Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Day 118
“The immediate certainty that we attain in moments of insight does not retain its intensity after the moments are gone. Moreover, such experiences are rare events. To some people they are like shooting stars, passing and unremembered. In others they kindle a light that is never quenched. The remembrance of that experience and the loyalty to the response of that moment are the forces that sustain our faith. In this sense, faith is faithfulness, loyalty to an event and loyalty to our response.” (God In Search of Man pg.132)
Rabbi Heschel is reminding us of an obligation to which many of us have abdicated. We all receive moments of insight at some time in our living. I hear him teaching us that to be human is to receive insights and to deny them is the beginning of our inhumanity to one another as well as a repudiation that there is a power greater than ourselves in the world, a repudiation that the Ineffable One exists and cares. Reading this passage immerses us in the truth of Rabbi Heschel’s teachings and, for many of us, the weakness of our denials of God, of obligation to our insights, of our betrayals of God, of our insights, our selves, and of another human being.
The first sentence above teaches us that certainty in one moment is not going to last into the next and this is the conundrum we face as human beings. We crave certainty, we are afraid of not knowing and we need certainty to be able to believe in ourselves, in God (for some), in another, that a way of being will bring the results we want, etc. We are in such need of certainty, we will cheat, lie, steal to make sure we get the outcome we want and justify our actions while, of course, accusing another of lying, cheating and stealing in order to nullify their success. I am not sure when this need overcomes us and overwhelms us, I just know that we all get it. We all have experiences, if we are willing to be in truth with ourselves, when our desire for certainty has caused us and another much grief, much angst, and we have acted in ways that don’t match the image we want to portray. Our craving certainty, wanting guarantees prior to taking an action belies faith as the Israelites at the Red Sea experienced. God told Moses to have the Israelites go forward into the Sea without any guarantees of what the outcome would be. While in the moments of insight, we attain a certainty that is rock-solid, our actions are the proof we had an insight, our follow-through is the response to our insights because we are doing this without the certainty we had when the insight came upon us, as the Israelites show us by walking into the Sea.
Following through on our insights when the certainty has waned is very difficult. Look at the Israelites, 40 days after receiving the 10 Commandments, 4-5 months after being liberated from Egypt, they built a Golden Calf! While seeking independence from King George and not wanting to be under the thumb of another human being dictating our every move, the founding fathers allowed and, in some cases, promoted the owning of and controlling of slaves! Germany was a center of art, culture, thought, etc and the Nazi Party won over the people. How are these things possible? Because when we need certainty, when we need a guarantee that taking the next right action will get us what we want, we are susceptible to the mendacious deception of another human being because of our own need to deceive ourselves into believing there is a guarantee, a way of getting the results we want and everyone else be damned. We have seen this throughout our history as a nation and never more apparent than now. America has always been engaged in a “great civil war” between people who want to fulfill the spirit of our constitution/Bill of Rights and people who want to use these sacred documents to fulfill their lust for power and controlling the outcomes to be what they want. When one needs to be certain of the outcomes, defaulting to deceptions will always win over the truth of momentary insights.
In recovery, we are aware that being in the solution, taking the next right action is the only power we possess. We cannot nor should not control the results! We attain this certainty through insight and through past experiences. We know it is a fools errand to control the results. We may experience short term certainty/guarantees and we know in the long-run it is a crap shoot. In recovery, we speak of our spiritual awakenings and re-experience the certainty we had in that moment and allow it to sustain us into the next.
Every experience with God, with these “moments of insight” have left impressions in and on me. The intensity is gone, absolutely, the certainty as well as clarity is cloudy, and I have been blessed with the gift to experience many of these moments through my relationship with God, the teaching of Rabbi Heschel, through the Bible, through the mentorship and learning from my teachers and colleagues as well as the people I learn with daily. I also understand why I have been so ‘misunderstood’ as I like to put it. I have tried for years to explain my insights and my certainty to people who are not aware of their own and/or could not hear me. I had/have a philosophy that says: everything we do works! Even if the outcome/result I/we had hoped for wasn’t achieved, we learn something from each experience and that is how/why everything works. The lessons we learn help us move forward and improve. I tried to explain this to other people and, I guess their need for certainty outweighed their ability to explore insights, their own and another’s. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark