Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Day 123
“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)
Living these words may seem so difficult to many people, yet-as the saying goes-it is simple, not easy. Staying loyal to the events in our lives is something that many of us do, especially the negative experiences, the ones that have hurt us, the ones that we can blame on another. Rabbi Heschel, as I said yesterday, is calling upon us to live up to our responses to our encounters with the divine, with a higher truth, with our higher moral and spiritual values.
There are so many people that we call heroes because they followed their higher instinct, their “moment of insight” to help and care for another(s) human being. Immersing myself in Rabbi Heschel’s teaching reminds me that we all can be heroes, we all can have a new response to an old situation because of an insight we have obtained. There is none among us that has not had a “moment of insight”, I believe; the challenge is to pay attention to this experiences, to respond to these events and to stay loyal to both the awareness of the experience and our response, as Rabbi Heschel teaches us. We do this through our daily spiritual practices, we do this by being open to these “hits” of wisdom and truth, we do this by being present in as many moments as possible during each and every day.
The challenge that we face is to not ‘fall asleep at the wheel’. When we take things for granted, we lose the ability to stay faithful to our experience and to one another. This is the great challenge of being human. Staying faithful to our experiences with one another, with God, with the universe and then being faithful to our responses throughout our lifetime. This way of living denies the betrayals and the myriad of divorces from our commitments that we engage in throughout our lifetime. When we are loyal to our “moment of insight”, we stop denying it and we stop pretending that this “insight” doesn’t apply in this situation. Every “moment of insight” applies to all areas of our living and how we treat our self and every self-regardless of their beliefs, their color, their nationality, etc. Yet, we want to compartmentalize our “moments of insight” and this is where we stop being loyal to both the experience and the response. We betray our self and another self when we decide to forget and/or bastardize our “moments of insight” for our own good rather than for the greater good, for fulfilling a divine need. We allow ourselves to have good reasons to betray our basic goodness of being and the connection we can/do have with another person by forgetting to stay loyal to our insights and responses. Rabbi Heschel is gifting us with the knowledge to use our insights “in all our affairs”.
Living our insights “in all our affairs” gives us a freedom to like and dislike ideas and ways of being without having to hate a person. Living our responses in all our affairs gives us the ability to live congruently and without shame. Being faithful to the standards of: truth, kindness, justice, compassion, t’shuvah(repentance, repair and new responses), tzedakah(righteousness/charity) caring for the stranger, poor and needy, connection, and joy that the Bible gives us is the path to being a free human being and be a whole human being who never has to hide in shame, blame, etc. Living these “moments of insight” and their responses gives us the strength and moral fortitude to “do the next right thing, no matter how I feel”.
In recovery, we continually seek to have a better “conscious contact with God, as we understand God”. We are doing this so we can be more aware of these “moments of insight”, understand them better and be able to respond more properly to them. It is in our response that we find the greatest applications of our insights. In recovery, we cultivate our spiritual life so we can gain more and more wisdom and ways to live from our “moments of insight”.
Every time I have not stayed loyal to my “moments of insight” and my response to them, I have betrayed my self/my soul and life blows up. I am unhappy and know I am betraying God, my soul and another(s). I also know that staying loyal to both my insights and my responses doesn’t always make me popular and it keeps me in line with the divine. I am so remorseful for the betrayals I have done since childhood because I did not stay loyal to my insights and I am so grateful for the life I have now because I have stayed loyal to many of them. I know the pain of being betrayed and betraying another because loyalty to insights, loyalty to principles, loyalty to agreed upon responses to these insights and principles wasn’t kept. I also know that people change and our insights get sharper, yet the basic insight that truth is crucial in all relationships never changes. When I was lied to and when I deceived myself is when betrayal happened. Staying loyal built a great community and saved many lives-it doesn’t get better than that. Stay safe and God Bless, Rabbi Mark