Daily Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Day 224
“We, however, live on borrowed notions, rely on past perceptions, thrive on inertia, delight in relaxation. Insight is a strain, she shun it frequently or even permanently. The demand, as understood in biblical religion, is to be alert and open to what is happening.” (Who is Man pg. 115-116)
Rabbi Heschel’s opening paragraph from chapter 2 of Man is Not Alone, on Radical Amazement rings throughout the teaching above. Rabbi Heschel is reminding us of the perils of not reconciling our experiences with God’s view: inertia, borrowed notions, past perceptions being our experience now, seeking ‘fun’ all the time, etc. Falling into these old, desperate, and blind patterns is what surely will kill our appreciation, our being in the moment, our ability to praise, to be grateful, to truly have compassion and kindness towards one’s self and towards another self.
A borrowed notion is something that we don’t own, rather it owns us. Borrowed notions will always fail us, they will always subject ourselves to being ‘under the thumb’ of another person, we become indebted to the person from whom we have borrowed the notion and we become enslaved to following it through in the way someone else is telling us to. Because the notion is ‘on loan’ to us, because we have to repay/use it on the terms dictated to us, we become human doings, rather than being human.
Believing something is true because you heard it on Cable TV is an example of living on borrowed notions, believing something is true because you hear it from your friends, your clergy, etc are examples of living on borrowed notions. Believing anything without your experiencing it, without immersing your self in the ideas, the experience, without taking the plunge to hear, read, think of the truth and validity of the notion/idea makes one susceptible to falsehoods, being deceived, engaging in mendacity, and being enslaved to untruths and evil people. As Hannah Arendt wrote about after the Eichmann trial, evil is very banal. It is carried out by clerks, by ordinary people who come to ‘just follow orders’ who buy into the deceptions by another person, who just want to ‘fit in’, etc. Whenever we are into extremist views, whenever we are engaging in behaviorism and spiritual plagiarism, we are living in and on borrowed notions.
We are in a time where the borrowed notions of racism, anti-semitism, Islamaphobia, white men should control a woman’s body and everything a woman does, gender inequality, anti-LGBTQ sentiments, and senseless hatred of anyone “not like me” are nearing a zenith. We see everyday where people are spouting the rhetoric of these borrowed notions and getting elected to Congress, winning seats in our State Houses, etc. They bow down and kiss the ring of Donald Drumpf and spout his conspiracy theories, his senseless hatred, etc just to get power, to be part of the authoritarian hierarchy that is trying to take over our country, that is trying to steal our democracy. Yet, many people are willing to live on these borrowed notions, many people seem excited to engage in the senseless hatred that caused the destruction of the 2nd Temple and drove the People Israel into exile for almost 2000 years.
The pathway out of these evil and enslaving ways is immersion. We have to immerse ourselves in our own lives, stop living as tourists, as victims, as ‘know-it-alls’. We have to immerse ourselves in the nuances of our beliefs, into the incongruence of what we believe and the ways we act, into the lip service we are paying to our values and ethics and into the ways we are living by rote. Immersing ourselves in our morning prayers, in our morning coffee, in our morning routines means they stop being routines, they become fresh, new and exciting. Immersing ourselves in our daily living, being aware of what is, seeking to learn something new, especially about something we have learned before, stops us from taking life for granted and helps prevent us from sinking into self-deception as well as preventing us from falling under the spell of the charlatans and pharaohs and false prophets that are calling out to us.
In recovery, we are acutely aware of our need to be fresh each day, to continue to examine and re-examine the borrowed notions we have lived on for so long. We know the dangers of falling into the clutches of these old borrowed notions-spiritual atrophy and loss of our ability to distinguish: truth from lies, the things we can change from the ones we can’t, and things, places and the people who help us in our recovery and those who seek to bring us back into the web of negativity and evil.
The borrowed notions I have lived in and on make me less of a human being and more of a robot who cannot reprogram itself. I am unashamed of who I am, I am immersed in almost every situation in my life, almost every daily action I take and I find that I have relied on borrowed notions whenever I am afraid to speak truth because “they won’t like me”, because ‘I need their approval’, because ‘who will listen to me against her/him’, etc. These borrowed notions, like ‘the one with the gold rules’ as the new golden rule come to enslave me, make me afraid, and eventually cause me to erupt-sometimes appropriately and sometimes not! I am realizing that I can no longer even give into the borrowed notions that are positive, I have to make my own experience fresh and new, otherwise I am no longer living in this world, I am living in a made-up one. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark