Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 2 Day 31
“The ultimate requirement is to act beyond the requirements of the law. Torah is not the same as law, as din. To fulfill one’s duties is not enough. One may be a scoundrel within the limits of the law. Why was Jerusalem destroyed? Because her people acted according to the law, and did not act beyond the requirements of the law.”(God in Search of Man pg.327)
The more I immerse myself in these ideas/thoughts of Rabbi Heschel, the more I find the nuances which were fairly well hidden in my subconscious mind come to light. The word Jerusalem in the Hebrew comes to mean ‘city of wholeness’ and when we only act “according to the law”, we are destroying the wholeness we seek as humans. While we are satisfying a need, a compulsion, a necessity so we can feel accomplished, fulfill someone else’s rules, fulfill God’s rules, do what we need to do to get ahead, we are not satisfying the deep craving in the soul of every human being to be whole, to be complete. In fact, as I am experiencing Rabbi Heschel’s words above, we are destroying the very pathway to the wholeness we seek.
While we will never get ‘there’, just as we never get to the Promised Land by the end of the Torah, we can continue to make this journey if and when we decide to “act beyond the requirements of the law”. We saw this with the Founding Fathers, the Declaration of Independence says “all men are created equal”, not just white men, and it is an incomplete document because they did not include women. However, the fact that they went beyond these requirements at the time, by a Southerner Thomas Jefferson, shows the reason our nation survived two wars with England and a Civil War as well.
The Jewish People have survived with our roots intact and our Torah as it is for over 2500 years, some say over 3300 years, because people have been willing to go beyond the letter of the law and serve the spirit of the law as well. The Prophets tell us the story of the destruction of both the Northern Kingdom (Israel) and the Southern Kingdom (Judea) and the reasons for both, giving lip service to the law, bring sacrifices that did not change the inner life, the heart, the spirit of the people, rather being punctilious about the letter of the law, the requirements, while not being engaged in the spirit of the law, in not “going beyond the requirements of the law.” And we learned from this that we have to remember and act, to paraphrase Pirke Avot, the world endures because of 3 things, Torah (a teaching of how to live) Service (fulfilling the words and will of God) and Acts of Lovingkindness (going beyond fulfilling the words and will of God to acting Godly in all our affairs). While this is a tall order, it is the only way to experience more wholeness in our inner life, it is the only way to experience a serenity and calm in our inner life, it is the only way to engage our subconscious and bring more clarity, more wisdom, more wrestling to light in our lives.
Going “beyond the requirements of the law” has to become a daily routine that we never do routinely. If we are to move towards wholeness and freedom for all, we must stop our narrow viewing of Torah, the Bible, the Koran, the Constitution, and begin to turn them around and around, upside down and sideways to glean all of the different paths to wholeness that they give us, to immerse our selves in all the different paths to freedom that they uncover for us. Doing this means creating the Bigger Table that John Pavlovitz speaks about. Doing this means changing from a “me” society to a “we” society. It entails as moving from seeking to be ‘somebody’ to knowing and embracing being an ‘everybody’ as Joe Dispenza teaches and as Rabbi Harold Shulweis teaches being Ehad, part of the Oneness of God/Universe. We do this by giving voice to our true inner desires, to our soul’s call, to our unique talents and gifts. We do this by allowing our deeds to change our inner life, by being immersed in our actions such that we become transformed, recreated by them. Each and every day is an opportunity to move towards wholeness and/or destruction. We have to choose life, we have to choose wholeness, we have to choose freedom, otherwise destruction/negativity “couches at our door and it desires us much”.
In recovery, this is the path we seek to follow. When we make “a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God” we are seeking wholeness, we are seeking freedom from the “bondage of self”. We are seeking to go beyond the self to join with the Higher Self, both ours and the One of the universe. We do this on a daily basis and we seek to grow one grain of sand more whole each day.
I hav experienced this journey towards wholeness for the past 35 years. It has been one step forward and two steps backwards at times and 3 steps forward and ½ step backwards at other times. Today, I know I am more whole than I have ever been thanks to Rabbi Heschel, my path of recovery, Torah, my wife and family, my friends and my non-friends. I am taking the lessons of the experiences over these 35+ years and incorporating them into my daily living and each day is calmer, more whole and freer than the days before. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark