Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Day 134
“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)
The more I have lived with this sentence, the more embarrassed I become. Being “a contemporary of God” means to live in together in time, according to the Latin root of the word. How frightening to consider the ways we have not sensed God, we have ignored the greatness of God, not lived in a manner that recognizes and honors our living together with God in this moment, at all moments. I am also understanding the awe and reverence Rabbi Heschel had for the Prophets because they sensed, honored and lived their lives according to the demands of their relationship with God.
I hear Rabbi Heschel telling us to stop trying to save our faces while our souls, our inner lives, the lives of people around us are being destroyed, harmed, demeaned, and imprisoned. We are in a great war within ourselves and with human beings right now and we are not realizing that the ways we are treating one another are in direct conflict to the teachings above. We cannot hate one another, we cannot judge people on the color of their skin or their religion, we cannot preach enslavement and revere the enslavers of the 16th, 17th, 18th Centuries, we cannot bow down before the deceivers and the grifters, we cannot take away the rights our country was founded on and proclaim we are doing it for and in the name of God.
Living together in time with God is a haunting way of being. In a Yiddish Poem, Rabbi Heschel wrote: “God follows me everywhere” and I understand the above teachings in this light-God is with us all the time and we are too dull, too egotistical, too obsessed and self-centered to sense this truth and to act accordingly. It is time for us to stop our need to be right, our need to win at any and all costs and our need to crush another human being so we can feel good about ourselves. It is time we return, do T’Shuvah to the values America was founded upon and to return to living our lives as the Bible shows us.
Living together with God is also the greatest joy we can experience. It allows us to know ourselves better, to appreciate one another a little more, to have the capacity to love another person and keep our covenants with one another, to own up to our errors and do T’Shuvah/amends so we can repair relationships we have harmed. Living together with God gives us a smile when we realize our errors and correct them, learn from them and restore the dignity of another human being that we tarnished so harshly. Living together with God reminds us of our responsibility to and for our personal relationships as well as our global relationships, it reminds us to stay “loyal to the event” of meeting God in our time and “loyal to the response” of this event. No longer are we able to just use people for what we selfishly need and throw them away when it isn’t convenient anymore when we know that we are “a contemporary of God”, we are people who hear the demands of God and serve these demands, no longer serve our self-serving desires.
Living as “a contemporary of God” is the message of the Bible and yet, we get so engaged in picking apart the words of the Torah, we miss the message! We are so busy bastardizing the stories and the words so we can have control of another person, engage in self-aggrandizement because we are ‘so pious’ we have missed the compassion, the love, the different ways of living joyously together with God. In this way, God is no longer to be feared, no longer the punisher, the fire and brimstone thrower. God is our guide, our teacher, our lover, our friend, the entity that never leaves us alone and always welcomes us back when we go on trips and ‘leave’ God home. As Rabbi Heschel teaches, “God is pursuing man” and “God is in search of Man”(God in Search of Man pg. 136), and it is time, past time for us to sense it, stop running away from God and start living as “a contemporary of God”.
In recovery, we know we need God, yet most people still don’t see themselves as contemporaries of God. In recovery, we do know that we are living in God’s world and, I realize, that we are forgetting that the world belongs to both humans and God, that our ability to grow in our recovery is dependent upon our ability to live inclusively, with God, self and humanity. As soon as we compartmentalize and separate, we are no longer sensing our living together with God in realtime! In recovery, we are growing along spiritual lines to the extent that we meld our spirits with God and with one another.
I am seeing the areas of life where I have lived this teaching and when I have not, I am also saddened by the lack of sight/vision I had to see the people who had a transactional relationship with me while I thought it was more. I am saddened by my being hurt, angry and bitter at the betrayals of another person(s) when I have had God with me all the time and I didn’t realize it. I am acutely aware, because of this teaching today, that our co-dependency, our need to be liked, our need to be important and the behaviors that we exhibit to achieve these states are all because we have forgotten and do not sense we are “a contemporary of God” and this is enough! God Bless and Stay safe, Rabbi Mark