Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Day 149
“There is hardly a person who does not submit his soul to the beauty parlor, who does not employ the make-up of vanity to belie his embarrassment. It is only before God that we all stand naked.”(Who is Man pg 113)
Rabbi Heschel is giving us the gift of awareness and a path to wholeness in all of his teachings and the teaching quoted above is one of the hardest to incorporate into our living. Rabbi Heschel is giving us a direction for our Chesbon HaNefesh, our accounting of our soul each and every day/evening. It is a recipe for a daily unmasking of ourselves and a daily cleaning our face and our soul of our vanity. His recognition that this is a human problem takes the pathology out of the experience and we are able to use this teaching to see what “make-up of vanity” we have put on this day and how we can clean it off and find ways to stop adding this particular “make-up” to our self/soul any more.
If only people would take this seriously! We keep hiding from embarrassment rather than embracing it.
I find Rabbi Heschel’s use of the word “employ” interesting. I am understanding this word to intimate, at least for me, how much we pay people, in any number of ways, to put the make-up on us, to be like the make-up people on a set and constantly ‘fix’ our “make-up of vanity”, how we lose our own sense of self because these ‘employees’ keep feeding our vanity and ego so we can’t see the truth nor are they willing to speak the truth. It happens in business, it happens in Church, it happens in families, in marriages, etc. We all have a need for approval and we all have a need to be seen as ____(fill in the blank). Yet the greatest need we have is to live in connection and truth, covenant and kindness and we are unable to have these experiences when our ‘employees’ keep fixing our make-up and we keep putting new make-up on over the old ones that have become caked on us.
Seeing our country as it is, right now, is seeing a large group of people who have ‘employed’ many other people to keep the make-up of their vanity, their lies, their subterfuge, intact and looking fresh. These ‘employees’ keep spreading the big lie by speaking some truth and then covering it up with their lies and their make-up, William Barr is just the latest example. This large group of people who are being employed to keep the make-up fresh for their leader(s) do not realize that they also are wearing the make-up of mendacity and the make-up of UnGodliness! These so-called ‘good christians’ are going against the teachings of Christ with their hatred, their racism, their inability to see clearly through their make-up and have the Image of God that another human being carries revealed to them, no matter what the race, creed, religion, etc of another human being is!
We are in difficult times today as we were when Rabbi Heschel first taught this wisdom. Some of us have the advantage of being part of the experience of Selma and seeing the horror and then the triumph of Rev King who asked Rabbi Heschel to march with him. Some of us saw the miracle of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts passed by Congress that had many racists in it. Yet, President Lyndon Johnson took off his “make-up” and saw the humanity of non-white people and said we must ensure their rights and acknowledge their humanity. Yet, some 60 years later, we are facing the same issues as we did in the ’60’s, we are fighting for the dignity of all people again because the racists and the deceivers did not covert to the religious maxim that we are all created in the Image of God, they just rested until they could gerrymander enough votes to give them the power to return to hatred and ‘white people are the only true rulers’ way of being. The ‘south has risen again’ and hatred, violence has returned, disgracing God’s laws and principles, harming God’s children is their path and they have no embarrassment about doing this. Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom above is calling on all of us to take off our “make-up of vanity and see one another as Divine Images and treat one another accordingly. It is time to #SaveUkraine and defeat Putin and stop feeding the Putin in each of us.
Recovery calls upon us to wipe off as much of the old make-up as possible early on so we can use the embarrassment we experience from doing the Chesbon HaNefesh, accounting of our soul, to enhance our daily living. We also continue to wipe off the old make-up as we become aware of it while making sure that we wipe off any new “make-up of vanity” we put on each day. In recovery, we seek authenticity and transparency which are antithetical to putting on make-up!
I realize the make-up I have use most is one of being impervious to the arrows, the pain, the hurts I have experienced. This make-up is old, it goes back some 56 years and, I realize, many people walked away from me when I took the make-up off and expressed my anguish and pain, either asked for their help or I accused them of helping my ‘enemies’. They walked away, in part, because if I was going without make-up and calling out to them to take their make-up off, it was just too scary for them and “not the way we do things around here”. I realize I use anger as a make-up for hurt sometimes and I use Rabbi Heschel and Torah as tools to help me take the “make-up of vanity off. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark