Daily Prophets
Day 162
“This is My servant, whom I uphold, My chosen one in whom I delight I have put My spirit upon him to teach the nations. Sing a new song to God, His praise from the ends of the earth…Who is so blind as My servant, so deaf as the messenger I send? God desires His servant’s righteousness and that he glorify and make great God’s Torah.”(Isaiah 42:1,10,19,21).
The opening verse has been taken to mean a single person as opposed to the context which is about Israel. Isaiah the second, is reminding all of us of our heritage, our commitment, our ancestor’s deal with God and our purpose in the world. We are to know that God holds us up at our lowest times, God ‘has our back’ forever and a day, God doesn’t allow us to fail. We, people who are constantly wrestling with God, self and another, are the delight of God, according to this first verse as I understand it today. We are God’s delight even when we don’t follow God because we are at least aware of God, we know God’s love, help, kindness, grace, etc.
And we forget that God’s spirit is upon us, in us and calling to us all the time. We are able to teach nations, individuals, self about God and how to live well, how to care for another and how to love self, God and another. We engage in purposeful forgetting and willful blindness because we mistakenly believe the next new Idol will fix us, will make it easier for us, will be under our control and not demanding anything from us. T In abdicating our responsibility to teach and practice, in imprisoning our spirit and trying to silence it, we are creating an inner war that leads us to ruin and destruction. Hence, the defeat of Judah and the destruction of Jerusalem and The Temple. Hence, the belief in the big lie and destruction of so many governments and uptick in authoritarianism.
We are being told to “sing a new song” to God by Isaiah the second so that we can remember the purpose of our living. We are to sing a song that is original with each of us, a song that acknowledges the goodness, kindness, caring, love, justice, mercy, demands of God that fuels our living. We cannot borrow the words or melody from another, we have to sing our own unique song to and for God and ourselves. It is a demand from God that we each live lives that match our souls, we teach the words of Torah that have been placed in us by God and we do this loudly and proudly-no matter what some people think.
Rabbi Heschel teaches about the last verse above: “Israel’s destiny is, as we have seen, “to open the eyes that are blind”. Yet the tragedy is that the servant himself fails to understand the meaning of his mission.”(The Prophets pg.157). Isn’t this the great conundrum we all face? We are destined for a purpose, we have the ability and, at times, the desire to “open the eyes that are blind and bring out the prisoners…” yet we succumb to our own willful blindness and self-interests. Self-deception, running away from God, from purpose, from helping another has been the bane of human existence forever and Israel was given the mission and sent to “teach the nations” has not only not done this, Israel has joined in the self-deception, blindness and deafness of everyone else. A tremendous betrayal of God, Covenant, and family-remember this deal was struck with Abraham and succeeding generations. We stand on the shoulders of previous generations, and it seems, that we only want to use the advances and the inheritance without the service, commitment and continuation of our part of the covenant that made the advances and inheritance possible. Are you able to see the tragedy of the failure of Israel to understand its mission? Are you able to see the tragedy of our failure to understand and fulfill our mission?
In recovery, we are dedicated to hearing God’s call, in fact we are so aware of our need to hear the call we come “to believe that a power greater than ourselves can restore us to sanity”. We wake up each and everyday searching for ways to be of service, to connect with another and God as well as singing a new song, a song that is uniquely ours and adding our voice to the millions of people who, like us, have found that recovering our passion and discovering our purpose is a job not just for ‘addicts’ but for all of us, as the prophet teaches above. In recovery, we are constantly “seeking to improve our conscious contact with God, as we understand God” so we stay on the right path for us, not worrying about competition nor comparing ourselves to another(s), instead relishing in the delight of God for us living our authentic lives.
I have been both deaf and blind at times in my recovery, I know this and I see how this has led me to where I am now. I think that, as God did in 1986, I needed to be hit right between the eyes in order to see and hear. I realize that, while I was living well and doing my thing, I was not where God nor another(s) needed/wanted me, maybe I had overstayed my welcome at one place too long.I wish that I had heard God’s voice better, I wish that ‘the powers that be’ would have not deceived me with promises and a plan that no else paid attention to. Yet, in the end, my blindness and deafness was the problem, not the deception by another(s). I realize that I have the opportunity to sing a new song to God, to myself and to another(s). Stay safe and God Bless, Rabbi Mark