Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Day 194
“Man cannot think of himself as human without being conscious of his indebtedness. Thus it is not a mere feeling, but rather a constitutive feature of being human. To eradicate it would be to destroy what is human in man.” (Who is Man pg. 108)
As I ponder these words of Rabbi Heschel, I am more and more amazed at their timelessness, the painful rebuke they engender, their life-affirming experiences and the deep commitment Religion, faith, spiritual disciplines have to being human. Every authoritarian and their followers do not believe in honoring their indebtedness although they are conscious of it. In fact, they are so hateful, spiteful, blaming, destructive precisely because of their dishonoring their indebtedness and all of these inhuman actions are ways of hiding, running, denying their own indebtedness. Hence, the painful rebuke to them and to all of us, painful because for Rabbi Heschel to write them he must have been so pained by the condition of humanity at that moment as many of us are at this moment and painful for people of conscious, people of depth who had to see the ways they hid from this truth and painful to the people who these words speak to directly because they had/have to either see their truth and change or deny harder and double down, correct Mr. Putin, Mr. McCarthy, et al. So many of us run from and hide from our indebtedness through the ‘protection’ of wealth, power, racism, anti-semitism, and/or the support of the people who engage in such acts. I am thinking of Rabbi Heschel’s statement in the book Insecurity of Freedom, where he defines prejudice as “an eye disease, a cancer of the soul”. The only way we can arrive at this “eye disease” is to hide from, run from, and/or deny our indebtedness. The denial of our indebtedness is also a denial of our own humanity, our commonality, the divine need we are created to fill and the denial of the humanity of another person through our treatment of them as either a servant to/for us or a utilitarian tool/partner for us.
We have faced this dilemma from time immemorial, every generation has had to wrestle with this issue of being human or being homo sapiens. Every generation has had homo sapiens who have eradicated or tried to their consciousness of indebtedness and brainwashed a large cadre, sometimes the majority, of people to go along with them and eradicated their own consciousness of indebtedness. I see this in all fundamentalist faiths, movements, any and all groups who are ‘all or nothing’, who refuse to see grey and nuance, who continue to be victims and, thereby victimize another with impunity, etc. Whether all the way on the right or the left, whether ‘religious’ or ‘secular,’ all of these ways of being deny indebtedness and are just covers, just ways to hide from and still ‘look’ like one is honoring their indebtedness. Blow on these groups and homo sapiens and one can see the hardness of their hearts and the cancer afflicting their souls.
There is a solution to all of these societal ills. BE HUMAN! Acknowledge our indebtedness and ask for help to make payments. Help comes from the Ineffable One, from our fellow human beings, our family, etc. This help also comes in many forms, one of which is recovering one’s passion and discovering one’s purpose. We cannot repay the debt without passion and purpose because we are created in and with passion as well as for to fulfill a need that no one else has fulfilled before-not for lack of trying, rather because we have a unique purpose that no one else could ever know nor ever will. We are not competing nor do we have to compare, we only have to repay. We do not have to be powerful and rich nor do we have to be weak and poor/needy, we only have to live gratefully and with wonder as our normal state of being.
In recovery, we keep peeling back the onion skin, the membrane that covers our hearts, souls and minds and prevents us from acknowledging, being conscious of our indebtedness and begin the repayment of this debt. We do this through prayer, meditation, inventory, amends, asking for help and in a myriad of other ways. We know our propensity to deny, run from, hide from our indebtedness, as well as blame someone else when we ‘fail’ to meet the expectations of our false self and the false selves of others. So, we are constantly engaged in activities that cause us to face our self, our true self, repay our debt and no longer live as a victim, no longer blame another for our inadequacies, no longer need a bad guy to make us look good.
I am, of course, writing about my experiences and self in all of these paragraphs. I see myself, and hopefully you see yourself, in each of these and all the other paragraphs I have written because Rabbi Heschel’s teachings, wisdom are about the human condition which we all experience. I have been blind at times to my indebtedness and I have been painfully rebuked by God, by the people that love me and this has been used by people who don’t love me to shame me, defame me, deny my rights as a human being. Because of the pain of this experience, I became blind to my indebtedness and stopped repaying for a moment. I believed the lie that I was irrelevant, my vision was no longer valid and my ways of being were no longer wanted. I because frozen in place, I was a person without a home, a teacher with no classroom, a Rabbi without a congregation. None of this was true and I bought into these lies and I suffered as did the people I could help. These blogs are my path to repayment, God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark