Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Day 107
“Responsiveness to God cannot be copied; it must be original with every soul. Even the meaning of the divine is not grasped when imposed by a doctrine, when accepted by hearsay.”(Man is Not Alone pg. 91)
Rabbi Heschel is calling to us, in this first sentence, to a) be aware that God is calling, b) respond to God, and c) respond in an authentic personal manner. I believe this sentence is a call/plea to all of us to stop seeing life, the world, our texts, one another through someone else’s lens, through the “conventional notions” of society, family, tribe, etc. This call goes unanswered by many of us because of our fear of being different, being made fun of, being shamed in public, having egg on our faces, being ostracized and exiled, being not acceptable to anyone/someone/society.
We can begin our original responses to God, to life in the way we teach and study texts/Torah, the way we pray, the way we engage with the world around us, etc. As Rabbi Heschel says in his interview with Carl Stern, we have to immerse ourselves in the text, not just pick it apart as ‘critical thinking’. I believe Rabbi Heschel was reminding us we cannot have an authentic experience of the Bible, of the Torah, of life without immersing ourselves in them and then we can use ‘critical thinking’ to understand how to use the text, our experiences, our spirit to enhance our life and the lives of the people around us. Rabbi Heschel is reminding us to stop copying someone else’s thoughts and ways to God, to life. This is so important a teaching for us as many of us feel like frauds because our responses are just copies of someone else and, at times, copying an original response we had in the past, kind of like ‘mailing it in’.
When we are responding to God as an original, without copying the ways, thoughts, actions of another we can have a spiritual awakening and a spiritual experience. This does not mean we are not performing the Mitzvot, the commandments, the ways of living well that God/Torah/Sages have given to us. Rather, it means that we are not trying to copy someone else’s practices. When we are responding to God from our soul, in an original manner, we are totally in the moment, we are unable to even know what a former response was because we are in awe of this moment, we are engulfed in our experience of being seen by the Ineffable One/another soul, seeing beyond what is in front of us, seeing the light, the brilliance, the solutions, the questions, the demands and our unique abilities to respond to all of these mini-experiences in the larger experience of being called to by God, by another human being, by our higher consciousness.
Seeing ourselves in the texts we study and live by is an awesome and frightening experience. We get to cross the Red Sea, stand at Mt. Sinai, enter the Promised Land; we get to engage in sibling rivalry, build Golden Calfs, continually bitch about what we don’t have and whine for what we want! Well, I guess one could say we do immerse ourselves in the Torah as we have sibling rivalry, senseless hatred and comparisons between people, when we copy/use the ways of another to respond to God we are creating our own Golden Calf, when we bow down before money, power, prestige, another person we are creating our own Golden Calf, and when we constantly complain and only see what we don’t have, what we think we ‘deserve’, we are following the ways of our ancestors in the Desert. The purpose and reward of Rabbi Heschel’s call to us is to stop practicing the negative paths of our ancestors and our own prior negativity, to stop putting up walls and covering ourselves with make-up and masks. It is also to appreciate the wonder, beauty, importance, need, talent, gifts we each have to change, to learn from the errors of our ancestors, the errors of previous moments in our life, to learn how to live lives that are compatible with being in relationship to the Ineffable One as well as compatible to being human, to being a part of the solution that we are created for.
In recovery, this is an issue also. Many people want to copy what someone else does and believe they will have the experience of that person if they do the same things. Yet, it rarely happens this way. We all have to have our own experience of recovery, we all have to follow the guidelines of the 12-steps, etc in our own unique manner, otherwise relapse is waiting to happen and, usually, does. In recovery, we all have an opportunity to be original, we all receive the tools and learn how to use them to peal back the layers of the onion that have been blocking our original response to life.
Immersing myself in text, in life has brought me to where I am today. I am an original and I only have been upset with myself when I have tried to be a copy of someone else, when I have tried to calm down in the face of injustice, mendacity, etc. I have gotten into altercations with people over my responses, which when they are original I am at peace with me and when they are copies, I fight from my ego instead of from my soul/spirit. I am sorry for the inauthentic responses to God and to another human being I have engaged in from fear, expediency, fitting in, etc. I feel the tears and sadness of my inner life as I reflect on these times. I also am elated with my usual way of being-original, helpful, engaged, advocating for the soul of another, an organization, a way of living. I commit to being more original each and every day-hope you will also! God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark