Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Day 241
“The secret of spiritual living is the power to praise. Praise is the harvest of love. Praise precedes faith. First we sing, then we believe. The fundamental issue is not faith but sensitivity and praise, being ready for faith.”(Who is Man pg. 116).
As we begin our 41st week of immersing ourselves in Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom on a personal, actionable level, the words above stir me, and hopefully you, to a deeper connection and understanding of self, an authentic need of our self and a path to letting of our fear of “the optics”, “what will someone else/neighbors think of me/us”, and other such nonsensical conventional notions and mental cliches; as Rabbi Heschel teaches, this is the greatest block to our knowledge. To praise is to “prize” according to the Latin, believe comes from the Latin word “cred”, meaning give credence to, and faith comes from the Latin word “fides”, in Hebrew “emunah” is the same word for both believe and faith. Rabbi Heschel, as I understand him today, is reminding us that singing bypass’ the rational mind and comes from our guts, as any singer will tell you about their breathing during singing and as other musicians have attested to me when playing their instruments. Singing is the precursor to our giving credence that spiritual living is important, that to “prize” our inner life, our inner wisdom is essential to living well and learning how to celebrate our life, how to live with love at the foundation/core of us.
Because of the mendacity being spewed over the airwaves, the internet, the newspapers and in our homes and workplaces, we have lost our way to our foundational needs; to love and be loved. This, in turn, (in my opinion) has led to our inability to sing the unique song we have inside of us, to sing and live the divine need we are created for. Instead, we keep singing the song of our ego, we keep ‘where’s mine’ at the foundation/core of our actions, we spread the deceptions of our minds, the desires of our emotions to live with a sense of certainty and power. Rather than hear the call of our imprisoned souls, rather than sing the song that is in our kishka’s(guts), we are accustomed to singing a false song with notes that harmonize and are the wrong notes for the moment, the notes of ego, not God. We are seeing the harvest of these songs in our everyday living. Homelessness, Jan.6th, addiction deaths soaring, mental ill-health abounding, war, inflation, prejudice, the vast gap in economic health of individuals as well as countries all are symptoms of the disease of mendacity, the disease of denying our need to love and be loved, our need for true connection.
I believe it is essential to find the authentic song of our soul, to acknowledge the validity, the credence and the acceptance of the truth that we all need to sing our songs of praise, our songs of knowing, our songs of love, faith and believing. It is not as important to me what your path to believe is, it is only important that this path is through one’s inner life. It is time to free our inner life from the shackles we have enchained it in by medicating a spiritual crisis with psychotropics and/or mind-altering chemicals. We don’t need hallucinogens, alcohol, opiates to medicate the spiritual pain we are all in, we don’t need meanness, inhumanity towards one another, authoritarianism to soothe the inner pain we are all in. We don’t need to follow the deceptions, the mendacious paths of the fundamentalists on either side of the spectrum.
We need to cultivate the song within, we need to see the abundance we live in, no matter what our economic health is, we have to let go of the old ideas, the lies we tell ourselves and the conventional notions and cliches that have imprisoned our souls, shackled our truth, blocked our ability to breathe/live from our inner life/soul. We can begin to do this by first acknowledging our innermost desire to sing songs of praise. We can do this by acknowledging the credence/belief of our need for love and need to love is at the core of our being human. We can do this through valid and truthful living rather than buying into our self-deceptions and the deceptions of another(s). We can do this by finding the prayers/songs that praise life instead of the prayers/songs that complain about life, singing the prayers/songs that help us see and evaluate our inner life and outer actions to ensure they are becoming more congruent rather than the prayers/songs of superiority, prejudice and hatred.
In recovery, we seek the song that is authentic to our soul, the song we need to sing and that another needs to hear. We “come to believe” that cultivating this song and our relationship to our inner life brings us clarity, stability and a path to living a more purposeful life. This is a foundational principle that we are recovering in recovery.
I am aware of singing the wrong song for many years prior to my being in recovery and, at times, of singing the wrong song in my recovery. I have continued to listen for the off-key, off-topic, off-course notes in recovery as opposed to never believing that the notes I was singing were off at all prior to recovery. I know that every wrong note brought harm to another, harm to me and I keep working to minimize these. I am also aware of the joy of praise that most of my living in recovery has produced, the songs I and many people together have been able to compose, distribute and come together in a cacophony of sound. I am aware of the abundance I live in when I am praising, singing, believing in God, and behaving in love, in goodness, in truth, in validity, in justice, and kindness. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark