Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Day 243
“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).
What are we really sensitive to? The word in Latin means “feel”, the English definitions are “quick to detect or respond to small changes, signals, influences”. While we are all sensitive to the slights that people throw our way, the experiences we take personally whether meant that way or not, how sensitive are we to God’s Will? How sensitive are we to our own divine Image and the divine Image in each and every human being? How do we really ‘feel’ their pain and their joy? How do we truly express our gratitude to and for our connection with another human being, with God?
As we immerse ourselves in the last sentence above, we can find that these are some of the fundament questions we need to be asking ourselves. We are living in a very narcissistic society, which has always been true to a lessor and greater degree, that is on the upswing of the narcissistic continuum. However, the narcissists in charge have worked hard to deceive all of us into believing they are acting from a religious, a faith-based, a God’s will basis. Yet, they miss the fundamental issue of sensitivity to God’s call, God’s demand. The exodus from Egypt, as I learned from Rabbi Jonathan Omer-man, is the manifestation that slavery will not last forever and, I add, that freedom is the natural state of being. We are created with Free Will and when charlatans and liars, deceivers and practitioners of mendacity, under the guise of god wants this, manipulate and convince people to believe these lies, when they are only sensitive to appealing to the lowest common denominator of human beings, fear and prejudice, “we have a problem Houston” as the Astronauts said on Apollo 13!
Be it the Justices who lied directly to the Congress, the elected officials who lie to their constituents, to the American People, the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers and other such white supremacist groups, and/or the Donald Trump/PT Barnum circus that keeps happening, we are facing the greatest crisis since the Civil War: when President Lincoln so beautifully captured our current situation “a new nation, conceived in Liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men(people) are created equal.” Will we “have a new birth of freedom” depends on what we do now!
We have to hone our sensitivity to God’s demand, to the call of the voiceless and the powerless. We have to stop serving our selfish and false egos, we have to stop listening to the liars and the deceivers, we have to hear the truth and discern our own self-deceptions. We need to stand up for justice, truth, kindness, compassion, mercy, and love if we are to meet the challenge of Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom above. It is almost 60 years since these words were spoken at Stanford University and we have shunned his wisdom rather than embraced it.
Standing for justice and truth, entails first the acknowledgement of our Sages who said every soul has infinite value, every soul is worth an entire world, every soul’s dignity and worth is equal to every other soul’s dignity and worth and, finally, every soul is unique; no two souls are exactly alike , so no need to compare and compete, to hate and deny the humanity of one another. As a country we have to stop the rhetoric of them/us, stop the degradation of one another by labelling people and using those labels to define them. We have to be sensitive, “feel” the words and actions we are about to take and, as Rabbi Hillel taught 2000+ years ago, “what is hateful to you do not do to another”. We are engaged in a “great civil war” a war for civility, a war for integrity, a war against prejudice and senseless hatred, a war for the acknowledgment of all people, based not on race, color, creed, religion, rather based on “the content of their character”.
In recovery, we are seeking to be more human each day. We are peeling away the armor we have been wearing that we, mistakenly thought, protected us and empowered us to fight the world. This armor, as we increase our sensitivity to what is and what was, we find was another lie we were telling ourselves and the key to recovering our authentic self is willingness, honesty and openness, the WHO am I going to be today.
I have always been sensitive to injustice and blind to the ways I was unjust when I was steeped in my own mendacity. I apologize to my family, my siblings, my daughter and my first wife, Linda, for my willful and unwitting blindness. Being sensitive, to me, means to review the past every so often because as I grow in sensitivity and awareness I find new gems that I have learned and given away as well as new ways I was not so nice. I have and do work hard to be sensitive to the needs/calls of another and I am being more sensitive to the call and needs of my self as well. The writing daily of this blog helps we realize more and more how wonderful life is and how much greater it can be by living Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom. I know the scales are tilted towards justice, love, truth in the way I live today. I know that mendacity is so antithetical to me I still get inflamed and loudly try to shout down the lies people are telling themselves and another. Most of the time, I am considered the crazy one, yet, like Jeremiah, I have a fire in my belly that cannot be put out with water or mendacity, only with truth speaking can I rest. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark