Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Day 129
“How embarrassing for man to live in the shadow of greatness and to ignore it, to be a contemporary of God and not sense it. Religion depends upon what man does with his ultimate embarrassment.” (Who is Man pg 112)
Continuing on with Rabbi Heschel’s concepts of embarrassment and how to use it to live better, the first part of the first sentence is reverberating within me! We live in the shadow of greatness and we ignore it-how brilliant and how true. The reverberations we all could be experiencing as we immerse ourselves in this phrase could be the reverberations of a deep truth that we have been hiding from.
There are many ways, I am sure, to understand “live in the shadow of greatness”. I am going to write today on one that has struck me and stayed with me lately, a personal application of this concept. Carl Jung believes we all have a shadow self, one we hide from ourselves and we hide from another(s), sometimes successfully and sometimes not. I am proposing that we are living in the “shadow of greatness” and ignoring it precisely because it is the root of our shadow self!
The shadow self, as with the Yetzer HaRa, is not evil in and of itself, it is how we bring it to light and transform/use the energy of the shadow to do good or evil that matters. Rabbi Heschel is teaching us, maybe the first teacher/person to do so, our shadow contains greatness and we are hiding from it. It contains greatness because it comes from God, just as our Yetzer HaRa and Yetzer Tov do, ergo it has to contain greatness. We are hiding from it and we are burying our greatness because we are unable to pay attention to it for all the distractions of our mind, our surroundings and our uneducated /immature spirit/soul.
Rabbi Heschel believes we are all divine needs and we all have a purpose to fulfill that no one else can, he believes we have to live our life like work of art, as he told Carl Stern in an Eternal Light television interview. Michelangelo said his art was based on “The sculpture is already complete within the marble block before I start my work, it is already there. I just have to chisel away the superfluous material.” I am hearing Rabbi Heschel remind us to stop ignoring the greatness that is within each and every human being. He is teaching us to chisel away the false sense of security and certainty we attain by hiding from our greatness and the greatness of one another through prejudice, racism, anti-semitism, anti-asian, anti-muslim, mistreatment of the poor, the needy, the stranger, seeking power for our own self importance, engaging in mendacity, self-deception and the deception of another(s), the bastardization of goodness and holiness through using the vulnerabilities within a system against, and the vulnerabilities of another human being against them. We are seeing this marble covering our greatness today as we have in the past. Rabbi Heschel is calling out to us, I hear him as I hear the prophets of old, to take the chisel and get rid of the superfluous material within us, each of us, so we can step out of the shadows and stop ignoring our greatness and the greatness of every human being.
Rabbi Heschel’s calling upon us so we can wake up, we can come out of the deep sleep we have been in for a while, for some us our entire lives, and begin to fulfill the greatness we have inside of us, offer our unique talents to another person, our community and the world to lift up our standards of living and the ways we live well.
In recovery, we know this is not a new call. We ran away from it, like Jonah, our recovery is rooted in chiseling away the superfluous materials in our life, inner and outer. We write inventory, we work with other people in recovery, we have a guide and a community to help us with our chiseling. In recovery, our daily goal is to rid ourselves of one superfluous piece of material each day, at least, and we call this progress.
I have been a chiseler for a long time-55+years. For the first 22, I was chiseling a person and/or people out of their greatness and their money. I was intent on “getting mine” and using you to do it. I had a great fear that I could not just make it on my own, I didn’t want to ‘work that hard’ and I had a talent for chiseling. Of course I knew it was wrong, yet I hid from that knowledge like I hid from my “shadow of greatness” for those 22 years. I am saddened by this fact, by all the opportunities I had to be better and all the people who were hurt by my chiseling and I apologize again for this embarrassment. I know in these past 33+ years I have been chiseling away the superfluous material within me and for another person/family for their gain, not mine. I chisel away this material, I have stepped into the greatness that was in the shadow, I have accepted the gifts God has given me and I am using them to the best of my ability and my life and the lives of countless people are better for this. I know I still have marble stuck in the wrong places, I know there are ways I stay in the shadows, I know there are ways I ignore my greatness and yours; this is why the chiseling never stops, this is how we continually meet our shadow and make friends with our greatness. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark