Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Day 171
“Over and above the din of desires there is a calling, demanding, a waiting, an expectation. There is a question that follows me wherever I turn. What is expected of me? What is demanded of me? (Who is Man pgs 107-108)
What makes Rabbi Heschel so brilliant, wise and disturbing is his ability to put into words what most people experience in our inner life and are afraid to/unable to articulate. In the first sentence above, Rabbi Heschel is disturbing a conventional notion and mental cliche, we do the right thing because we desire to do it. WRONG, as I am experiencing Rabbi Heschel’s words this morning. I am realizing that our desire to see ourselves in this light of desire to do what is good, is another way of hiding from our self, hiding from another, hiding from God. We are afraid to admit the truth that our desires have to take a back seat to the call, the demand, so I can fulfill the expectation that my life is to fulfill and stop making God and the people who need my fulfilling the expectation wait.
This is a complex idea, as I write it, yet, it also is simple. We are born with different drives, the drive to rule the world and the drive to connect with people. Both of these drives are part of God’s creation of us/of our natural evolution if this is more palpable than a Creator. It is also true that our desire to rule and our desire to self-satisfy is a stronger desire than our desire to create for most of our lives. In fact, as Rabbi Heschel notes in his book Insecurity of Freedom, these desires have become needs and not satisfy them results in psychological disorders for many! We have come to define our desires as needs, our desires as good, our desires as right, our desires as important and our actions are reflective of our desires to “do good”. These are the lies we tell ourselves, these are the conventional notions and mental cliches we have come to accept so we can block out the calling from our ears, the demanding from our inner life, the expectation from our soul and the waiting from our consciousness. We are engaged in the wrong inner war, as I immerse myself in Rabbi Heschel’s words today.
The war most people engage in is a war of denial, distrust, denigration. It is an inner battle to stop the incessant demand to do the next right thing and rise above our desires, to realize that being obligated is more important than waiting to be moved to do something, more important that doing only what one ‘feels’ like doing. We deny this truth so we can continue to distrust people who know they are obligated to help the needy, the poor and welcome the stranger and denigrate both the people who hear the call and the demand of the Bible to not only love your neighbor, but to welcome the stranger and care for the poor and the needy-whether one reads the Hebrew Bible and/or the New Testament, the Koran and/or the Tibetan Book of the Dead. In the Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, at least 36 times we are commanded to care for the stranger, the widow, the poor, etc. being reminded that we were strangers in Egypt. This goes against the conventional way of life, which is to subject the stranger to the same hardships we faced when we first immigrated to the country we live in, it is wrong and yet it is conventional wisdom. We want to say our desire is to do good, yet we know that doing good when it doesn’t cost us anything is easy and doing what is right at some sacrifice to oneself, going against conventional ‘wisdom’/notions is too risky for most of us.
This is an inner war that all human beings have, some of us engage in battle to rise above desires and conventional notions, to let go of the mental cliches that enslave us and others of us are too afraid to so we deny and stay safe, warm and cuddled in the lies we tell ourselves, wrap ourselves in all the “right and good” causes we take up no matter right or left, conservative or progressive, powerful or pauper, we would rather deceive our selves than engage in the battle to hear, much less respond, to the call, the demand, the waiting and the expectation.
Being in recovery is a decision to engage in the battle for our inner life, to be confronted by the calling, the demand, the waiting and the expectation. While “expectations are resentments waiting to happen” between humans, the expectation of God for us to be authentic, responsive and responsible, leave our feelings aside to answer the obligation and the demand that is in front of us is what fuels and propels our recovery. Faced with difficult choices because our desire is to one thing and there is a nagging call to do another, we ask ourselves “what would God have me do” or “what is the next right thing to do without regard to my desires”. In recovery, we continue to clear away the schmutz/junk that blocks are hearing these calls, demands and expectations because God and people have waited for our gifts long enough and it is time for us to share them.
This first sentence, as you may be able to tell, is pulsating through me. I have been shamed by others my entire life because of I live my inner war out loud. When I was ‘out there’ being a drunk and a criminal, it was my response to not being heard, not being able to accept the conventional notions and mental cliches like those mentioned above and others. My response was WRONG! And I did not know another way to respond at the time. More on this tomorrow. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark