Ghosting God Ghosting Self
Day 93
Each morning I sit down at my iPad and play different games to get my mind active and, at the same time thinking about what I want to write about. I do the NY Times Wordle, Mini Crossword and the Crossword, all to varying degrees of success. And my day begins when I awake and am grateful to God for another day, for “returning my soul to me with compassion” and cleaning it up overnight. My recognition of both gratitude for being alive and the compassion shown to me by God, by Harriet, by all of you, by my family is necessary for me to truly appreciate the gifts I receive daily-no matter what my bridge game score was the day before:)
All of this to say that without a spiritual program, too many of We the People fulfill Habakkuk’s words in chapter 2 verse 19: “Woe to him who says to the wood, Awake. To the dumb stone, Arise. Can it teach? It is overlaid with gold and silver and there is no breath at all in it.” Too many of We the People follow the will of these idolators, calling them gods, calling them genius’, calling them “master” instead of worshiping God, instead of knowing the truth of one’s inner life, instead of hearing the call of their souls, instead of hearing the pleas of the poor and the needy(which has no relation to economic status), instead of loving the stranger, etc. And knowing we are being ‘led by the nose’ by the Pharaoh’s courtiers gives me more awareness of how many of we the people are so indifferent, so unaware, so ridiculously stupid believing any of the people in power care about them, their plight AND these idiots keep voting against their self-interest, against what they know to be right and good, against the tenets of the ‘religion’ they claim to hold so dear, like Mike Johnson proclaims so loudly and proudly while Real Christians CRINGE at his actions!
Then, of course, there are the ‘brilliant ones’ on the far left who think Israel should not exist, that are as anti-Semitic as their counterparts on the far right, who want to blow everything up rather than repair the damages they, the far right and we centrists have made. We the People, all of us have bastardized the Declaration of Independence, done our best to fuck up the corrections to the Constitution that the Bill of Rights and subsequent amendments have made, and continued the institutionalization of prejudice, it is just a matter of whom those ‘good white christian nationalists’, ‘fine upstanding ‘religious’ jews’, ‘caring about the underdog progressives’ and every other group that revels in bastardizing their faith, their ethnicity. Prejudice has no boundaries when it comes to whom practices it and this is the “cancer of the soul” that Rabbi Heschel speaks about and this “cancer” has spread throughout the United States, Israel and the globe. This cancer, as practiced by its proponents, is murdering the instructions of the Bible, the truth of Jesus’ words, the intuitive mind Einstein speaks of, and murdering the dictate to: “Proclaim Freedom throughout the land and to all its inhabitants therein” which is on the Liberty Bell on display in Philadelphia, Pa! Is it any wonder why the Prophets are so understudied? To study the prophets, to hear their call, to immerse ourselves in their wisdom, is to be forced to take action, beginning with our self.
I have lived at a level of outrage most of my life, I am coming to realize. I inherited from my father, my grandfathers and I have not been able to tame it so well as my brother Rabbi Neal Borovitz has. My outrage comes from the prophetic inheritance that I realize I have and have been using most of my life. Unfortunately some of the times I was using my inheritance from Jonah and running away from what God wanted, to the belly of the prison instead of the fish and in the belly of the prison is where I found God once again. For the rest of my life, I have been living Robert Kennedy’s words: “Some men see things as they are are and say why. I dream things that never were and say why not”. WHY NOT a) call a piece of wood a piece of wood rather than worship the callousness and the cruelty that piece of wood when fashioned into a tool of destruction, when added to a raging fire to give it more fuel; b) stop worshiping what is dead and gone, ie, m the good old days, and stop stoning people with the lies, the subterfuge, the deceptions on full display today; c) let go of the self-deceptions and bastardizations we the people are using to pat ourselves on the back for being ‘god-fearing people’?
This fight I have been having with the people who worship wood and stone is a long one, going back to childhood. My outrage has overflown and been misunderstood as egotistical anger and I have been unable to explain it until now. The Truth will Set You Free and it does, for me at least. I am not ashamed of me, I have made errors, big ones at times, and I keep coming back to worshiping God, not the idols, the lies that so many of we the people are worshiping today and throughout history. How can a descendant of the prophets, which we all are, NOT be outraged?
ACTION STEP: Discern personal anger from righteous indignation and stop worshiping everything but Truth and God
God Bless, Stop Ghosting God, Ghosting Self, Rabbi Mark