Ghosting God, Ghosting Self
Day 135
“Today is the Day Adonai has made, I will rejoice in it”. This is the theme of the holiday of Sukkot, which we are in the 2nd day of. Happy Sukkot!! As I have said before, F$#**@k Happy! It is another societal norm, mental cliche that belies the truth- there is no guarantee that we the people will be happy and, as I have stated over and over again, joy is not the same as ‘happy’. In so many cases, ‘happy’ is phony, a front, facade that people should ‘put a smile on your face’ and pretend. Well, why I believe in acting your way into right thinking, feeling; I do not believe pretending to be something that is a societal standard is not the “next right thing to do”. Rejoicing is on a whole other level, it is making the statement that living with God, being guided by our higher consciousness is more important than giving in to the societal norms, mental cliches we the people have grown up with, come to accept in our later years, when we needed the job, keep people ‘happy’ with us, etc.
This is the path of our ancestors, rejecting the norms of society in their times, from Noah to Abraham, from Esau/Jacob to Moses, from King David to the prophets, the entirety of the Hebrew Bible is a rejection of the societal norms of the time and instituting higher norms, decency, truth, justice, kindness, compassion, love, joy in all our affairs, as the 12th step of AA reminds us to do. Given our multitude of Bible studies, both in Christianity, Judaism, given the number of Big Book studies happening around the globe, how can We the People continue to be ruled by these ridiculous norms of ‘society’? How can we the people continue to jettison joy in favor of ‘happy’, truth in favor of expedience, justice in favor of blindness, love in favor of cruelty, the commandment to love the stranger in favor of hatred, political expediency, etc?
BECAUSE WE THE PEOPLE HAVE BECOME LAZY, just as Moses says in Parsha Hazinnu: “Jeshurun grew fat and kicked, You grew fat, gross, coarse, They forsook God and spurned the rock of their support”(Deut. 31:15). This is the story the prophets tell us, this is the other side of the story that our ancestors wrote with their lives-the side that makes up the norms, that goes along to get along, the side that enforces the norms and denies the truth of being maladjusted to these norms, the side that denies the need to BE human and BE true to the soul we are created to be. This is the schizophrenia of being human, this is the both/and of being alive and, it takes kindness to reconcile these two sides, it takes love to bring them together, it takes justice to decide which side to go with in the moment we are in, it takes truth to fight against the outside lies and self-deception we are bombarded with, it takes love to allow ourselves our “oops I made a mistake moments” and not surrender to ‘be happy’, ‘I am a failure’ messages that come from childhood.
There is a solution, of course! Yesterday, in studying with my friend and teacher, Rabbi Hazzan Danny Maseng, we spoke about the prophets’ being hated not because they were wagging their fingers at us, rather because they are reciting the indictment against us, they recite the jury’s findings and we don’t want to hear it-be it before the destruction of the Israel, the destruction of Judea, and/or the destruction of freedom, democracy, America, the State of Israel. Rather than hearing the plea that Jeremiah recites in verse 2: “what wrong did your ancestors find in Me that they abandoned Me and went after delusion and became deluded”, we the people have continued to hear the call of the idol, be it Baal, Zeus, Money, Prestige, Power, etc and followed them! Can you hear the cry of God’s voice in the first half of the sentence “what have I done to you for you to treat me like this” is God’s question and it is never answered by us, because there is no answer-it is not God who is the abandoner, it is We the People and until we acknowledge this truth, we will continue to substitute ‘happy’ for joy, lies for truth, senseless hatred for love, perversion for justice, cruelty for kindness.
In sitting down this morning, I had a different idea to write on, even as I sat down to write AND, connecting with God, this is what is coming out. The solution is simple, it is said over and over again by the prophets, by Moses, by God, by us in our daily prayers: RETURN to the One who created us, RETURN to the ‘new’ Norms found in the Bible-not the controlling ones of some Rabbis-, RETURN to JOY by loving the stranger, being truthful with oneself, being kind to one another, reminding one another of the way to live justly and in mercy.
ACTION STEP:
What societal norms are holding you back from BEING YOU
God Bless, Stop Ghosting God, Ghosting Self, Rabbi Mark