Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 5 Day 20
“And life is indivisible. The inner sphere is never isolated from outward activities. Deed and thought are bound into one. All a person thinks and feels enters everything he does, and all he does is involved in everything he thinks and feels.” (Thunder in the Soul pg.87)
The quest for “right living” begins and ends right here, I believe. That we the people in our ridiculous belief that someone can be a ‘ruthless business person’ and a ‘wonderful father and husband’ and other such split descriptions is insane, as I immerse myself both in these words and my own experience. When we the people elected Donald Trump and now say, “I didn’t think/want him to do this…” it is a complete denial of the truth of their ignorance, their stupidity, their willful blindness. Teach an animal to kill and then expect it not to kill you? DUH!!
When one wants to believe a liar, a grifter, an autocrat because they say some things that one was thinking, and don’t realize the rest of the story, it is not the liar who is at fault, it is we the people who are both GUILTY and RESPONSIBLE! What is happening in Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, the Caribbean, in the USA is not being done by ‘those people’, it is being done because enough of we the people thought it was cool to use Nazi rhetoric about immigrants, because enough of we the people cheered on the cruelty towards people with disabilities, people of color, and because enough of we the people believed a ‘smart businessman’ would increase their 401k’s, their money. HA HA HA, the yolk is on we the people! All Trump is concerned about is Trump, all he cares about is his money and his power. He told everyone this in his first campaign, he said it in his second and third as well, yet, enough of we the people decided to jettison the cognitive dissonance we experienced and believe we could isolate “the inner sphere” from “outward activities”, how is Trump, how is Kushner, how is Lutnick, Bessent, et al doing? How are you doing in this separation?
The issue rising to the surface this morning is our denial of what is true and what the Bible, what the New Testament, what history has long ago proven. “What is on the heart should be on the lips” Maimonidies teaches and, we have seen over and over again, despots follow this teaching. They speak the rhetoric of the day and appeal to the “hate in our hearts” and our need for certainty, our need to ‘win’. Rather than “circumcise the foreskins of our hearts”, we the people relish in having our prejudices, our fears stoked and fed, erroneously believing the ‘hero’ of our story will not turn against us-HA HA!
Be it Kushner’s being bribed by the Saudis, by Qatar, Bessent getting whatever he gets, Lutnick practicing the same cruelty he showed at Cantor-Fitzgerald, Vought promoting Christian Nationalism, the priests the Bible, the prophets warned us about laying hands on Donald Trump, Vance being led by Peter Thiel, Stephen Miller living out his cruelest fantasy, Trump using his very own militia that is called ICE to spread fear, hatred, throughout the land, We the People are being called to RISE UP and say NO to these split personalities. It is WAY PAST TIME for We the People to let go of our prejudices, our inner hatreds, our hardened hearts, and remember we were strangers in the land of Egypt, we were strangers in the land of America, none of the people running shit are home grown because we are all immigrants except the Indigenous People who we the white people put onto ‘reservations’ and treated them a little better than Black people but not much. All the time extolling our “good christian values”!
The issue is for we the people to come to grips with our own ‘lower angels’. It is imperative if we are going to ‘make our corner of the world a little better’ for We the People to heal our inner splits, to heal the prejudices, the egocentric lies we continue to tell ourselves, the ways of being that belie what we know to be true, etc. It takes a lot of soul searching, it takes a lot of spiritual growth, it takes a commitment to something greater than oneself. I am bewildered at the ignorance, the willful blindness, the self-centeredness of we the people! I know it firsthand because I was lying to myself and giving excuses of the worst kind, I told myself that “I deserved it”, “if I could steal it then it was meant to be mine”, “I have to help my family”, and other such bullshit stories. Living in the cognitive dissonance drove me to drink, because that was the only way to calm the psychic pain I experienced both from the trauma of my childhood and the ugliness of my own actions. I knew right and did wrong, I loved being immersed in prayer and the Bible and went against so many of the ways I was learning. Hence when I had my spiritual awakening, I engaged in my spiritual growth with the same passion and intensity that I had in hiding from it! If we the people are going to become We the People it is necessary for us to take some:
ACTION STEPS:
Do a daily journal of the thoughts that went along with the deeds we performed this day-good and not good
Do a daily journal of the thoughts that opposed the deeds we performed this day-good and not good
Engage with a spiritual counselor, spiritual friend to discuss and discover the lies, the societal norms that are running your life, consciously and unconsciously
Begin to clear out the lies, the societal norms that impede your intuitive mind, your soul from being the arbiter of your actions.
GOD BLESS and STAY SAFE, Rabbi Mark