Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 2 Day 21
“Repentance is an absolute, spiritual decision made in truthfulness. Its motivations are remorse for the past and responsibility for the future. Only in this manner is it possible and valid.”(Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity)
As I am understanding Rabbi Heschel’s brilliance today, our ability to return to our authentic self is dependent upon our willingness and thoroughness to engage in T’Shuvah. It is dependent upon our openness to maturing and living from our spiritual nature instead of our lower mind nature. It is dependent upon our search for truth about our self, about the ways in which we are living, and about our deep desire to connect with something greater than our self, with people, with people who love us and whom we feel love for.
The first sentence above reminds us that any “I’m sorry” to get the heat off, to not be bothered, to be perfunctory, doesn’t make us repentant, it doesn’t help us return, it is another self-deceptive and mendacious action on our part. Too often we say we are sorry and mean it emotionally and/or intellectually maybe and not in our depth of our beingness. Too often we say we are sorry because it is what is expected of us, we learn to as children when our parents make us say: “I’m sorry” to someone for something we are not really sorry about. Some times we are in the right and we are still told to say we are sorry which only lessens the veracity of those words in our minds. We say “sorry” without any meaning or heartfelt expression because we are just going through the motions.
Rabbi Heschel is reminding us that T’Shuvah, true repentance comes with a desire to return to a connection as well as to return the dignity we robbed another human being of. It is to return the “kingly dignity” to God and to regain some of our own dignity as well. To err, while human, is to denigrate our self, to soil our spiritual nature, to put plaque in our spiritual arteries and T’Shuvah is the angioplasty of our spiritual arteries, it is the return of dignity to our self, to another(s), to God. Without this being “an absolute spiritual decision” it is subject to being another deception we use to ‘get over’ on another person, to look pious and then claim to be injured when someone detects our insincerity and doesn’t accept our false repentance. We are so used to the insincere “I’m sorry” that many of us do not even know that we are not being sincere as we have convinced our self that it is all meaningless, life is hard and then you die attitude, do whatever it takes to get ahead attitude.
Earlier in this essay, Rabbi Heschel asks: “What is the state of our repentance?” This question needs to reverberate within us. Is our T’Shuvah a once a year mechanical beat our chests to look good, to fulfill our superstitions event? Is our T’Shuvah a continuation of our false “I’m sorry’s”? Is our T’Shuvah a decision that we make with our minds, emotions and spirits? We know the difference even when we say we don’t. We know the difference between our desires and what is the next right thing to do. We know the difference between ‘getting the heat off’ and being sincere in our remorse. We know the difference between effectuating a return for connection and a return for our gain. We know the difference between authenticity and falseness. Yet, we have played the false route so long and so often we have trouble distinguishing one from the other. We have made our desires so important that we have trouble distinguishing them from what is truly the next indicated action. We have be insincere for so long, we have trouble distinguishing what sincerity truly looks like. We have been living false scripts for so long, we are almost unaware of what is authentic and what isn’t. Unfortunately, this seems to be the state of our repentance, this seems to be the reason we buy the mendacity and the deception of another(s) so readily, it seems to be the state of our personal affairs, self-deception, mendacity and inauthenticity.
The Good News, however, is we can change this state of being! The gates of repentance, the gates of T’Shuvah are always open to us, God is always waiting for our return. In the Talmud we learn that between the 2nd and 3rd watches at night, God cries: “My children are in exile” and weeps for the disconnection. The people we have harmed are also open to our return, many of them don’t act this way because they are afraid of being hurt again, being taken advantage of again, yet they need and want us to own our errors, restore their dignity and whatever else we stole from them and maybe reconnect again or not. We have to do the work of T’Shuvah, we have to see our self in a state of absolute truthfulness, we have to look at our self through our soul’s knowledge and memory, not the false excuses of our minds that we have come to believe.
In recovery we do this by making a searching and fearless moral inventory. We do this by continuing to review our days and realize what we have done not so well and what we have done well.
I am grateful that so many people welcomed me back, I am grateful for those who accepted my T’Shuvah and didn’t want any more connection. I am grateful that I have learned how to make “absolute spiritual” decisions based in truthfulness after so many years of deception. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark