Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 2 Day 27
“This is one of the rewards of being human: quiet exaltation, capacity for celebration. It is expressed in a phrase which Rabbi Akiba offered to his disciples: A song every day, A song every day.” (Who is Man pg. 118)
Today is Simchat Torah, we dance with the Torah and rejoice in and with it. While it is a loud celebration, it is also a time of quiet exaltation. Exaltation comes from the Latin meaning raise aloft, raise upward. Today, Jews all over the globe raise the Torah up and pledge allegiance to God, to the principles of Torah and to help the stranger, the poor, the needy. We do this in quiet exaltation because it is only a pledge between us and God, it is a commitment that we make with our spirit, our mind and our heart. We actualize our capacity to celebrate and be part of a celebration of truth, justice, mercy, kindness, compassion, and love.
The last sentence above is one that speaks to all of us. Frank Sinatra sang “Without a Song” and in it, like Rabbi Akiba’s wisdom, he reminds us that: “without a song the day would never end …when things go wrong a man ain’t got a friend without a song.” Where is the song: in our hearts, in our minds, in our souls. We get to sing it every day, we get to raise our self up by singing the song that is uniquely ours, singing it in concert with everyone else’s song making a cacophony of sound and music that opens the hearts of everyone a little more, makes us a little less judgmental every day, raises our standards of living one grain of sand each day. In the quiet exaltation of singing our unique song, we realize our focus on comparisons, competitions, past hurts, future fears are all for naught. We get a glimpse of what freedom truly is, where we are going towards and how to move forward.
We sing the words of Torah when we read it, we sing hymns in Church, we sing songs in the Mosque, we sing our prayers, we sing songs of love. In the Jewish tradition one of the central prayers is the V’Ahavta, “and you shall love”. We sing of our love of God with all our heart, all our soul, all our everything. When we are able to love life, to love God, to love our self, to love another(s), to love everyone with our heart, our soul, our everything, we have reached a level of freedom that is unknown to most people. While most of us don’t stay there for long, as Michael Corleone said in Godfather III, “every time I think I am out, they pull me back in”, those of us who have experienced this level long to return. We return on a day like today, not just because we are dancing with God’s wisdom and teachings, rather because today we are singing our song, with joy, fervor and love. This is the key, of course, to sing our song and not the song of someone else. To sing our song without trying to drown out the song of any one else. To sing our song, letting go of our need to deceive another, to act mendaciously, to engage in self-deception. I would posit that singing one’s own song is the antithesis of deception, mendacity, isolation, and self-deception/self denigration.
We can use today as an example of what this looks like. When I led a congregation, I would unwind the entire Torah Scroll and wrap it around the people gathered for our celebration. Each person would point to a word in the Torah and that would be their word for the year, to live with, to embrace and to celebrate in quiet exaltation, raising upward from where they were prior. Each year some people would return for this one service only so they could get their word of Torah. We have the same opportunity today, whether Jewish or not, whether in Temple or not, open the Spiritual book you count on, your ‘go to’ spiritual text, flip through the pages quickly, stopping on a page; close your eyes and point to a word, look at it, and find the meaning of the word for you today and for the next year. If you don’t want to do this, here are some words I have had in years prior: truth, kindness, life, exaltation, love, choice, liar, rebel, wonder, awe, return, response, speak.
This year, I was studying with someone yesterday and my word of this year jumped out at me, mist. In reading Ecclesiastes, the word mist jumped out to me. Every thing that I believe is permanent just isn’t. I get to remember to seek God and live Godly each day, as much as I possibly can. I get to be accountable for me and to me, I get to stay in this moment, this day and not be imprisoned by the past nor the future. I get to remember the vanity of my youth and the stinking thinking of my own puffed-up importance. I get to turn my heart and my soul to the best life has to offer, using each experience as a teaching moment and learning the lesson of this moment in order to make the next moment better. Mist also means watering my soul with the elements God/Universe has provided, no longer asking ‘where’s mine’ rather taking in the nourishment of this day, staying present with the people, the surroundings, the learning, the joy of this day without needing to moan about what was and isn’t, without needing to fear what is to come, just remembering the wisdom of Rabbi Akiba and these words from “Without a Song”, “I got my troubles and woes but, sure as the Jordan will roll, and I’ll get along as long as a song, strong in my soul.” We all have songs in our souls, we all need a word to trigger a stanza, a lyric, a melody for each year so we can build the symphony that our life truly is. This is the “quiet exaltation”, the celebration I understand Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom gives us. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark