Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 4 Day 349
“Thus, the purpose seems to be to ennoble the common, to endow worldly things with hieratic beauty; to attune the comparative to the absolute, to associate the detail with the whole, to adapt our own being with its plurality, conflicts, and contradictions to the all-transcending unity, to the holy.” (Thunder in the Soul pg. 78)
“Attune” is defined as “make receptive”, “comparative” comes from the Latin meaning “to pair, to match”, “absolute” comes from the Latin meaning “freed, unrestricted”. Remembering that Rabbi Heschel is still speaking about the “Jewish pattern of life”, he is reminding us that it is incumbent upon all of We the People to make our minds, bodies, eyes, ears, souls, inner life “receptive” to “pair/match” with the unrestricted, the ineffable one, the universe, however one wants to refer to the power greater than ourselves. This is an amazing idea, it is one of the ways of being that seems to be lacking from Jewish institutions, including the State of Israel, at times, lacking from our Jewish education, lacking from our own consciousness. I believe the reason is because it brings more uncertainty to our lives, it brings less assurance of “this is the one way”, “I have the answer”, “I am your retribution”, and other such mendacious ways of thinking, speaking and hearing. Admitting their is an “absolute”, an unrestricted source of energy, power, strength, wisdom, that is not us seems like a bridge to far for many human beings, especially the megalomaniacs who are the elected officials in Israel and the United States, ie running the government and fucking over everyone else because these find upstanding ‘good christian and jewish men “unrestrictedly” believe they are “the absolute”, there is no “match” for them so no need to deal with “the comparative”, and certainly the only thing that they need to “attune” to is the call of their desires, their hunger for power and their thirst for cruelty, as we see playing out here in the US with ICE, etc and in Israel with Netanyahu’s denials of responsibility for Oct. 7, his maniacal hatred of Arab people, his disgusting treatment of both Arabs in the West Bank and Israeli Arabs who chose to stay and be good citizens since 1948! Can these ‘good jews and christians, after all Trump is selling ‘the good book’ with his name on it, of course, be against what “the Jewish pattern of life” is?
“To associate the detail with the whole” is another wild idea in our world, imagine “associate” comes from the Latin meaning “to share, to be allied with” and “detail” comes from the Latin meaning “twig”, while “whole” means “something that is complete”. I am hearing very loudly in my soul, in my ears Rabbi Heschel reminding us to stop taking a twig and making it “complete within itself”. He is calling me/us to “heel”, the Dutch word that “whole” comes from, to the Truth that not to be allied with something greater than ourselves is to make ourselves smaller and smaller, more self-deceptive, more believing of our own bullshit, our own press that we are the whole enchilada, we are the end all/be all, we can take anything out of context, out of a paragraph, be it a word, a phrase, and do what is called “a midrashic move” as my teacher Rabbi Aryeh Cohen taught me. This is the way the Rabbis tried to legitimize their power grab, with the good intentions of keeping Judaism alive, keeping the Torah, the prophets, the writings alive, using the “Jewish pattern of life” to enhance the world around them. AND, as with any and every good idea, good motive; the idolators, the charlatans, the mendacious narcissistic power grabbers use the same methods to spread cruelty, to enslave another(s), to enrich themselves and their cronies, to kill the spirit of the people like the Pharaoh did in Ancient Egypt. We are witnessing these lying assholes on steroids in today’s world and we cannot only point our fingers towards them.
The biggest culprit in bastardizing the words above, in not being able to “attune the comparative to the absolute” is We the People! It is our responsibility to live into “the Jewish pattern of life”, it is our responsibility to hold ourselves accountable to “ennoble the common”, to “attune the comparative to the absolute”, to “associate the detail with the whole” AND it is our responsibility to ensure that the people we choose to enforce our laws, improve our freedom, decide on how OUR money is spent, make the words in the Constitution more alive, bring the ideas of the Declaration Of Independence closer to fruition, and fulfill the promise we make to every immigrant that is written on the Statue of Liberty that greets every new person to our country, either literally or metaphorically. We the People have allowed, promoted, gone along with the bastards who have made the “detail the whole” rather than sharing all the details to make a whole picture, ie the TRUTH. We the People have supported the people who mis-attune the comparative to the absolute allowing them and US, to believe they are in line with the divine instead of seeing they are in line with the idea that government should be “for themselves, by themselves and of themselves” only! WHAT THE FUCK WE THE PEOPLE??!!
Action Steps:
What am I receptive to hearing, to seeing, to experiencing-only what supports my ideas or the whole picture?
What am I pairing my way of living with- my ego, my self-centeredness or with a power greater than myself, with God, with community?
How am I separating the “twig” from being the whole tree, ensuring that I don’t get stuck in the narrowness of the detail and miss the forest for the trees?
How do I use a small piece of something to validate my superiority, my lies, my false ego, and bastardize the “whole, the absolute”?
God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark