Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Day 67
“What is a thing to us is a concern to God; what is part of the physical world is also a part of a divine world of meaning. To be is to stand for, to stand for a divine concern.”(Man is Not Alone, pg 145).
“To be is to stand for” is a reverberation of a calling to us from Mount Sinai, from Jesus’ Temple Mount, from Mohammed’s Mecca, from Buddha, Confucius, from Freud, etc. For those of us who believe in a faith, this is a calling from the Ineffable One. I am hearing Rabbi Heschel remind us that if we don’t “stand for” we are merely breathing/existing-not living and being human.
It would seem if we just stopped there, Hitler, Putin, Orban, Trump, Hirohito, Jung-un, etc would fall into the category of being because they stand for something: authoritarian power, wealth, etc. To be clear about what “to be is to stand for” is not bastardized, as so many spiritual truths and tenets have been in the past and are in the present, Rabbi Heschel further clarifies what stand for means: “to stand for a divine concern”.
What is a divine concern? 36 times in the Torah (the first 5 books of the Bible), God reminds us to care for the widow, the orphan, the poor, the needy and the stranger, 36 times; more than any other commandment! Yet, we have forever tried to and been successful at finding workarounds to this call that reverberates through our Torah, through Jesus, from Mount Sinai and from our souls. It began when people would not lend money in the 5th and 6th years before the 7th year of release so Hillel proposed a workaround and it was adopted-even in ancient Israel, wealthy people did not want to help the poor. Even in a place where pilgrimages to Jerusalem were common to worship God, wealthy people were afraid of ‘getting beat’. They stood for something, however, it was selfishness, power, money, prestige, success, not the interests of another who was hurting, needy, not knowing the way of the land.
We are hearing from ‘people of faith’ that the asylum seeker should be sent back, the immigrant is bad, people who have abortions, who perform abortions, are abominable, trickle-down economics, which did not work in President Reagan’s time is wonderful for the country, the rich paying their fair share is wrong-the middle class should pay more taxes than the wealthy. Be afraid of the stranger, the LGBTQI, the Jew, the Muslim and, before now, the Irish, the Italian, etc. Anyone who is not like us, we don’t have to nor should we care for. Of course, ‘like us’ is used very loosely because many of the followers of these ‘people of faith’ are the very ones who are in need. These ‘people of faith’ are not believers in Jesus’ teachings, they are believers in their power, their rightness, their ‘whiteness’, their entitlement, their superiority, etc. They are spouting the words of Christ in ways that Christ would be aghast at if he were here to hear them.
The woke crowd is not too much better as they are willing to write off and treat the people they feel hurt them and they are against are less than human as well. They are against so much and, while they say they are for the people God is telling us to be for, they are ignoring and mean to the poor, widows, strangers, needy and orphans that don’t agree with them.
Standing for a divine concern means we get to take the actions that our inner being is calling us to take, We get to be in action to help another person in the ways they need, not the ways we want to. We get to see how to help the stranger and needy inside of us, we get to see the way we are orphaned from our essence, from our Divine Image, from our core gifts. We get to experience a connection with another human being that is real, truthful, transparent and whole. Our soul is calling us to be one with the universe, one with our self, one with humanity. Standing for a divine concern is the path of being human, the path of a fulfilling life, the path of meaning, purpose and passion. Standing for a divine concern is true Beingness.
In recovery, we know that we have to stand for divine concerns because standing for our concerns got us nowhere good. We crashed into a wall from our selfishness, our self-centeredness and total self-reliance. When we are standing for our own concerns only, we are stuck in a narrow prison that leads to depression, anxiety, addiction, need for more, more, and there is never enough. In recovery, standing for divine concerns becomes the greatest gift to fulfill our own concerns as well.
I have been standing for divine concerns throughout my recovery, not perfectly nor always, and consistently and constantly. I have had all of my needs met by standing for divine concerns and I have the honor of being a trusted servant of the Ineffable One! “To be is to stand for” has gotten me into trouble when I am standing for ego-mine or someone elses’- and when what God is telling me/my soul is calling me to stand for goes against the conventional notions/‘wisdom’ of the people around me or the mood of the times. Divine concerns have not changed, the ways we fulfill them may have, however the concerns haven’t. I have erred in standing for divine concerns in ways that are ‘outdated’ though effective, in ways that leave me and another vulnerable to attacks and lawsuits. I am sorry for this and am more careful now, while still standing for divine concerns. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark