Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Day 192
“Indebtedness is given with our very being. It is not derived from conceptions; it lives in us as an awareness before it is conceptualized or clarified in content. It means having a task, being called.” (Who Is Man pg. 108)
As I immerse myself in Rabbi Heschel’s words above, I realize the power and freedom our awareness of our indebtedness brings! Being indebted means I don’t own anything, everything is a partnership with me repaying the ‘loan’. I don’t even ‘own’ my life. As the last sentence above states, our indebtedness “means having a task, being called.” Everything being ‘on loan’ to us enables us to stop guarding it against someone else taking it, destroying it, etc and allows us to focus on growing our call, enhancing our task, preserving and enhancing our corner for the next person/generation to find the garden we have tended a little better than how we found it.
Not ‘owning’, knowing we will never ‘own’ our homes doesn’t stop us from having a mortgage and paying on it. It doesn’t stop us from buying a car and making payments on it. So too is how I am understanding Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom above, I do not ‘own’ my life, I cannot ‘do my own thing’ with no regard to anyone else and/or to the Ineffable One. This way of being is so antithetical to Western/Greek philosophy that most people will find this outrageous and dismiss my words out of hand.
Fulfilling our task, responding to the call are two ways of repaying our indebtedness. Yet, many of our leaders, parents, employers, students, employees, children, feel no such need. Listening to the leaders of our world like Putin, McCarthy, Trump, MBS, Kushner, it is all about them, it is all about what they want, it is all about what they can amass and it is all about power over people, it is all about what they own. This is not the path of faith, this is not the path of Godliness, this is not the way to respond to the call nor fulfill the task. Our political leaders have been entrusted with a great responsibility and, instead, they believe their position entitles them to Mistreat the stranger, Uncare of the poor and the needy, be more Pharaoh-like and celebrate the ways of the Egyptians! All while wrapping themselves in some false version of the New Testament, all while bastardizing the kindness, love, justice, mercy and compassion of Jesus into Jesus as the Lion, as the powerful. Bastardizing the Hebrew Bible by calling God, vengeful, angry, punishing instead of recognizing how much God cares about the stranger, the poor, the needy, how much God cares about “dwelling among us”! Yet, these leaders and so many others like them continue to prove Hannah Arendt’s belief in the “banality of evil”. And we, the people, are not powerless to stop them. We, the people, have to put an end to their mendacity, to our self-deception and to the ‘“banality of evil” in our own midst and in our own self.
Not “owning” extends to parents and children-both have to be grateful for one another instead of needing the child to make the parents dreams come true and for the parents to be the ‘parents I want you to be’. Teaching our children to be self-sufficient, raising their souls along with their minds, bodies, and emotions is a commandment in the Hebrew Bible, elucidated further in the Talmud. Seeing each child as a gift and we repay our indebtedness by raising each child “according to their own understanding” as we are taught in Proverbs, not according to what we want and/or the way we want. Children as they age, need to understand parents do the best job they can and are themselves dealing with issues of inadequacy, ego, fear, hearing voices in their heads that are not the call nor the task-rather the voices of society, parents, peers-that cause them to compare and despair. Seeing parenthood as a repayment of our indebtedness, giving our children agency from a young age, preparing them for the difficulties of life and teaching them resilience, helping them heal the Hole in their Soul means we have to do the same for ourselves.
In recovery, we recognize our indebtedness upon engaging in the 4th step of AA, a searching and fearless inventory. By taking our own inventory, listing liabilities/errors and assets/kindness’, we see and re-experience the moments of repaying our indebtedness and the moments of incurring more debt and digging a deeper hole for us to climb out of. In recovery we climb out of the hole of debt, literally and figuratively, one day at a time.
I had the realization that being indebted means not owning yesterday in the car with Harriet. It is freeing for me, it is also invigorating and exhilarating for me. This idea goes hand in hand with T’Shuvah. Once I have done T’Shuvah I can’t be (should not be) reminded of my past errors, according to the laws of T’Shuvah. While people continue to remind me and try and control me with my past errors, even going so far as to lie about my actions, I am realizing the true freedom of being indebted and not owning my failures past the time of my rectifying them. Once I have done the inner repair, the outer repair and the asking for forgiveness, I do not own the negativity anymore. Once I have finished the helping, I do not own the person I have helped either. While I have expected gratitude from some, I know now that no one needs to be grateful to me for the help I have given, it is my repaying my indebtedness and God is grateful and I am grateful and humbled to be able to make a payment. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark