Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 2 Day 22
“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)
In a recovery meeting I attended yesterday, we were talking about the topic of accountability and I thought of the quote above. Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom is reminding us that we can return, we can repair old damages, we can have new responses to the old ‘triggers’ as long as we are accountable and in truth with our self and with another(s) self! This is the Good News of our day, of all days and too many of us don’t believe this good news, too many of us are skeptical of this good news, too many of us still believe the lie of the Ancient Greeks who thought perfection was attainable.
Just as with the barnacles on a boat, just as with objects that have lost their shine, just as with cosmetic surgery, we can do a ‘facelift’ on our beingness. We can, through T’Shuvah, through “remorse through the past and responsibility for the future” remake our lives, remake our relationships and remake our world. Armed with this truth, with this knowledge, we are able to change the course of our future and change the history of our past. We can become ‘new’ people as the famous teacher/physician Rambam teaches. We can be a world saver as Reb Meir teaches in the Talmud in Tractate Yoma 86b. All of this is within our reach once we turn our attention to accountability, to repenting, to remorse and to responsibility.
As we are in the intermediate days of Sukkot, the tradition in many Jewish circles is that we are able to repent until the end of the 7th day of Sukkot. So, while we are celebrating joy and greet one another with words of joy, we are still given the opportunity to clean up whatever ‘messes’ are still lingering on our souls, on our minds, on our ‘shoes’ as it were. We are still called to be accountable, we are still given the joy of being responsible for and to tomorrow and all our tomorrows. I use the word gift to indicate the immense grace we are all given to return to our families and friends, return to our communities and world, return to our authentic core self and to God even when we haven’t been aware that we were separate. I hear, in his words above, Rabbi Heschel call us to account, calling on us to stop being willfully blind, to stop engaging in self-deception, to stop deceiving another(s), to stop buying the deception of another(s). He is demanding we take seriously our lives, our obligations and our talents and opportunities. He is demanding we experience the grief and remorse for the myriad of errors we have committed by not being true to our self, by not being authentic with another(s), by hiding from God.
And, he gives us the remedy, an ancient remedy as we learn in the Cain and Abel story. God tells Cain “if you do right, there is an uplift”(of your soul) and “negativity couches at your door, it desires you a lot, and you can master it”. The problem of our negativity being so strong, our urge to do whatever we want without regard to the impact on another is in our DNA! And there is a remedy, we can master the negativity so it no longer controls us, it no longer defeats us. That remedy is in the brilliance of Rabbi Heschel’s words above. Being in truth with oneself about what we need to change, being accountable to another for the damages/harms/errors we have made, repairing and changing as well as expressing gratitude for the love and connection are paths to achieving our return, having remorse for our past errors and taking responsibility to lessen the errors of our future. We will still make some of the same errors, they just won’t be from indulging in our negativity, they won’t be as severe and they won’t be as long-this is what T’Shuvah is about, as I understand it. We are not going to be perfect, we are going to be aware and our eyes will be opened wider and have less film on them, our hearts will be circumcised and be more open to the love and cry of people. We will be more accountable, more truthful and more able to respond to this moment, to the present without the baggage of the past weighing us down. I realize, in this moment, the spiritual truth and reasoning of continuing to clean up the past during this holiday of Joy-leaving the old baggage and being unencumbered with guilt, with shame, with blame is the only path to true Joy!
This is the good news of recovery, this is the freedom of recovery, this is the burden and accountability of recovery. Repentance, living our spirituality out loud, remorse and truthfulness are the paths to freedom for us in recovery and for everyone else as well, even though many people are unaware of this truth. We engage in being truthful with our self as to how our day went with a 10th step(taking of our own inventory) each evening; noting the errors and the good we have accomplished. We engage in a spiritual decision each and every morning and throughout each day to live the best we can rather than the worst we could and herein is the way we show both our remorse and our new found responsibility.
I make an “absolute spiritual decision” each day to be one grain of sand better today than I was yesterday. To those people who feel I have wronged them, I apologize publicly as I have privately. I pray for your forgiveness and I commit to changing, growing and being more responsible. God Bless and Stay safe, Rabbi Mark