Daily Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Day 220
“The biblical words about the genesis of heaven and earth are not words of information but words of appreciation. The story of creation is not a description of how the world came into being but a song about the glory of the world’s having come into being. “And God saw it was good” (Genesis 1:25). This is the challenge: to reconcile God’s view with our experience.” (Who is Man pg.115)
Continuing in Rabbi Heschel’s teachings on celebration, I find this paragraph particularly challenging, enlightening, and refreshing. Rabbi Heschel’s deep commitment to the Jewish Tradition is without question and here he is reminding us to not bastardize the beauty, the poetry, the spiritual meaning and message God is giving to us in Genesis. Too often, in our search for and our need for certainty we try to concretize something that can only be appreciated and experienced. I hear Rabbi Heschel calling out to us to have a new experience of appreciation and sing from our souls the song of appreciation that there is a world and we are in it.
In these sentences, I hear the call to stop making something what it isn’t and revel in what it is, be it the creation of heaven and earth, that there is a world and we are in it, the truth of our own being and gifts, our ‘station’ in life, etc. We are here now, we are alive and the opportunity to appreciate what is always beckons to us and, again too often, we are too busy to notice, we are too dissatisfied with what is to recognize, and we are too off key to sing. We compensate for this by having to ‘follow the rules’ that have been set down before us, we are regurgitating what was said before us and we put nothing of our own self into the mix. All the while congratulating ourselves on how well we are living and how well we are doing. We have found ways to take words of appreciation, words that point the way, words of glory of God and turned them into absolutes.
By doing this, we make it simple for us to live, we make it easy to control another(s), we set ourselves up as authorities and ridicule those who are appreciating, singing of the glory of life and engaging in their divine purpose. We have become not a country of laws, not religions of faith, we have become a country of rules where people serve the rules rather than the rules serving the people. We have become religions of creed, discipline, habit, and authority as Rabbi Heschel teaches in the opening of God in Search of Man. The so-called ‘creationists’ who did not, and still do not, want evolution taught in the schools, are not people of faith, they are people of power and creed, discipline and habit. They are fearful people, afraid to think, afraid to appreciate, afraid to sing from their souls because they have allowed their spiritual life to atrophy, they have allowed their voices to become dry and insipid. They have, like many of our religious leaders and political leaders, become dull, irrelevant, and oppressive. Total fealty to the ‘rules’ that man has set down is not the same as faith and commitment to God, yet they have become synonymous over the millennia. How sad!
Yet, in our Human Dignity Movement, as I am calling Rabbi Heschel’s teachings, we do not seek the information from the story of the creation of heaven and earth, we seek to appreciate there is a heaven and earth. Every morning we rejoice at the arising of the sun, at our own awakening. We make commitments to our selves to live one grain of sand more compassionately and faithfully. The prayer, Modeh Ani, that we say upon awakening can be understood as “returning my soul to me with excitement, with fire,”. This reading, which I learned last week when studying with a dear friend of mine, Daniel Friedman, reminds us to appreciate what today has in store for us, to sing our song of living with excitement and follow the “fire in our belly” as Jeremiah did. It is not always fun, it does not always produce the results we want, and it always gives us satisfaction and clarity, joy and strength to move forward towards as well as appreciate the glory of this world, this day, and in the place/palace we are.
In recovery, appreciation and singing a song of glory that we are alive, we are living in concert with the wonder of the world is a daily exercise. We are dedicated to being grateful for what we have, writing gratitude lists morning and evening, reaching out to be thankful to those who help us and acknowledging the joy of living. We know the other side of this coin and living with appreciation, recognizing the glory of life is a much better path.
We are taught in Pirke Avot, “Who is rich? One who is happy with what he has”. This is one of Harriet’s favorite teachings as well as one of mine. Living with appreciation for what is, what I have, is the foundation to my appreciation of being here now. It is the source of my ability to face adversity, do T’shuvah, keep moving forward, help those who have hurt me, reconnect with those I have hurt, accept people for who they are and no longer need them to be who I want them to be. Appreciation and singing my song of glory has allowed me to accept what is, not be personally angry at what isn’t and fight for what should be according to God. I cannot appreciate the glory of the world and stand by and do nothing as our leaders are fiddling while religion, our country, the world is burning. Each day I learn to appreciate more and more the “glory of the world’s coming into being” and I rejoice in my place and fulfilling the divine need I was created to fill. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark