Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Day 180
“Meaning is found in responding to the demand, meaning is found in sensing the demand.” (Who is Man pg.108)
As we enter Good Friday, Shabbat, Passover and continue in Ramadan, I wanted to give a few final thoughts and ways of being from this teaching. It is such a profound sentence, it is so antithetical to what many people understand as a path to a whole life of being human as Rabbi Heschel teaches us. Happy Easter and Passover.
We are desperately searching for meaning and purpose in all the wrong places, as I understand the totality of this sentence. Just the act of searching for meaning and purpose belies the truth Rabbi Heschel is telling us. Our purpose is in sensing and responding to the demand(s) of God, of the Universe, not in finding what we love to do. I know this is radical, yet I hear Rabbi Heschel calling out to us to find what God is demanding, calling us to do and then… We will learn to, grow to love what the demand is because it is a reciprocity of the love God gives us. We will love the call and the demand because we will realize the good we are doing, the holy we are bringing and the uplifting of our own souls that is happening. Just as the Prophets did not ask to be prophets, just as Moses did not ask to be the leader of the Exodus, we too do not ask for the demand, we sense it and then we can respond to it or not.
Jonah is the story of someone rejecting the demand while feeling entitled. He believed that God owed him something for not destroying Nineveh! He did not want to respond to the demand and tried to flee to the other side of the world and wound up in fish! Yet he cared more for a plant than he did for human life and, this is the definition of entitlement to me, when one cares more about ‘stuff’ than human life-they are demonstrating entitlement.
Moses rejected God’s demand 5 times until he realized it was fulfill it or die. I believe this is an important lesson as well. The reason many of my colleagues walk around with dead eyes is because they have rejected God’s demand so they can keep their jobs! I am positing the reason so many people are so angry, so despondent, so lost, so addicted to being miserable and/or causing other people misery is because they are not sensing the demand of God/Universe and/or they sense it and don’t respond to it which causes vapidity in their living. Living a vapid life is the worst torture possible, as I am experiencing Rabbi Heschel’s words today. It is the end all of life, it is the defeat of one’s humanity, and it is a denial of the gift of life, the joy of life, the toil of living well.
Rabbi Heschel is calling to us, I hear it, as demanding of us to stop living for fun, stop living in self-glorification, stop living for the next like on Instagram, Facebook, the next retweet on Twitter, the best seller on Amazon, the despair of exile, the tolerable sadness of slavery, the false joy of being in the “in crowd”/country club folks, the prestige money buys you without the inner resources to handle the prestige, etc. Rabbi Heschel is calling on us to be true to the demand that God causes us to sense, to stop denying the truth of our soul, of our 2nd brain-our gut- and embrace our unique sense of demand. Rabbi Heschel is demanding we stop talking ourselves out of the call we get, the demand that is placed on us, we acquiesce to the need we are created to fill and the healing we are created to bring to the world.
Passover, Easter, Ramadan, all are spiritual experiences that we need to actualize and engage in. We are able to use this time, this season to marshall the forces within us and the people around us to both sense and respond to the demand. We are able, in this moment, with this spiritual light and pathway to ‘see’, respond, and walk the path of uniqueness and joy, divine need and reminder, healer and one in need of healing that we are created to be. Rabbi Heschel’s teaching above is: how to be human and how to be a partner with God. Yet, so many of us are unwilling, insensitive, and/or just willfully blind and deaf to the demand, the call, the need.
I am not including a special recovery here because Passover, Easter and Ramadan are the paths, the spiritual experiences, the calls, the demands, the cries of God to us to be in recovery! Be in recovery, my fellow clergy from your denial of the humanity of those closest and furthest from you-be really engaged, not faux-engaged as so many clergy are. Be in recovery, members of non-profit boards who want to ‘protect’ the institutions that have helped them, their family members by taking the passion and the creativity out of the organization and make it act “on advice of counsel” instead of on the demand of God! Be in recovery, business leaders and the top 1% by paying your fair share of the tax burden, not just what you can get away with, pay your employees a fair, livable wage because without them-you have no business!! Be in recovery, government workers and department heads-remember the people calling with concerns and needs are the same people who pay your salary through their taxes, be kind and helpful rather than abrupt and unhelpful. Be in recovery, Senators and Representatives-remember God demands Justice, Mercy, Love, Truth, Compassion and Kindness, not the hate speech you are spewing nor the gridlock you are causing while people are suffering. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark