Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 2 Day 25
“Repentance is a decision made in truthfulness, remorse, and responsibility. If, to be sure—as is often the case among us—instead of deliberate decision we have a coerced conversion; instead of a conscious truthfulness, a self-conscious conformity; instead of remorse over the lost past, a longing for it; then this so-called return is but a retreat, a phase.”(Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity)
Today is Hoshanah Rabbah, the 7th day of Sukkot, the day when we beat the ground with myrtle as a gesture to have the negativity and errors of the past leave us. It is a day of looking forward with renewed strength, energy, determination, hope, and a plan. It is not a day of looking backward in longing for the past, it is not a day to return to the “good old days”, it is not a day of retreat, rather it is a day of advancing. Rabbi Heschel’s words above capture this so beautifully, so powerfully and so completely.
We look forward by, in Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch’s words, keeping the negative impulses far enough away from us so we are not caught in their web of desire and close enough that we are able to see when we are falling back into old patterns. We cannot do this when we are in a self-conscious conformity, when we are in a coerced conversion, when we are living a life of deception and mendacity, when we ‘look good’ while doing wrong. Yet, we persist in this manner even today. For all of our advancements in science, in technology, in space exploration, in philosophy, in psychology, etc we are still retarded in spirituality, still “falling off the wagon” of decency, “truthfulness, remorse, and responsibility”. We are still blaming another for our errors, we are still convicting someone else when our feelings are hurt, we are still exiling people when we feel guilty, we are still seeking ways to enslave someone else so we can feel like ‘sovereign of the mountain’.
This brilliance and wisdom from Rabbi Heschel in 1936 are still a bright light and the path to follow for all people. They remind us to search inside of our self, to search and engage in an inner dialogue in order to uncover the subtle self-deceptions we hold onto. We have to explore our minds, hearts and souls to find the mendacious beliefs we hold onto so dearly that we are not even aware of how they run and ruin our living. We have to engage in an inventory that exposes our ‘cleaning up bad behavior of another(s) and our self by blaming someone/something else. We get the gift of time and space to do this today and everyday. It isn’t only on Yom Kippur, it isn’t only on Hoshanah Rabbah, it is every day we are gifted with the opportunity to engage in T’Shuvah, to make a decision to live life in “truthfulness, remorse a responsibility.” Given the state of our world, given the need of some to capture and enslave another nation, another people, given the need of some to hold onto power through being “scoundrels within the law” as the Ramban says, all of us need to engage in this inventory, all of us need to be looking forward after and during our T’Shuvah and seeing where we missed the mark and where we hit the bullseye! All of us need to be taking responsibility for our actions, positive and negative, have remorse for our errors and a plan to repair the damage, and take responsibility for our errors without blaming another, without explaining them away, without disgrace and shame. All of us need to rejoice in our positive patterns, paths and deeds, we need to stop hiding from our goodness and use our goodness, our spiritual connection and our wisdom to move forward in making our corner of the world a little better for our being here.
We advance the goodness when we come to realize and admit our imperfections. We humans are imperfect, all of us. When we realize, acknowledge and grow from our imperfections, when we see how connected we are to one another through our imperfections, we are able to take pride in our humanity, we are able to embrace our humanity and the humanity of another(s), and we are able to find other points of agreement and not need to “kill the enemy” because we are no longer enemies or competitors, we are different people with different ways/ideas and when we can merge and compromise our ideas and find ways to see our similarities, we are advancing our humanity and the humanity of all. This all comes about when we are living our lives through deliberate decision making and living in conscious truthfulness.
In recovery, our search for truth is called peeling the layers of the onion skin. Each deception, each mendacious way and thought is as thin as the skin of an onion and as difficult to peel away. Yet we persist in this endeavor each and every day, we constantly take our own inventory and sometimes quickly and sometimes slowly we are able to see the self-deceptions and mendacity we have engaged in and with.
I am dedicated to the words of Rabbi Heschel above. I know I continue to engage in coerced conversions of my own negativity. My negative impulse derives me so much I feel compelled to act on it, I see this so clearly today and I now know how to resist it. I fell prey to this coerced conversion of my Yetzer HaRa so often because I was able to ‘clean up’ my actions with self-deceptions and coercing others to agree. I am so remorseful for this, I am changing this pattern because of the words above, the teaching of Rabbi Heschel and my desire to embrace my own goodness and advance the goodness of the world. God Bless and Stay Safe, Rabbi Mark