Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Day 288
“Entertainment is a diversion, a distraction of the attention of the mind from the preoccupations of daily living. Celebration is a confrontation, giving attention to the transcendent meaning of one’s actions.” (Who is Man pg. 117)
To “climb above” our baser instincts is to get out of ourselves and get over ourselves. We are living in a time of great inner turmoil which is being played out in our outer living. We are sensitive to any and every slight, any and every word, any and every action that, without the context, we believe is against us. While not being a victim, many people claim to be victimized by ‘the system,’ ‘those people,’ perceived hurts and slights, and even their own guilt and shame. We see shrinks for this, we turn to addictive behaviors and substances to relieve ourselves of this angst, and many of us stay stuck and/or return to the comfort of this inner turmoil. I believe this to be the true issue we are facing in our inner turmoil between entertainment and celebration.
We are entertained by standing up to ‘the man’ and we are distracted by people reminding us of how ‘those people’ are ruining our lives, how they are the ‘enemy’ and the cause of the current state of affairs we find ourselves in. We are entertained with ‘bread and circus’ of politics, of institutions, of religious ceremonies even. This happens because even religious ceremonies have become irrelevant and oppressive through their lack of spontaneity, their lack of depth, their lack of meaning and their lack of impact on our inner life. There is, however, a solution!
We have within us the capability to change, the motivation to look inside and transcend our old behaviors, our old beliefs and the lies we have been telling ourselves. We have the power to move forward and block out the deceptions and mendacities we are hearing all around us. We have the gift of spirit and community to no longer need the same things we did before, to no longer twist lies into truth, to no longer need to make good guys and bad guys, to no longer be victims of our own making nor of anyone else’s making. We have the power, the capability and the path out of these slaveries and break out into the light of freedom, the power of spirit, the joy of celebration.
This path begins with us, it begins with shifting from believing we can think our way out of any and every situation into believing in radical amazement. Going from our belief in conventional notions to a belief that everything is new and fresh. Using eternal wisdom in a fresh and new way to see today’s living and today’s challenges in the present, in the moment and not try to use old solutions to solve them. While old solutions may have great wisdom and use, we have to make them new and fresh because this moment has never happened before, we can’t use cookie cutter solutions to solve new and different challenges. We “climb above” our need for certainty by living in radical amazement, by being “maladjusted to” our old ideas, our old glasses. Only by seeing today fresh and new, only by seeing yesterday in today’s light can we move forward. Radical amazement means we can never be ‘pigeonholed’ and never stop learning. To understand and experience the Torah in each of the Torah’s 70 faces one has to be in radical amazement and the same is true for everyday living.
Transcending our usual and common ways of being allows us to pay attention to the long term effects of our actions, to see our actions in the light of our current situation and to make our amends, change and grow from each and every daily activity. While we probably will never achieve this level of mindfulness, we can work on this way of being every day. Each day, when we review our day, we can write down the ways and events when we were in radical amazement and what we learned from these experiences. We can see where we kept using old solutions to respond to today’s issues and how our old ways of being adapted to today’s challenges. We begin to live in the nuances of life, we let go of our old visions of our self, we let go of our need to make allies and enemies and we accept people for who they are, not who we want them to be. We are gifted with the freedom and the spiritual uplift to “love our neighbor” whether we like them or not.
In recovery, this is the path of joy, love, kindness we follow so we can leave our old ways in the past where they belong. We embrace new and different ways of facing and transcending old issues. “We will intuitively know how to handle situations which used to baffle us” is one of the promises of recovery and it is promise that comes true more and more often than many of us realize. In recovery, we are constantly in a state of transcendence, not always achieving it and always striving for it. We have “climbed above” our old ways and we live freely and spiritual one day at a time to the best of our ability in the moment.
I still have some of the old ways of seeing life and they serve me when I keep them fresh and they don’t serve me when I am stuck in tunnel vision. I have “climbed above” many old ideas and ways, I have used radical amazement to use my strengths in new and different ways and I have an attitude and practice of gratitude each day. I am grateful for life, for learning and even for the hurts and injuries because they help me learn and grown. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark