Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 2 - Day 10
“The world has fallen away from God. The decision of each individual person and of the many stands in opposition to God. Through our dullness and obstinacy we, too, are antagonists. But still, sometimes we ache when we see God betrayed and abandoned.” (Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity)
This wisdom is so important for us to incorporate into our ways of living, it is crucial for us, at this time of year and in all of our days of living, to ask ourselves the questions and meditate on the thoughts of the previous days I have been writing on these words of Rabbi Heschel. As he said in his interview with Carl Stern, anyone who doesn’t think they have any problems, anyone who believes they can solve everything, is an idiot, so too with anyone who believes they always stand with God, so to with anyone who continues to blame another(s) for the tragedies that befall a nation, a community, an individual, they are idiots!
When 9/11 is blamed on infidels, when AIDS is blamed on LGBTQ+ people, when the pandemic is called a sign of God’s anger with us, when all of these blaming and shaming are used to get people to ‘come to Jesus’, we know it is mendacity and deception in play. When we blame our troubles on another so as to not take responsibility for our part, we self-deception is in play. When we blame the innocent victims, like women who are raped, children who are molested, because of their ‘enticement’, we experience these supposedly people of faith lying and bastardizing God’s words and desires. When politicians wave the flag and proclaim loyalty to God and Country while taking freedoms away from people, treating the stranger with disgust and indulging in senseless hatred of anyone who doesn’t ‘toe the line’ of their ideology, we are watching history repeat itself as it has since the destruction of the 1st Temple.
Yet, the last sentence above gives us all hope! As long as we can ache, as long as we can, at sometime, recognize the betrayal and abandonment of God, we are not lost forever. Each one of us matters is what comes to my soul as I read and meditate on the last sentence above. While it is said in the plural, we, it takes at least 2 ‘I’s’ to make a ‘We’! Our ability to ache is something we have to also write down and contemplate as we do our inventory and work of T’Shuvah in these next 7 days. Our aches and pains are signs of our return, are guides to our way back to the life we want to live, the life we need to live, the life we were born to live and the life with passion, purpose and connection that is our birthright. Aching allows us to leave the unnecessary suffering of ‘woe is me’, ‘I am so bad’, the indulgence in self-pity that keeps us enslaved to betraying and abandoning God, our authentic self. Aching is a spiritual awakening that, Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom is teaching us that aching is the realization of how far we have strayed and how much we need to and want to return to our core, to our authentic self, to our community, to God.
There is not “one true faith” so we have to take our aching and find the spiritual discipline, the path that works for us, that sings to our soul and allows our soul’s voice to join in the choir and the cacophony of voices of this or that particular faith/discipline/philosophy. All true paths are welcoming of the true paths of another discipline. We are told there are 70 ways to understand the Torah, so who can be so arrogant as to say: “Only my interpretation is correct”, a liar, a charlatan, an abandoner of God, a betrayer of God. We have to be careful of these deceivers and we have to be careful to not engage in self-deception. Remember the words of the prophet: “do justly, love mercy and walk humbly with God.” This is the motto for those of us who use our aches as the opening to return to God of our understanding, who use our aches to welcome and engage with people from every walk of life, who use our aches to reconnect with our inner life and live our soul’s knowledge rather than our mind’s wisdom and rationalizations.
In recovery, our aching is our sign that we are on the right path, the path of returning to a decent way of living, a path of returning to caring for our self and for another(s) dignity and well-being. We use our aching as a signal to be aware of what is going on, don’t phone it in, stop taking things for granted and check in with our soul, with our friends, to make sure we haven’t drifted off this new path even slightly. We are using our aching to constantly self-correct before we get too far off the path and find ourselves lost again.
My aching has led to amazing breakthroughs in my living. This aching and Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom and the wisdom of his daughter, Dr. Susannah Heschel, have led me to not have resentments, to accept the negative actions of another(s) towards me with sadness, pain at times, and then to ache for their healing and returning to God. My aching reminds me that, while I personally suffer some effects, these negative actions are much more about the person perpetrating them than about me. Just as my negativity prior to recovery was not personal towards the individual, it was about me needing an outlet for my anger, resentments, etc, so too, I realize, are the negative actions people take towards me their outlet for their own inner anger, resentment of themselves. My aching propels me to pray for these people, to wish for their return to truth and authenticity rather than blame, “poor me”, optics, perfection. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark