Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Day 185
“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)
How do we sense the presence of the world? For many people the world is a dangerous, frightening place to live, going all the way back to Adam and Eve in the Bible. For many people the world is full of mystery, glory and beauty and we have to navigate it carefully. For a few, the world is the Garden of God and we are blessed to be able to tend our corner/plot of God’s Garden, while we will have some fallow years, the abundance, the connection, the responsibility and the ability to respond lift us up and fill our beings with joy, sadness, love, and truth.
When we fear the world, when the world is a dangerous place to live, we believe that the world owes us, hence the many entitled victims we encounter. This is NOT to say that people are not victimized, we all are at one point or another in our lives, it is to say, however, when we fear the world, when the danger outweighs the mystery, we tend to believe that we are owed something rather than our owingness as Rabbi Heschel is speaking about above. There are people who have destroyed another person’s work because they ‘felt assaulted’ by the other person telling them the truth. There are people who are feel entitled to sue a company, a person, because the person screwed up and wants to blame another rather than being responsible for their errors-think Donald Trump and his minions/followers like….
Adam and Eve did not know how to handle the knowledge they obtained from eating the fruit from the tree of knowledge.They mistakenly turned their knowing into shame, they wanted to hide from God, cover themselves up and thus began the “masking of the human being”. As Rabbi Heschel says in Man is Not Alone, we all wear too much mental make-up and we are forfeiting our faces, which I understand as our authenticity. Victimhood is not authentic-being victimized is. Yet, we have the ability to decide to change our story when we choose differently than Adam and Eve, when we choose differently than the ‘entitled victims’ who wear their wounds with justification and victimize everyone else. We have to rise above our feelings and “sense its presence” so we can be both responsible and responsive to the world as it is, to the Call of God as it comes and leave our state of perpetual victim. We can and must do this now, God is waiting, another human being is in need and waiting and we have a unique responsiveness to the needs of both God, the world and another human being that no one else can replicate.
In being responsive and responsible we are acknowledging the truth of our existence, the need for our existence. We are acknowledging that we all matter-everyone is important, necessary, needed, and has the capacity for love, truth, kindness, compassion, mercy and justice. In being responsive and responsible we are declaring our adherence to the demand, the call, the expectation that lays deep in our souls and we begin to engage and grow our unique talent to add to our plot of the garden, to tend it better in good times and be less defeated in bad times. Our garden is not going to grow the same all the time, no garden does, yet by being responsive and responsible, we do not blame another for our crop failure, we do not seek to ‘game the system’ by suing another to stop them from flourishing, we do not seek to be paid for work we have not done, we no longer overpromise and underdeliver, etc, we only seek solutions to what is not the “what ifs” “could have, should have” and “if only you would have__”.
In recovery, seeing the world for what is and living “life on life’s terms” is a cornerstone of the new/old way of relating to one another, to the world and to our selves. We have guides and mentors who we go to in order to check out our thinking and see where and in what ways/areas we are using the correct fertilizer for our plot of the garden and how we are not. We appreciate the advice and the learning to be both responsive and responsible to something greater than our false needs and our momentary feelings. In recovery, we sense the presence of the universe and our small and vital role in furthering it or retarding/destroying it.
Covid-19 and my error at my mission/work that gave people the opportunity to exile and marginalize me have made me realize how often I was responsive and responsible to/for another person, a way of being, God, Judaism, Spirituality and non-responsive and not responsible to and for my self, my soul. I was/am filled with spirit and with joy when I am responding to the needs of another, including and especially God. I also realize that my outbursts, especially the one that led to my not being able to fulfill any Rabbinic Duties at Beit T’Shuvah, came from my not responding to and being responsible for the turmoil that I was experiencing in my inner life. While some may say “oh Mark, he couldn’t give up control” the truth is/was I couldn’t stand to see the good work, the powerful spirituality and integration be diluted and I was fearful that the robust program I and many other people had developed would wither away. Because I was fearful, I wasn’t responsive and responsible to my soul and the rest is history. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark