Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Day 264
“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)
The interrelationship of work and worship are, as I said earlier, epitomized in Hebrew with the word for both being Avodah. In “Ethics of the Fathers”, we are taught “the world stands on 3 things, Torah, Avodah and G’milut Hasadim; a path of spiritual and moral behavior, working this path and fill our lives/spaces with kindness. Avodah is the lynchpin of this trio because without working the path, we will never fill our spaces with random acts of kindness and love. We have to work towards our “authentic existence” otherwise we will fall into mendacity, deception and a ‘false self’ that we adopt and adapt to whatever moment we are in. Working the commandments goes back to the acceptance of the Torah at Mount Sinai, “Na-Aseh V’Nishmah”, we will do and then we will understand is the response of the Israelites to the question of will they accept the covenant with God that the Torah comes with. If we think we can worship while acting in direct opposite of the tenets of our faith, we are sadly mistaken. Herein lies one of the roots of our problems today.
We believe that we can do anything we want and then say we are faithful to God, to our ‘religious’ tenets because when we are in Church, Temple, Mosque, etc we behave in the manner of our faith. We sing the praises of God and cheat a person in business. We listen to the testimony of the Prayer Leader, Minister, Priest, Rabbi, Imam, etc and we clap, sing the praises of the person and treat the stranger with disdain and suspicion. We show up loyally at our houses of worship, go through the service and have none of the service go through us. We claim to be good “Christian’s, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, etc and bastardize the teachings, we work the religious beliefs to serve us instead of serving them. This is where work and worship are interdependent and interrelated in negativity and evil. Our spiritual leaders who remind us to be judgmental, prejudiced, remind us to be benevolent ‘white people’, are working the way they worship, just not the way God intended us to make work and worship interdependent and interrelated. They are spouting the words of Christ, Mohamed, Buddha, Moses while twisting their meanings and the spirit in which they were delivered. This is the height of mendacity, deception, idolatry!
What Rabbi Heschel is pointing out, I believe, is that without dedicating ourselves to a path of holiness, we will never become whole human beings. Without working diligently and consistently on our incongruent parts we will never truly enjoy the compliments we get other than to think “if they only knew”. Without ensuring that each day we work a little more and our worship infuse our actions/work at least one grain of sand more each day, we cannot enjoy the “authentic existence”, the genuineness of coming into being and taking a stand for God, for what is right and for our true self. We have this opportunity each and every day. We wake up in the morning and can greet the day with hope, promise, joy and commitment. We can make our plan to live the joy, hope, promise, love, kindness, justice, mercy, and truth that each day holds in store for us. Doing this makes our work and our worship come together. When we don’t do this, we are going through the motions of prayer, of worship and we are committing “religious behaviorism” which to Rabbi Heschel is a big sin, a big way to miss the mark.
Realizing that we don’t truly accept Torah or any faith without making sure that our actions are in line with the religious, moral, ethical, spiritual principles of our faith is the subtlest form of idolatry. We think we are spouting the right words, we believe we are ‘being spiritual’, we believe we are following the tenets of faith, yet our actions are actions of false ego, prejudice, spiritual plagiarism, racism, unable to see women and anyone ‘not like me’ as equal to me, homophobic, treating the stranger as a criminal rather than welcoming them. To experience the truth of Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom we have to begin with using our faith as a plan of action (which is what a commanded life is) and then our daily actions are to fulfill this plan of action (which is what the work is) and then we get to have a genuine coming into being our true self and this leads to the random acts of kindness our Sages of old taught about. When our daily ‘work’ is imbued with our faith/worship we walk around with a smile for people, a howdy and a hello and are not concerned with any return, just with putting the Grace of God that we receive in the morning out into the world we work in and the people we worship with.
In recovery, we speak of “faith without works is dead” because we have been giving lip service and using worship and faith as pawns in our scheming way of living. We have not actually put these tenets into action and/or in the ways they were meant to be used, we have bastardized them in the past for our own needs/good and now we use them in the ways they were intended.
I find this idea so important to my recovery, to my teachings, to my ability to live. I can say that I have seen, lived and do live the interrelationship between work and worship. Not perfectly and more tomorrow. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark