Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 2 Day 18
“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)
As we ready ourselves for Sukkot, the holiday of Joy, seeing our own transformations and creations is appropriate and important, I believe. Too many of us have become stuck in certain ways of being that, while ‘normal’, have brought us to a place that I call “low-grade misery”. This is the place where we respond to the questions of “how are you”, “what’s happening”, etc with “okay”, “not much”. Our excitement comes from the next ‘killing’ we make, the achievements of our children, our hometown teams winning, and other outside ‘victories’. We even count the mitzvot we do like we are trying to keep our score high enough for god, for some entity that is non-existent, for how we look to the neighbors, etc.
Yet, even though Judaism itself is about our inner lives as well as our outer actions, we have become diligent and determined to ignore our inner life in favor of ego-driven emotions, in favor of mind-driven thoughts. We recreate ourselves through mind games and/or through mendacity and deception, not through T’Shuvah-return! It is time to either continue our journey of the month of Elul, the 10 days of T’Shuvah, and/or Yom Kippur itself of self-reflection, of inventory, of seeing the truth about ourselves, the beauty of our self, the ugliness of our actions, and the indifference our blames, shames, deflections and hiding.
We live in a world of smoke and mirrors much of the time, it is hard to be real, it is hard to be authentic. Yet, this is what all of Judaism, all of 12-Steps, all of Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, etc call for, authenticity, realness, truth and give us the path to achieving them. We have to begin to see how we have ignored these paths, be it Religious Science and/or Hinduism, God as Creator and/or Higher Consciousness as the power greater than ourselves, it doesn’t matter-because every true spiritual discipline leads to the same place, authentic living, truthful speech-inner and outer-, caring and loving actions towards self and another(s), and each one brings about the words of the Bible, “Proclaim Freedom throughout the land and to all its inhabitants thereof”! We can transform our self-made prisons into gardens of joy, love, kindness, justice and mercy if we are willing to see the truth of our self and the truth of our prior actions. While many of them have been great and life-saving/giving; they have been done with an eye to how they make me look, with an ego that is waiting to be stroked, with a non-spoken lien for collecting at a later date.
We learn that we are born with and always have two inclinations which Rabbi Harold Kushner taught me are: the earthly inclination and the Godly inclination. Both are necessary to our humanness and both need to be satisfied, fed and nurtured/grown. For too many of us we believe that our earthly inclination is all that is important either to satisfy it with more and more and more or to see it as the source of evil and try and starve it, kill it, ignore it, etc. Neither way is the correct way. The correct way is to transform our earthly inclination by feeding it in proper measure, and using the energy of this inclination to serve our Godly inclination, to serve our community, family, world and God. We have the compass to lead us here, we have the strength to endure the trek, do we have the will to make it happen, do we have the faith we can engage in our spiritual nature and transform our self-this is the great question each one of us has to respond to in our individual “dark nights of the soul”.
In recovery, we are aware of a daily and constant transformation and creation. We are in awe of our ability to make mistakes and learn from them rather than defend them or blame them on another(s). We are also aware of our daily growing, one or two steps at a time, until we are amazed at how far we have travelled. We are seeking transformation and creation each and every day, knowing we are not always going to see progress and having the faith to wait for the next challenge to appear.
I have been transforming myself for ever. I transformed me from a good kid with a good upbringing into a drunk, criminal, liar, cheat and thief. I created a persona that would get people to like me so I could take advantage of them. I then began the transformation from being a hustler for me to being a hustler for God. I have been working on this transformation and creation for the past 35+ years and it is really transforming the false self into my authentic self. It is a journey of trial and error, good and not good, ridicule, scorn, and love, devotion, truth seeking and self-deception, light and dark, moving forward and falling back. This journey is never done, the transformation is never complete, there is no line that says finish, no race to be won, only to live a life that is more or less compatible with being a partner of God, a life that is worthy of my daughter’s reverence, as Rabbi Heschel says. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark