Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Day 10
“We must keep our own amazement, our own eagerness alive. And if we ever fail in our quest for insight, it is not because it cannot be found, but because we do not know to to live, or how to beware of the mind’s narcissistic tendency to fall in love with its own reflection, a tendency which cuts thought off its roots.”(Man is Not Alone pg.14).
In Rabbi Heschel’s interview with Carl Stern in 1972, he speaks about how we humans get stale, we become static instead of dynamic. This passage reminds me of those words and I am inspired by it. Rabbi Heschel does not say we will gain the insight we seek, he doesn’t say we will have/get all the answers to the questions we raise, he is speaking about the quest for insight. Herein lies the crux of the issue for Rabbi Heschel and for all of us. In a world that seeks to have all the answers, in a world where some people are so sure they are right, in a world where some people have closed their minds to anything other than what they believe or the “canned theories” that I wrote about yesterday, there is no quest for insight, because they know it all already.
We have grown up in a world where “knowledge is power” and I hear Rabbi Heschel refuting this maxim. I know how often I/people/we have cut short our quest for insight because we get frustrated and this happens because we are seeking answers, not insight-I believe. When we have to be the ‘smartest person in the room’ there is no quest for insight, there is only power through fiat, the actuality of people falling in love with our own mind. We have already fallen prey to the narcissistic tendency that Rabbi Heschel is talking about. We see this is the adherence to a strict code of conduct displayed by people with fundamentalist ideas, ie people who have fossilized religious tenets, constitutional tenets, scientific tenets, etc. According to the Jewish tradition, there are 70 ways to interpret Torah, how can we not continue to be on a quest for insight? We are being overrun by this narcissistic tendency to fall in love with our own thinking/canned ideas and it is killing our spirits and our world. We are impeding the insights that the Ineffable One is showing us by blocking them from ourselves. It is too difficult to be on the quest for insight when you need to be sure and certain of every move you make. When fear of ‘being wrong’ overtakes our quest for insight, we are in love with our own mind’s reflection and we are in deep spiritual, emotional distress which leads to living life in a manner antithetical to the call of our soul and the call of the Ineffable One.
We continue to see and practice cutting “thought off at its roots” daily, it seems. We are afraid to speak up, we are afraid to go against the flow, we are afraid to find consensus and compromise because it would show weakness and/or disbelief in the rightness of our way! What a crock, as I am reading Rabbi Heschel today. We have to admit how we have failed in our quest for insight, how we have fallen in love with one idea above all others, how we have fallen in love with our mind’s reflection and the people who reflect the same small vision. We have to admit our failure to keep our own amazement and eagerness alive.
How do we do this? It is a practice that begins, I believe with gratitude for waking up. Before we put our feet on the ground, before we get out of bed, we say a gratitude prayer for being alive. We then have to realize that being alive today is an opportunity to learn and learning keeps our quest for insight alive. Each morning we make a commitment to learn and grow. We approach life with a curious mind, rather than with a mind made up. We stay maladjusted to the conventional notions and mental cliches that will bombard us this day. We continue to pursue our passions and our purpose, we seek to connect rather than conquer, we seek to lift up rather than put down, we give out compassion rather than disdain, etc.
In recovery, we are aware that staying stagnant is falling into old behaviors and will send us back to days of woe and dismay. In recovery, we are eager to share new insights with our fellow human beings, we seek to study and learn with a few other individuals and/or a group. We are constantly on a quest for new insights. In recovery, we are eager and amazed at what we learn, how we grow and how we are of service and how much we love and connect to the Ineffable One and each other.
I have been guilty of falling “in love with” my mind’s reflection at times. I have been so stubborn and sure that I have been unable to hear another’s perspective and cut them off. How sorry I am for these times because: 1) I negated the wonder, quest for insight of another human being and cut them off at their roots. 2) I limited the options, solutions and insights that could have helped the organization. 3) I failed to keep my eagerness and amazement to learn and be in wonder front and center of my living. I, as Rabbi Heschel says, did not know how to live in those moments. And, I have continued to be on a quest for insight each and every day. I love to learn, I know a day without learning is not worth living and I learned from those days of stubbornness-not hearing, listening and being on the quest for insight, will surely lead to the right answers to the wrong questions. I can’t have the correct questions, if I am not on the quest for insight, if I am not in amazement and eagerness to learn, to explore and to connect to the Ineffable One, to my soul and to you. God Bless and Stay Safe, Rabbi Mark