in growing the world God entrusted to me. I see where my guilt and misery maimed my integrity and that of the people around me. I also see where my need to connect and believe maimed my integrity because I mistook transactional experiences for covenantal ones and the hurt upon realizing my error was/is tremendous. I also know and am grateful for the overwhelming number of times and experiences when I honored God’s trust in me and kept my covenant with another person and never hid from being me, my not so greatness and my greatness is always transparent. This is integrity for me-insides and outsides matching. Stay safe and God Bless, Rabbi Mark