Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 3 Day 162
“The sense for the realness of God will not be found in insipid concepts; in opinions that are astute, arid, timid; in love that is scant, erratic. Sensitivity to God is given to a broken heart, to a mind that rises above its own wisdom.” (God in Search of Man pg 159)
The last phrase above is the conundrum we all face! I hear Rabbi Heschel is calling to us to use our minds appropriately rather than the ways we use it out of proper measure. Without “sensitivity to God” we are left to our own devices and this is where our minds become the arbiter of everything we do. We have seen throughout history what happens when we “forget the gift” as Einstein says and we “worship the servant”, our mind being the servant to our “intuitive mind”, the “mind”/soul that has “sensitivity to God”.
We are in awe of brilliance, be it Oppenheimer, Jobs, etc, and fail to be awe of our spiritual giants like Rev. King, Rev. Barber, Rabbi Heschel, Pope Francis, etc. We have come to believe that our minds will and can get us to the “top of the mountain”, much like the people of Babel thought! We have not heeded Einstein, St. Francis of Assisi, Thomas Merton, Martin Buber, the Baal Shem Tov, and instead come to believe in the words of Descartes: “I think, therefore I am”.
Our reliance on our minds has brought about: atomic energy that morphs into nuclear weapons; democracies that have morphed into authoritarianism; free will that has been usurped by deception and mendacity; “sensitivity to God” that has morphed into idolatry and bastardization of God’s Name and God’s teachings. The later has been promoted widely by the very Priests, Rabbis, Imams, Clergy who are supposed to be helping us be more sensitive to God!
We have come to believe everything as a reason and reason can solve everything. We ignore the call of our souls, we disbelieve our intuition and our intuitive mind, we give short shrift to God’s constant call to connect, to live up to the covenant, to Shema-hear, listen and understand- that we are all part of the Oneness. We have ignored the teachings of Maimonidies in his “Eight Chapters” that speaks to our soul sickness and how to heal it. We use our minds to try and heal our spiritual maladies by patholgizing them and calling them ‘mental illness’!
We are so much better than our minds tell us, we are so much more in need of having “sensitivity to God” than our minds allow us, we are more in need of spiritual healing than our minds can comprehend. Yet, we push forward and use our minds to manipulate ourselves and another(s), we use our minds to lie to ourselves and deceive another(s), we use our minds to go along with ways of being that harm ourselves, make prejudices and unkindness holy, support the dictator, hate and suspect our neighbors instead of loving them.
It is time and we are in desperate need for us to engage life in ways where we heed and live into Rabbi Heschel’s teaching: “to a mind that rises above its own wisdom.” We have seen the destruction that we have wrought since the time of Noah, we have watched in horror the breaking down of our free will, the taking apart of our freedoms, the objectification of human beings so we can focus on a false enemy while the ‘leader’ picks our pockets and makes us into puppets for his/her pleasure. We can and must “rise above its own wisdom” so we can imbue the wisdom and knowledge that “sensitivity to God” brings us, so we can heal the despair and sadness that some of us call home and the “low-grade misery” that most people live in.
We do this not by ignoring our rational minds, we do this by subjugating our minds to what our souls, what our “intuitive minds” know to be right and good, even when it ‘doesn’t make any sense’. What the brilliant minds of science, of technology, of medicine, of quantum physics all know/knew is that what seems inconceivable, impossible, could be our rational minds denial of something greater than our selves. What they know/knew is that we are more than our rational minds, we can rise above the reason and rationality we have come to worship and adore to meet the mystery that is at the very foundation of our universe, go beyond the mystery to meet the Ineffable One and tap into the energy that continues to supply us with the ability to dream, to see more than what is in front of us, to know how to live as a member of the human race instead of living selfishly, and to create a world where everyone lives better, we embrace the commandment to “love our neighbor as we love ourself”, we “choose life” and we live with our hearts broken so we can always “let the light in”.
We are facing an election in the US that could well determine our fate for generations, we are facing a force that claims to be a “christian nation”, to “love Jesus” and has a plan concocted by the Heritage Foundation for the Republican Party, not just the current nominee for President. These idolators, these mendacious people, these power-hungry people want to subjugate everyone to their way of thinking, to make themselves the “power forever” and go back to the days prior to 1776-all the while claiming to be ‘conservatives’. They make sense to a lot of people, just not to God and people who have “sensitivity to God”. And this way of being is happening in Board rooms, non-profits, small business’, and at family tables. We have to stand up for what is right and what is humane, what is freeing and what is true. To do this our mind has “to rise above its own wisdom”. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark