Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Day 138
“Embarrassment is the awareness of an incongruity of character and challenge, of perceptivity and reality, of knowledge and understanding, of mystery and comprehension.”(Who is Man pg.112)
Our willful blindness to our not being in agreement with the challenge that living our Godly Image is astounding! It is the root cause of the hatred, power-hungry despicable actions by some, unfortunately no longer the few, and the root cause of our internal strife that we believe can be healed by having enough money, prestige, alcohol, sex, gambling, action, etc. Rabbi Heschel is calling to us with a painful rebuke, I believe, as well as a deep love for humanity and God in the same moment and in every moment. In other words, Rabbi Heschel is a prophet in our times and, unfortunately, like the prophets he is misunderstood, misread, etc, remember the core of his being is to take action, not just study him. While some of us have been liberated from Egypt, we are no longer in a physical prison/slave plantation, we are standing at the foot of Mount Sinai and building, worshiping and/or watching idolatry happen in real time and doing nothing! We are not embarrassed by our incongruity of character and challenge, in fact, some of us are proud of it-ask Fox News, OAN, etc.
Our character as individuals, as a community, and as a country are being challenged by so many issues today and some of us are unaware of these challenges because we are afraid to be embarrassed, people on both sides of any issue fall into this trap. We are so engaged in proving ‘we are right’ and ‘we have the only right way’ to fix something that we fail to see the true challenge that these issues bring-are we going to be human, are we going to live life as partners of God, are we going to fulfill the divine need we were created for? These are not right/left challenges, these are not Republican/Democrat challenges, these are challenges we all face to be human, rather than just call ourselves human beings. Rabbi Heschel teaches us we are able to and need to “enoble the common” with each of our actions, a command from God is an opportunity to refine our inner life and, unfortunately, without being embarrassed, we are unable to achieve these goals. In fact, without our awareness and our embarrassment, we are unable to even realize that our #1 challenge is to be human towards one and all.
We are constantly faced with the inner strife of doing what we want and what is good for our self and another self. We are constantly faced with the inner strife of living a life based in and of truth and/or living a life of self-deception, deception of another and mendacity. When we succumb to the mendacity and self-deception, as many people today are and many people always have, we put on dark glasses so we cannot see the reflection of divinity in the people we choose to scapegoat and treat another human being as less human, less worthy than we are. Our inability to stay loyal to God’s call of Ayecha, where are you, and our inability to stay loyal to the response of Abraham, Hineni, here I am, are the result of trying to relieve our inner strife through external means.
Do we really need to support Putin in his dictatorship? Do we really need to support MBS in his killing of dissidents? Do we really need to stand idly by the bloods of our neighbors, brothers, etc? Do we really need to abandon the men and women who serve in our Armed Services when they return from combat? Do we really need to ignore the unhoused, the formerly incarcerated, the newly recovering person, the families who can’t afford food, clothing, and shelter as well as medical supplies and have to choose which to buy this week? Do we really need to blame another rather than help another? Do we really need to worship at the Golden Calf’s of the Confederate States of America, the authoritarian path of some so-called leaders, the sham of the so-called religious leaders who preach the opposite of God’s challenges to us, the self-deceptions we engage in, etc? The answer, evidently is a resounding YES from many people here in America and across the world. They need to in order to stay unaware, to not be red-faced and not have to change. The challenge they meet is not the challenge God has given to us, when we ever learn?
In recovery, Chuck C wrote a book called A New Pair of Glasses in which he speaks about the changes in ‘eyesight’ that occurred to him and he adopted in order to cure the blindness that he had about his behaviors, his alcoholism, his philosophy of life and his inability to make agreement between his character and the challenges of being human while he was drinking. This is the challenge for all of us in recovery, to put on new glasses, to see the truth of the consequences of our actions and end our ‘but we meant well’ excuses. In recovery, our intentions take a back seat to our actions, one day at a time, we bring congruency to our character and challenge.
I keep seeing how I hide from some of the challenges life gives me through food, through frustration and each day, I am lifting another membrane of the mask I wear to stay unaware and being more responsible to and for the challenges God gives me and bringing my character more and more into line with these challenges. I am embarrassed at the weight I have put on because of my hiding from some challenges, hiding from some truths and hiding from myself! I am committed to being more congruent in character and challenge. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark