Ghosting God, Ghosting Self
Day 60
Continuing with the words of our founding document, after acknowledging every person has a unique gift, unique relationship with “their Creator”, we move to “certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, the pursuit of Happiness.” The bolding of “among” is mine because, once again, as with “their Creator”, the founding fathers did not limit our “unalienable rights” to just those three! Yet, we seem to forget that We the People, and all human beings living here or abroad have “unalienable rights” that the United States should be helping to protect and we did for 83 years, as our alliances with NATO countries proves.
Today, as we approach 250 years of living with, against, into this Holy Text of our nation, We the People are facing down a “new Pharaoh” who has arisen from the ashes, from the garbage heap and doesn’t know this document, doesn’t know Washington, Lincoln, Truman, Reagan, et al. Like the Pharaoh in the Bible, the current President and his merry band of thieves and cruel, malicious, mendacious men, the narcissism is rampant, the vision is limited, the control of a segment of we the people is total-a recipe for disaster that is happening in front of us and too many of We the People are handwringing and feeling powerless while the idiotic Democrats, who have/had a chance to reassert some sanity in Government, are supporting Anti-Israel candidates, promoting Anti-Zionism as a cover for their Anti-Semitism, going as far to the left as possible and, once again, as they did in 2024, promoting an American Dream that is full of hatred for ‘the other’, disgust and disrespect for anyone but “the underdog of the moment” and being as exclusive and ‘elite’ as they were 2 years ago-BRILLIANT!
I hear the call of the prophets to the People Israel and the People of Judah, to the people in the America, to the people living in Israel in this moment, “RETURN, RETURN” the call of God to those of us who have exiled ourselves from the covenant, from the teachings of Adonai, of Jesus, by being bullies, by being so arrogant as to believe we don’t need a spiritual practice, by having the hubris to believe everything we do is “God’s Will” when it is, in reality, our egocentric desires we masquerade as “God’s Will”. What the prophets are calling to us is, I believe, encapsulated in Shlomo Carlbach’s song: “Return Again”. The lyrics go like this: “return again, return again; return to the land of your soul; return to who you are; return to what you are; return to where you are; born and reborn again”. These words capture the message of the prophets, the message of God, that every return has to begin with a “return to the land of your soul”. This is, I believe, what Thomas Jefferson and others were doing when they were blocked from including freedom for Black Slaves in this document and hid their belief in “liberty for all”, even black slaves and believed that everyone deserves a life that fulfills what, who they are created to be without interference from the new ‘king George’, the new ‘pharaoh who has arisen’!
Unfortunately, like the representatives from the Southern Colonies for whom their entire economy was built on slave labor, who had already developed their willful blindness to the fact that Black Men and Women were and are human beings deserving of dignity, seeing both their worth and their equality with every human being, and saw their uniqueness as either only for their gain or as stubbornness that had to be beaten out of them-man or woman, is on steroids today with the “South as risen again”, with the prejudice, the cancer of the soul that prejudice is, brings about. Rather than be “people of faith”, these Anti-Christ christian nationalists refuse to hear the call of either the Declaration of Independence that the founding fathers wrote nor the Declaration of Independence found in the Bible, the New Testament! We the People have to take back our power, take back our control, take back a government that is of the people, by the people, for the people which we the people are allowing to perish, even after knowing Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address! In the Revolutionary War as in every war, people of all faiths and colors, many different ethnicities fought for the principles above, the principles of the prophets, and were willing to “give their last full measure” to “Let Freedom Ring”.
As one who has returned from the “dark side”, from the narcissistic, self-centered belief that I was ‘owed’ something, that if I could steal it, then it was meant to be mine, from the prisoner, to a free man, a man of faith, a man of deep connection to “my Creator” and the Prophets-I can tell you the gains received by being with, in, on, the “dark side” with the liars, etc is not the panacea that is being sold. It is a cruel trip and when I “return again to the land of my soul”, I began to and continue to understand “certain unalienable rights” for me and for you-hence my devotion to helping people recover and “return to the land of their souls”!
How are you engaging in a return to who you are, what you are?
GOD BLESS, STOP GHOSTING GOD, GHOSTING SELF, Rabbi Mark