Ghosting God, Ghosting Self
Day 118
This Tuesday, Rabbi Ed Feinstein and I will be doing our 2nd Melton Learning Session on T’Shuvah, Heschel, Forgiveness-Please join
The next “missing the mark” of the Ashamnu Prayer is: “speaking slander” and Rabbi Omer-man taught us to, as the Kotzker Rebbe said about the commandments, “make it personal”. Today I want to talk about the slander we speak to and about our self. While not being positive at what point in life it begins, I am reasonably certain that the slanderous speech We the People have engaged in began in early childhood, maybe the first time we got scolded, the first time we realized imperfections is the lot in life of all human beings, the first time we were made fun of because of a quirk we have, the first time… After this ‘first time’ of being made fun of, being corrected, being punished, it seems as if we the people, like Adam and Eve, went into hiding, started to be careful and wary of what we showed to another(s) and became very self-protective AND we the people also have bought into the laughter, the punishing, the needing to be corrected, seeing our imperfections as bad, etc! Herein lies the issue, the beginning of “speaking slander” or as Rabbi Omer-man taught-negative self-talk.
I can remember way back in my own life to when I was 3 years old and ‘took a walk around the block’ because no one was watching me and I was not seen, that my mother and brothers blamed me! I bought into this and began to berate myself in any number of ways and, for all of my bravado, I believed the “slanderous speech” I was spewing upon my soul, my inner life, leading me to continue down a road of “it doesn’t matter what I do, someone will berate me for it, so I might as well be bad rather than be falsely accused”. I remember this thought vividly, as I am writing this, I am having a physical reaction to this memory and I am so aware of how dumb this was to do to myself AND how much sense it seemed to make to me. Only upon returning to the Bible, only upon beginning to immerse myself in the Bible, the prophets, did I begin to realize that there is no perfection, there is only return, there is no being a goody two shoes, only people trying to get it right, there is no banishment in God’s world for making an error, there is only a desire for me/us to return. WOW, this changed everything for me, I began to speak to myself a little nicer, I still have problems with this, especially at the Bridge Table-OY!!
While there is a point in which we the people engage in so much “slanderous speech” against our self that T’Shuvah becomes very difficult, yet even Pharaoh, in Parasha Bo, still has his God-Image when God says to Moses: “Come to Pharaoh”. I believe the use of the word “come” is meant to teach us that God doesn’t leave us, it is our negative self-talk that causes we the people to leave God, to ignore the truth: We the People are created in the Image of God; We the People are Divine Reminders, Divine Needs; We the People each day are given the gift of our soul being returned so how ‘bad’ can we be if God has faith and compassion for We the People?
Wherever the thoughts come from, whenever they rear their ugly, venomous, hateful words, We the People have the opportunity to NOT BUY IN! We the People by living into a spiritual discipline, living into a program of recovering our essence, of returning to who we truly are-children of God, holy people-, and setting our intentions to have a response to the self-deceptions we the people are constantly buying into, the rationalizations we come up with, etc is a crucial part of each and every day. It is a matter of life and death for many we the people. It is very difficult to “accentuate the positive” when “eliminate the negative” is proving to be so impossible and “messing with Mr. In-Between” only leads we the people more astray, because we are trying to deny a negative and it is IMPOSSIBLE to do this, hence the need of each and every human being to hear the self-correcting speech as positive, as belief We the People can return, can improve AND NOT as a berating of self!
As I am writing this, as I said earlier, this is still a work in progress for me, and like many people, I sometimes blame another-usually Harriet- for my mistakes, because I still fall into old traps of equating making a mistake with being a mistake! I am constantly searching for more and more of the subtleties of “slanderous speech” and each year, doing this inventory helps me realize more and more ways I deceive myself, I harm myself, I betray myself by “speaking slander” to and against myself!
ACTION STEPS:
How are you “speaking slander” against your self
What do you gain from doing this
How has negative self-talk promoted you to hide more
How has the hiding more because of slanderous speech got you money, property, prestige
What is the state of your soul, are you dangerously close to Pharaoh’s path of losing his way back?
God Bless, Stop Ghosting God, Stop Ghosting Self, Rabbi Mark