Ghosting God, Ghosting Self
Day 4
Watching the “news”, listening to the pundits, reading the in-depth reporting in newspapers, magazines like The New Yorker, the Atlantic, the Guardian, it seems as if many human beings are DRUNK! Having survived Covid, it seems as if the reaction of so many of we the people is to get drunk, ala Noah! While the majority of we the people may not have a substance abuse problem, a drinking problem, it is CRYSTAL CLEAR that a substantial majority of we the people have the “ism”, the “stinking thinking”, the belief that we are entitled to be bulllies, be cruel, be invasive, seek power, and be like we the people were before the FLOOD! While shit happens in the Bible, there is also an underlying and, at times, obvious correlation between the choices of we the people and the resulting consequences, both good and not-so-good. Most of the not-so-good consequences are the result of not-so-good choices made in our drunken stupor of believing we are God, we can control God, we have the “‘right’ to do whatever we fucking want to do-who is going to stop me?” This is not a new phenomena, look at Jacob, his sons, Korach, Kings Saul and David, King Solomon, etc. It is precisely what the prophets scream at We the People about and, like our ancestors, we the people are too drunk with our own deceptions, self and the ones we buy into, to hear them, to follow them, to learn from them! This is one of the greatest tragedies of humankind-our inablity to hear, learn, follow the gift of the prophets: how to live a life compatible with being a partner of God’s in perfecting creation!
The name Noah means comfort and it is a “polar opposite” verb because the Bible uses the same word to express God’s regret at creating human beings once God witnesses the cruelty, the entitlement, the savagery we the people perpetrate upon one another. Noah’s story is both an uplifting one and a warning; Noah is a righteous human being in a generation of degenerates! It is hard to be decent when all around you is indecency, is cruelty, is thievery, is power grabs, is enslavement by ‘the man’. Yet, he was and this is what God “found comfort in” and the lesson for We the People is simple and profound: Stand for what is good and right no matter what is happening around you. This is the message of Noah, I believe, and it is the message that keeps emanating from Mount Sinai, keeps reverberating in the spiritual and moral universe We the People can attune our ears to. We the People are not doomed to be cruel, to be ruled by the multitude of Pharaohs that present themselves to us, by the dictates of our “hearts and eyes”. We the People do not have to “drunk” on our power, on our entitlement, on our sense of importance, on our being a victim, on our victimizing another(s), on…. There is a program of Recovery for all of humanity: it is called Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Eastern Philosophy, etc. I am not speaking of the rituals, the bullshit of ‘looking good’, the lies of the prosperity gospel, the bullshit that killing innocents gets you 70 Virgins in heaven, the desecration of God’s Name done by the far-right Jews who claim it is “G’Shriben”, written in the Torah to kill Palestinans, that they are less than human! Talk about BEING DRUNK, these liars, these false prophets, these bastardizers, are KILLING the TRUTH, trying to upend the democratic underpinnings that the Exodus began that the experience at Sinai gave us the blueprint of, and We the People, like multitudes of families have done with the drunk in their midst: SAY NO!
One of my favorite phrases to people is: I will support your recovery and I will not help you kill yourself or anyone else. My own drunkeness caused so much damage to people I genuinely cared about, it sullied my family name that my father and grandfather were so dilligent about building, it caused my daughter to not be able to trust while desperately wanting to trust, it made people much more cautious about helping someone else after I took advantage of their vulnerabilities, I was a fucking HORROR SHOW! Hence: listening to Hegseth, Trump, et al, Bibi, Smotrich, et al, Putin, MBS, et al, Kushner, Wytkoff et al, I keep wondering: WHEN IS CONGRESS GOING TO DO THE INTERVENTION that the Constitution calls for? WHEN ARE WE THE PEOPLE going to demand that our governing bodies SOBER UP, DO THEIR JOBS, RECOVER FROM THEIR ENTITLEMENT, THEIR LIES, THEIR DRUNKENNESS? When are they going to do their T’Shuvah, their Amends, have a plan to do things differently? When are the democrats going to have a PLAN of RECOVERY from their mealy-mouthed, attack-dog ways and give We the People a choice?
ACTION STEPS:
1) Do an Inventory of your personal Drunkenness-being rigorously truthful with your self
2) Do an inventory of self-deceptive ways you hide from God, from another(s), from your authentic self
3) Choose a path of recovery from the paths of indecency, inhumanity, drunkenness you are engaging in
4) Make a Plan of recovery, find a friend, group of people, a spiritual guide to help you along the way-to “sponsor” your becoming more human
GOD BLESS and STOP GHOSTING GOD and SELF, Rabbi Mark