Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Day 178
“Meaning is found in responding to the demand, meaning is found in sensing the demand.” (Who is Man pg.108)
The first half of the teaching above is so foreign to most people. The reason it is so foreign is that most people, as I said the other day, are unable to hear the demand. Most people are unable to tune into God’s frequency and they stay tuned to the frequencies that most appeal to them and give them comfort.
The demand that God gives to all of us, individually is not supposed to comfort us! By its very nature the demand is going to disturb us and disrupt us, yet we want comfort, we want peace, we want tranquility, we want serenity without understanding the meaning of many of these words nor understanding the demand that God places upon us is never going to be easy to respond to and the only path to have meaning, purpose and passion in our living.
The charlatans who say “follow me and all will be easy and well” want to fleece us of something, money, time, adoration, etc. They need people to feed their false sense of self-importance and they need people to do their bidding and, in some cases, they need people to become their slaves, sexually and in other ways. The deceivers who tell you, “only I can make everything better”, “only I know how to fix this”, “only I can save you” are authoritarians who don’t give a shit about anyone but themselves and seek power at any and all costs to another human being. What these two broad classifications have in common is their lack of care, concern, for the human being standing in front of them, their lack of concern for God’s demands, God’s call, God’s ways.
Yet, they have a tremendous amount of followers, they have so many people who are willing to give them their cash, their votes, their hearts, their minds and their souls. How is this possible, one might wonder. It is possible because we are unwilling to answer the demands of God, we are unaware of and uneducated in the Ways of Godliness, ways of decency, ways of hearing the call of the soul of another human being because we are so sure of our way, our needs, our superiority. We are unable to respond to the demand of God because we are unwilling to surrender. Surrender is a dirty word to most people, yet they surrender to their egos, they surrender to the lies and deceptions of the charlatans and deceivers mentioned above and so many others! Surrender to the demand, surrender to the response that is appropriate for them to fulfill the demand-NEVER! This ‘never surrender’ mentality is good when fighting the evil of Putin, the evil of Trump, the evil of MBS, the evil of indifference, the evil of either/or living, the evil of prejudice, the evil of the deceivers and charlatans, etc. In fact it is a necessary part of the fight against these evils. This mentality does not originate in the mind, however, it is the soul that continues to battle these evils, it is the soul that promotes this ‘never surrender’ mentality. However, it is precisely this attitude that the deceivers, the charlatans, the authoritarians, etc use to fool so many people. It is this ‘never surrender to the outside enemy that I/we have created to take your attention off of the true enemy, the true evil, the true demand of God, the true call that is in your soul, the authentic needs of your inner life’, attitude and way of being that may, in the end, destroy us.
Hence the need for Holy Week, Ramadan, Passover cleaning and the week of celebrating/remembering. Hence the need to get back to our basic goodness of being, clear out the schmutz, the puffed-up parts of our egos/self that block us from responding to the demand, that block us from experience true liberation, a true path to freedom, a true way of living well and going to the land God is trying to show us! More tomorrow on this.
In recovery, we are constantly seeking to “improve our conscious contact with God” and we keep listening for the demand on God’s frequency, not our own. We know how easy it is to make our voice sound like it is God’s and we are very afraid of doing this once again-we do, after all, have priors in this way of being. We are seeking to rise above our self-centered desires and walk/trudge the path to freedom, to our place and give back to the world what we stole from it, truth, kindness, justice, compassion, love.
I have encountered many obstacles to hearing the demand of God clearly. I realize that, while I/we are leaving a home of 45+ years and leaving with regrets and sadness, I am following the call of my soul, the call of the Torah Portion of my birth-Lech L’Cha. God is telling me, once again and this time I am listening, to “go for yourself, go to yourself, go out from everything/person/place you know to the place I am showing you”. I know this is the demand I need to respond to, I am realizing that this demand has been in the universe for a lot longer than I have heard this, I am excited to say I have heard the call, the demand and I am responding to it a little more enthusiastically after this writing/revelation. Leaving Egypt means leaving the schumutz behind, getting rid of the lies I tell myself and being better at seeing what is, not what I want it to be. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark