Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Day 273
“Man may forfeit his sense of the ineffable. To be alive is commonplace; the sense of radical amazement is gone; the world is familiar and familiarity does not breed exaltation or even appreciation.” (Who is Man pg. 116)
The last phrase above is the disease of our time and this was written/spoken 59+ years ago! Familiar comes from the Latin meaning ‘family’, ‘household servants’ and in Hebrew it is the word used for knowing someone as a friend, acquaintance, etc. I believe the way Rabbi Heschel is using the word is as ‘family’, ‘well-known’, etc and in this way he is challenging our belief that we only know what we can see, prove, convince. We are treating the world as a servant to us rather than us serving the world. Instead of caring for the world, we have grown into believing the world should serve us no matter what we do, how little we care for it, how much we abuse it. In the ways I hear Rabbi Heschel speaking to us in this phrase is much like the Prophets of old who called the people Israel, the people Judea out over their similar beliefs to ours today. We all know what happened to those countries; exiled into assimilation and exiled from the land for almost 1900 years!
Treating the world and people like ‘family’ might sound wonderful, yet we see how the family has disintegrated so much to be a safe place for mendacity and lies, deception and anger. We know how often people treat family poorly because they can and know they can always come back and “blood is thicker than water”. Yet, the abuse in families is tremendous, be it sibling rivalry, parental expectations and emotional neglect, physical abuse and the pressure to perform, be perfect, realize the dreams another family member has for one. It is subtle and powerful. One can see the addiction epidemic as a manifestation of what is going on under the surface in families, schools, synagogues, churches, etc. It is a rebellion against the mendacity of optics, against the deception of another to serve us, against the senseless hatred of someone else so one doesn’t have to look at oneself in truth and change. We have problem in our families that is reflective of the larger societal problem: a loss of radical amazement, a loss of our sense of the ineffable, a loss of the dynamism of being alive. Yet, we are happy with the status quo, we are happy being deceived and engaging in self-deception because truth seems to hard to take. Seeing what is happening in our country today is a mirror of this. People are willing to lie to themselves, follow mendacious Mitch, lying Ted, deceiving Donny, minion Mike Pence, destructive De Santis, et al, all to avoid seeing themselves, growing their inner lives, following the demand and call of the Universe/God to make our corner of the world a little better than how we found it, and living a life of “love your neighbor”.
It is time for us to stop believing we know this story, we have seen this movie before and realize that today is new, there has never been another day like this. We will not have another day/time like right now and there never has been. Our need to make daily life “familiar” is our belief that slavery is okay, following the Pharaoh is better than being free. The boss is our friend and needs us and cares for us, so what if he charges 3 times as much at the “company store”, so what if he abuses us in front of his friends and they all laugh in our faces and behind our backs, so what if he beats me occasionally, he is my master! What poppycock, what self-deception! Yet, we buy into this belief overtly and subtly whenever we believe the world is here to serve us, whenever we believe we have to go along to get along, whenever we buy into the lies of another because we are too lazy, too afraid to speak truth to power, truth to ourselves, truth to another. We were freed from Egypt over 3300 years ago and told not to go back, the entire Hebrew Bible is the story of how to stay away from Egypt and the desire, pull to go back. We have, in our society, in our ways of living in optics, fear, mendacity, returned to Egypt and don’t even realize it. We have fallen under the spell of Pharaoh and he has “dealt shrewdly” with us, enslaved us even though we were “more numerous and mighty” than he and his crowd.
In recovery, we use family to help us be free, we engage in a new family dynamic because the old one was a sick system that served us and our family to stay in denial, anger, stuck, dependent and co-dependent. It kept us in roles and prevented our souls from speaking and connecting with one another. In recovery, family is part of our core recovery tools, it is what supports our core contentment and knowing we are enough.
I have abused family when I was drinking and stealing. In my recovery, I cherish family and I refuse to buy into the old system. It caused some issues with my mother at times and it brought me and my siblings closer because they too did not want the old system. Family is a gift which needs to be engaged with in joy, truth, anger, sorrow, kindness, mercy, justice and love. In our family, “having one’s back” means telling the truth and believing in one another. No mendacity, no cover-up, no throwing away! We help one another stay out of Egypt by keeping it real, caring for one another and teaching our children the same way. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark