The Prophets - wisdom to enhance our daily living

Daily Prophets

Day 194

“Thus says God:”I have returned to Zion and I will dwell in Jerusalem…I will rescue My people from the east and the west and I will bring them home…They shall be My people and I will be their God in truth and in righteousness. These are the things you are to do: speak truth to one another, do justice and wholeness in your gates. Do not plot evil against one another and do not love lying/mendacity for these are the things I hate. …the fasts of the 4, 5,7,& 10th month shall become occasions for joy and gladness…but you must love honesty and integrity.”(Zechariah8:3,7,8,16,19).

Many years ago, my friend, teacher and Rabbi, Rabbi Ed Feinstein, and I were studying together and he began to talk about the ways Christians speak about the “Good News Bible”. I said, “Ed, our Torah is a Good News Torah”. For months, every Friday Night at Shabbat Services I would speak about the Good News Torah-until some congregants/Board Members believed it sounded “too christian”.

Zechariah is delivering such good news to us and to the people in exile in today’s reading. God has returned to Zion and God is going to dwell in Jerusalem!! This is big news for the people who felt abandoned by God, the people who turned their backs on God in previous years and for generations, no matter what the Prophets told them, they were stiff-necked and stubborn in their refusal to live decent and truthful lives. These are the people who felt abandoned, yet now their descendants can rejoice in this Good News! Not only is God returning, God is bringing the people back to their ancestral homes and restoring them to their inheritance. God took us back then and takes us back now in truth and in righteousness. We have to be willing to return this attitude. Writing this opens me up to a truth that Gratitude is righteousness in action. In fact, the only way to repay a kindness is by living in truth and righteousness as I understand the prophet in this 3rd verse above.

We get to be redeemed and we have to pay a price, not the price of enslavement to God, rather the price of truth and righteous behavior to God and to all of God’s creations. We have to tend the earth, care for the climate, care for the animals and plants that are being extinguished by our greed and neglect. Care for the stranger, the poor and the needy through Tzedakah, righteous giving and living the truth of our good fortune, knowing I can’t keep it if I don’t give some of it away. It is God who gave me the wisdom, the strength, the insight to be able to support myself and I must help another to attain this basic human need. 

There, of course, is more to the cost of redemption. We have to change our ways of being! We have to leave our mendacious ways, we have to engage in truth talk each and every day. We have to speak truth to one another, which is the same as being kind to one another; Harriet and I learned from Dr. Stephen Marmer in 1990 at a conference chaired by Elaine Breslow, z”l, that kindness is speaking truth to another human being. How difficult this seems to be for most people today-speak truth without subterfuge, without hiding, without misconstruing another’s actions, without worrying about optics, etc. just speak the unvarnished truth. How refreshing a world we would live in. AND then, God is charging us to live justly and not render false verdicts nor love false witnesses. Oy, God also wants us to stop plotting revenge against one another, stop plotting how to use the vulnerabilities of another person against them, stop plotting how to use another human being to meet one’s selfish ends!! It is too high a price to pay, some of our elected officials say; I am not God, says some of our Church/Temple/Mosque leadership; Are you serious complains the people on the “right” side of any issue. All of these foolish people who are unwilling to follow God’s words, commands, wishes thinking they will outrun God’s truth.

In recovery, we are so grateful to be redeemed that truth, kindness, justice are reliefs and gifts that we get to use. We have loved lying, plotted to and done much evil against our fellow humans and our relationship with God and all other human beings has to be rooted in truth and righteousness. In recovery, we get to rejoice in our return, we get to be grateful for our redemption and we get to spread the GOOD NEWS of recovery to everyone we meet. How Blessed are we?!

We are still in exile today- I know this from the last verse above. For 30+ years, I led services at Beit T’Shuvah on Yom Kippur believing it was a day like a wedding because we are doing T’Shuvah each day/week. I see the prophet validates my belief even when the “leaders” of my congregation, my fellow clergy, and so many others laughed at me and thought me the fool. I realize that while I may be exiled from a community, I am not exiled from God as long as I love truth and integrity.  People today do not rejoice on their fast days, people today do not love truth, integrity, kindness and true justice, they want to continue to plot evil against their fellow human beings for their own gain. I have seen this in my work and I see this in the world. I am grateful for being redeemed and I realize how I abandon God when I feel rejected by people I trust. I realize that my T’Shuvah to God this year is to remember God doesn’t move nor does God ever stop loving me. We get to remember this through our spiritual work during Elul, the month before Yom Kippur, and during our entire year/life. God Bless and Stay safe, Rabbi Mark 

The Prophets - wisdom to enhance our daily living

Daily Prophets

Day 193

“And the word of God came to me saying: “Say to all the people and to the priests; when you fasted and lamented in the fifth and seventh months these past 70 years, did you fast for My benefit? Look this is the message that God proclaimed through the earlier prophets…Thus says the Lord: Judge with true justice, deal with compassion and kindness with one another. Do not defraud the widow, orphan, stranger, poor and do not plot evil against one another. They paid no heed.”(Zechariah7:5,7,9,10,11).

Zechariah is delivering a message that is as relevant now as it was then, is as true now as it was then and we continue to “present our backs and turn a deaf ear”(ibid;11) to God and to each other. 

The question in the first verse above is an important one for all of us to answer. God is telling us to stop playing the “optics” game. While the Rabbis were concerned with “maris ayin”, how things look, they were not implying that we should only care about how things look. God is calling all of us out, when we fast on Tisha B’Av are we fasting for our benefit-to show false piety as we and our ancestors have done in the past? During the years of exile, have we fasted in order to bring about a spiritual awakening within ourselves, acknowledging our responsibility for the destruction of the world and life God had given us? Or, as God is suggesting, do we fast in order to comply with ‘the law’ and to look good to one another? If there is no spiritual awakening on Tisha B’Av, if there is no uncovering of how we are still engaged in harshness, perverted justice and seeking of power for our own sake-the fast is a false fast and worthless in God’s eyes. 

On Yom Kippur, are we fasting so we can reconnect with God, reconnect with our souls and reconnect as a community and dedicate ourselves to work together to live more justly, more compassionately, more kindly, to stop getting together to exert power, subterfuge, and mendacity over others, to stop plotting evil against our fellow humans? This is what the prophet and God are asking us in this first verse and it is a haunting question as we are in the month of Elul to take stock of our year, our lies, our successes and our missing the marks. Are we engaged in an authentic review or are we just concerned with optics. “Never let them see you sweat” is a phrase used to help people deny what is truly going on within them. People will come to Kol Nidre and Yom Kippur and beat their chests and cry, etc. all the while plotting the meal, their next move in their power game and what is wrong with the service and the Rabbi. I shudder at our inability to learn from 2500+ years ago, all of the ‘smart’ people. Truly, we have gotten better at believing our own self-deception and getting others to go along with our mendacity in their desire to be deceived. 

The last verses leaves me in trembling awe. The message of the prophets is simple and in keeping with the message of Torah, which we read year after year: “take care of the widow, the orphan, the poor and the stranger; live in truth, justice, kindness and compassion; stop trying to make yourself better by harming another human being and learn to live together as a community.” Yet, the people of Judah, including the priests, failed to hear and return to God and God’s ways. As I look at the charlatans who proclaim loudly how they know the ways of God and they alone practice them and this gives them the right and power to stop another from voting, having control of their body, etc, I am concerned for our country and our world. Where are these charlatans open hearts and who will rescue us from their power grab? 

Rabbi Heschel teaches that “spiritual deprivation will be but an intensification or an extension of what they themselves had done to their own souls.”(The Prophets pg. 90). Many people ask “where is/was God?” In recovery, we know that God is as close to us as we permit God to be. In recovery, we are grateful for the opportunity to return, to hear the call after being deaf for so long, to turn to face God rather than run from God. In recovery, we seek to find ways to connect and respect the rights and the life of every human being. In recovery we are deeply aware of our need for community, for guidance  and for our ability to engage in self-deception and in truth. In recovery, we live our lives in service of God and God’s will for us. 

I know deafness well, prior to recovery, I had a PhD in deafness and turning my back. I have been blessed with better hearing of God and another in these past 32+ years. My fasts have been to connect with God and with another more and more each year, my outreach to the stranger, the poor and the needy has increased over the years and I have learned more and more about myself as well. God’s blessings are abundant in my life and I have honored them much more than not. I have made errors, sometimes big ones, and I have stood up and been responsible for them. As I reflect on my last Shabbat leading a service at Beit T’Shuvah this week, I am excited for what is next, sad for the way I am leaving and know that serving God with compassion, truth, justice and kindness is what is most important. In this way, I/we serve ourselves and everyone according to God’s way, no more plotting revenge, evil, power, just being decent is the path the prophet is telling us. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

The Prophets - wisdom to enhance our daily living

Daily Prophets

Day 192

The word of God came to me:…Take silver and gold and make crowns. Place one on the head of the High Priest Joshua son of Jehozadak, and say to him,”Thus says God, behold a man called the sprout/branch shall sprout up/branch out from the place he is and he shall build the Temple. He shall sit on the throne and there shall also be a priest seated on the throne and they shall have peace between them… if only you will hearken to the voice of Adonai, your God.”(Zechariah 6:9,11,12,13,15).

The beginning of this chapter is a revelation in the manner of Ezekiel, with chariots, horses and other mystical experiences. They became so in tune with God and so identified with God that they imagined/experienced themselves in heaven with God. This was also an experience that the Early Hassidic Masters had, ie Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev. 

In the verses for today, we hear Zechariah tell us what is going to happen to both rebuild the Temple and to rebuild the leadership of Judah/Jerusalem. Joshua will be crowned High Priest and he is being told that someone will be the Branch/Sprout to take over the building of the Temple and sit on the throne of kingship. The prophet here is crowning/anointing the High Priest and then the new King. This new covenant, new earth that he talked about earlier is coming to pass in that there is a new High Priest and a new King-from the appropriate families, probably, just not the choice of the former High Priest nor the former King. Rather the choice is God’s choice, which is an important distinction. God wants a reboot of everything in the return from exile. If we go back to the same people and the same lineage, what will be different seems to be God’s question and God’s response is to change everything up.

The name of the man for the rebuilding is Zemach, which could be his name and/or it could be where he comes from. He is a branch of and he sprouts up from God and from God followers, unlike the previous regime who followed their own negativity and desires, not God’s. I love this description and it makes me realize we are all branches of and sprouts up from God and most of us forget this basic fact. This reminds me of the introduction to Path of the Just by Rabbi Moses Luzzato, to paraphrase, because we accept our being created by God as a basic fact, we become oblivious to the meaning of this fact and the carrying out of the obligations this basic fact puts on us. Being a branch of God means we have to/get to act Godly, as Rabbi Harold Shulweis, z”l, teaches us. We have to/get to exercise our higher nature, our natural tendency to assist another human being, to care for the stranger, the needy and the poor. This way of being then sprouts up and causes us to be our own unique branch of God in all of our affairs. We no longer can say “we didn’t know”, rather we will say:”oops, I made a mistake”. We will no longer take advantage of the vulnerabilities of another, rather we will help them live well. We will no longer engage in mendacity because truth will sprout up from us and branch out to everyone we encounter everywhere we are. 

This branch is the only person who can build an edifice that God would dwell in. Since God dwells among us, as we learned in Exodus, and since we are branches and sprouts of God, only when we are tuned into and in harmony with another(s) can we build a sanctuary for ourselves so God is recognized as being among us. I am understanding the harmony between people is dependent on all of us hearing God’s voice. The political and the spiritual are not at odds with each other. Both know their lanes and both are serving God in their own ways. When we acknowledge that we do not know everything and another human beings wisdom sprouts up, we have to acknowledge they could know better in this area than I. It is this hearing of each other that leads to hearing God’s voice and it is the hearing of God voice that leads to hearing each other! We have to power to change our way of being, we have to power to be the branches and the sprouts of God’s love, compassion, justice, kindness and truth- will we use our power for God’s ends or our own selfish ones? 

In recovery, we know that we are branches of God and we know that we have a spirit that is true and a guide for us. We are constantly searching our inner lives to clean out the schmutz/crap that keeps us from hearing God’s voice within us and what we have to do to nurture our particular branch of Godliness so it can sprout up from us. In recovery, we are acutely aware that our spirituality is not relegated to meetings or religious experiences, rather, our spirituality is to be lived ‘in all of our affairs’ in all of our days.

I am struck with a teaching: there are three crowns, the crown of royalty, priesthood and wealth, yet the crown of a good name exceeds them all. I am embarrassed at all the times I didn’t live the truth of being a branch of God and acting Godly. I am sorry to the people who I pushed away rather than brought near. I am also grateful to everyone who has understood me and for everyone who has helped me sprout my wings to be a better branch of God. I know that my hearing of God keeps improving and my harmony with the people I share life with keeps getting better. I am so grateful for and to Harriet and Heather and Miles as well as my extended family for helping this off-tune person get more tuned in each day. Stay safe and God Bless, Rabbi Mark

The Prophets - wisdom to enhance our daily living

Daily Prophets

Day 191

“I lifted my eyes and saw a flying scroll. That, the angel explained, is the curse that goes out over the entire land, for everyone who has stolen…and gone unpunished and everyone who has sworn falsely and gone unpunished. Then the angel who spoke to me…said lift up your eyes and see what is approaching…That is evil and, thrusting it down in the tub, he pressed the leaden weight into its mouth.(Zechariah 5:1,3,5,8).

Zechariah is having another encounter with an angel and hearing messages that he wants us all to hear.  In this chapter, he uses the same words to describe how he sees what he sees as God spoke to Abraham: “lift up your eyes and see” in the command form. I am continually surprised by this command because it makes so much sense and most of us continue to follow it. We are either looking around us, looking down, seeing things with the same eyes and same lens as we have seen them before, etc. The angel her and God to Abraham are calling on us to see the world as God sees the world, see the world as the angels see the world, and see the world as it really is; not just how we want it to be. Take off our blinders and SEE, the angel is telling the prophet and, in turn, telling us.

We have to see the thieves in our midst who have stolen and gone unpunished. How is this possible? These are the thieves who still our time, our trust, who deceive us and convince us that wrong is right and sour is sweet. These are the people who play on our vulnerabilities, engage us in false conspiracy theories, convince us that the false god of their making is really God, etc. These are the thieves who use every loophole to avoid guilt, avoid taxes, avoid caring for the poor, the needy and the stranger, avoid being responsible for the evil they have wrought and constantly blame someone else for their wrongdoing. They are the ones who cheat their labor force and then sue them and tie them up in court so their labor force can’t collect. They are the ones who pay fines and admit no guilt, they are the people who pack courts with judges who follow their ideology, not caring about justice. And, they are the same ones who swear in God’s name that they are the TRUE BELIEVERS! They are the clergy who preach that Jesus loves the lion more than the lamb, that Jesus believes if you are rich and healthy it is because God loves you and if you are poor and/or ill it is because God doesn’t love you. What BS! These are the people to whom the curse is coming, according to the angel of God. These are the people Zechariah are warning us about to stay away from and beware of. 

We also have to see the evil that is in our midst and put a lid on it. This is also difficult to discern as we have experienced. We are in, and have been in at previous times, an assaultive moment. Our senses are being assaulted, truth is being assaulted, justice is being assaulted, our very ability to stay healthy is being assaulted, our individual uniqueness is being assaulted, our freedom to be who we are is being assaulted. Evil is not just being perpetrated by ‘the other side’, it is being perpetrated by many of us. It is wrong to take advantage of another person for your own gain and it is evil to make everyone conform to your way of thinking and being because it is ‘politically correct’ or ‘optics’. It is evil to subjugate Truth to political correctness and/or optics on either side of the spectrum. It is evil for the majority of us to allow this to continue. It is evil to  subvert the laws and the government to serve one person/family as is done in autocratic countries like Hungary. It is evil to promote falsehoods about life saving vaccines, it is evil to promote falsehoods about Israel and Jews, Arab Countries and Muslims, immigrants and dreamers, etc. The prophet is telling us to put a lid on this type of behavior once and for all. As Edmund Burke said: “Evil flourishes when good people do nothing.” Charles Weller, a typing teacher, said: “Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country”. Will we? 

In recovery, we have to constantly lift up eyes and see. We have looked through clouded glasses and lenses for our entire time prior to our recovery. The prophet is giving all of us a lesson that we all need to be in recovery from our willful blindness. In recovery, we continue to take inventory (do T’Shuvah) daily and are responsible for our misdeeds and our good deeds. In recovery, we are constantly putting a lid on our ability to do evil and we are continually searching ways to be of service to another(s), to put back into the world what we stole from it and to keep our word to friend and foe alike. 

I have to constantly lift up my eyes and see as well. I have been guilty of not doing this and each time, I hurt myself, Harriet, Heather, and many people around me. I have been angry at myself for not seeing the evil around me, for thinking that the evil around me are actually friends because they swore falsely to me. I also realize that I have done the same and each time, I must make my amends. I realize that the evil I don’t see is much more subtle and the false oaths are much more cunning. I also know that I am not going to break because of them, I will survive and see more because of these experiences and I will continue to put a lid on my own evil inclinations and help others do the same with theirs. I am continuing to come to the aid of my fellow human beings, to do something when I see evil even when it could hurt me, as it has in the past. God Bless and Stay Safe, Rabbi Mark

The Prophets - wisdom to enhance our daily living

Daily Prophets

Day 190

“The angel who talked with me came back and woke me as a man awakened from a deep sleep. Then he explained to me as follows:”This is the word of God to Zerubbabel: Not by might, nor by power, but by My spirit-said God.”(Zechariah4:1,6,).

Zechariah’s description of his encounter with the angel is a description that happens to many of us, more often than we think. It is the same experience that causes scientists to exclaim ‘eureka’! It is the experience many of us have after we solve a challenge that we worried over and kept trying to solve and couldn’t for awhile. It is the experience that causes us to say “it was right in front of us all the time”, “how could I have missed it when it was under my nose”, etc. The prophet is also reminding us that the angel we need is always around us, yet we are too asleep to notice the angel and/or too self-reliant to ask for assistance, and/or too afraid to ask for help. When we allow ourselves to be woken by the angels around us, we are opening ourselves up to finding solutions rather than winning. When we acknowledge how asleep we have been, we are open to ask for and receive forgiveness for our willful blindness. The prophet is giving us a message from God as well as from his experiences: Wake Up, Lift up your eyes and see, Circumsize the foreskin of your heart, etc. When we listen to another with open heartedness and open mindedness, we are awake. We are awake when we hear the call of our soul and God to do the next right thing. We are awake when we stop taking advantage of another’s vulnerabilities, just because we can. We are awake when we see the Image of God in our fellow humans. 

This awakening leads to the second verse above. In a world that worships power, prestige, money, buildings, etc, Zechariah comes to remind us that all the power and strength will not redeem us, will not make us worthy of being redeemed nor will it bring us closer to our authentic selves. Here is God, the All-Powerful, the Almighty, reminding us that it is by God’s spirit that we will succeed, survive, thrive. I can only imagine the response of the people of Judah, they have been captured and exiled by a human power that was greater than they and now they are hearing that what will save them in the future is God’s spirit and connection. These words are so antithetical to our way of being then and up to this day. Power is the only thing that matters to most of us. People use it for their own good and to strengthen themselves rather than using God’s spirit to wield their power for the common good and the highest good-care for one another. Debby Friedman, z”l, wrote a song-“Not by might, not by power, but by spirit alone will we all live in peace.” These words, from Zechariah, were true in his time and so very very true in ours. I ask the leaders of our country, our state, our city, our Jewish Community if they are following the prophet’s words/God’s words or are they once again using God as a battering ram to win and/or a shield to justify? Zechariah is clear that neither position is cool with God.

Rabbi Heschel teaches regarding this last verse: “those who have a sense of beauty know that a stone sculptured by an artist’s poetic hands has an air of loveliness… The prophet’s ear, however is attuned to a cry imperceptible to others. What is the highest good? Three things ancient society cherished above all else: wisdom, wealth and might. To the prophets, such infatuation was ludicrous and idolatrous.(The Prophets pg. 7-8).  He goes on to say:”The prophets were the first men in history to regard a nation’s reliance upon force as evil. God’s special concern is not for the mighty and successful, but for the lowly and the downtrodden, for the stranger and the poor…the heart of God goes out to the humble, to the vanquished, to those not cared for.”(ibid pg.166-67). Rabbi Heschel once again shakes me to my core. I love beauty and I have to be on guard not to worship it; how many divorces happen because one member of the couple see someone else more “beautiful” in physical and/or spiritual ways than their partner? How often do we worship buildings and powerful people? Celebrity is not gained because of achievements in making the world better, it is gained through likes and views and making the world worse! “Why can’t we all just get along”, Rodney King’s words are constantly hanging in the air and should be ringing in our ears as I am hearing Rabbi Heschel today. We are idolators, those of us who forsake God to worship mendacious politicians to be able to have a seat at the ‘big people’s table’. I am embarrassed at how many of my colleagues in the Clergy have sold their souls to have power, who practice Avodah Zarah, idolatry to keep their jobs! 

In recovery, we know that we live each day because of God’s grace and God’s spirit in us. We are sober one day at a time, depending on our spiritual condition, as it says in the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous. In recovery, we are constantly keeping our hunger for power in check so we can connect with God’s Spirit and make the world and our living one grain of sand better each day. 

I worshiped power and went into alcoholism and criminality because of my idolatry. I have sat with powerful people in my recovery and I see the times I gave in to my need to exercise power for my sake and when I exercised power for the sake of God. I am painfully aware of my errors when I cherished wealth and might over spirit and care. I am also aware of my sending up for the downtrodden, the humble, the vanquished, etc. I am alive and well because of God’s spirit after my exile and my return is grounded in spirit and love. Stay safe and God Bless, Rabbi Mark

The Prophets - wisdom to enhance our daily living

Daily Prophets

Day 189

“The angel of God said to the Accuser; “God rebukes you, Accuser/Satan; and the rebuke is in God choosing Jerusalem (again), it is a brand plucked from the fire. He said to him (Joshua), See! I have removed guilt from you…Thus said the Lord of Hosts if you walk in My paths and guard My paths and also be just in My house…I will allow you to be the High Priest. I will remove that country’s guilt in a single day. In that day, declares God, you will be inviting one another to the shade of vines and fig trees.”(Zechariah 3:2,4,6,9,10)

Zechariah is reminding us of God’s love and God’s eternal forgiveness. In the first verse above, God is rebuking Satan/Accuser for his readiness to deceive the court with facts that are spun in a certain manner to tell only part of the story. For the Accuser/Satan, winning is all that matters and whatever is necessary to win is what Satan is willing to do. Satan/accuser has always been at the ready to condemn the Jews, the poor, the downtrodden, the needy so she/he can have the power to rule and control. Where is the Satan/accuser in us? Are we allowing that part of us to rule our actions and our ways of being? Are we seeking power for power’s sake and twisting the facts and the truth into lies in order to accuse another person and gain both their power and power over them?

“A brand plucked from the fire” describes both Joshua the High and the People Israel. Brand here means: a charred piece of wood/a remnant of the fire. Joshua and a remnant of the Jews were saved from death through exile, the city was set on fire/destroyed as was all of Judah. He and his fellow Jews in exile were saved, they know the power of fire and they know the power of God’s saving Grace. We all can trace our history to being this “brand”, all of us in this country are immigrants, children of immigrants, descendants of immigrants, so all of us were “plucked from the fire” of persecution, poverty, injustice, mendacity, etc and saved by the love of our ancestors and the love of God. God is rebuking the Accusers, the Satans, who want to finish the job, who want to follow through on the eradicating of the Jews, Muslims, poor, needy, immigrants, anyone who isn’t ‘them’. Yet, we are all still engaging in being the Accuser in order to make ourselves feel right, vindicated and powerful. How very, very sad. 

God speaks to Joshua and lets him know that his guilt does not last forever! God’s mercy and kindness, love and attachment overpower God’s anger and hurt. God doesn’t need our continuous guilt, God wants our continuous connection. We have to accept God’s forgiveness, the forgiveness of another(s) and then forgive ourselves. We do this through walking in God’s path, keeping God’s ways and living a life based on truth, justice, compassion, kindness and love. Joshua is promised to be restored to his position as High Priest as long as he lives these principles and not just talks about them. The ritual aspects of the job don’t seem as important to God as the actual living the ways the rituals are supposed to help us to do. This is such an important concept in today’s ‘political correct/incorrect’ world. We have charlatans of faith denying the need for health care, care for the poor and the needy and we have charlatans of progressive denying their own racism and hatred towards anyone who isn’t them! We are in a state where Satan/Accuser is ruling and giving power to either polarity. Zechariah’s words come to us in the ‘nick of time’ I hope. 

I call upon all of us to walk in God’s ways, follow God’s path and do God’s justice in our daily lives. I call on all of us to rebuke the Satan/Accuser in us and around us. My grandfather, z”l, never said a bad word about another human being and would not let us shit talk or trash someone else’s name. He said, we are not walking in their shoes, we don’t know what happened to them and they have the power to trash or build up their/our own name-it is not our right to do this to them. I think of these words and marvel at God’s vision and the vision of the prophet:”I will remove the country’s guilt in one day.” We are clean in the day we stop being Satan/Accuser. We are clean in the day we invite one another to sit together and give each other shade, rest and food. We are clean in the day we see our similarities and allow our differences to lift each other up and help one another. 

In recovery, we are learning to love ourselves, to stop beating ourselves us mentally and physically as well as spiritually. We are so aware that we are also a “brand plucked from the fire” and we have the internal and some of us the external scars to remind us. In recovery, we look for and see the similarities and the worth of every human being and we no longer stand as the Satan/Accuser towards ourselves and another(s). 

I think of my grandfather’s words and I am guilty of not following them. As I age, I get better and I think of how I trashed his name, my father’s name and my family name prior to my recovery. There is an interesting difference between Satan and the Prophet, I realize. The prophet accuses in order for us to recognize our errors and return, Satan accuses in order to win and subjugate/kill their adversary. I have been like a prophet much more than Satan in my recovery and for the times I have been Satan, I have done and continue to do T’Shuvah. I pray we all hear the prophet in us and around us and cease to be Satan in our own lives and in the lives of another(s). Stay safe and God Bless, Rabbi Mark

The Prophets - wisdom to enhance our daily living

Daily Prophets

Day 188

“Jerusalem will be full of people and cattle and I, says God, I will be a wall of fire around it and My Glory will be in it. Shout for joy, fair Zion, for I come and dwell in your midst, declares God. In that day, many nations will attach themselves to God and become God’s people and I will dwell in your midst. Judah will be God’s inheritance, God’s portion in the Hoy Land and God will choose Jerusalem again.”(Zechariah 2:8,9,14-16).

This chapter begins with a vision that is similar to Ezekiel’s in that the prophet sees angels and horns, etc. The message, however is different because Zechariah is bringing good news to the people. They are about to be redeemed and sent back to Jerusalem and the prophet is giving them courage and strength to believe they have been forgiven, redeemed and can rebuild without fear. 

We, in modernity, forget the power of prophecy and the comfort of God’s words and actions. We, in modernity, also forget that we have an obligation to follow through on truly living in God’s ways, not just giving lip service to it. We still follow the example of ancient Israel in performing rituals correctly and still taking advantage of the poor, needy and the stranger. We still believe that our cunning will save us and God will not notice. We have rebuilt without fear, foolishly believing we have been redeemed while not noticing the ways that we are destroying those we consider inferior as well as ourselves. Zechariah is reminding us that God’s glory and protection is here as long as we follow God’s ways, and act in God’s Name. Instead of using God’s glory and God’s fire as protection, guidance and joy; we use it for entitlement, power and glory. We are, like ancient Israel, using God’s power to destroy ourselves while engaging in the self-deception of enriching ourselves. 

“Shout for joy” is the call of the prophet because God is dwelling in our midst. While that is true in Jerusalem, what many of us forget is that God dwells with us in exile as well. God dwelling in our midst is not just a sign of forgiveness and redemption, it is a reminder and call to action. It is a safeguard against our false egos and baser nature to take advantage of the people we are to care for. It is a constant advocacy for the poor and the stranger. It is a call to our better natures to care for the earth, the animals and people in it and care for God. Zechariah is building up our spirits and I am seeing him call to us to live in a way that is compatible with being a partner of God. The angel delivering this message to the prophet is eager to confront Zechariah with this good news and to imply the covenant that is attached to this good news. 

An important message is contained in the last two verses above. Jerusalem and Judah are to be restored to their places of honor and inheritance, beauty and strength, gathering place and light to the nations. Since these verses are in the ‘future’ tense, they have begun and are not yet completed. We have to finish the work that God has begun and our ancestors began. We get to be the welcoming place for God, we get to hang out with God and be the example of God’s love and direction that will bring other people to join with us. We get to act in and live in God’s world and continue to do the next right thing, do our daily inventory, worship God with our actions, not just our words. Then, “on that day” the nations of the world led by the righteous visionary people of same will come to “attach themselves to God”. Then, we will live in harmony and there will be a joining of spirits of humans and God. This is the upbeat message of Zechariah, we have yet to follow his lead!

Rabbi Heschel teaches “Prophecy always moves in a polarity, yet the tension yes and no, of anger and love, of doom and redemption, is often dissolved in the certainty of God’s eternal attachment,”(The Prophets pg.95). This teaching is so important to remember, God is always attached to us. God is always with us. Our experience of loneliness and isolation is one that is of our making. We are like Cain in interpreting our errors as God’s rejection. God doesn’t reject us, God is with us, we reject God because of our shame at not living up to God’s call and feeling unworthy of God’s attachment to us. Rabbi Heschel is teaching us that the extremes we feel can be and, I add, must be mitigated by God’s “eternal attachment”. We get to hang out with God all the time, if we choose. As the Kotzker Rebbe said:”Where do you find God? Wherever/whenever you let God in.” We can let God in, are we willing to? 

In recovery, we continually seek to let God in, continually seek to better understand God’s call to us and fulfill it. In fact, this is the major joy of recovery, getting to live life in ways that answer God’s call to us, getting to fulfill God’s path for us, getting to experience the worthiness of being human. In recovery, we have attached ourselves to God and experience the redemption, the love, the joy, the connection and the community we sought for so long. 

I have been redeemed and I have some work to do to live completely attached to God. I am blessed by God’s love and only God’s companionship, attachment to me brought me out of the Egypt I was in 32+ years ago. I never have to ask “where is God” I only can ask “where is Mark”. I joined and helped to create a community of God-Attachers 32+ years ago and we all rejoice and shout for joy in our connection to God and to one another. Stay safe and God Bless, Rabbi Mark

The Prophets - wisdom to enhance our daily living

Daily Prophets

Day 187

“In the eighth month of the second year of Darius, the word of God came to the prophet Zechariah. Thus said God of Hosts, turn to me and I will turn back to you. Do not be like your fathers, when the prophets called to them “Come turn from your evil deeds and evil ways, they did not obey nor give heed to Me. Proclaim! I am very jealous for Jerusalem, for Zion…I graciously return to Jerusalem, my house shall be built in her. God will again comfort Zion and choose Jerusalem again.” (Zechariah 1:1,3,4,14,16,17).

Zechariah is preaching to the people who are getting ready to return to Jerusalem and to Judah. Cyrus has already allowed for the captives to return and, it seems, not everyone left all at once. We do know that some of the people stayed in Babylon as the Babylonian Talmud was developed there. I am not sure whom the prophet is speaking to, yet it seems as if he has to support and encourage the people to return. 

The first verse above reminds the people that God is still calling for the people’s return. Today is the first day of Elul and it seems appropriate to be speaking about return/tshuvah. Just as God and the prophets called for the people to ‘turn from their evil deeds and ways” in real time, the prophet is calling for the people to do the same while in exile. This seems to indicate that some of the people had not learned the lessons of the exile, they were not accepting responsibility for their actions that caused the exile and believed they were ‘above the law’ even God’s law!

As we are entering this month of Elul, the month of inventory, tshuvah/amends, and reconnection with those we have harmed and those who come to us to repair the damages they are responsible for, we have to remember that God is still calling to us:”RETURN!!” God still is asking us some 2500+ years later to turn away from our evil deeds and evil ways. God is still hoping and praying that, unlike our ancestors, we will heed God’s call and turn back to God and God’s ways.

We are living in similar times as Jerusalem of old, when the leaders and followers believed they were God’s messengers and they could bend God’s laws, God’s words, God’s plan to their own liking. They believe their evil ways are actually good ways because they alone can fix everything. Reading the prophets words above I wonder what stops all of us from hearing and obeying the words of God and the prophets to RETURN!? We have this month of Elul to reconnect with our authenticity and our actions, positive and negative. We have this month to hear God’s call to return and to obey. We have the power within us to withstand our inner horror at our errors and to take appropriate pride in our good deeds. Let us begin this work now!

The final verse above is the catalyst for this work, I believe. God will always comfort Jerusalem and us when we return. Rabbi Heschel, in his interview with Carl Stern says: The biggest message of the Bible, of the prophets of Israel is that God takes man seriously…God should have been disgusted. He said, “No I will keep the human species alive. I’m waiting…But He’s still waiting, waiting, waiting for a mankind that will live by justice and compassion. He’s in search of man.” The prophet’s time and words prove Rabbi Heschel’s words. God has been waiting forever to comfort us and to comfort Jerusalem. God is waiting for us to stop our senseless hatred, our evil drive for power, our evil deeds towards God’s creations. God is waiting for us to turn back to living a life of justice and compassion, truth and kindness, caring and love. We do this by participating in our own inventories, engaging in the work of Elul and doing our T’Shuvah/amend. 

In recovery, we have turned from our evil deeds and evil ways. We still make mistakes, they are not with evil intent anymore, they are no longer done with a lack of caring and thought. They are “missing the marks” rather than ‘how can I get mine’. In recovery, we turn our life and our will over to the God and become more of an instrument for God, for goodness, for recovery than an instrument for our selfish needs. In recovery, the interests of another(s) become our concerns as Rabbi Heschel teaches. We continue to do our daily inventory, each day is a day of turning away from our negative patterns/actions and turning to the positive patters/ways we are attaching ourselves to. In recovery, we are more connected to God, hear God and follow God more and more each day. 

I have heard God’s call to return and I followed it, after hanging up on God many times. I am aware that God’s call to us is also God’s way of showing us love and acceptance. Heeding and obeying the words of the prophet above is my way of reciprocating God’s love for me back to God. Doing my inventory, which has come out in these writings and in other reflections, making amends/T’Shuvah, resewing the fabric of relationships that want to be resown are the ways I leave my evil deeds and evil ways. I left evil ways a long time ago, I still commit evil deeds, 95% of the time unwittingly. I am using this month to return to God, to return to the people who love me and to return to my rightful place. I pray you take advantage of this spiritual vortex in time to do the same. God Bless and Stay safe, Rabbi Mark

The Prophets - wisdom to enhance our daily living

Daily Prophets

Day 186

“Yet to such a one I look, to the poor and brokenhearted who is concerned about my word. Hear the word of God, you who are concerned about His word! Rejoice with Jerusalem and be glad for her, all you who love her! Join in her jubilation all you who mourned over her. As a mother comforts her child, so I will comfort you; you will find comfort in Jerusalem.”(Isaiah 66:2,5,10,13).

The first verse above is another lesson for all of us, I believe. The prophet is telling us to stop trying to have it all together, stop being impervious to God, to emotion, to truth, to kindness, to love, etc. The poor and the brokenhearted are the ones to whom God looks, not the rich, famous, scholarly, erudite, politically correct, etc. Many of the people who are being vilified in our world now are the poor and brokenhearted. Viktor Orban is being hailed by Tucker Carlson, and by extension Fox News, as a paragon of virtue yet when Harriet and I visited Hungary a few years ago the Jews told me they were as worried about the anti-semitism as during WWII! 

We hate the poor and the brokenhearted because we see them as weak and they reflect our neediness back to us and we can’t stand it. Yet, Second Isaiah is telling us that only through our broken hearts can God enter, only with a broken heart can we truly hear and be concerned with God and God’s words. We have to end our false beliefs that we have to be “tough and strong, a rugged individualist and warrior”. We have to allow our broken hearts to be open to God, as Leonard Cohen says, the crack is what allows the light to enter. We are not tough and strong, an individual and warrior in our quest for wholeness, we are dependent on God, on community, on teamwork, on cooperation, on truth, kindness, love, compassion, caring and justice to be whole and to live well. Yet, we continue to engage in the major disease of self-deception and make things worse. We are the people, the ones who are engaging in self-deception and mendacity that will suffer the fate of those who didn’t/wouldn’t return to God. 

God calls us to rejoice with Jerusalem as God is restoring her to her new glory. The ‘us’ here is those who love her and mourned for her. I am fascinated by these qualifiers. What does it mean to love and mourn for Jerusalem? I hear the voices of Isaiah, Jeremiah, all the other prophets who called to Israel and Judah and Jerusalem to return and love God and love the city. I believe loving Jerusalem is to love the whole story, to love the search for wholeness and togetherness. It is to mourn the fact that it took the destruction of the city and the Temple to begin to get our attention. As I see the world today and see the polarization, I realize we are in a similar situation, the extremes are pulling at the fabric of compromise and incremental change that makes for a democracy. The extremes are either bastardizing God’s words, God’s path and God’s will or denying that God plays any role in our daily living. For those of us who live in the grey, the center-right to center-left, we are homeless and brokenhearted. Maybe this is why we can listen to each other and hear each other so much better, our hearts are open to hear God’s voice in another(s) and know that we are not God.

Rabbi Heschel teaches “It is God’s involvement in the suffering of man that explains this particular concern for the downtrodden and contrite. To extricate the people from despondency, to attach meaning to their past and present misery, was that the task that the prophet and God had in common…deliverance from captivity and the restoration of Zion and Jerusalem.” The last verse above exemplifies this thought, this task. We will be comforted by God when we allow God’s love and comfort to penetrate our obstinacy. We have to be willing to leave our low-grade misery and our love of suffering, we have to leave our self-deception that we are not suffering and/or miserable and see that our need for power, prestige, money, etc are all ways to hide from our broken hearts and our misery. Joining with God and allowing God to extricate us from all this is our challenge and our reward!

In recovery, we are brokenhearted and we are grateful for this state of being. We know that when we were a closed system, life was not so good and staying brokenhearted allows us to hear, experience and follow God’s path and ways. Turning our lives and will over to the care of God has enhanced our joy, extricated us from our misery and suffering and given us a newfound will to live. We have learned to rejoice in the success of another(s) rather than being jealous and/or resentful. We have learned to hear the voice of God in one another and not be judgmental. In recovery, we are comforted by God and by another(s) each day. 

I have had my heart broken many times by people. Each time, after my initial howling from the pain, I seek the light of God that comes in through my brokenness. I do not believe I am ‘broken’ and I know that I have to keep the brokenheartedness that God has given me to remain so I remain open to healing, to learning and to coming together with people again. My broken heart causes me to comfort another and be comforted, I get to do T’Shuvah and forgive another(s) because of my broken heart. Thank you God for showing me my path through my broken heart and thank you who have broken my heart for opening me up to new experiences with God. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

The Prophets- wisdom to enhance our daily living

Daily Prophets

    Day 185

“​So that he who blesses himself in the land shall bless himself by the God of faith; and he who swears in the land shall swear by the God of faith; because the former troubles are forgotten, and because they are hidden from my eyes. But be glad and rejoice forever in that which I create; for, behold, I create Jerusalem a rejoicing, and her people a joy. The wolf and the lamb shall feed together“.(Isaiah 65:16,18,25). 

In the first verse above, the prophet is calling to the people to remember that the land is God’s creation and gift. The blessings and oaths that people make to care for the land, to work the land and to live by and in the land are really blessings make to God who keeps faith with the people and with our ancestors. Faith, as Rabbi Heschel teaches in God in Search of Man, is loyalty to an event/experience and loyalty to our response. Rabbi Heschel reminds us that faith is also faithfulness. God has, does and will stay loyal to us and to God’s covenant no matter what we do. Yet, the exiles have taught us that this loyalty and love is not a ‘get out of jail free’ card. It comes with obligations and actions we get to fulfill. When we do not, exile results. This beginning of this verse reminds us of God being everything, the land, the wind, the spirit. Everything is God’s creation and has God as it’s foundation, including humanity; we have to keep remembering and honoring this fact. 

The second half of the first verse is the blessing we receive constantly, God forgets our earlier iniquities and our earlier strifes. When we call out to God in remorse and responsibility, God accepts our T’Shuvah and we are able to reconnect to God. I realize that it is not God who hides, rather it is us who hide, turn away, disconnect from God. I know our tradition says God hides, yet I see this in the same vein as Cain who decided that God didn’t accept his offering; how would we know God doesn’t accept the offering and God hides when God is incorporeal? We use these descriptors to cover up our hiding and our responsibility for our troubles. God, as the prophet is teaching us, forgives and forgets once we turn back to God. This is unconditional love as I understand it; always being open to our return and forgiving easily and completely. 

Second Isaiah reminds us that God’s creations are creations that are joyful and here for our rejoicing. Joy is not the same as happiness to me, it is a state of being where even the ‘bad’ things that happen are taken in with an eye to ‘what can I learn from this’, ‘what question is this experience the answer to’. Living in the state of joy doesn’t mean there is no sadness, no hurt, it means that I will not stay there and I will go through it. Getting stuck in any of these experiences leads us to depression, anxiety, bitterness and low-grade misery. God creates in us the power to live in joy and deal with all our emotions by going through them, knowing that they will pass. Joy is the state of being connected to God and to humanity, to community and to family. Joy is the way of life that God is giving to us in this chapter, will we take it and live in it? 

The promise of the last verse is the promise that one day we will all be able to live together. We can bring about the days of the messianic era by learning to accept each other and, while we have disagreements, find ways to work together towards common goals. In today’s polarized society, it is impossible for this promise to be fulfilled. While many ‘people of faith’ wonder where is God in this strife, I wonder when will we put down our swords and see the humanity and the God-Image in one another? We don’t have to have the same ideas and the same religions nor the same political bent, we do have to recognize the humanity of one another for this last promise to be fulfilled. God is waiting for us, as Rabbi Heschel says in his interview with Carl Stern 10 days before his death. Are we willing to meet each other face to face, God-Image to God-Image to make this happen? I pray we find the spirit of God within us to do it sooner so we don’t have to go into exile again!

In recovery, we experience the reconnection to God and to one another so powerfully. We know the opposite of exile is connection. We also know that this reconnection begins by reconnecting to the power greater than ourselves that is both in the universe and in us. We rejoice in our recovery and we are living in joy each and every day of our recovery while going through difficult, ‘shitty’, sad, etc times. The joy is we are not hiding, we are not blaming, we are responsible for our part of each experience, good and not so good. In recovery, we seek and move closer to the last words above and see one another as travelers on the same journey; “trudging the road of happy destiny”

My own experiences are proof of the prophet’s words. I have been forgiven by God and many people along this journey of life. I have learned to delight and rejoice in the portion that God gives to me and not need to have everything I want. I know each of us is an Image of God and when I can’t see it and/or another person isn’t living/meeting my Tzelem with their Tzelem, I work hard to have compassion and I don’t always do. I see that I also have not sought out ways to eat with the wolf all the time. I also know that living in the state of Joy has allowed me to not get stuck in the sadness and the exile that I have experienced, especially as of late. I am keeping faith with God and returning to God’s ways with my imperfections and being responsible for my part in my exile. Stay safe and God Bless, Rabbi Mark

The Prophets - wisdom to enhance our daily living

Daily Prophets

    Day 184

“But we are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteous actions are as filthy rags; and we all fade as a leaf; and our iniquities, like the wind, have taken us away. ​But now, O Lord, you are our father; we are the clay, and you our potter; and we are all the work of your hand. Be not so terribly angry, O Lord, nor remember iniquity forever; behold, see, we beseech you, we are all your people.”(Isaiah 64:5,7,8).

 The first verse above is the recognition of our actions and the results from them. We are as an unclean thing is the key here. The prophet is telling God we are not unclean in and of ourselves, we seem as one is an important distinction to me. Just as with our righteous actions are as filthy rags, the prophet is reminding God to not discount the goodness, the righteousness that we have done because of the iniquities that “have taken us away”. Second Isaiah is teaching us an important lesson and reminding God that we are not just our iniquities. We are more than our worst missing the marks. We have done good things and we have kept faith. 

This lesson is one which we all are guilty of. As is said; one Oh Shit wipes out 100 ‘atta persons’. We are seeing another(s) for their errors and imperfections in order to feel good about ourselves. This happens in politics, in business, and in our personal affairs, we are constantly looking for the ‘chinks in the armor’ so we don’t have to feel bad about our own imperfections. This is either/or thinking and behaving. Second Isaiah is calling to God and, I believe, all of us, to stop seeing human beings as one-dimensional. We are both/and; doing right and missing the mark! One does not wipe out the other, yet we live as if it does. We make idols of people and then search for their errors so we can bring them down. We do the same things with ourselves. People are constantly in fear of ‘being found out’ because we are stuck on the idea of perfection. We are not perfect, nor will we ever be, yet we continue to put up the facade of perfection or we continue to beat ourselves up for not being perfect and we fall into depression, anxiety, addiction, etc. 

The prophet is reminding God that we are God’s creations and we cannot be wholly to blame for being imperfect. God made us, God is parent and God is the potter who molds and shapes us. God made us imperfect and, while our job is to improve ourselves and the world one grain of sand more each day, we should not be lost forever because of our imperfections. Yes, we have missed the mark greatly through our actions of idolatry, cruelty, being power hungry and we are still Your people, God. We need Your chastisement at times to return, we need Your anger to remind us to clean up our acts, we need You to hide Yourself in order to realize how much we need You, this is all true at times. We also need to know that You are still with us, that You are still calling to us and responding to our searching for You. We need You, God, to accept our amends/T’Shuvah and take us back. The prophet is reminding both God and all of us that we are God’s people, we have rebelled and revolted against God and we are still in need of God and we are in ready to accept God’s love and God’s path. 

Rabbi Heschel teaches “Yet, Second Isaiah does not passively accept Zion’s lot. Far from being silent he challenges the Lord putting the Lord in remembrance. The prophet voices his bewilderment at the silence of the Almighty.”(The Prophets pg. 185-186). I am hearing Rabbi Heschel’s words in relation to his actions. Rabbi Heschel spent his life calling us to return to God. He was an activist who worked so hard for all of us to ‘be human’. He taught us by the way he lived to seek peace and end strife, to stop seeing with prejudiced eyes, to acknowledge our similarities rather than promote our differences. He is constantly reminding us to seek God, to live a life that is compatible with our being partners with God. Rabbi Heschel also challenged God and through his challenges brought many of us lonely people back home to God and God embraces us with love and kindness, truth and compassion. We have to continue Rabbi Heschel’s work, we the inheritors of his words and ways, we who have returned to God to whom God has returned to get to continue his path and his work. I pray we are willing and worthy of this. 

In recovery, we leave either/or thinking and see the totality of living. We recognize we are imperfect and we continue to improve. As the 12th step says: “we continue to practice these principles in all our affairs”. Addiction/behaviors were the symptoms of our problems, the problem was our separation from God and from living decently. In recovery, we recover our integrity, our decency and a ‘new pair of glasses’. 

I am guilty of missing the mark by allowing one ‘oh shit’ to wipe out connections. I have been the one whom other people have done the same thing to. I am so sorry for the times I have done this and have made amends to most of the people I did this to and I see how I still do this at times. Like the prophet teaches me and as Rabbi Heschel teaches me, I have to continue to see the whole person and I have to see myself as a whole person. My commitment is to continue to be in Radical Amazement and not get stuck in old notions and ideas. I also commit to see everyone in both/and thinking and leave the either/or. I will not be naive and I will not be distrustful, I will see each person and situation for what it is, rather than what I want it to be. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

The Prophets - wisdom to enhance our daily living

Daily Prophets

    Day 183

“In all their affliction God was afflicted…in God’s love and in God’s pity God redeemed them; and God bore them, and carried them all the days of old. Where is Your zeal and Your mighty acts? Your compassion and Your mercy toward me are withheld from me. Lord, why have you made us stray from your ways, and hardened our heart from your fear? Return for your servants’ sake, the tribes of your inheritance.“(Isaiah 63:9,15,17)

Second Isaiah is recounting for God the history of the people. In the first verse above, he is reminding both God and us that when we are afflicted, so is God. The prophet is reminding us and God that we are inextricably linked together. We are so entwined with God that our suffering becomes God’s suffering. God is engaged with humanity at times of sorrow and joy, at that time and in all times. God’s love, pity, compassion, connection, and covenant override the sadness and anger that God experiences, according to the prophets, and God’s redemption is always near. Second Isaiah seems to be reminding the people not to lose courage, strength, heart and willingness to be redeemed by reminding them of days of old. Many of us forget that God is afflicted by the pain and suffering experienced by human beings and we inflict the same onto ourselves and another(s). These words cause me to reflect on the suffering I have caused and I am bowed by my actions. I and we have to commit to end our afflicting another(s) because of our own pain and/or our need to be powerful. 

In the second verse above, Second Isaiah is calling God out. I love his fearlessness and his belief that God is still in tzimtzum, hiding. While he knows the end of exile is near, he is getting inpatient it seems. He is calling for God to end God’s withholding of zeal, mighty acts, compassion and mercy. I understand this to be the prophet’s call to God that enough is enough. God’s silence and inaction are bewildering to the prophet, it seems. I am fascinated by this verse because the prophet has been in contact with God, hence prophecy, and knows that God is going to redeem the people, yet it isn’t happening in the prophet’s time. I think about the words found on a cellar wall in Cologne, Germany after the Shoah, “I believe in God even when God is silent”. Second Isaiah is taking God’s inaction as silence and I am not sure he is correct. God’s time is different than our time and, I believe, God is waiting for a critical mass to return to God for redemption to take place. Yet, the prophet’s plea here is one that many have thought/spoken. “Where are You, God” is a familiar refrain in times of distress and despair for many of us. I have asked this question many times in my life also. The response always seems to be “where are you, Mark” and that is when I find God and me and we are together again. 

Rabbi Heschel’s teachings on the last verse blow me away. He teaches:”The opposite of Freedom is not determinism, but hardness of heart. Freedom presupposes openness of heart, of mind, of eye, and ear…Freedom is not a natural disposition, but God’s precious gift to man…While not denying that the people sin of their own free will, there is a subtle awareness of God’s being involved in man’s going astray…” Rabbi Heschel’s words cause me to tremble with fear and awe. Hardness of heart is what the prophet is accusing God of in a way by not redeeming the people already, he is pleading with God to open God’s heart to the people and welcome us back. Rabbi Heschel is also pointing out that God gave us the free will to be callous, to go astray, to forget the gift. To paraphrase Einstein, the Intuitive Mind(I call soul) is a gift and the rational mind a servant, we have forgotten the gift and worship the servant comes to mind for me in reading Rabbi Heschel. We get to use the gift of freedom wisely or throw it away. While the prophet is calling God to redeem us and knows it will take God to return us to our proper places, while he is also reminding God that God plays a part in our exile as well as our return, I think his words are a plea to God that we are ready, we need God’s intervention to regain the gift because we threw it away once and need to be reassured of our worthiness through God’s redemption and then we can honor our inheritance from God. 

In recovery, we are aware of how we hardened our hearts and turned away from God, from another(s), from our own humanity. We are aware of our need for God to redeem us and we realize that what we are recovering is our integrity, our humanity and our freedom. We called out to God in our exile without being responsible for our hardness of heart. In recovery we know that our brokenness is imperative if we are to be open to hear, understand, see and truly take in the gift of freedom that God is giving us in recovery. Each day we seek to stay open, willing, and in truth to deepen the brokenness of our hearts to let more of God in. In this way we can act more Godly in our daily life. 

I know that God gave me the will and the power to be callous and hard hearted. I know that God was with me in those times as well. I know this because God was so near and dear when I called out, when I asked to return and when I asked for wonder and knowledge. The freedom I experience is not continuous and not linear. It is truly based on my spiritual condition each day. My commitment is to remember that God is with me, wants me to be open hearted and helps me grow as I let God’s light propel me to more goodness and less affliction of another(s) and myself. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

The Prophets- wisdom to enhance our daily living

Daily Prophets

    Day 182

“For Zion’s sake will I not hold my peace, and for Jerusalem’s sake I will not rest, until her righteousness goes forth like radiance, and her salvation like a burning torch.  And the nations shall see your righteousness, and all kings your glory: You shall no more be termed Forsaken; nor shall your land any more be termed Desolate; for the Lord delights in you, and your land shall be married.”(Isaiah 62:1,2,4).

Second Isaiah is speaking up for Judah and Jerusalem. He is calling to God to restore Jerusalem now, or at least soon. The prophet who usually calls the people to account is now the spokesperson for the people to God. Second Isaiah is very forceful about the return to and of Jerusalem. What is he trying to save and restore? An idea, a way of being that never really was and yet the promise of what could be is uppermost in his mind. Second Isaiah is calling out to God and to the people, I believe, to radiate righteousness and be the safe harbor for everyone’s salvation. 

Radiating righteousness is a beautiful image to me. Isaiah is calling to us to ensure that this happens. We have to build the ‘city of wholeness’ into a shining example of righteousness and then we will achieve salvation and make it possible for another(s) to achieve salvation as well. The people of Jerusalem will not have the market on righteousness and salvation, rather they will be the examples and the spreaders of righteousness and salvation to the world, a “light unto the nations”. I think of Ronald Reagan calling Washington DC the “shining city on a hill” and we see that the light has dimmed somewhat just as Jerusalem’s light dimmed in the time of the prophets AND they kept hope alive, they held humans and God responsible for returning the light, the righteousness and the salvation to both the city, the people and all people. How are we engaged in bringing righteousness and salvation to country, city, home, to Jerusalem? 

 Second Isaiah goes on to tell the people of what will be and what they shall make happen in partnership with God. They are going to create such righteousness and salvation that the entire world will see the light and, hopefully, want to bring this same righteousness and salvation to their people, their land. Kings will see the glory of the city as well as the Glory of God and will finally bend their knees to God. What a beautiful vision, much like Reagan’s vision of Washington DC, and in both cases this prophecy is yet to happen. We are charged, as I read Second Isaiah with making this happen in our time, in every time; yet we delay, we dally, we get stuck in senseless hatred and competition for power and prestige, there is none of this type of behavior in the prophets visions and words. He is telling us that we are not forsaken, Jerusalem is not forsaken any more, Jerusalem is not desolate anymore, God is delighting in us and in our return, our salvation, and is waiting for us to be righteous so the marriage can flourish. This is a marriage between what Jerusalem is meant to be and the work of the people who inhabit it. This is a marriage between God and the people, a marriage to give strength, confidence, and love to the people to carry out God’s call to them/us. 

Yet we dally with our pettiness and pride, envy and enmity, we forget to allow ourselves the opportunity to enjoy God’s love, God’s grace, and allow ourselves to build the righteousness that radiates from us and from Jerusalem. At the risk of sounding blasphemous, Jerusalem is more than a city in the State of Israel, Jerusalem is a spiritual home and a way of being that has to, as the prophet says, “radiate righteousness” throughout the world so that every place becomes ‘a city of wholeness’ a “shining city on the hill”. We have the opportunity to take God’s delight and use it to rebuild our cities, our countries, our homes, our neighborhoods into places of righteousness and salvation. Will we all accept this challenge? 

In recovery, we are so grateful for God’s light, righteousness and salvation that we work each day to honor it and grow the light, righteousness and salvation inside of us. We are also aware, as the prophet teaches, that we have to shine this light of salvation and righteousness to all people. We get to create and build on the creations of safe spaces for people to recover. We get to “carry the message to other alcoholics who suffer” actually to all people who suffer from the spiritual malady of disconnection. In recovery, we know that God delights in us because we have returned, we have rejoined our partnership with God and we are growing along spiritual lines. 

In my years of recovery, I have been blessed with the myriad of opportunities to bring light, salvation and delight to many human beings and their families. I have also blown some of these opportunities as well. I have erred and brought thunder and lighting when I should have brought a candle and I am sorry now for these errors as I was when they happened. I will not dwell in my past errors as I have done T’Shuvah for all that I am aware of. While there have been times when I have tarnished the shine on their amazing place, the honor of “carrying the message” and helping Harriet Rossetto build a Jerusalem in Los Angeles, a place of wholeness, salvation and righteousness is so overwhelming I have no words to describe this honor. I am grateful to God for the strength and to the thousands of people who have touched and enhanced me during this Godly adventure. God Bless and Stay safe, Rabbi Mark

The Prophets - wisdom to enhance our daily living

Daily Prophets

    Day 181

“The spirit of the Lord God is upon me; because the Lord has anointed me to announce good news to the humble; he has sent me to bind up the broken hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to those who are bound;

For I the Lord love judgment, I hate robbery with a burnt offering; and I will give them their reward in truth, and I will make an everlasting covenant with them.(Isaiah 61:1,8)

Second Isaiah is bringing strength, hope and courage to the people of Judah, the exiled ones. He begins by letting the people know he is not bringing false hope, rather he as been sent by God to imbue the people with an open heart to take in the words, the strength and courage to be ready for their redemption. The prophet is speaking to the people who can hear, the people who are desperate to hear and experience their redemption. 

The humble, broken-hearted, and the captives are waiting for their prison doors to be open. We are the people who have learned through our experiences of being haughty, being closed and believing our power will save us, to seek and hear, wait and be ready as well as pray and call out to God for our salvation. We learned from our past and the history of our ancestors that we alone cannot save ourselves, we need God, we must seek God and we can only do this through humility and an open heart. We have been bound up in our glory, our power, our false sense of self and this has brought us low and imprisoned us. Second Isaiah is calling out to all of us, those who were in exile in Babylon and those of us who are in exile from God today that our wounds can be healed, our captivity will end and our humility will be rewarded. He is also telling us that without humility, a broken/open heart and the realization that we are imprisoned in our own self-centeredness and false ego, we will not be saved. 

We are in a time when these traits are needed badly. While many people are proclaiming God speaks to them, they say it with haughtiness and pride, a sure sign as we see from Second Isaiah that God is telling them to return, not to continue to wrap themselves is some false sense of security. Being humble means to hear and listen to another(s) and to hear the voice of God through another(s) words and actions. Broken/open-hearts come from realizing our need to not be the smartest person in the room and be open to learning more and more each day. Realizing we are imprisoned and a captive to our own self-aggrandizement is the beginning of the end of our captivity. 

The last verse above is so important to all of us. God loves judgement/justice! We know this from the Torah, the Prophets, the writings, etc. God hates false offerings, falseness in any and everything. Rabbi Heschel teaches: “sacrifice is an essential act of worship. It is the experience of giving oneself vicariously to God and being received by Him.(The Prophets pg. 249) and he goes on to say: “To love means to transfer the center of one’s inner life from the ego to the object of one’s love.” Just as God loves judgement and hates false offerings, so too do we, humans, have to love justice more than falseness. We employ falseness to cover up for our self-centered and egotistical drives. Second Isaiah is telling us to let go of our false egos, serve God in truth and we will be rewarded. The reward being an “everlasting covenant”. We have this and have been given an “everlasting covenant” many times over by God. God doesn’t leave us, we leave God. We have to be willing to surrender our falseness, surrender our coldness and hard-heartedness, surrender our hunger for power and prestige to God. We have to transfer the center of our inner life from our false sense of self to God. Only then will we serve God, self and humanity in the manner we were created for. Only then will we stay free, stay humble and stay open-hearted. Only then will we be able to bask in the everlasting covenant God has made, makes and will continue to honor with us. 

In recovery, we work hard everyday to stay humble, open-hearted and out of imprisonment and captivity. It is a daily job and we do this by remembering who we are serving, God! We have transferred the center of our inner lives, the center of meaning for our life to serving God, to loving justice, to loving kindness and service from the self-centeredness and betrayal of our lives prior to recovery. We are not perfect nor do we claim to be. We know, however, our recovery is dependent on our spiritual condition and when we are not loving and living our spiritual principles, when we are not loving and living in God’s will, we are in danger of losing our recovery. In recovery, we have a daily practice of service, of kindness, of truth, of compassion and of love towards God and our fellow human beings. 

I heard these words of Second Isaiah in a prison cell and I have kept them in the forefront of my being ever since. I miss the mark, of course. Yet, the majority of my life has been spent being open and humble to God’s words and will, to staying out of the prison of my mind and the captivity of my ego. I love justice and hate falseness, especially my own falseness. I am engaged in spiritual practices each and every day. I work at being of service to humanity more and more each day. I am engaging in  the lessons life has taught me, engaging in correcting my errors, and engaging in transferring the center of my inner life to God, to Harriet, Heather, Miles, family and friends more each day. I pray you do the same. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

The Prophets - wisdom to enhance our daily living

Daily Prophets

Day 180

“Arise, shine for your light has dawned. The Presence of God has shone upon you. Raise your eyes and see; they have all gathered and come to you. Your sons shall be brought from afar and your daughters like babes on shoulders. For in anger I struck you down but in compassion I take you back. And you shall know that I, God, am your Savior and I, the Mighty One of Jacob am your Redeemer.”(Isaiah 60:1,4,10,16).

As the end of our exile nears, Second Isaiah is imbuing the people with both the courage and the strength to return to Jerusalem/Judah with the knowledge of God’s love and the way of living that will ensure longevity in the land. The first verse above is very telling; the people have to be told to rise and shine because their glory, their light has dawned. God’s Presence is shining on them and, it seems, they are unaware of this truth. It is still true today; people who think and proclaim that God’s Presence is upon them and their light is the only light are usually the charlatans who only are concerned with their welfare, power and prestige, not God’s nor anyone else’s. The people that God shines on and whose own light is dawning and beginning to shine, just keep working for God and for humanity. Second Isaiah is speaking to two groups of people, the downtrodden who are so ashamed, guilty and saddened by their own actions that exiled them and the second group; the people who do T’Shuvah and are moving forward in their service to and for God without need for recognition nor reward. Their reward is the reconnection with God and humanity. 

“Raise up your eyes and see” is a command from God to Abraham in Genesis. It is still a command from God to all of us. We are all together, we are all brought back from afar, yet we don’t notice it, we don’t “see”! What stops us from seeing is the fact that we are not raising up our eyes. We are either looking down at the ground, back at yesterday, forward into tomorrow, etc and not looking at the beauty and the joy, the power and the opportunity of today, of right here, right now. We are so stuck on looking at our own reflections, we are unable to “raise our eyes and see” what God is showing us, what God is giving to us and where God is leading us, so we keep taking the wrong turns and the wrong moves and wind up stuck in exile and stuck in/on ourselves. Raising up our eyes is the prophet’s reminder that we can no longer stay blind to God’s desires, God’s commands, God’s ways and God’s love. Doing so keeps us in exile and raising up our eyes and truly seeing sets us free. The question each of us has to ask and answer for ourselves is: Exile or Freedom; both take work to get to, one is the work of pride, mendacity, willful blindness and the other is the work of seeing, doing, guarding and connecting to God’s will, God’s ways and God’s love. Which are you choosing today? 

The last two verses speak so loudly and accurately to me. God’s anger is but for a moment, God’s anger is the last resort to get our attention and wake us up and it doesn’t last! God is compassion, God is waiting for us to return, God is kindness and love-even in God’s anger is love and the desire for us to return. God is our Savior and our Redeemer and we need to recognize the myriad of times God is saving us, redeeming us while we keep rejecting God’s saving and redeeming well as God’s love. We do this rejecting through our senseless hatred of each other, through our taking unfair advantage of the poor, the needy, the voiceless and the powerless. We do this by denying each and every person their dignity and worth, judging them poorly because we can, engaging in deception of another(s) because of our need to engage in self-deception, proclaim our fealty to God while actually serving idols of our own making, etc. We are being told by Second Isaiah, all of these actions are forgiven-God is redeeming and saving us again! I just wonder if we will join in with God or, once again, accept the saving and redeeming while scheming in our own hearts for the time we can  once again be in charge? 

Rabbi Heschel’s words “Second Isaiah’s task is to give “power to the faint” and “strength to him who has no might”(40:29)…he calls upon her (Israel) to sing and rejoice”(The Prophets pg.153), have special meaning to those of us in recovery. We are hyper aware of God’s saving us and redeeming us. We are grateful for God waking us up, helping us see truth and returning us to our own humanity. God’s redemption allows us to rejoin humanity and bring our unique talents to the world so as to help instead of harm, to add instead of take and to love instead of hate. In recovery, raising up our eyes is the key to our continued joy, love and serenity. Thank you God is our refrain daily and many times each day. 

I have been awakened so many times in my recovery. I am grateful to God for waking me up in a jail cell in Van Nuys, Ca. In December of 1986. I am grateful for God’s saving power ever since. I am also grateful for the love God shows me each and every day. I understand each experience in my life in a different light, as I read this passage. God saves me and redeems me from myself and my false pride and my errors daily. What I see as punishment I understand now as refinement and God getting my attention, again! I am in awe of God’s love and care, I am grateful for God’s direction and guidance and I am choosing Freedom today and, please God, everyday. Stay safe and God Bless, Rabbi Mark

The Prophets - wisdom to enhance our daily living

Daily Prophets

Day 179

“Your iniquities have been a barrier between you and God, your sins have made God hide God’’s face and refuse to hear you. Your hands are defiled with crime…your lips speak falsehood…they rely on emptiness and speak falsehood, conceiving wrong and birthing evil. God shall come as redeemer to Zion, to those in Jacob who turn back from sin, declares God. And this shall be My covenant with them, says God,: My spirit which is upon you… shall not be absent from your mouth.”(Isaiah 59:2,20,21).

Second Isaiah is reminding us of all the things that separate us from God, and by extension, each other. We are so quick to blame God for things-“God why are you doing this to me”- is a refrain I heard growing up and up to today. Some people are quick to point out God’s “death” because there is no direct intervention in their eyes. So, Second Isaiah is reminding us of the root cause of our lack of connection, US! It is our iniquities that cause separation, it is our “missing the marks” that cause a hearing loss and a hiding for protection and for comfort. As children we play the game ‘hide and seek’ learning how to hide from another(s) and from God! That game continues into our adulthood and we then blame everyone and everything else for our loneliness and isolation, for not being heard, etc. Second Isaiah is reminding us that we are the cause of separation, we have to be responsible to and for our own actions prior to laying blame anywhere else. 

It is difficult for us today as it was for our ancestors in antiquity to see the crimes our hands have committed; the theft of time, material goods, the slights of hand we use to fool people. It is even harder for us, as it was for them, to acknowledge our falsehoods. We speak lies like they are truth, we defend our lies and the lies of “our people” with more lies and perverted logic. We allow anything to be okay if it fits in with ‘our side’. Hence we have lies about Jews, Asians, Blacks, Muslims, Hispanics being promoted by both the far left and far right. We have bought the ‘poor underdog’ speech of people on both ends of the spectrum without examining the truth and the falsehoods of what is being said. So, we stop hearing anything that isn’t ‘our view’ and allow the falseness of ‘I’m right and you’re wrong’ dominate us and separate us further and further from one another and, by extension, God. Second Isaiah is calling us out to see our part, to stop blaming and to learn how to be responsible and to return, of course.

What is the wrong we are conceiving even as we read Torah, pray our prayers, read the prophets? Which wrongs are we thinking about as we get into our cars, go to work, try to ‘make a killing’? What evil are we birthing in our blaming of another and taking no responsibility for our part in wrongdoing? What evil are we birthing with our deception of another(s) and our practice of mendacity? We have choices each and every day, to hear and listen to God, to hear and listen to the call of our soul, to hear and listen to our false ego’s, to hear and listen to our self-protective self. When we need to make someone else bad for us to be good, when we betray the people who have helped us live well and when we seek to harm another for our own gain- we are birthing evil that separates us from God and from our inner essence. No one is born bad, it is a trait we learn and grow or not, depending on our environment, our education, and our desire for connection with God. 

Rabbi Heschel teaches about the verses:”In contrast to the books of earlier prophets…now the Voice speaks to Israel directly…it is predominately God addressing Himself to the people; it is I, not He.” God is calling us back, God is telling those who turn back to God, who do T’Shuvah, being responsible for their own sins/errors, giving up their old ways, making proper and sincere amends to those we have harmed, God will redeem us and make a new/renew God’s covenant. Not only renew/make new the covenant, but put into our mouths the words, the ways and the spirit of this covenant so it never leaves us. God did this for our ancestors and is doing this for us today, will we turn back to God, will we be the true remnant of Jacob that takes the mantle of God and be the light to the nations? Will you do your T’Shuvah, acknowledge the evil you have birthed, the falseness you speak, the crimes we have committed and turn back to God by making the proper amends and retraining yourself to not go down these paths anymore? 

This is the path of recovery! In recovery we have the new covenant and the words of God are the ones we speak most often, never being perfect is a sign of being in recovery:). In recovery, we have faced ourselves and we have made our amends and continue to grow along spiritual lines so we can continue to grow in our daily quest to do God’s work each and every day. 

I have, of course, committed all the crimes Second Isaiah is speaking of. I also turned back and keep turning back. I am aware of the harm I have wrought and the amends I have made. I am aware of the good I have done and the lives I have helped to save. I know the good outweighs the harm and I know that people still want me to pay for the harm I have done. I am amazed at the ‘pounds of flesh’ some people I thought to be friends and colleagues want from me. I also know that God continues to redeem me and I can’t let the evil of another(s) influence me to do the same. God’s love and redemption will save me and does save you! God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark.

The Prophets - wisdom to enhance our daily living

Daily Prophets

178

“Why when we fasted did You not see?…because on your fast day, you see to your business and oppress all your laborers. Because you fast in strife and contention, you strike with a wicked fist…Is this the fast I desire?…No, this is the fast I desire, to open the fetters of wickedness, unite the cords of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free and break off every yoke. To take the poor of your neighborhood into your home, when you see the naked, clothe them and to not ignore you own kin.”(Isaiah 58:3,4,5,6).

Second Isaiah is calling to the community to stop living in Mendacity! This is an age-old issue for God, for people of faith and for people of non-faith. Mendacity is what angers God according to my reading of this passage. We complain “but we did what you wanted, what the job description says, what the question was on the test, etc” and fail to see beyond the literal. We do this not because we can’t see, rather so we can look good while doing bad as stated in the first verse above. Sure, they fasted on the proper days and did the fast properly, however, they chose to ignore the reasons for the fast and the purpose of the fast! On Yom Kippur, we fast so we can go beyond physical needs to attend to our spiritual needs and ends. If we are doing business, oppressing our laborers, arguing with each other and other people, we are missing the point of the fast and the spirit of the law as well as the Spirit of God that is in search of us. 

Yet, many people continue to live this way. One ‘oh shit’ wipes our 1000 ‘atta boys”, people go to services to see and be seen, not to worship and look inside of themselves, we expect perfection from another and, sometimes ourselves, in order to blame someone when perfection doesn’t happen. All of these and so many more are insidious ways of performing rituals and not have the rituals go through us. Rabbi Heschel teaches us:”Religion declined not because it was refuted, but because it became irrelevant, dull, oppressive, insipid. When faith is completely replaced by creed, worship by discipline, love by habit;…when religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than with the voice of compassion-its message becomes meaningless.”(God in Search of Man pg.3). The fast days, the Holy days, Shabbat, the six days of creating, all are meant to bring us one grain of sand closer to God, to authenticity, to joy, to clarity, to serve another, to create stronger bonds of community, etc, yet this is all impossible when we go through the motions and stay in strife, contention, wickedness, oppression. We are the causes of the decline of religion, not science, not modernity, not the internet, us-the people who have shown the younger generation that religion is a ritual that we do without really meaning to fulfill the spirit of the actions, the spirit of the law, just lets look good, like we do in the rest of our living. Religion has become a transactional relationship rather than a covenantal one. What do I get out of it, is the question people ask and they do not stick around long enough to hear the response. What do we get from immersing ourselves in religion? Awareness, wholeness, ability to live in our skin, truth, transparency, help and service, love, kindness, connection, compassion, integrity, in our outer and inner lives. This is what Second Isaiah is calling us to engage in, I believe.

God wants us to immerse ourselves in the purpose of the fast day-to take truthful inventory of ourselves and our actions. God wants us to let go of our need to control and to oppress. God wants us to clothe the naked, take in the poor homeless people, and be connected to our kinfolk, stop the sibling rivalry, the compare and compete of families. Second Isaiah is calling to us all to be more congruent, live with integrity and leave our mendacious ways. T’shuvah was put into the world before the world was created, according to our sages, I add: because God knew we will screw up and wanted us to have a path back. When we do our daily truthful inventory and see what we have done well and where we have missed the mark, we are able to move forward and use the Mitzvot as stepping stones to ‘a richer and more meaningful life’. God is calling us out, God is confronting us with the truth of our actions and the consequences of these actions. 

In recovery, we are aware of how we bastardized many of the good things in life, how we used people’s vulnerabilities against them and how we took advantage of most situations and tried to bend them to our will. We realize how much terror we caused prior to our recovery. We are recovering from the human condition of hiding and shame. In recovery, we adopt and adapt rituals that help us see truth, be of service, practice kindness, compassion and hope and live a principled life. We use the holiness of each day as tools to connect to God, help another(s) and grow along spiritual lines.

In my recovery, I have been contentious and caused strife and I have lived the spirit of our tradition, imperfection and growing each day. I have witnessed the mendacity of myself and the mendacity of another(s), I have learned more truth about me from this witnessing and attempted to help another(s) see more truth about themselves. Being a witness to mendacity is a painful experience-whether it is one’s own or the mendacity of another(s). I am grateful for this pain as it has made me more aware of the ways to serve God and another(s), to clothe them, to house them and to be more present with them. This is the joy of prayer/looking inside for me. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

The Prophets - wisdom to enhance our daily living

Daily Prophets 

Day 177

“…Reviving the spirits of the lowly and reviving the hearts of the contrite……For their sinful greed I was angry; They went on backsliding in the way of their own heart…I will guide them…peace, wholeness to the far and to the near said God and I will heal them. There is no peace, says God, for the wicked.”(Isaiah 57:15 17-19,21)

Second Isaiah is reminding us of how we caused our own exile and how God is going to help us leave our exile. Nonbelievers use these words of the Prophets to make fun of people of faith saying:”Why didn’t your God save you from ___?”, missing the point of what the exile was about. Exile happens when we allow our spiritual life to fade away, when we engage in activities that may help our bottom line/net worth and kill our spirit/humanity. What was happening in Israel and in Judah was a slow death of spirit led by people in power through their lies, their deception, their grab for power, their false testimony, their false rituals, their abdication of God and disdain for God’s will/way. This is, I believe, the reason God is reaching out to the “contrite and lowly in spirit”, these are the people who want to return, who are aware of their part in their exile from their land and from God. I pray that some of the people in leadership throughout the country; in government, in business, in non-profit, read the Prophets and learn how to rectify the pain they cause and return to the mission of helping each other instead of trying to ruin one another. 

God will not always be angry because we will wake up and return! This is the call of the prophets, return and stop your backsliding. It is our hearts that take us out, the prophet is saying. They do this because we allow our desires, our false egos, our inauthentic needs to rule us. We see this all the time, companies protect their shareholders at the expense of the consumer, clergy preach that they alone know God’s ways and have even bastardized (again as in days of old) Christ’s words, the words of the Torah, the Koran, etc to serve their own selfish desires for power. Anointing Donald J Trump or anyone else as God’s messenger is arrogant, rude and an affront to God, yet many clergy did and many others called to their flock to follow and believe, to not get vaccinated for the Covid-19 virus, etc. This is not God’s will as God gives us the wisdom and the spirit to find cures and ways to put diseases into remission, yet these charlatans, in the clergy and in government and in the streets, want power so badly they are willing to watch their flock die. 

When we return, even a little, God is here to guide us, love us, greet us and heal us. As the title of Rabbi Heschel’s book states: God in Search of Man. This  is more than a philosophy to me, it is an accurate description of the relationship between humanity and God-God is searching always which is why God is near to us when we seek God. God is still hovering over the earth and our lives as God was in the first chapter of Genesis. It is us who have myopic vision and an inability to connect. Still, God is here to guide us, to love us, to heal us and to bring us to peace and wholeness. We have to decide to take God’s “outstretched arm” and we have to decide to let go of our wickedness, our hubris, our mendacity and our greed. 

There is no peace for the wicked seems like a pipe dream to some of us because we see wicked people ‘get ahead’ all the time, enjoy perks, get invited to all the ‘right’ affairs, revel in their ill-gotten gains, take advantage of the poor, the needy and the stranger. What they don’t have is any true peace, they are always needing more and more and they are always afraid someone will take their stuff away from them. They also fear being found out and shamed in public, having to experience the consequences of their behaviors, and, for some, the fear of meeting God and having to face themselves. These harsh words are not a final decree, as Rabbi Heschel teaches:”Indeed every prediction of disaster is in itself an exhortation to repentance”(The Prophets pg. 12). God doesn’t want our death, God wants our living well, living authentically and living together in truth, kindness, etc. 

In recovery, we seek and find the peace that we thought our backsliding and greed would bring. We are so aware of God’s saving power, God’s awesome love and guidance and how are spirits are revived each and every day. We respond to these gifts from God by serving God’s needs and desires, not our selfish ones. We, as the Rabbis taught, “nullify our will…so God’s will becomes our will”, “turn our will and our lives over to the care of God” as AA teaches us. We had no peace in our backsliding and in our greed, now, in many instances we have less material things, we have peace in our daily lives, not looking back over our shoulder-rather looking forward with hope and joy. 

I have been the wicked person, I have been the contrite and the lowly in spirit and I have experienced God reviving my soul, my spirit and lifting me up from my contriteness. I am grateful for repentance/tshuvah and I have experienced a new freedom because of my recent past error, I don’t need the forgiveness of another(who want to punish) because God has forgiven me, God is guiding me and God is reviving me. I don’t have to twist myself like a pretzel to please the one who believes I have harmed them beyond repair, nor do I have to seek out the ones who turned away-the power of God’s guidance and revival is freedom. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

The Prophets - wisdom to enhance our daily living

Daily Prophets

Day 176

“Thus says God: Guard justice and do righteousness; because My salvation is coming near and My righteousness will be revealed. Happy is the person who does this, the person who holds fast to it…and guards their hand from doing evil. And the foreigners who attach themselves God…for My House shall be called a house of prayer for all people.(Isaiah 56:1,2,6,7).

Can you imagine these words were spoken 2600+ years ago? God is calling to the people to “guard justice and do righteousness” then as God is calling to us now. The word tzedakah is commonly translated as justice, yet its meaning is righteousness. Even charity in Hebrew is established as being righteous. Righteousness here and in other places where it is mistranslated as justice is used, I believe, to go beyond the letter of the law, to go beyond what is just and to be engaged intimately in the action of justice and righteousness. Many people have stolen, killed, won races by following the letter of the law and not the spirit of it. Case in point is Billionaires who pay very little in taxes while the burden falls onto everyone else. I am not for socialism, I am for fairness and letter of the law is inherently unfair because most people don’t know the loopholes nor do they have time/energy/education to seek them out. Righteousness is an action that goes deep into the Mitzvah, deep into the law and the place/action where our actions meet God in the doing of righteousness. It is a place of no false ego, no boasting nor looking good, it is a place of humility, love, truth, kindness. 

God is telling us our time in exile is almost over and we will return to our proper places. It is interesting to me that return is the major theme throughout our texts, we are returning to the land God swore to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, we are returning from exile, God and the prophets keep calling for us to return, we are to see ourselves as if we are part of the people leaving Egypt to return to the Promised Land, we are told to do T’shuvah (return) each day and, as we approach the month of Elul, we are to do our yearly inventory, ask for forgiveness so we can return to community and God fresh and new in the new year. This is a piece of the righteousness of God that gets revealed when we live a life of justice and righteousness. We are called out to, begged to, return; God wants us to come home to God, to reconnect with our authentic self and God, to walk in God’s ways and return to our purpose to make God’s world a little better than when we found it. This, I believe is the righteousness that God reveals to us and we need to get out of self-centered, false ego-driven urges to see it and to live “Happy”. 

Without “holding fast” to justice and righteousness, we automatically move our “hand to do evil”. We cannot help but to do this because we have cut ourselves off from the path of God, justice and righteousness. As the Rabbis teach, we have to see the scales balanced between good and evil and our next action will tip the scale one way or the other; there is no middle ground here. 

In the last verses above is God’s “oath” as Rabbi Heschel calls it. “The Father of all men is committed to all men. Second Isaiah not only conveys the Lord’s invitation and commitment to every man on earth…”(The Prophets pg 154). Such is the greatness of God, of spirit, of humanity to me. God swears an oath to the people who attach themselves to God whether an Israelite or not. Just as MalkiTzedek, Bilaam, Jethro were all connected to God and not Israelites so too will all people be able to avail themselves to God through their own paths of righteousness and justice. Holding fast to the covenant of Noah brings them God’s salvation and kindness. Israel is here to be the “light unto the nations” not the sole arbiter of how to serve God. It is sad that some other faiths/paths think that there is only one way to serve God, one understanding of the Ineffable’s message, and use this to perpetrate evil acts onto anyone who they disagree with; even to the point of watching people die from their promotion of lies, deceptions and false faith. 

In recovery, we are the recipients of God’s saving Grace. We know that our recovery is dependent on how we grow more and deeper into living a just and righteous life. We are not fooled by our own self-deceptions of trying to ‘look good while doing bad’. We are committed to “holding fast” to the covenant we have made with ourselves, God, etc. We know that we have been saved, we have experienced the salvation of a life we believed could never be redeemed and we stand here today as examples of God’s love, the power of return, the power of transformation and the power of righteousness and justice together.

I have been redeemed more than once. God continues to save me and help me stay on God’s path for me. I realize my travails are always God’s way of getting my attention, not as punishments but as awareness’ and realignments. I am committed to justice and righteousness for another(s), I always have been and for my entire recovery I have lived it to the best of my ability and, when I realize I haven’t, I promptly admit it and repair it. I know that I belong in God’s world and I know I have earned the joy I experience. This is the power of righteousness, justice and salvation. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

The Prophets - wisdom to enhance our daily living

Daily Prophets

Day 175

“Incline your ears and walk with Me, listen and your soul will be revived. Seek the Lord and God will be found, Call to God because God is near. Forsake your evil path and your sinful plans, return back to God and God will have mercy for you. Our God forgives abundantly.”(Isaiah 55:3,6,7).

These words of Second Isaiah are so important for all of us to immerse ourselves in. Our ears take in so many words, noises, sounds all the time. Yet, far too many of us are so bombarded by these outer and inner noises, sounds, words that we cannot hear the voice of, the words of, and the direction of God. This is the reason the prophet is so forceful in the first verse above. He is trying to cut through the noise and the self-deception as well as the mendacity of so many to help us hear truth. I am amazed at how often we deceive ourselves and another(s) that we are the ONE TRUE ___(fill in the blank) in order to gain power, etc. Yet, Second Isaiah, is telling us to do whatever it takes to “incline our ears” so we can “walk with” God! There is no blind faith here, it is faith based on hearing, doing, walking with God as our partner and allowing our soul to be revived. When we “incline our ears and walk with” God, we are alive and well, our mission gets clearer, and we have the strength to overcome the obstacles the charlatans put in our way. 

“Where is God” is a popular refrain along with “where was God”. The prophet is explaining to us that God HAS NOT LEFT the building, we have! “Seek God” is the response to these questions. We ask these questions as a retort, a put down, a clean-up for our bad behavior, etc. The Kotzker Rebbe, possibly as a commentary on this verse, asks “Where do you find God?” After his students give all these beautiful and scholarly answers, the Kotzker answers himself saying: “Whenever/wherever you let God in”. God is near to us because the spirit of God is within us. We don’t find God in prayerbooks or even in the Torah, we find God in our souls, in another human beings, in our interactions, in our doing and being the Mitzvot (commandments/ways) God gives to us. God was in every person who perished in the Shoah, in everyone who died in wars, overdoses, 9/11, etc. We get to be the inheritors of their spirit and incline our ears, walk with God and continually seek and call to God for assistance and guidance.

We beg on Yom Kippur that God not forsake us, the prophet is calling bullshit on us. We are the ones who forsake God through our evil actions, our sinful ways, our deception of another(s) and our self-deception. With all of this, we are still called upon by the Prophet to forsake our evil path and sinful ways and return to God, decency, a spiritual life. As Rabbi Heschel teaches us: “Above reward and punishment is the mystery of His pathos. Sin does not inevitably bring about punishment. Between act and retribution stands the Lord God…Indeed the central message of the prophets was the call to return.”(The Prophets pg.237/8). Conventional wisdom is to try and convince ourselves and another(s) of how we are right and we really didn’t ‘sin’ or ‘miss the mark’. Never admit anything as this is seen as weakness. Because of this misguided approach to living, this evil path that is widely accepted, we are unable to return to God wholeheartedly, whole soulfully, with our entire intelligence, etc. We cannot do anything 100% except follow the wrong paths. Rabbi Heschel is giving us another experience, we cannot fathom God’s pathos, God’s compassion, God’s mercy and God’s forgiveness and this doesn’t mean God isn’t all of these attributes. Once we begin our return to God’s ways, to “walk with God”, a miraculous light shines upon us and within us. God’s call is always “ayecha”, where are you, Shema, hear/listen/understand, and Shuvah, return. How will we respond today? 

In recovery awareness of God’s nearness and walking in God’s path is a cornerstone for most of us. This is not to say Agnostics are not in recovery in fact, to paraphrase Rabbi Heschel, God is so great, God helps those who don’t believe also! Seeking God, walking with God is our path to return, to forgiveness and to connection. We cannot stay in recovery without a spiritual path, in my opinion. We may stay sober, we just are not in recovery (for more on this see harrietrossetto.com/blog). In recovery, we experience God’s compassion, forgiveness and pathos daily and we take strength from our errors and what we learn from them, “never shutting the door on them” as AA promises.Without seeking God, being forgiven, bending our ear to God and walking with God, we would not have the lives we do and celebrate the errors and the ‘wins’ with the joy we do. 

I am continually seeking God and inclining my ears so I can discern when I am walking with God and when I am walking with negativity. I don’t always hear correctly or well, according to Harriet(so I am going to get hearing aids as my ENT agrees with her:)). I find myself returning after going back to old places that I know don’t serve me, another nor God. I also know that my triggers are the same and some of them are for holy purposes and I do not use proper measure in my responses. Yet, while some humans can never forgive me for being me (even though they used me for their ends), God always does when I return in humility, faithfulness and truth. I will never be whole nor perfect, I do/will continue to err in many of the same ways, and they are/will not be as harmful or dangerous, and I will grow and learn each and every day. Stay safe and God Bless, Rabbi Mark