Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Day 133
“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)
I am overwhelmingly embarrassed at our inability to experience our embarrassment at being a contemporary of God and our lack of acknowledging it through our actions and not sensing it within our self. While all faiths give credit to God, speak of the “image of the divine” we are all created in, few practitioners of these faith actually live this truth, act in these ways as opposed to the overwhelming majority who speak it. We are in a terrible spiritual condition as human beings right now, precisely because we are unable to be embarrassed at our inability to sense our being a contemporary of God, because we hide from our own embarrassment through prejudice, through lies, through self-deception and our ‘spiritual leaders’/idolators promote and enhance our hiding. Exactly the people who need to be leading us to experience this embarrassment as a joyous experience of growing our inner and outer life, are helping us hide, helping our inner lives grow darker and darker, helping our souls to wither.
As I said before, Rabbi Heschel gave these lectures at Stanford in 1963, yet some 60 years later people are still lacking the proper measure of embarrassment at being “a contemporary of God” and not sensing it nor acting on it. What is wrong with the human race that we refuse to live this teaching. The use of the word embarrassment is not for shaming us, as I am understanding Rabbi Heschel’s teaching. Rather embarrassment is the reflection of the inner glow we have when we realize that we are a “contemporary of God” and while we don’t live up to this truth all the time, we get closer with each decent act we engage in. It is the outer reflection of experiencing love from God, from another human being, from our own soul. The embarrassment of being a contemporary of God is the reflection our inner experience of being known and accepted. Embarrassment, as I am reading Rabbi Heschel is an experience that spurs us on to growing and living one grain of sand better each day.
Yet, we are afraid of being embarrassed, we are afraid to own up to our errors and blame another person for what we are responsible for. We use Rabbi Heschel’s phrase “a contemporary of God” to grab power and to bastardize the words of the Torah, the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, the words of Jesus, the Koran and the words of Mohammed, the teachings of Buddha, etc. How often have punishment and fire been preached as a means of control and one-upmanship as opposed to seeing the words of God as a cautionary tale? We are living in a time where the people who run the National Prayer Breakfast believe Jesus is the Lion, they promote the right for a man to choose how a woman treats her body, how she looks, etc to ensure that she is subservient to the man, where they have decided to be the ‘power brokers’ and call this Jesus’ vision. We are living in a time where people who tried to overthrow our government, our constitution are being celebrated as patriots by the Hawley’s, McCarthy’s, Cruz’, Rubio’s, etc. All of this because they are afraid to be embarrassed by their inability to sense and embrace their being a contemporary of God. In Exodus Moses calls the people “who are for God” to join him in slaying the people who worshiped the Golden Calf and while it seems a little harsh to our ears, we are witnessing and participating in the erection of another Golden Calf - authoritarianism, mendacity, prejudice and anti-semitism, anti-muslim, behaviors practiced by these treasonous leaders and their followers.
We are contemporaries of God, we are made in the Image of God, we are partners with God in perfecting and caring for the world. This is an embarrassing fact of existence and we don’t even realize how we ignore this truth. We don’t realize when we treat another human being as ‘beneath’ us, we are treating God in the same manner. We don’t realize how often our words and actions are in conflict with each other and we keep covering up and explaining how they ‘really, really’ are congruent. We don’t realize our explanations fall on deaf ears and God is crying because we have exiled ourselves. All this because we refuse to sense our being a “contemporary of God’ and living up to this truth.
In recovery, we are aware of our need to connect with God and many of us are aware of being a servant of God as well as a contemporary. We are constantly embarrassed from our inner light when we know we are living up to being worthy of being a contemporary of God and we are embarrassed when we know we are not. In both cases the embarrassment is a reflection of our inner dialogue and awareness.
I am always embarrassed by my ability to recognize my being a “contemporary of God” and my inability to recognize this truth. I am aware in this moment of the times I have been unable to see this truth are all caused by fear and inauthentic desires. I am committed to being more aware of these fears and phony desires so I can let them go quicker. More on Sunday! God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark