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)
The second sentence above is very cradling for me. While “He hides” is a little troublesome for my rational self, my ‘lower logic’, my soul knows that God always hides a little to a lot, depending on us, on our needs and on our ability to hold on to the “traces’ we have obtained through our living. God “hides” is a device we humans use to explain the imperfections in the world and/or our need to deny the existence of God/the Ineffable One, I believe. While it is ‘true’ that we cannot see the face of God or we will die as the Torah teaches us, it is also ‘true’ that God sends messengers/angels to us all the time. God “hides” could be another way to describe the immutable truth of God’s gift of free-will. God’s full presence in the world would rob us of this gift, and even when we use it poorly, God doesn’t take the gift back. “He hides” is, in my immersing myself in this thought, Rabbi Heschel’s way of pointing to the impossibility of ever really knowing God, Rabbi Heschel’s way of showing us the enigmatic nature of the Ineffable One.
The second part of this three-part sentence is causing me to tremble. How can our souls lose “His trace”? How is this possible? Our soul is our divine image, how can we lose “His trace” from His image? I hear Rabbi Heschel is speaking to all of us to be careful and stay right-sized. We lose “His trace” when we stop hearing our inner voice of God/Intuition/knowledge/higher consciousness, whatever you want to call our connection to something greater than ourselves. We stop hearing the call of the “still, small voice” within us and in the universe when we allow our souls to atrophy, when we end our spiritual development at age 13, 16, 18, or whenever. We lose “His trace” when we end (if we even began) our spiritual growing/learning. While many people quote the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, the Koran, other Holy texts of the other religions and spiritual disciplines, many of those have lost “His trace” because they do not live the words, they only speak them.
Our world is full of people who are narcissists and sociopaths who will quote/say the right words all the while acting totally different in private. While their public actions look good, they are all for show because they have lost “His trace” and their path of deception and mendacity is so strong, they have convinced so many of their sincerity and kindness, all the while fleecing people’s emotions, spirits, and, at times, their bank accounts. We see this in the political sphere all the time-be it about abortion, vaccines, protecting the wealthy and treating a corporation as if it is human while it engages in inhumane activities, obstructionist measures to ensure the unequal rights of one group or another, etc. We see this in advertising, especially the advertising and marketing of prescription drugs on TV and in Magazines. “Tell your doctor” is a way to force doctors to prescribe something that might not be good for a patient but the patient either is going to leave the practice or, worse yet, sue for malpractice-watch “Dopesick” on Hulu to see this practice in action and how many deaths are still occurring thanks to Purdue Pharma.
We see this behavior in small business and families as well. The different serial killers who were family men, people ‘you would least expect’! We see the parents who put on a show of how devoted to their children they are while neglecting them spiritually, emotionally and treating them as investments, props-not precious souls they are blessed to steward into adulthood. We see this in the two-faced way people are at home and at work, in church/temple/mosque and in the world.We see this in the person who prays every day and then cheats another person, who gaslights another person, who spreads gossip, true and not true, about someone they are trying to dominate, all the while speaking eloquently about their spiritual connections.
We lose “His trace” whenever we engage in mendacious behavior, whenever we wall our souls off from the rest of our being, whenever we actively ignore the “still, small voice” inside of us and outside of us. When we choose to hide from God and when we choose to not seek God and not allow God to find us we lose “His trace”. It is not God’s hiding that makes us lose “His trace”, it is a choice we make!
In recovery, we know that our recovery is determined by the nature of our spiritual condition each and every day. We know that spirituality is not something we attain, it a way of being. We know that the moment we believe we are spiritual, we lost “His trace”. We continue to “grow along spiritual lines” so we can deepen our connection to the Ineffable One and grow “His trace” within us.
I will write more on this second sentence tomorrow including my experience with it. Stay safe and God Bless, Rabbi Mark