Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Day 210
“The question is not where is the event and what is the surprise, but how to see through the sham of routine, how to refute the falsehood of familiarity. Boredom is a spiritual disease, infectious and deadening, but curable.”(Who is Man pg. 115)
Boredom is “a spiritual disease” because it deadens our ability to see what is, hear the call/demand of our inner life, and take positive actions that help us immerse and engage ourselves in the joys of living. Boredom infects our entire being and is ‘caught’ from people around us, the media, and our community. We seek many ‘wrong’ paths out of boredom; hatred of another, blaming of another, addiction, workaholism, risky behaviors, etc, all for naught because they destroy our souls even more, they prejudice our minds and our emotions till we cannot tell truth from fiction, holy from profane, life from death. Boredom is a way to exist, not live.
Humans have always sought excitement as a path out of boredom and this excitement leads to the ways above. It is exciting for some to hate someone else for who they are, what they have accomplished and to tear them and their achievements down. It is exciting for some to blame their failures on another human being/group so there is no personal responsibility for ones own situation. It is exciting to ‘get high’ and leave reality for a moment, a day, year, etc in order to not have to deal with the sadness of missing the mark. It is exciting to engage in risky behaviors for the adrenaline rush we get is intoxicating. It is exciting to manipulate truth and facts so we can always ‘be right’ and convince another of our ‘rightness’, get them to join in our false narratives and ‘have our back. Excitement is another ‘wrong path’ out of boredom.
Our young people are bored with the status quo, they are bored with the need to make more than and do better than their parents’ generation. They are bored with the vapidness of life, they are bored with themselves, hence the suicide rate among young people, from teenage up, is rising. Over 100,000 people died of Opiate Overdoses this past year because people are seeking relief from their boredom in all the wrong places and manners. We are in a crisis of our own making. We have made money, celebrity, likes on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, etc the sole measure of our worth and value. Boredom leads us to deny our intrinsic infinite value and is a tool of comparison and competition for popularity, not celebration of our uniqueness.
Boredom leads to the mass shootings, I believe, we are experience. Because hatred, stereotyping, blaming another group/individual is so insidious and there are so many people promoting this with big megaphones, Tucker Carlson et al., more and more people are bored with ‘those’ people taking the place of, trying to replace ‘me’. Because of boredom and the refrain “its not my fault”, one can justify the killings, the marginalizing, the dehumanizing of another human being so one can be happy, one can take the place of another rather than find their authentic place in the world. Boredom is a motivating factor behind wars as well, I believe. When leaders are bored, they want to ‘shake things up’ so they go to war to take what isn’t theirs. When business leaders are bored, they believe their solution is to engage in ‘killing the competition’. When communities are bored, they ignore the present to focus on the glory of the past.
We are in a state of boredom today. Boredom leads to indifference and indifference, as I hear from Rabbi Heschel’s teachings, is the birthplace of evil. We have become indifferent to evil, not the Putin evil, not the Hitler evil (although many people are revering him today and rewriting the mass destruction he committed as not true), we have become indifferent to the evil of not acknowledging the humanity of another, the infinite worth and dignity of another. This stems for being bored with our selves and not recognizing, growing and maturing our inner worth and dignity, our inner life’s needs and externalizing what is “an inside job”. Like Covid-19, boredom is easily caught and not so easily diagnosed, we go through a lot of tests, like mentioned above, and some people never accept nor seek the diagnosis of boredom as the root of their anger, indifference, and unhappiness.
In recovery, we are engaged in service as a way of staying fresh, we know the dangers of being stale. Staleness/boredom has led us to live false scripts, engage in profane paths of living and stay indifferent to the world around us. Service helps us hear the call/demand of our inner life, take action to help another and fulfill the task we are uniquely qualified for.
In my old life, I would say “I’m going to do something, even if it is wrong” and it always was. In fact, these words always came before I was arrested! The boredom I was in was choking me, killing me and, in my misguided attempts to get out of being bored, I was hurting people, I was breaking the law, I was acting against all of the morality I was brought up with and I was trashing my name, my father’s name and causing grief and pain to the people I loved. Boredom gave me the permission to be entitled, to believe the lies I was telling myself and everyone else. Boredom was killing my soul and it is so encompassing, I was unable to discern the cries of my soul from the cries of my emotions. I am grateful this is no longer the case. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark