Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 3 Day155
“Our task is to open our souls to Him, to let Him again enter our deeds. We have been taught the grammar of contact with God; we have been taught by the Baal Shem that His remoteness is an illusion capable of being dispelled by our faith. There are many doors through we have to pass to enter the palace, and none of them are locked.” (Essential Writings pg. 92)
The first sentence above brings to mind:“What an order, I can’t go through with it” is a ‘cry’ from the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous in Chapter 5 after the reading of the 12 Steps! The “task” Rabbi Heschel is giving us seems so daunting to so many who are not even aware of the call of their souls, who are so enamored with their intellect, so deep in their self-deception and mendacity that they are unaware of how closed off their souls are. No wonder we have made the false premise that God is hiding because God doesn’t care, it is our defense against God entering our souls, it is the path to blocking God from entering our deeds.
Yet, Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom above is the only path for solving the distress, the anguish, the anxiety that we all face each day. We are being called to open our souls, our selves to God, to allow the lies and the deceptions to fall away and re-enter our covenantal relationship with God, with one another. Rabbi Heschel is teaching us that we are capable, we are worthy, we are necessary to and for God, for Godly actions, for connection to something greater than ourselves. This teaching is calling out to us to go beyond our reason, to enter into the mystery that is holiness, to let go of the absurdity we live in each day. It calls out to us to transform the absurdity into meaning, to live into mystery so we can find ourselves, our authentic selves not the false ones we have become so adept at showing to the world and to ourselves.
Immersing ourselves in this “task” can be frightful because, like Abraham, we “go to ourself, for ourself” to a place that only God can show us, an unknown and unknowable place. There is no GPS that we can use, there is no “you have arrived” outer voice to validate when and where we stop. Even more scary is the truth that we lose our false egos, we lose our facades, we lose the cataracts that have given us false images of ourself. We lose the foreskin we have placed over our hearts and we lose the rationalizations of our intellect. “To open our souls to Him” means we have to suffer losses that our reasoning tells us are essential to our well-being, it means we have to end our reliance on the lies we have been telling ourselves and that society expects us to live. “What an order”!
Yet, without letting “Him again enter our deeds”, we continue to be on the hamster wheel of ecstasy and despair, tremendous highs and the lowest of lows, comparisons where we are either better than or less than, competitions that give us the ‘right’ to ‘kill the competition’, and living in fear of everything being taken away, losing our place, our wealth, our health, our masks/facades. Without opening “our souls to Him”, we stand at the precipice of the abyss and our footing gets shakier and shakier, with one good blast of wind pushes us into the abyss forever. Without opening “our souls to Him” by not letting “Him again enter our deeds”, we are blind to the realities of our current situation and we continue to blame and shame everyone else, we continue to make war with one another and use false gods to validate our mendacity, our treachery, our abandonment of our souls and of God.
Rabbi Heschel gives us the path to rectifying the errors of our ways, he is giving us the response to living in fear, the solution for leaving the despair, depression, hatred and false needs we live in daily. “Open our souls to Him” is to relearn how to live in the world with one another in, at least, somewhat peaceful co-existence. It means to regain our eyesight and see the divine image that each of us is created in, it means to see and live into the intrinsic worth and value every one of us possess naturally, that calls to us that we belong in the world just because we are born, we have value for who we are and the divine need we can fill, the broken chip in the world that only we can repair. “Open our souls to Him” calls for us to return to a way of being that the Bible describes; building a Mishkan, a sanctuary within each of us, a place where God dwells among/in/with us. This “task” takes work, it takes each of us finding the spiritual path that speaks to us, it takes each of us finding a spiritual guide to help us along the way, it takes each of us to let go of the particular lies we have told ourselves that have atrophied our souls, our spiritual growth.
It takes “to let Him again enter our deeds” by no longer trying to prove our worth, no longer engaging in life’s activities for the sake of our false selves, no longer believing we have to be ‘the best’. It takes the realization that what we do here will be remembered and matters. It takes a dedication to doing the next right thing no matter how I think nor how I feel. “To let Him again enter our deeds” reminds us that we have done this before, we have responded to God’s call for us and to us before so we are actually returning to a way of being that is familiar and that we can once again call “home”, once again experience the oneness that seek every time we recite the Shema. “God is One” and we are part of God when we “let Him again enter our deeds”, so we achieve the goal we all truly seek.
I open my soul each day, to the best of my ability. I invite God into my deeds and seek guidance from God, from spiritual guides and all of my success, all of my good works are due to the guidance of God and spiritual teachers, family and friends. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark