Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 2 Day 20
“The most unnoticed of all miracles is the miracle of repentance. It is not the same thing as rebirth; it is transformation, creation. In the dimension of time there is no going back. But the power of repentance causes time to be created backward and allows re-creation of the past to take place. Through the forgiving hand of God, harm and blemish which we have committed against the world and against ourselves will be extinguished, transformed into salvation.” (Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity)
Today is the first day of Sukkot and as we enter the Sukkah we are supposed to bring in guests who are no longer alive, like our ancestors, Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Rebekah, Jacob, Rachel and Leah, etc. We also can invite our own deceased relatives and friends. This is called Ushpizin. I would like to suggest another ‘friend’ to invite this year, based on the text above and my understanding of it today, this friend is called acceptance. Without acceptance, we cannot change anything, we cannot be present and we cannot be joyous. And the hardest experience for most people to accept, I believe, is forgiveness by another person.
Most of us do not believe it when someone says they forgive us. We see ourselves as so bad, so despicable, we can’t believe the other person could seriously forgive us and we are wary and non-trusting of them from then on. The reason being, of course, that we would not forgive someone who did this harm to us, in fact, we probably haven’t. We are unable to accept the forgiveness of another, we are unable to accept the forgiveness of God and we are unable to accept we are worthy of self-forgiveness as well. This is another form of self-deception, a very subtle form of self-deception through which we are able to stay in misery and disbelief of a basic spiritual principle: The Gates of T’Shuvah (repent, return, new response) are always open!
The prophets proclaim God’s call for us to return, three times a day in our daily prayers we call God “the One who desires our return”. Yet, we continue to hold on to our disbelief that we can and/or should be forgiven, we continue to hold onto our belief that another person can and/pr should be forgiven.These two ways of being block us from the true joys of living; a covenantal connection with God and a covenantal connection with human beings around us. Our disbelief and our belief as stated before prevent us from accepting our imperfections as part of our nature, from accepting we will continue to make mistakes and we can learn from them, we can grow from them and we never have to hide from them or hide them from another person.
We must engage in what is called, suspending my disbelief. This is a process whereby we put our disbelief on hold, we are not letting it go, we are just putting it on a shelf for right now and we believe that you/another person whom we can trust, believe we can be forgiven. We hold on to your belief until it is proven true and valid or false and invalid. Once we do this, the world opens us up to new possibilities, we are able to see and experience a freedom from this self-deceptive principle we were holding onto. We are able to experience the forgiveness of another person, we are able to accept the forgiveness of another person and we are able to shed the skin/label of “bad person” that we have carried for so long. Suspending our disbelief in this area will lead to us suspending a lot of old beliefs we have held onto that cause us to suffer the “low-grade misery” of living in mendacity and self-deception.
Doing this allows us to invite those we have harmed into our Sukkah, we can welcome them with open arms and a belief in their words of forgiveness, we can be open and honest with them and ourselves, we can willingly accept them for who they are and know we are being accepted for who we are-truthfully and completely. Suspending our disbelief and believing in forgiveness allows us to invite the people we have held resentments against into our Sukkah. People we have said we will never forgive we can invite into the Sukkah, whether in person or spirit, and embrace them for and with their imperfections. I have come to realize that Sukkot comes when it does not just as a harvest festival, it comes as a joyous reunion after we have recovered from the awe of being forgiven, forgiving another person(and for some forgiving God), and forgiving our self. It takes a few days to recover from such an enlightening experience as Yom Kippur and then Sukkot is the celebration of the new person who has emerged from the Day of At-One-Ment with a new skin, a new outlook, a revived spirit and a new vision of what is possible.
In recovery, we know we “acceptance is the answer to all of our problems today” as Dr. Paul teaches us. We know we have to accept life on life’s terms and we have to accept our imperfections. We have to accept that we are worthy of forgiveness and we accept that resentments are the number one cause of falling out of recovery. We rejoice in and find a new freedom when making our amends.
This year, I have let go of resentments and invite all the spirits of people I have harmed to forgive me, I invite the spirits of the people who have harmed me to know I forgive them and I will sit in a Sukkat Shalom, a canopy of inner peace this year. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark