Ghosting God, Ghosting Self
Day 23
In one week Jews around the world will be celebrating the spring festival of Shavuot. It is a harvest festival like all the other major festivals and it has had the receiving of the 10 Sayings, the Torah added on by the Rabbis. Not a bad idea, it goes along with the Biblical narrative of the timeline from leaving Egypt till arriving at Sinai. The custom of staying up all night on Erev Shavuot (the night before) began with Isaac Luria, the famous Kabbalistic Master. Their are so many fervent Jews of all denominations who participate in this ritual while at the same time supporting the very ideas and principles that are diametrically opposed to what the Torah teaches, what God is demanding and they just don’t care-they just want to be seen, look good and sound smart, so they can keep on being next to power, in power, getting richer while we the people are getting poorer, suffering indignities that go against “certain unalienable right”, having the Freedoms promised and fulfilled for the most part for most of these past 250 years TAKEN AWAY, RIPPED APART, and the Supreme Court, the Congress, both of whom are the checks and balances, are sucking the private parts of Trump, Vought, Lutnick, Miller, Bessent, et al. WTF?!
As we Jews study all night in order to repair for the Israelites supposedly “sleeping in” on the day the Torah was being given, We the People are actually being called upon to repair the damage being done to the principles, the call, the demands of God to we the people. I love this night and have for the past 37 years because I have stayed up all night and studied, except for the last 5. At Beit T’Shuvah, it was a time for our residents and alumni to teach all of us, staff, residents, alumni how to live better through the principles that made a difference in their life. We would start at 8PM with 100+ people and by 6 AM there would be 50+ left and we read the 10 Commandments out loud, with everyone wrapped inside an open Torah Scroll-a very powerful, spiritual uplift to end this experience. There are many recovering people who still remember the “word of Torah” that they pointed to and lived into each year one grain of sand more.
Rather than speaking about living the principles of the Holiness Code, of the 10 Commandments/sayings, most of the Jews keep trying to outdo one another with their erudite knowing of the sources, the Talmud, the Mishnah, etc. Rather than delve into their need to Tikkun/Repair their ways, their inner life, their Ghosting of God, their living inauthentically, they keep pretending that they are fine, they know what they are doing and they are doing “god’s will”; “god’s will” being whatever they decide it to be, whatever serves them, not another(s), not the betterment of the world, not loving the stranger, not loving their neighbor as themselves and they refuse to be rebuked, they refuse to acknowledge the myriad of ways they put stumbling blocks before the blind, they are cursing the deaf. It is ‘just business’, just ‘the way of the world’.
Shavuot is the moment in time when God called upon We the People to make the ways of the world in line with the Divine rather than follow the insanity, the hubris, the egocentric paths of the rich, famous, cruel autocrats. Hence, the ways of the Jews who work for, support, donate to the Trump bullshit, the Republicans who have no backbone, the Christian Nationalists who spout their ‘love for Israel’, who worship at the Statue of Donald J Trump in Florida, ARE NOT THE WAYS OF GOD, ARE ONLY MAKING THE DAMAGE HARSHER, BIGGER, MORE IRREPARABLE, rather than actually DOING TSHUVAH, DOING TIKKUN!
I know the power of Torah, it saved me when I began to read it, study it, LIVE it in earnest when I was in Prison for the 2nd time-I am so smart it took me going to the joint twice to “get it”. Each day I study something so I can learn, I wake up excited to learn, to use whatever is happening to better my daily living-be it coming in first or the middle of the pack at the bridge club, be it trying new glaze combinations and shapes in the ceramics studio, be it in leaning into the conversations I have with Harriet, with any of the people I am connected to. What is important for me is to live these principles in all my affairs-as AA also stresses. How am I being in truth, being kind, being just, being merciful, being compassionate, walking in the ways of Godliness are the questions I ask myself many times a day and, I am happy to report, as the years have gone by-I get more and more in line with the divine!
ACTION STEPS:
What do you need to repair this year on Shavuot
How are you preparing yourself to receive Torah this year
What are the Incongruence that you keep refusing to deal with
How are you hiding behind dogma and looking good rather than being just
How are you living and not living the principles of love, truth, kindness?
GOD BLESS - STOP GHOSTING GOD, GHOSTING SELF, Rabbi Mark