Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 4 Day 340
“With quiet sadness and rich with strenuous lessons of defeat, we learn today to understand that there are no extemporaneous solutions to perpetual problems; that the only safeguard against constant danger is constant vigilance, constant guidance. Such guidance, such vigilance is given to him who lives in the shadows of Sinai, whose weeks, days, hours are set in the rhythm of the Torah.” (Thunder in the Soul pg. 75)
Rabbi Heschel taught at the Union Theological Seminary, he was friends with Reinhold Niebuhr, Martin Luther King Jr. and the Berrigan Brothers, went to Rome to speak with Cardinal Bea and the Pope. In the passage above, from his book Man is Not Alone, he is speaking to Jews about Judaism so please do not understand this as a xenophobia, when speaking of Sinai and the Torah.
The opening sentence is so powerful, full of truths that are not contestable AND, today, too many of we the people are disbelieving these words. It seems there is a group of we the people who refuse to sit with their sadness much less be in quietude about it. No, they rather rage and yell, be mad not sad, and ignore the wealth they have gained from their “lessons of defeat”. Some of these people, of which I was one for quite a while, WAY TOO LONG, I might add, are incapable of being sad because we are afraid that sadness will break us, that the broken heart is a deficiency that we cannot let anyone else see because we are afraid we will have these vulnerabilities used against us, another human being will take advantage of us and our ‘weakness’ will be exploited. It is a horrific way to live, always worried about the person next to you, never knowing when ICE, both the governmental agency and the ICE in the veins of those who need to perpetrate evil by using vulnerabilities against another person, will strike.
Because the people who will not only not sit in sadness, they will also never admit “defeat”, and, instead blame everyone else, “you don’t understand, it’s not my fault”, etc are the excuses of people who will not only deny “defeat”, we/they refuse to become “rich with strenuous lessons of defeat”!! HOW STUPID!! I KNOW because I was also one of these people, belonging to the club that if I deny long enough, both another person and ME will believe the lie! Even worse, instead of accepting Einstein’s definition of insanity, I kept doing the same thing over and over again and truly believing the results would be different. Writing this is giving me the chills, I am in a state of disbelief that I could have been so spiritually immature, so emotionally bankrupt that neither sadness nor lessons of defeat could break through the iron wall I put up within me, the castle of high, thick walls I put around my soul, that every person who engages in the behaviors I did puts around their souls. The suffering I experienced and would not admit I perpetrated onto another(s) and this is one of the MAJOR CRIMES I committed in my days prior to my return to Judaism, prior to my recovering my true essence, prior to my recovery from alcoholism and criminality. All recovering people experience these types of crimes prior to our spiritual awakening, our surrender to the “quiet sadness and rich” “strenuous lessons of defeat”.
This is proving to be another experience where I hear the call of Rabbi Heschel and the call of the prophets, where I connect my prophetic inheritance with both the words above, the actions taken by Rabbi Heschel, by the prophets, and respectfully DISAGREE with “we learn today to understand that there are no extemporaneous solutions to perpetual problems”. It is so evident that We the People not only do not engage in this type of learning, enough of we the people believe the SNAKE OIL SALESMAN, aka TRUMP, who says “I can fix it all for you”, “I am your retribution and I will make it happen immediately” to elect this criminal, this grifter, and his band of THIEVES. After one year, he has been the “retribution” for the Jan 6th criminals, he has been the retribution against the very people who have stood with the U.S.A. since the 2nd World War, Europe, he has once again been the “retribution” for Vladimir Putin, helping him take more of Ukraine instead of supporting freedom in Ukraine. He has overseen higher prices, a worse economy because of his tariffs, he is suing his own government in order to get MORE money from We the People and he is treating the stranger with disdain, with hatred, and with death squads unless the stranger is a white christian, of course. Only “strangers” of color need to be killed, put into concentration camps and this horrific behavior is being sold by Miller, Noem, Holman as a “quick fix” to our economic problems, to the problem of “vermin” and ‘those people who are infecting the blood of our people”! REALLY PEOPLE, WHAT THE FUCK!!
The problems we face in this moment are not new, they are as old as human history. I was not the first to abandon my morals, the first to be afraid of sadness, the first to not know how to handle the state of emergency I felt inside of my from the day of my father’s first heart attack and the fears of sadness, of shame, of being blamed for whatever was wrong. All of these factors and more drove me to deny the “strenuous lessons of defeat” because admitting “defeat” made me a laughing stock, a fool to be pitied, a weak suck. My father tried to explain how truth would set me free and I was too young to understand the nuances of what my father was trying to tell me and he knew he didn’t have enough time to teach me slowly so he tried to give me all his wisdom at once. I have, in these 60 years since his death, heard and used the wisdom I was unable to use in my youth to make life better, to make the world a little better, to love more, to live in the sadness, rejoice in the “strenuous lessons of defeat” and grow more into the self I was created to be. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark