Ghosting God, Ghosting Self
Day 43
My brother, Rabbi Neal Borovitz, sent me an email yesterday about even though Amos and Hosea were absolutely pissed off at the ways in which Israel demeaned, desecrated, spit on, ignored, etc God and the ways of Godliness, they believed wholeheartedly in the power of return, the compassion of God, the eternal covenant that God made with us human beings, the unconditional love of God for humanity! Heaven forbid lest anyone think I am only condemning We the People. I am pointing out the lessons we can, and in my opinion, must learn from our communal stories found in the Bible, in the New Testament, in the Koran, in the Eastern Philosophical writings, etc. In fact, before I got my brother’s email I had picked out this verse from Hosea 6:1- “Lets go and return to God, the One who tore us can heal us, the One who wounded us can bind us”
The Hebrew word for “lets go” or “come” is the word that is at the root of what is called “Jewish Law”, the Halacha. It is the word for walking also, it is the word that God spoke to Abraham, “lech” to let him know it was time to continue his inner spiritual journey and the outer journey to a place where he and his family, his people, could worship Adonai in semi-peace. Sitting here this morning I am overwhelmed with the inner experience that “return to God” is the purpose of the “Halacha” and the Rabbis of old, the OG’s did not want it to become the club that it has, did not want the Halacha to pit the people one against another, as has become the norm. They gave us majority and minority opinions, they gave us the permission, the demand to keep arguing with the text and it is only since the Middle Ages, since the Priniting Press that discussion, dissent has been stifled. The Hasidic Movement begun by The Baal Shem Tov was a revolution against the stiffling of creativity, spiritual enthusiasm, etc and, as a desecration to God’s Name and the legacy of the Baal Shem, Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev, Reb Nachman, the Maggid, et al, it has “run after the majority to do evil”!
While this is not what I had in mind when I sat down to write, I have to stay on this theme else there is no point to the words from Hosea for us now. The gift of the Bible for We the People is to remind us of previous errors and returns, previous choosing the next right thing to do and the deeper connection with God and self. When we engage in “walking to”, strictness, we are missing the point of Hosea’s words, when we engage in elitism, we are missing the point of Hosea’s teachings, when we engage in cruelty for its own sake, we are missing the call to RETURN! When we support any type of cruelty, even the slightest amount with the caveat “this is the way of the world”, we are rejecting Hosea’s demands, we are telling God to go fuck Godself, we the people know better! This is what Reb Joshua told God and Rabbi Eliezer when Eliezer corrected him on what the “way of the law” should be. This type of behavior was not limited to the times of the prophets, the times of King Saul, King David, et al, it was not limited to the power struggle amongst the Rabbis, the power struggle between Jews and Christians, it has continued to this day and all of it is a desecration of God’s Name. I am enraged, sitting here thinking of how little we the people have learned, how ridiculous it is to keep doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results, how we the people proclaim our faith and allegiance to the god we make up for ourselves and not GOD who is “our father, our King”, who calls to us each and every day, 24/7/365 to return, to come back to God’s fold, to “walk in the ways of God” as we learn from the prophet Micah, yet we the people keep ignoing the demands, shutting out the “noise” of the call.
I know this way of being so well-I lived it for 20 years, drinking to quiet the ‘noise’ in my head asking me “what the fuck are you doing- you know better and are better than this”. It worked sort of for those years, I say sort of because the voice, the call, the demands were always niggling around in the front, back of my head, my neck, my shoulders, etc. Knowing right and doing wrong is the most excrutiating pain I have ever endured, I am not sure it is as bad as the physical pain of a terminal illness, I do know that spiritually it is the worst. The cutoff of God is not something that God has done, the cutting off from family, friends even when we “look good” is our doing, and the inner psychic pain is piled on exponentially to the psychic pain of the trauma we endured to begin to lie, to cheat, to be cruel, to “get ours”, etc. The only solution is “L’Chu”, lets go and return to the way we know we should live, lets go and return to one another and make amends for our behavior and forgive them when the make theirs, lets go and return to the soul we are created to be, lets go and stop the CRUELTY that is rampant in our midst, lets go and return to our covenant with God and with one another!
ACTION STEP:
STOP GHOSTING GOD, STOP GHOSTING SELF
GOD BLESS, Rabbi mark