Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Day 106
“Some of us blush, others wear a mask which veils spontaneous sensitivity to the holy ineffable dimension of reality. We all wear so much mental make-up, we have almost forfeited our face. But faith only comes when we stand face to face-the ineffable in us with the ineffable beyond us-suffer ourselves to be seen, to commune, to receive a ray and reflect it. But to do that the soul must be alive in the mind.” (Man is Not Alone pg 91)
The last sentence haunts me daily! I woke up this morning at 2:30am thinking about it and each time I read it, immerse myself in it, I understand it a little more. Rabbi Heschel is teaching us, calling to us and reminding us that the experience of faith, the experience of being seen for who we truly are, the experience of seeing our true and authentic self as well as the Divine Need we are to fill in this world, to share our wounds and our healing, to “stand face to face-the ineffable in us with the ineffable beyond us” cannot be a mental exercise! We can never think our way into any of these experiences and, as I am understanding Rabbi Heschel, our mind will make us impervious, help us make and wear a mask, and is the source of our “mental make-up” when our soul is not alive in our mind.
Just as Mitzvot, Religious Doctrines, Dogmas, Rites, etc done from a performance aspect miss the spark of the Divine that is necessary to infuse these actions with meaning, purpose and our self; just as we run the risk of falling into religious behaviorisms and spiritual plagiarisms, when our thoughts and actions are determined solely by our mental thoughts and our lower consciousness, we miss the human connection and the connection with the ineffable in us and beyond us. We have within us, three centers of control: our minds/intellect, our emotions/feelings, and our soul/higher consciousness/spirit, I believe. We live in a society that tells us “what the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve” according to Napoleon Hill and it is a mantra that people have used since he said it and even prior to his coining this phrase, society, especially since the Renaissance, has lived this. We have forgotten how much our spiritual life matters, how much knowledge and brilliance as well as foresight our souls have and we waste it because we have inherited and promoted as well as added to society’s erroneous belief that “mind over matter”, etc is the only way to live well. We see the results each and every day and they are scary, they are deadly, they are destroying the fabric of life and the fabric of community, democracy and freedom.
“The soul must be alive in the mind” is a way of being that acknowledges and demands our integration of mind and spirit. It is a way of being that acknowledges the importance of our inner life, the need for our soul to be the arbiter, the controller of our actions and beingness in the world. Our minds and emotions have votes, have important information and wisdom to add to our ways of being, our actions and our souls become the decider of what is good, what is right, how we are able to bear seeing our authentic self-warts and all-how we are able to see the soul/ineffable in another human being, how our next action is going to impact us, another, and the Ineffable One. This is why the education, maturation and freeing of our soul and living from the inside/out is so crucial to making our world more whole(holy) and we, the people, more in sync with the call of higher consciousness/Ineffable One.
We are in a Spiritual Crisis, I believe worse than, in Rabbi Heschel’s lifetime and it was not good then either. His rallying for Civil Rights, for getting out of Vietnam, for stopping the indiscriminate death of innocent Vietnamese, etc is well-known and, at times, misunderstood. What his teachings and thinking are focused on, to me, is encapsulated in this last sentence above: growing/maturing our souls, being aware of and educating our inner lives so we infuse our actions with the proper measure of respect, awe, love, intention, etc to reflect the rays of the Ineffable in us and beyond us, to respect and carry along the people in our community and to open our wounds to healing and love. My soul says YES, this is the path to living well. Yes, this is the pathway out of the Spiritual, Moral crisis we all face and Yes, this is the path to ensuring dignity, democracy and freedom to all people of our country.
In recovery, we learn to ‘trust our gut’ as clean out the our spiritual arteries and reconnect our souls and our minds. We are constantly engaged in educating our inner life and listening to the Ineffable in us and beyond us through waiting for the second thought, checking our thinking and decisions with another trusted person, and deepening our connection to the universe, to our higher consciousness and to our self.
This last sentence is one of the many sentences that envelop me in the love and being seen by Rabbi Heschel and God. I live them to the best of my ability each day. I also see how I have gotten off track by at times because I could and I was blind and deaf to my soul’s call. I also know that I have been accused of being off track, when my soul was speaking to me, I was screaming from my “soul being alive in my mind” and seeing what was and what would happen if we stayed the false path, gave into the deceptions/optics we wanted to see and believe. It is a difficult way to live, sometimes unpopular, always humbling and, after the rejections and exiles, connection to self and the Ineffable One comforts and envelopes me in love. Stay safe and God Bless, Rabbi Mark