Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Day 232
“Every moment is a new arrival, a new bestowal. How to welcome the moment? How to respond to the marvel?” (Who is Man pg. 116)
Rabbi Heschel’s teaching above brings us to a “dark night of the soul” experience when we actually immerse ourselves in this wisdom and seek the truth of his brilliance in our own lives. I am calling it a “dark night of the soul”, even though the phrase was coined by the Spanish mystic and poet, St. John of the Cross, because this phrase has come to connote the journey from hiding from God, from our self, to becoming one with oneself, with God’s call/demand. It is the experience of Jacob when he wrestled with the “ish” in the Torah prior to meeting Esau, his brother who he had conned so many years ago. It is the experience of facing one’s self and the wrestling with the Yetzer HaRa to transform the energy usually used for negativity into energy used to promote our “better angels”.
We live in a time where the arrival of every moment is usually taken for granted, seen as a burden by many, seen as ‘no big deal’ by most unless there is something gigantic going to happen. We are alive in a moment that is fraught with historical significance and we have the opportunity to rise to the moral grandeur and spiritual audacity that Rabbi Heschel asked President Kennedy to rise to or sink lower into the morass that Donald Trump and his minions want us to get stuck in. Each and every moment is a new opportunity to engage in the “dark night of the soul”, to immerse ourselves in an experience of T’Shuvah that is worthy of the gift that T’Shuvah is. Each and every moment is pregnant with the bestowing of newness, of change, of improvement, of joy, of awareness and of love upon us and, in turn, we can bestow the same on another and on community. To do this, we have to leave the ‘comfort’ of the conventional notions we have been accepting and leaning into, we have to leave the acceptance of the mendacity, aka bullshit, some people are slinging and many in this country have been buying. We have to leave our addiction to self-deception and the deception of another, we have to leave our addiction to us/them, we have to leave our addiction to power for our sake, etc.
We are not hopeless and our current situation will pass, each moment that arrives gives us the assurance that it can/will. The bestowal of every moment, the gift of every new moment is our opportunity to change, to repent, to admit our previous errors of judgement and actions, admit to our mendacious behaviors, admit to the spurious use of previous moments, admit to our mistrust of God, of people, of decency, etc. Rabbi Eliezer, in Tractate Shabbat of the Babylonian Talmud, pg 103b, teaches we should do T’Shuvah one day before we die and since no one knows the day of their death, we should do T’Shuvah every day. Yet, very few people take this teaching seriously, very few people believe in the power of facing oneself each day, admitting our errors and finding ways to repair them and the damage they cause, finding ways to no longer act in the same way; seeing our strengths and our acts of goodness and Godliness, accepting our basic goodness of being, taking as much credit for our goodness and good acts as we do for our erroneous ones, and finding ways to enhance and add to our caring for the stranger, the widow, the orphan, the poor, the needy around us and inside of us. Until we are willing to engage in T’Shuvah each day/every other day/on a regular basis, we cannot appreciate the arrival of every moment, we cannot experience the true nature of the “honor/gift”, as the dictionary defines bestow, that is “placed” (Latin root) upon us in each and every moment. We are in a time where the threat to our humanness is greater than when Rabbi Heschel wrote this wisdom, a time like no other because the mendacity, the deceptions, the hatred, the puffing up of one’s errors as great and admirable, are able to spread quicker than wildfire by the internet with no one to vet their truth. Liars, charlatans, haters, white supremacists are taking over the airwaves, because like Rush Limbaugh, Tucker Carlson, Donald Trump, et al., they are louder, more evil and motivated by money, money, money, and power. Yet, we have the power to defeat them, recognize that each moment is “a new arrival, a new bestowal”.
In recovery, we are constantly engaged in self-reflection, not for narcissistic reasons, rather for betterment of our self, finding the nuanced ways we have fallen back into old behaviors and old ways of thinking and acting. We know the conventional notions and mental cliches, the lies we have told ourselves in the past creep back into our unconscious and begin to influence us or try to. Our recognition of the newness of each moment, the gift every moment gives us reminds us we are never stuck unless we want to be, we are never doomed, fated, etc, rather we have the power and this moment to change and improve our way of living.
I have not always used each moment as “a new arrival, a new bestowal”. Today, I recognize this error and commit to appreciate each moment more, even the ones that don’t “feel” so good. I know that my constant self-reflection has made life so much better over the years, my ability to acknowledge my own errors, even when others cannot admit theirs, has kept me strong and resolved to live my life according to God’s demands and call, to live in this moment and not the past one and to embrace every moment for the pregnant possibilities it contains. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark