Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Day 256
“To be human involves the ability to appreciate as well as the ability to give expression to appreciation. For thousands of years authentic existence included both manipulation and appreciation, utilization and celebration, both work and worship. In primitive society they were interdependent; in biblical religion they were interrelated. Today we face a different situation.” (Who is Man pg. 116)
Beginning with the phrase “authentic existence”, Rabbi Heschel is again awakening us to basic principles and ways of being. Authentic comes from the Latin meaning “genuine” and existence from the Latin meaning “take a stand” and/or “come into being”. Rabbi Heschel is calling to us to remember and learn from our history, from the examples that lasted “for thousands of years” to take a genuine stand in the ways we live, to stop the mendacity, to stop the deceptions, to end our own self-deception and to end our indifference to the genuine love and duty that life calls upon us to engage in. Having never looked up existence before, I am blown away with the root of it. While the dictionary definition is “continued survival/way of living/all that exist”, the root of the word gives us all much more to ponder and to live to. To ensure that his words are not bastardized, I believe, and to ensure that people can easily(?) understand him, Rabbi Heschel puts together genuine with taking a stand, so he is reminding us, teaching us, enlightening us to the fact that for thousands of years, people lived lives of taking a genuine stand on issues, on living, on caring for one another. While power has certainly always been an issue, the words above reflect the majority of people’s way of being. Families cared for one another in genuine ways, not just for how things would look, unless of course you were in the ‘ruling class’ then optics was all that mattered. Nothing can come into being unless we take a stand to make it happen, unless we take an action to cause an idea, a goal, an invention, a cure to emerge, we stay stuck in the same old ways of doing things and life is no longer dynamic, it is static, boring and oppressive.
Today, we are facing the very challenge Rabbi Heschel put in front of us in 1963, are you going to live an authentic existence or continue to live in deception of another, deception of self, mendacity? Living in deception and mendacity has its rewards, as we can see from so many people like the leader of the pack to end our democracy, Trickster Trumpster, Caving Kevin, Josh aka Judas Hawley, Moscow Mitch who believes Christ was a lion and a bully, the squad who needs someone to hate in order to flourish, etc. All of these ‘leaders’ live lives of “quiet desperation” as Thoreau spoke about and rather than face themselves, rather than have a “dark night of the soul” they engage in the self-deception of blaming another for the ills of the world and wrap themselves in the mendacity of victim and savior all at the same time. These people and their ‘soldiers’ like the Oath Keepers, Proud Boys, et al, continue to bully, cajole, lie to everyone about their motives, except for Moscow Mitch-he tells everyone he only cares about power and supporting the corporations and the ultra-rich.
“Authentic existence” is calling to our souls to overcome the mendacity and deceptions of these so-called leaders, these so-called ‘good christians’ who spout hatred rather than love, who denigrate the stranger, the poor, the needy rather than welcoming them, for whom prejudice, anti-semitism, racism, Islamaphobia, homophobia, etc are at their core and are cancers eating away at their inner life, their souls so they can continue to practice their art of indifference to the plight of their fellows and the plight of their souls. It is so sad, frightening, devastating, serious to see the level of inauthenticity being lived by so many today. It is depleting and fatiguing to do battle with the bombardment of lies, the flood of deception, the storm of spin, the assault on truth that the charlatans above and their followers, their competitors in deception are engaging in each day. Probably the saddest realization for me/us is the followers of deceptive and mendacious people are not even aware they are being duped and feel genuine in their indifference and self-deceptions.
In recovery, we take a stand every day to live as genuine, as decent, as ethically principled as possible. We are aware of our previous shortcomings, our previous self-deceptions and deceptions of another, so we are sensitive to the lies of another. We know that we have to scrape our self-deceptions away from us as people scrape barnacles off a boat. It is a never-ending job and a job that brings genuine joy each and every day.
I am so aware of deception of another, deception of self, and when I am being deceived usually. And then there are times when I fool myself, times when I get fooled. In doing my own inventory, I know my reactions to mendacity and deception seem over the top and, to some they are. Yet, I also know of how afraid I am to get near to mendacity, to be close to deception, to be inauthentic, to not take a stand. I am hyper-afraid because I was a mendacious, devious deceiver who took no prisoners prior to my last Prison Term. If I am not bombastic, if I do not have a strong inner revulsion to mendacity and deception whether practiced by me or another, I am in danger of sliding backwards on my journey to the Promised Land. I don’t expect to get there, I do not have any illusions of perfection, I only know the path to Hell is paved with deception and I refuse to go there anymore. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark