Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Day 70
“It is as easy to expel God as it is to shed blood. And yet even when He hides, even when our souls have lost His trace we may still call Him out of the depths: out of the depths of all things. For God is everywhere save in arrogance.” (Man is Not Alone pg.145)
I have spent 9 weeks in the Chapter titled: The Divine Concern in Rabbi Heschel’s book: Man is Not Alone. In reading the above quote, I am realizing that this chapter is holding my interest so strongly and profoundly because of my fear that we, as individuals and as a society, have forgotten the concerns of the Ineffable One, the concerns of the Universe, the concerns of Higher Consciousness-however one wants to define/label the creative force in the Cosmos.
NEWS FLASH: GOD IS NOT DEAD!! Rabbi Heschel is reminding us that those who say this are the people who expel God from their living so they can shed blood in all manners of ways. There are the people who shed blood through mendacity and deception. Many of these people are ‘bible thumpers’ and ‘bible quoters’; they can recite chapter and verse of the Bible so they can bastardize the Holy words! These mendacious and deceptive people claim “Come to me, I have the answer to all your problems” all the while deceiving another human being to become subservient and dependent upon them. This happens in all walks of life, in all religions, in all political parties, in all movements, in all families, communities, etc. These people, while claiming to be people of faith, ‘God-fearing people’ have already expelled God from their ways, their hearts, their souls because they are shedding blood through deception and mendacity, they will, when found out and they will be eventually, cause people to lose faith, to lose hope and to become more cynical and more desperate, making us more susceptible to the next charlatan that shows up.
We expel God and shed blood in so many ways: through dishonest speech, through the ‘delicious pleasure’ of gossip, through twisting the words of someone else to overpower them and/or embarrass them, through using the vulnerabilities of another person against them, through betraying covenantal relationships in a myriad of ways, through going to war to gain money, not for principle nor safety, through criminalizing/marginalizing certain groups of people to ‘keep order’ while really just enslaving the particular group, etc. War, when attacked, when fighting for a principle of God, while shedding blood is not expelling God.
We are living in a world where ‘alternative facts’ have become mainstream. The insurrectionists who attacked the Capital on Jan.6 and their supporters in Congress and elsewhere have decided to promote the ‘alternative fact’ that these people were just visiting and are patriots and only killed and maimed because they had to protect themselves and …! What BS! Yet, these people also claim that God is telling them to kill anyone who disagrees with them, to prosecute and imprison people who help women make their own choice about their bodies, imprison people of color for longer terms than white people for the same/similar crimes, make it harder for people to exercise their right to vote, put the Jews in Concentration Camps, blame the Jews, the Hispanics, the Irish, the Italians, the Blacks, the Muslims, the ___(fill in the blank) for any and all problems. These are the same people who speak about personal responsibility while shunning wearing a mask to protect themselves, another human being, even their families. Exercising free-will is not freedom; Making free-will moral choices as Rabbi Abraham Twerski says is what makes us human and free. Free-will devoid of God’s Truth is the path to shed blood, enslave another(s) and try to destroy the spirit of another human being.
In recovery, we call this type of behavior EGO: easing God out. We say this because expelling God is a gradual, almost unnoticed activity. For people who don’t ‘have faith’, ‘don’t believe’ we find agreement in what they don’t believe in nor have faith in. Since we all know that thoughts come into us from somewhere and we have all experienced our intuitive minds, as Einstein calls it, we have all experienced the Ineffable One, in my opinion. We “ease God out” by ignoring the ‘gut instinct’, the intuitive voice, the ‘knowing in our bones’ because of our ability to rationalize and validate choosing our feelings over our soul’s knowledge. In recovery, we are constantly engaged in clearing out the junk that blocks our spiritual arteries.
I have shed blood by expelling God at times in my life, both prior to recovery and in recovery. I see how my need to be right, my ignoring signs that God and another person were giving me, having my ego puffed up by believing the bs that another person gave me and/or believing my own press pushed God out from my being in those moments and each time, I harmed someone(s) and I harmed myself and I learned. I also know that I have become pigeoned-holed as a lunatic for the ways I passionately and loudly proclaim God’s presence in my life and in everyone’s life, for promoting recovery for all people, recovering the true passion and purpose of each individual’s life. It is a bumpy road and I learn how to navigate the new pot holes each day with God’s help and the help of so many other people. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark