Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Day 304
“The mind is in search of rational coherence, the soul in quest for celebration. Knowledge is celebration. Truth is more than equation of thing and thought. Truth is transcendence, its comprehension is loyalty.” (Who is Man pg 117)
Truth has to be transcendence according to Jewish philosophy, thought, belief as Judaism says God is Truth and God is everything. We are not talking about an anthropomorphic god, we are talking about the abstract God of the Hebrew Bible, who comes to us in dreams, in Eureka moments, in higher consciousness, in our moments of moral quandary and in our moments of meditation and prayer. Rabbi Heschel is reminding us to stop believing our thoughts are truth, to stop believing because there is an object of our thoughts, a thing, and we can define it, use it, manipulate it doesn’t equal truth.
Yet we find ourselves, as we have throughout the millennia, in a time where people are willing to define truth in whatever way they want. We are so sure we have ‘the corner on the truth’ that we will annihilate anyone who disagrees with us. We so desire to convince ourselves and every other self of how smart we are, why we should be in power, why they are wrong, we actually deceive ourselves to believe we alone (and our ‘people’) have the truth and can carry it out. Some people actually believe that God is on their side, as the Dylan song goes, even though they wipe out millions of people, even though they disenfranchise millions of citizens, even though they spout hateful and warlike sermons, prayers, speeches, marches, etc. Others still know they are lying and continue to accuse someone else of what they are doing. We are in a quandary as to know who to believe in, what to believe in and how to discern truth from lies. We are still believing that truth is the equation of thing and thought. Descartes did us no favor by his statement “I think therefore I am” because we have bastardized these words to give us permission to believe that our thoughts are the basis of truth and we will use any thing we can to live this belief, just ask anyone on the far left or far right. Ideology becomes all encompassing truth.
We have an antidote to this moral and spiritual malady that has coursed through the veins of people forever, that courses through the veins of communities, countries, states, religions, ethnicities, etc. Rabbi Heschel’s definition of truth above is this antidote, transcendence means to “climb across”, “to go beyond our limits”, “to rise above”. Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom that he is imparting to us is the wisdom of not thinking we are able to fool all of the people all of the time. It is the wisdom of realizing that we all have to face “the man in the glass” as the poem teaches us. It is the wisdom of accepting the truth of our self-deceptions, our mendacity and our deception of another(s) for our own gratification, our own satisfaction, our own wealth, our own power, our own need to hide, etc. None of the “ways of the world” are good enough excuses to salve our guilty consciouses upon our newfound awareness of how we have bought into the conventional notions and mental cliches society has been selling us forever. It is the wisdom that while two plus two equals four is a truth, is valid, we cannot reduce truth to a mathematical equation anymore than we can keep it something ethereal and abstract. Truth is concrete and transcendent at the same moment, in every moment, as I am understanding Rabbi Heschel today.
Yet, as we are acutely aware, it is also highly manipulated beginning with religious leaders who want to rule countries, people and the world with their invalid interpretations God’s Will and their mendacious expressions of idolatry and continuing to the leaders of countries who actually want to be the rulers of their land as in antiquity, the Dark Ages, Middle Ages, and, up until 1776, the modern age. The need of some people to want to go backwards, to want to rule with an iron fist and rob the coffers, steal the gold and silver in the religious and secular temples and churches has never left us. Yet we are proving to not have learned from our history, we are proving that self-deception as a major disease of the mind, emotions and spirit is alive and well in many of us. We are proving that the “eye disease” of prejudice has caused stage 4 cancer in our souls and we no longer can discern truth nor lies, healthy actions from the unhealthy ones and ‘doctors’ who care from ‘doctors’ who want us to stay sick for their benefit. Our country is in such a quandary as I write and our democracy is in the balance. Truth is not known by either side in this battle for the soul of our country, in this battle for the health of our individual souls, mendacity and deception is detectable and this is what we have to fight against, this is what we have to find the cure for, on a personal level and then on the larger stage.
In recovery we are constantly seeking out the mendacity and self-deception that creeps into our way of being. We are looking at ourselves with a critical eye, not to beat ourselves up rather to uplift ourselves by seeing when we seek truth and when and where we give into deception of self, deception by another, etc. Both happen each and every day which is why we “seek progress not perfection”. We become deeply aware that we are not God so we cannot know all truths and our job is to continue to search, learn and seek more truth about self, about another, about the world, about God/higher power, each day. God Bless and Stay safe, Rabbi Mark