Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Day 182
“The world is such that in its face one senses owingness rather than ownership. The world is such that in sensing its presence one must be responsive as well as responsible. (Who is Man pg.108)
It is 59 years since Rabbi Heschel first spoke these words at Stanford University and, they are as true, valid and relevant today as they were then. We are desperately in need of heeding his words and wisdom. WE OWE! What a concept in the 21st Century when most people are trying to say they are owed. This is not to denigrate nor condemn the important social movements led by people such as Rev William Barber, nor the John Lewis Civil Rights Act that some members of the Senate refuse to pass, my statement is a response/reaction to Rabbi Heschel’s words. We are trying to own everything, homes, business, people, territory, land, governments, control of everyone else, etc. and we are willfully blind to the truth of our owing the world, our owing another person, our owing rather than our owning. It is imperative we open our eyes and see the truth of existence, the truth of being human-we owe, we are indebted and we must begin to make payments on our debt, even if it is only the interest payments.
We are living in a culture that believes ‘if I can take it, then it is mine’. This was/is the motto of criminals for as long as I can remember-I used it often to assuage my self in my misdeeds. It is also the culture of the boardroom and the bedroom, the seat of the car and the seat in government, it is the motto on the battlefield and the sanctuary. We are all susceptible to this culture, we are all engaged in living this either overtly, subtlety, in awareness and/or in blindness. We are seeing this in the Ukraine today in 2022 and we have seen this in wars fought throughout the ages. We have seen this motto/culture in action in the ways people use God to validate their inhumanity towards one another. We are in the season of liberation, on our way to freedom in the three major Western Religions and we are still fighting for who is right? We are allowing the crazy, power-hungry, self-seeking charlatans who have convinced their followers to go against everything that is God, from the Bible, to say: “I have the only right way”! We see this motto being played out in business all the time in their advertising, in the ways they engage in competition and subterfuge. We are able to, when we take off the blinders, to see the people who bastardize the movements that are engaged in social change. When white men from the South can call themselves the poor minority that is in danger of being eradicated so they can continue to own the narrative of this country, we are witnessing the bastardization of civil rights and the mendacity of power.
We forget how much we owe whenever we shut someone’s opinion off because we don’t like what they are saying, when we don’t agree with them, really when they are speaking truth to us and we do not want to change. We forget that we owe a debt whenever we find it inconvenient to repay at the particular moment. We forget our debt when we want to own rather than owe. We forget our debt when we need to rewrite the story so we can ‘look” good rather than be good. We forget our debt when we seek to destroy the very people who helped us because we are disgusted that we needed help.
Sensing the owing we all have can only be realized when we actually face the world, as Rabbi Heschel teaches above. What a concept, we have to face the world just as it is and just as we are. We are not able to face the world with our “mental make-up”, with our false self, we have to face the world as we truly are, as our authentic self with no trappings, no lies, no mask. Herein is the reason acknowledging our owing is so difficult, we are afraid to see the real us, we are afraid of the changes we will be compelled to make, we are afraid we will be forced by our own nature to pay our debt rather than own the life we want to own rather than live the life we are created for.
In recovery, we know we owe a debt. We owe a debt to the people who helped us get into recovery, our ‘eskimos’. We owe a debt to the people we have harmed while being enslaved to bad habits and erroneous principles. We owe a debt to God for giving us a path of decency and wholeness to follow so we can begin to own our true scripts and let go of the false ones. In recovery, sensing our debt is so liberating rather than trying to own our false stories, our false scripts and our false selves.
I am in awe of the confluence of events that are happening in this moment, Easter, Ramadan, Passover, my father’s birthday, my brother’s birthday coming up in a couple of days, Putin’s inability to defeat the Ukrainian people, the fact that my parents’ grandchildren are either involved in serving people as an occupation or they are supportive of the organizations and people who are. We are in a period of awareness of our debt, we speak about it at the Seder, we hear about our owing at the Easter Table, we are subservient to the Will of God during our fast of Ramadan. I sit here and think of how much I owe to all of you, to the many who have come before me and to the ancestors I don’t even know about. To the heroes who left Egypt, England, Spain, Eastern Europe, who saw an opportunity for a better life and gave it to all of us; I acknowledge the debt we all owe you and commit to continue to repay it each and every day. To God who has “blessed me beyond my deserving”, I commit to continue to repay my owing to You. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark