Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 2 Day 17
“The most unnoticed of all miracles is the miracle of repentance. It is not the same thing as rebirth; it is transformation, creation. In the dimension of time there is no going back. But the power of repentance causes time to be created backward and allows re-creation of the past to take place. Through the forgiving hand of God, harm and blemish which we have committed against the world and against ourselves will be extinguished, transformed into salvation.” (Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity)
The Gates of T’Shuvah are always open and we are taught to do T’Shuvah each and every day so, while Yom Kippur is past for this year, T’Shuvah is never over and done. I hope everyone had an experience of connection with their spirit, with community and with God yesterday. The word repentance conveys a meaning that could sound harsh and cold, punitive, and mean so I want to use the word T’Shuvah, or turn/return because T’Shuvah is the Hebrew equivalent of the word repentance.
The first sentence above could read: The most unnoticed of all miracles is the miracle of turning/returning! What a statement, what a thought! We do not notice the miraculous nature of T’Shuvah, the miraculous experience of turning back, returning to a way of being that is totally compatible with being a partner of God’s, totally congruent with our soul’s yearning and calling! How is this possible? How can this be true? Because we are stuck in our old ways, we are stuck in needing to be right/perfect, needing to be hurt/angry, needing to stay stuck in our patterns, fearing change, fearing facing our self in the mirror and the Ineffable One in our daily affairs.
We don’t notice the return of another person by not forgiving them their foibles, for exiling them because of their worst acts, by forgetting their best acts. We do this because truly forgiving another human being involves looking at our own actions in the relationship, seeing our errors and owning up to them so we can change, we can ask for forgiveness, so we can forgive ourselves. We are too afraid of this type of change, I believe because we still buy into the old adage; “a leopard doesn’t change its spots”, forgetting that we are humans, not leopards. While we have an animal part to us, we have a divine/human part that can control our ‘animal’ most of the time, and learning to control it more comes about from doing T’Shuvah. Another way this can be the “most unnoticed of all miracles” is because we are too hard on our self, expecting too much from our self. We judge our self by our worst, not our best actions. We have an expectation of perfection that blinds us to our incremental changes, to our progress, to our growing into our humanity a little more each and every day.
We engage in a practice of willful blindness so we don’t have to witness this miracle in another and we don’t have to do the work in ourselves. We have become so used to deny, deny, deny we have a hard time seeing truth, being honest with our self and with another human being. The thrust of T’Shuvah is to repair, return and have new responses, to change, to reconnect and to have hope/a new vision. We can’t do this if we are unwilling to notice the miraculous nature of T’Shuvah, if we are unwilling to dive into our own inventory, into the things we have missed the mark and the things we have done well. We can easily not notice the miracle of T’Shuvah when we are so focused on getting “it” right and not in what do we learn today about living one grain of sand better.
While it is understandable that we may miss the miracle of T’Shuvah in our self, missing it in another takes a concerted effort to stay angry, stay fearful, stay self-righteous, stay afraid to look at oneself. As it says in the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous, other people notice the change in us before we can notice it ourselves; so holding on to our need to be right, our need to make good people and bad people rather than seeing we are all both is the root of our soul sickness. Only through T’Shuvah, through returning to the words of the Prophets, “love mercy, do justly, walk in the ways of God” can we cure our spiritual malady. God wants and needs our return, we say three times a day in our daily prayers, and our family, friends, community does as well. In recovery, we learn this, we embrace this and we continue to do T’Shuvah in whatever form we choose, 10th step, rosary, confession, inventory, etc, in order to stay engaged in living well.
I have been engaged in this work for the past 35+ years and I am still surprised by things I did not notice: errors I have made that, at the time did not seem like errors; changes that have happened around me that I did not take note of; changes in my inner life that, upon realization, have helped me deal with life on life’s terms much better. I am constantly in awe of the miracle of T’Shuvah! For me, the miracle is that I live freer, better, and more in line with the Divine. I am more accepting, more resilient, more open, more connected to the Universe, to the call of God, the call of my soul, the call of another human being. Upon realizing all of these things, I see how they all begin with my action of T’Shuvah, my stepping into returning to the path, turning towards God by turning towards another person, learning, hearing and changing. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark