Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Day 245
“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).
Rabbi Heschel is challenging us to be people of sensitivity and praise prior to declaring that we are people of faith, an out of the box challenge and one that is crucial to our ability to take the actions necessary to serve God/The Ineffable One. Yesterday, I wrote on the power of sensitivity and the power of insensitivity, today I am immersed in praise. I think about how some people go to Church, Temple, Synagogue, Mosque, their Crystals, etc and praise the Holy Spirit, Soul of the Universe, Allah, Adonai, Higher Consciousness, in words that are just false and those who praise their particular entity of belief in truth. What is the difference, as my wife, Harriet Rossetto asked about the people who came forward to testify and defy the final requests of Trump and those who did not! The difference is, I believe, engaging in the true nature of praise-to prize.
Each of us has a dark night of the soul, like Jacob in the Bible, where we have to make a decision as to what path we are going to follow. When we choose praise, we are going on a path of prizing the tenets of our faith, our religion, our spiritual discipline over our personal desires and gains. This is what Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, Martin Luther King Jr. Rabbi Heschel and the Berrigan brothers, and so many others did. It is what we all need to do right here, right now. Unfortunately we see too often the droves of people who choose falseness, who choose personal desires and gains over principles of faith, decency, kindness, truth, love, etc. This is why, to me, these heroes of the Jan.6th hearings are actually cowardly heroes. They went along with the mistreatment of so many people, they went along with and helped carry out the biddings of people who were only out for themselves and gained money, prestige, etc for themselves. They aided and abetted a system that was rigged against women, Jews, Muslims, Hispanics, immigrants-legal and illegal, a system that caged innocent children and infants, keeping them away from their parents. They were cowards then AND they are heroes for not going along with the demise of democracy that Trump and Meadows and the rest of their “gang that couldn’t shoot straight” were attempting to bring about. They were faced with their own “dark night of the soul” and I am in awe of many of the witnesses, especially Cassidy Hutchinson who at age 25 showed more courage, more concern, more moral fiber and backbone, and prized principles more than her personal gains by testifying in person and on camera so truth could be known.
To prize the teachings and principles of our faiths, we have to stop making excuses for the bad behaviors we engage in. We have to wrestle with our darker angels and allow ourselves to confronted and defeated by a Higher Truth. We are able to do this when we make the decision, because of our own “dark night of the soul” when everything we know in our soul is confronted with the mendacity of another(s) and the desires of our minds/egos/bodies and our soul wins out. Many of us think we don’t need to have this dark night of the soul, we prize these principles already and we are wrong. Everyone has to have this wrestling match, this confrontation between our desires and our soul’s knowledge of what is truth. We are witnessing the ramifications of denying this experience, of not prizing the tenets of God, the tenets of spirit, the tenets of the Universe everyday. We are witnesses to the destruction of our freedom from fear, prejudice, christian rule, one-way thinking, etc. Between the lies of the Supreme Court Justices and their personal agendas getting in the way of truth, the willingness of so many people to go along with The BIG LIE of Trump, Pence, et al, the level of discourse of so many descendants of immigrants who disparage immigrants and disparage anyone not like them, the white supremacist theology that even people of color are going along with under the guise of ‘conservatives’, the identity politics and need for optics, political correctness, etc we are slowly and quickly helping the democracy that so many people fought for and died for slip away. When we truly prize democracy, when we truly prize and praise God/Higher Power/the Ineffable One, we fight for truth, we wrestle people to the ground for kindness, we help people open their eyes and see reality with and as kindness, we welcome the stranger, the poor, the needy with open arms and let them know they are loved and belong. We stop ranking human beings and realize we all are worth an entire world, we all have infinite, equal and unique value and dignity. This is how we praise, this is the path to sensitivity!
As in recovery, placing “principles before personalities” has helped me to face my dark nights of the soul and have God win, have my soul win. I am acutely aware of when my ego has won, temporarily, because I am never settled, never able to see clearly or live easily. I just went through a bout of soul sickness with all of the freedoms that my father fought for in WWII and we all marched for and lived in the 60’s and beyond being dismantled. I had to face my fears of what America will be like for my inter-racial grandson, what it will be like for daughter, nieces and nephews, for the poor, the needy, the stranger. I had to face the fact that I don’t have the same bully pulpit I have had for years and I found the serenity(clarity) to see I am not powerless over a response to evil, I am not powerless to reach out through my writing and I am not in control of the results and my job, the gift given to me is to be in the solution that prizes and praises the teachings of God! God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark