Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel - a daily path to living well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 51

“While man’s concern for others is often tainted with concern for his own self and characterized as a lack of self-sufficiency and a requirement for the perpetuation of his own existence, God’s care for His creatures is a pure concern.”(Man is Not Alone pg. 143)

I am continuing with this teaching because it kept me disturbed for the past 24 hours. Rabbi Heschel is reminding us/teaching us that God has no other agenda than our welfare, our betterment, our growth, our healing, our living our passion, purpose and divine need. He is contrasting this pure interest with the interests that we humans exhibit. 

We are not expected to be without self-concern, in fact, I am worried about someone who has no self-concern as it could mean a lack of self-reflection, a lack of self-knowledge and a lack of self-sufficiency. We humans are somewhat self-sufficient and not totally self-sufficient. We are told in Genesis, Chapter 2, “it is not good for human to be alone”. Yet, we try and portray ourselves as ‘rugged individuals’, ‘self-made people’, etc. We are none of these false phrases, we use them to prove our self-sufficiency rather than acknowledging we need aid and assistance to live well. As I am reading Rabbi Heschel, again, this morning, I realize the taint with concern for our own self is not a bad thing. 

Hillel said: “If I am not for my self, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? If not now, when?” I hear this call in these words of Rabbi Heschel. We have to have be for our self, our soul, our beingness and not expect everyone else to care for us and not denigrate the gift of life God has given us! We have to grow our self, our spirit, our intellect and our emotions, to maturity and that takes a lifetime and a lot of outside help. We do not need to hide our concern for self in our concern for another. In fact, owning our own agendas in our interactions is the best way to a) get more done, b) have more cooperation and collaboration, c) learn more and different ways to grow our skills, the skills of another and d) build stronger community. 

Rather than obfuscating our self-concerns, let us broadcast them loud and proud so people around us can make the choice to join, aid, teach, learn from a place of truth and transparency rather than from being deceived or their own self-deceptive place. If we believe that our self-concern is legitimate, holy and being ‘for my self’ ie, for my soul, why hide it? This is my problem, and I believe, Rabbi Heschel’s problems with the charlatans who purported to be speaking the “Word of God” all the while spreading hatred, bigotry, anti-semitism, anti-muslim, anti-immigrant, etc. They never spoke their agenda and bastardized the spirit and word of God for their own self-centered needs, not for their concern for their self/soul. I think this is an important distinction, self-centered needs are egotistical and totally selfish, self-concern needs are to promote a healthy self-image, a healthy intellect, ego and spirit. 

We are being inundated with the mendacity of people who have only one goal in mind, power over us! The attacks on the truth, the lack of transparency, the need to BE RIGHT, on both ends of the spectrum are the poisons we are being fed each and every day, 24/7. We need to differentiate between self-concern and self-centeredness, we have to differentiate between mendacity and truth, and we have to differentiate between authentic and counterfeit. It takes getting out of our need to be deceived and having real self-concern so we can have real concern for another. We are not supposed to have “pure concern” because that is God’s realm and God’s beingness, we are supposed to limit our self-concern when helping another person so it doesn’t become self-centered.

In recovery, we are constantly seeking to care for our self, which is why it is called a ‘selfish program’ all the while improving our self, maturing our self, hearing our self, so we can be of more service to another, especially those we have harmed prior to and in our recovery. In recovery, we are not seeking purity, we are seeking progress, we are not seeking total enlightenment, we are seeking to grow along spiritual principles a little more each day. In recovery, we learn to let go of the self-centeredness and self-deception so we can serve our authentic self and the authentic self of another. 

I have been disturbed about this sentence because it is so nuanced and I see the ways I have not always lived in the nuance. I am unashamed of my self-concern and deeply remorseful for my self-centeredness. While people may think they know the difference, I have come to realize I know the difference, I know when I have been in self-concern and when I have been in self-centeredness and I am aware of how the errors I have made, for the most part, have come from my concern for another and lack of concern for self. I have been a responder and that has taken time away from me, family, etc. I have taken time off and learned to say no and that has helped reconnect me to my self/soul. I know the wisdom of working hard to not ‘buy one’s own press’ because that is the slippery slope to self-centeredness and self- deception. I am happy being Mark and not trying to be God. Stay safe and God Bless, Rabbi Mark

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel- a daily path to living well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel 

Day 50

“While man’s concern for others is often tainted with concern for his own self and characterized as a lack of self-sufficiency and a requirement for the perpetuation of his own existence, God’s care for His creatures is a pure concern.”(Man is Not Alone pg. 143)

Immersing ourselves in these words and this experience brings both joy and anguish to me. Joy in that God is concerned for me, you, all of humanity-without any prejudice or bias! Anguish in how often my concern for you and your concern for me is self-serving and seen as something lacking in me and/or you. Yet, there is great hope and solace in this teaching as well, Rabbi Heschel uses the words “often tainted” nor always tainted. 

How is it often tainted? Let me count the ways! In speaking with someone explaining to me the “anti-vaxxer” way of thinking, the person said: “when someone mandates something to/for me, I immediately say No and exercise my right to say No. It is not fair that I am not allowed in the restaurant to eat with my other non-vaccinated friends.” I asked this person about their religious practice and they replied they are devoted to their faith and carry out the principles and tenets as well as observe the rituals exactly as told. I asked this person, who told you? The answer was: “God”. I engaged in a lengthy discussion and came away understanding that if a principle/law they want to follow or are told to follow by whomever is their Guru/Leader(spiritual, societal, etc) at the time is written in a form that people want to believe, then it is a higher power/God/Divine instruction so they can follow it. If it is a principle/law that they are told is bad by this same Guru/Leader, then they believe themselves exempt. The issue, as I understand it is not the divinity of a law/principle, it is the polarization of people so authoritarianism can prevail and replace our democracy. 

The taint often comes in the form of seeking power, riches, fame and prestige. We will blindly support an AOC because it is ‘woke’ to do and then when she supports anti-semitism in the form of anti- zionism/anti-Israel, we don’t know what to do. We will blindly support the right-wing policies of a Josh Hawley and then when he is standing for racism, hatred, tearing down the democratic norms America is built on, we are at a loss. For the devoted followers, they are never at a loss because they are following them off a cliff because they believe they lack something that these types of charismatic leaders can give them. They have bought the mendacity they need them for the “perpetuation” of their existence.

This way of being is true in the workplace, on social media, and in families. “My way or the Highway” is the binary choice we are given. People who don’t want to follow science, faith, laws, etc are free to do so, they just have to experience the consequences and here is the problem. People on the left pole do not want to be called out on their incongruence just as people on the right pole . Neither do any of the “polar people” want to experience any consequences for their behaviors, like the people who are going to benefit because of the 13 Republican Representatives voting for the infrastructure bill, yet they want to threaten their lives and think it is just fine for them to do this. The people, like Donald Trump and Steve Bannon, who decide to lie to Congress, the people who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, all think they can do this and not experience any consequences, except for being called heroes of course! The “squad” is proud of voting against compromise to defend their ‘purity’ while harming the rest of us. Families sometimes buy into the lie “father as all-knowing” (for those of us who watched the TV progam, “Father knows best) and we know this to be a lie, yet people still believe it and follow it. Families make up their own rules for themselves and live incongruent lives (as we all do) and yet defend to the death their congruency and their rightness. We see this in workplace, in the Hulu series Dopesick self-concern is on stage and on trial, yet even the good guys miss the Divine Concern for their spouses, their co-workers, their kids, etc. 

In recovery, it is okay to be concerned with our self as it is in the Bible. To “love thy neighbor as thyself”, as we learned earlier from Rabbi Heschel, we have to love our self. The difference for those of us in recovery is that the “self” we are talking about is the “self”/soul/spirit that is connected to our Higher Power, Higher Consciousness, God, Buddha, etc. It is not a self-centered egotistical self, rather it is a transparent, bright, maturing spirit that is unafraid and needs to serve another person because they “get to” rather than for selfish reasons. In recovery, we are attuned to service with an attachment to our soul and to the Ineffable. 

I find this passage disturbing, for a change. I know that I have changed “often tainted” to occasionally tainted and at times, my service is tainted. My commitment is to lessen the taint one grain of sand each day! I also know that I am an enigma to many people because I am loud, I am brash, I am on fire most of the time. I realize I am so sensitive to the “taint” Rabbi Heschel is teaching us about, that I come off angry, loud, bombastic, etc when I am reaching out to another(s) in order to bring them back to living authentically and covenantally. I am disturbed at how I have failed to be clear about concerns and how others have betrayed what I thought was an authentic knowing of me. More tomorrow, God Bless and Stay Safe, Rabbi Mark

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel - a daily path for living well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel 

Day 49

“There is no other way to feel one with every man, with the leper or with the slave, except in feeling one with him in a higher unity: in the one concern of God for all men.” (Man is Not Alone pg.142)

“The dedication of the heart and mind to the fact of being present at a concern of God…” that Rabbi Heschel wrote in the paragraph prior to this one finds its culmination in this sentence. Rabbi Heschel is calling us all to take this action of feeling one with every person; that he calls us to feel one with the leper and with the slave is telling as well. Prior to his involvement in the Civil Rights Movement, the anti-war movement, his outward activism, he was an activist in his writings, he was and is an activist in his call to all of us to: stop theorizing about God; to stop creating false narratives about God; stop claiming ‘only my way/definition/knowledge about God is correct; there is no God; etc and meet God through meeting the concerns of another person, in the interests of another human being, in the connection, cooperation with another soul/spirit. 

Reflecting on Rabbi Heschel’s background, how intensely the Shoah impacted him, how rich his childhood was with reverence, love, joy, being seen and freedom to be who he is, it makes perfect sense that the leper and the slave would be the extreme examples for him in 1951 when this book was published and in the years prior when he was writing it. Who were the lepers back then? I remember survivors of the Shoah thinking they were lepers and something was wrong with them, otherwise why were they chosen to be put in the camps and why were they chosen to survive? In the early 1950’s, prior to Elie Weisel’s publication of Night, people did not share their stories of horror, there was shame in even exposing their arms with their numbers tattooed on them, people stayed away from them, instead of welcoming them, for fear of any number of things and treated them like lepers to a certain extent. 

The slave could have been the black people whom he saw being treated as slaves, even though they had been emancipated 90 years before, with the Jim Crow laws, with the attitudes toward people of color in the 1940’s/50’s even up to today. I imagine Rabbi Heschel being terribly mortified, sad, and righteously indignant towards the people who treated the black person as less than, who thought they were so much better then the black person and, while they paid them wages, albeit not as much as white people, they looked down on them as if they were slaves and servants. Rabbi Heschel doesn’t reconcile a belief in God, a meeting/identification with God and Judaism as being compatible with these types of behaviors, as I am experiencing his writing/teaching/wisdom today. 

Rabbi Heschel is calling upon us to rise above our egos, our prejudices, our “eye diseases”, our societal norms, our self-deceptions, our lower reasoning, the calls of false prophets and clergy, to meet the slave, meet the leper, meet the person of color, meet the LGBTQI, meet the Jew, the Christian, the Muslim, the practitioner of Eastern disciplines, the enemy we fear, the white supremacist, the republican, the democrat, the neighbor, the person we disagree with, the ones who have harmed us and the ones we have harmed in this “higher unity” which is for all of the above to meet us as well! We do this by raising up our selves, raising up our souls and seeing the infinite worth and dignity of every soul. We do this by letting go of pettiness and pride, envy and enmity, false ego and misguided hearts and vision. We do this by, as is said in the 3rd paragraph  of the Shema, “do not scout out after your hearts and your eyes to whore yourself after them”. We rise above and meet/feel one with another human being when we see their interests as our concerns, when we stop judging people by the color of their skin, by the religion they practice, the country they come from. When we stop judging people by their worst action and not their best, when we are stuck in binary thinking about another human being and ourselves, when we need power and prestige over and above our need to be connected and our need to be one with God/Ineffable One. 

In recovery, we are constantly improving our “conscious contact with God as we understand God” so that we can carry a message and reach out to the person who is still stuck in their old ways of self-harm and harming another(s). In recovery, we know that we can only truly meet someone in spirit and in higher unity, which is a bedrock of recovery itself. 

I am overwhelmed with sadness over the fact these words published 70 years ago, are still unheeded. The issues they teach us about and the solutions Rabbi Heschel knew to be the best ones/only ones are so prevalent today, on the right and the left, in the home, the school, the workplace, in our governments, in the streets. I am ashamed of how little progress we have made in eradicating the self-deception, mendacity, lack of concern for God and another person(s). I am constantly seeking to stay in Rabbi Heschel’s solution and when I miss the mark, I learn something new and I continue to meet people in the higher unity, the one concern God has for all of us and, even when another person(s) can’t meet me there, more often than not, I continue to hold a place for them rather than leaving God’s concerns and presence. Stay Safe and God Bless, Rabbi Mark

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel - a daily path to living well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 48

“It is the sense of the ineffable that leads us beyond the horizon of personal interests, helping us to realize the absurdity of regarding the ego as an end.”(Man is Not Alone, pg. 142).

“Realizing the absurdity of regarding the ego as an end” is both brilliant and a warning to all of us. Our reality is that most people do not realize this absurdity. Most people either regard the ego as an end, satisfaction of one’s desires is a cherished value to some, or they are oblivious to the people who do and use them/us for their benefits only and these oblivious become enamored with the mendacity of the people who regard their ego as an end and use anyone and everyone they can to feed their insatiable ego. 

Ego is not bad in and of itself, reason is not bad in and of itself, manipulation is not bad in and of itself, what makes any of these entities bad is how we, humans, use them. God gave us ego and a healthy ego is the source of some of the greatest discoveries and cures humans have made happen. It takes a healthy ego to leave Egypt, England, to discover the ‘new world’, to leave one’s home for a better life in a foreign country, etc. It takes a healthy ego to be a pioneer in any field of endeavor, in any exploration.

 Ego only becomes bad/corrupted when we regard “the ego as an end.” When we are so focused on self, so enamored with ourselves and see our ego needs as the only think important to fulfill do we become dangerous to ourselves and to another(s). When our egos are so full of themselves, when we see/believe our egos are the only ends that even need to be fulfilled do we become bullies, aggressors, power-hungry, engage in willful blindness, enslave another person(s) to do our will/bidding, etc. While many people try to hide their egocentric behaviors, it has become in fashion lately to flaunt our egotism, to surround oneself with sycophants, to coerce good people into doing their bidding and tarnishing themselves. We see this in politics, in business, in organizations, in families, etc. 

It is very sad to see how “regarding the ego as an end” is ruining our democratic norms; breaking down employees who work hard and keep getting the short end of the stick; changing the mission of some organizations from their original mission to help to the new mission of keeping their jobs/organization afloat; how members of families live in terror of one or another member who rages when their ego needs are not met and/or enslaves the other members of the family to serve them out of fear of loss. Many people continue to use reason to serve their ego as an end, they manipulate people through coercion, persuasion, bribery, etc to do their bidding, to feed their ego. What Rabbi Heschel is teaching us, I believe, is to use our ego to serve the ineffable, to use our reason to serve our souls, to use manipulation to put our spiritual, emotional and mental structure back in sync like a chiropractor manipulates our body to get in back in sync. 

Our egos are means to an end, meeting the Ineffable One at a concern, our egos and reason can support our soul/spiritual knowledge and course. In fact, our egos are essential in pushing us forward on our spiritual course, moving us forward to “being present at a concern of God:, moving us forward in connection and love. Ego and reason are tools to serve our soul’s interest, our spiritual calling, acting on our “sense of the ineffable”. Our world is going through a depression right now, a depression of spirit, a depression of “being present at a concern of God”, a depression in honoring and revering those who have helped us get where we are, the good people who gave their lives in wars, who suffered from discrimination and did not stand down, the majority of people who vote for decency and justice, the leaders of different movements/organizations that send up for and serve the infinite worth of every human being-erasing the artificial margins we try and put up between “us and them”. It is our ego strength and our reasoning used in the service of our souls, used in the service of the Ineffable One, used in the service of another human being(s) that can and must raise us all out of this depression. It is what Rabbi Heschel did in conjunction with Rev. King, Father Berrigan, Rev Sloane and Dr. Bennett in forming CALCAV. We can and must rise up again and face down the lies, the power, the falseness of these EGO driven people today who are ruining our world, going against the call of God and the needy, the poor, the stranger, etc. and stand up for Decency, Democracy and Devotion to the Ineffable One. 

In recovery, when our egos are seen as ends, we say we are “easing God out” of our lives and our actions. Prior to recovery, our egos were the only ends we served and our recovery is based on how well we can use our egos to serve God, to serve another and to serve our authentic self. In recovery, we continue to grow along spiritual lines so we can be of maximum service to another, to God and to our self.

I have dedicated my ego to serving God for these past 35 years, since I was arrested and, while I am not always successful, I see how far I have come in this time. I am not a victim, I do not need to be right most of the time, I use my reason ,my manipulations and my ego to serve more than myself, I use them to serve God, to serve another and I remain grateful for the life I have today. I heal and deal with life as it comes today and I not afraid to admit my errors, which is the test of my ego working for my soul or for itself. God Bless and Stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel - a daily path to living well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 47

“It is the sense of the ineffable that leads us beyond the horizon of personal interests, helping us to realize the absurdity of regarding the ego as an end.”(Man is Not Alone, pg. 142).

Many people, over these past 33 years, have told me “I don’t believe in God” and therefore, whatever I am saying they feel they can tune out and doesn’t apply to them. So many people according the latest Pew Study, are unchurched and don’t believe in ‘the God of the Old Testament or the New Testament’. Here is the war between mind/ego and soul/spirit being played out within us and we use the hypocrisy of a few Religious Zealots/fundamentalists to help our minds/ego win the battle. In the face of this, comes Rabbi Heschel’s words, teachings and we are confronted with a deep truth that we know in our soul and our ego/intellect vehemently denies. 

Ineffable comes from the latin meaning not able to describe, the English definition is to great or extreme to be described. In Hebrew we use the phrase “Ein Sof” as a Name of God, meaning without end; so, we can read the sentence as it is the sense of the Limitless One, too great to describe, that leads us beyond the horizon of personal interests… Sense comes from the Latin meaning to feel, so only the feeling of the Limitless One, too great to describe, can leads us beyond the horizon of personal interests. I am overwhelmed with this statement because belief in God is not crucial to see the truth and wisdom of Rabbi Heschel. Most of us, scientists, clergy, atheists, agnostics, etc know that there is more to the world than humans, that we did not create this world, that there is an energy beyond our comprehension and description, aka black  hole, so sensing this energy can come with or without belief in God. 

Getting back to the wisdom, when we refuse to sense the Ineffable, when we decide that everything can be explained with our intellects and our egos need to be served first, last and always, we are stuck in our personal interests and live a very small and shallow life. We may be President of the United States, President of Russia, Hungary, Turkey, Syria, etc, we may run one of the Fortune 500 companies, a Senator, Representative, another elected official, yet “when we refuse to sense the ineffable”, when we are stuck in our egos and intellects, when power and money are what we worship, we live small lives, we live lives of opulence on the outside and decay on the inside. Furthermore, living a small life as described and being in any kind of power from child to parent to co-worker to employer to boss to official to lobbyist to power broker, etc we impact the lives of a few to the many negatively and, sometimes irreparably! We see how the poor are treated, we see the hatred, the racism, the anti-Semitism, the lies we are being told, the anti-muslim, the anti-anything other than me ism and these are all indicators of how large our egos have become and how stuck in serving them we are. We are experiencing a resurgence of xenophobic behavior as well as the behaviors above which leads to war, death, destruction and, as Afghanistan has pointed out, senseless loss of life on both sides. We need to restore the sense of the ineffable for us to have a chance at changing what is and fulfilling the basic need of all people; believers, agnostics, atheists; Freedom. 

We can never be free as long as we are stuck in ego and, Rabbi Heschel is saying the way out of the slavery of the ego begins with the sense of the ineffable. There is more to this world than me, there is more important activities than constantly feeding my/our ego. Yet, we seem to have forgotten this, we seem to be stuck in the collective ego, the fantasy of America, the ‘good old days’ when men and were men and women knew their place, etc. Without a sense of the ineffable, we fall into depression, anxiety, addiction, physical illness, possibly even somatic illness’. It is not that difficult to find proof of the ineffable, science does all at the time, whenever they get stuck, stopped in their desire to explain how things work, which is a noble and necessary endeavor, IMO, they are content with ‘I don’t know’, which is another name for ineffable, maybe. When we see all the things that we did not grow, we did not have a hand in making, mountains, lush valleys, forests and deserts, we have ‘proof’ of the ineffable because we cannot describe what we are experiencing , when we are sensing. This is how we can begin to nurture and grow a sense of the ineffable that will “lead us beyond the horizons of personal interests.” 

In recovery, we do an inventory of our behaviors and we realize how stuck on me we were and the only ‘cure’ for this self-centered, harmful, not seeing/caring about another human being is “a sense of the ineffable”. Without a larger purpose than our own selfish needs, we will sink back into old behaviors and return to a way of living that is harmful to ourselves and to so many people. We readily admit that going “beyond the horizons of personal interest” is the only way to freedom. 

I am overwhelmed by this sentence fragment. I sense the ineffable every day, every hour, and I know this is what gets me “beyond the horizons of personal interests”. Each day, I am given a new lease on life and joining my energy with the energy of the Ineffable imbues me with a spirit to serve, to create and live a little better today than the day before. More tomorrow. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel - a daily path to living well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 46

“Inner freedom is a miracle of the soul. How can such a miracle be achieved? It is the dedication of the heart and mind to the fact of our being present at a concern of God, the knowledge of being a part of an eternal spiritual movement that conjures power out of a weary conscience, that, striking the bottom out of conceit, tears selfishness to shreds.” (Man is Not Alone pg. 142).

As I was speaking about yesterday, the thoughts and teachings expressed above, as with all of Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom and teaching, go right to the core of being human. They are in keeping with Rabbi Heschel’s belief that to be human we are to “enable the common” and “the knowledge of being a part of an eternal spiritual movement…: “ is the path forward. Herein lies our challenge, our solution and the war that happens both in our inner lives and the ones we begin, face, react, respond to in our outer lives. 

We are fatigued, as people, as individuals, and as countries. The Covid-19 Pandemic only amplified the fatigue most people experience. It is a fatigue born out of selfishness, conceit, seeking of power for power’s sake, xenophobia, poverty of the economic variety, poverty of moral fortitude, and poverty of the spirit/soul. We have become people who are so fearful of ‘losing everything’, that we live from a scarcity mentality while living in the most abundant of times. We live in suspicion of everyone around us, not believing that someone could be kind because they are kind, that someone could reach out because they know they are part of this “eternal spiritual movement”, that we are able to and want to be present “at a concern of God”. Because of our suspicion and our fears, because of our experiences and those of our ancestors, because we are unwilling/unable to dedicate our hearts and minds to being presented with a concern of God and, hence, not responding to it, we remain a “weary conscience”. 

This does not have to be the case, however!  We, the people, need to rise up and demand from ourselves and from one another as well as from governmental leadership that we all change course, we all turn inward to seek the inner freedom Rabbi Heschel is speaking about, we all truly dedicated our hearts and minds to being present at a concern of God and acknowledging we are all part of an eternal spiritual movement. We may not nor should we agree on the solutions to today’s challenges, we may not nor should we agree on the priorities of solving today’s challenges, yet we will, once we seek inner freedom, see one another as humans just like ourselves, we will seek out compromise rather than ‘my way of highway’ obstructionist behaviors. As we seek our own inner freedom, we become so interested, excited and engaged in helping another(s) attain their own, sometimes overbearingly so. 

What this knowledge of being present at a concern of God and knowing we are part of an eternal spiritual movement does is infuse us with an energy that keeps regenerating. This spiritual energy is the fuel that keeps us going, keeps us in the battle against those who are stuck in inner slavery, stuck in self and stuck in ‘poor me’, ‘need to have power’, ‘where’s mine’, etc. The knowing, the deep experience of our soul’s knowledge, pushes us closet to God, closer to the honor, joy, wonder and awe of being present at a concern of God, which is another human being’s suffering, caring for our planet, treating each person as having infinite worth and dignity, believing in the possibility of change/tshuvah, and so much more. Every day, we are confronted with the gift of being present at a concern of God, it is a gift because we are given the opportunity and the power to be part of the solution, we are given the gift and the power of getting out of our conceited ways, our better than places to share with God and another human being an experience of connection. We are, every day, being given the opportunity and the power to “tear our selfishness to shreds” through service, through awareness, through connection, through learning together with community, friends, family and foe alike. 

In recovery, we are constantly seeking out our self-serving ways in order to “tear selfishness to shreds” and be of service to people, whether we know them or not, whether the result is what we hoped for or not. Being part of the solution is one of the keys to our recovery and, in recovery, we leave the results up to God and this is how we are aware God is both concerned and present. 

As I have been writing this, I realize inner freedom comes from heeding the prophet Isaiah’s words to beat our swords into plowshares and we will stop learning war. I am not able to be enslaved to all of the bullshit that life wants to throw at me, when I am engaged in putting down the tools of war and meeting another human being and God in the concern God has presented to me in this moment. I have dedicated my mind and heart to being present at a concern of God, I have much experience of being infused with God’s power, the power of my soul to meet a challenge and concern of another human being that God has put in front of me. I am certainly not shy about showing up, I certainly am not always the pretty package people hope for when they call a Rabbi, and I certainly show up and am strong enough to do battle with the Angel of death, literally and metaphorically, physical death, emotional death and spiritual death and never tire in this battle. I am grateful to Rabbi Heschel for opening up this knowledge in me and I hope I do for you as well. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel- a daily path to living well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 45

“Inner freedom is a miracle of the soul. How can such a miracle be achieved? It is the dedication of the heart and mind to the fact of our being present at a concern of God, the knowledge of being a part of an eternal spiritual movement that conjures power out of a weary conscience, that, striking the bottom out of conceit, tears selfishness to shreds.” (Man is Not Alone pg. 142).

Immersing oneself in Rabbi Heschel’s teachings is a wonderfully, arduous, exhilarating painful journey as evidenced by the teaching above. “The dedication of the heart and mind to the fact of our being present at a concern of God:” is a fragment that is too large for most of us to imagine. It is an experience that we shy away from and work hard to ignore. The word ‘dedication’ comes from the Latin meaning “to devote/consecrate” and the Hebrew is “Hakdasha” which connotes “holiness in the action”. 

Rabbi Heschel is teaching us that without holiness, without devotion, without consecrating our hearts and minds, the miracle of inner freedom will not occur, as I am understanding him today. I agree wholeheartedly, I also hear Rabbi Heschel reminding us that our hearts and our minds are separate entities from our soul. Our souls are in direct communication with God and want us to be “present at a concern of God”. Our souls are our Image of the Ineffable One that each of us have, so we are already in a state of “Hakdasha”, of consecration when we are one with our souls/let our souls lead our actions. The challenge, as I am reading Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom today, is to bring our hearts and our minds along. Too often we talk ourselves out of what our souls know to be right through the logic of our lower consciousness, the ‘reasoning’ of our intellect and/or the emotions/desires of our hearts. Rabbi Heschel is pointing out to us that, while we think we are serving ourselves and some made-up ‘greater good’, we are actually harming our souls, our authentic selves, sending authenticity, spiritual health, inner freedom farther and farther away from us. Thereby, sentencing our selves to a longer prison sentence, for some-a life imprisonment, yet, we always have the option of parole. We can parole our selves whenever and wherever we begin to consecrate, devote, elevate our minds and hearts to serve our souls, to serve another human being, to serve God/Higher Power/Higher Consciousness. 

We are living in a time that sorely needs this dedication, this devotion, this consecration of concerns of God, and the soul(s) of another(s) human being(s), elevating our selfish desires by devoting ourselves to serving something greater than our power, prestige, obliviousness to the call of the needy, the poor, the stranger, etc. We see how authoritarians are using our vulnerabilities against us, accusing good people of doing bad, just like Goebbels employed as part of the Nazi propaganda; how these people are gaslighting the rest of us in order to keep their power and have minority rule, rather than decisions by the majority, as our democracy calls for. We see this way of being in families, in organizations, in companies, etc. The lack of devotion, the lack of consecration, the lack of elevation and holiness people engage in to ‘make a buck’, stay in power, tear down another person to make themselves feel better, is at a tipping point and we need to heed Rabbi Heschel’s words and turn our society away from the impending doom and destruction we are headed for. 

We can only dedicate our hearts and minds when we realize that every human being has the same value as we do, every single life has meaning, a purpose and is entitled to dignity and respect. We can only achieve this when we cure the “cancer of the soul” that prejudice is, when we change the lens’ we see another person through and welcome them and their concerns into our lives, into our spaces, - not push them away, not treat them as less than human or at least having less worth than we do, no longer separate ourselves from our community at large. We achieve inner freedom when we dedicate, consecrate, elevate, make holy our connection with God/Higher Power/Higher Consciousness, when we realize what we do matters, when we appreciate the moments we spend with another human being-not fixing them, rather, hearing them. When we realize and respond to the interests/concerns of another human being and in doing so, we serve the concern has put in front of us , not the self-centeredness we default to. In Ethics of our Ancestors, we are taught: “Nullify my will before Your will” to remind us who we are serving. 

In recovery, the third step in AA teaches us to “turn our will and life over to the care of God as I understand God”… so as to get out of our selfish self, to leave the prison of our desires and reasoning. In recovery we learn how to use our reasoning to serve our souls, to serve God, not to serve selfishness and not to serve power for the sake of power. 

In my recovery, I have been blessed to devote, consecrate and elevate my living and the living of another(s) by being present at a concern of God. There is much more I have to write on this topic tomorrow. I know that being present at a concern of God is so much better than being stuck in my selfish concerns. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel - a daily path to living well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 44

“Inner freedom is a miracle of the soul. How can such a miracle be achieved? It is the dedication of the heart and mind to the fact of our being present at a concern of God, the knowledge of being a part of an eternal spiritual movement that conjures power out of a weary conscience, that, striking the bottom out of conceit, tears selfishness to shreds.” (Man is Not Alone pg. 142).

In Rabbi Heschel’s interview with Carl Stern in December of 1972, days before his death, he described the prophets as “abrasive, disturbing, giving me a bad conscience”. It is in reading Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom and teachings that he is the most abrasive, disturbing, giving me/us a bad conscience in the most uplifting, poetic, loving ways. 

In this passage, Rabbi Heschel is calling on all of us to strive for and, at times, achieve Inner freedom. We do this, as I am understanding him today, through our souls. We have to develop a mature soul/spirit in order to achieve this miracle of inner freedom. We have to engage in the soul enhancing activities of love, justice, kindness, compassion, truth, etc in order to grow our spiritual maturity as well as our spiritual freedom. Society is very dismissive of our inner lives in subtle and not so subtle ways. We will go see therapists to “figure life out” or to have help with a “mental/emotional condition” all the while neglecting the real issues of our time and all time: Soul Connection to something greater than oneself, Soul to Soul connections with another(s) person(s), and covenantal relationships not just transactional ones. 

One cannot achieve inner freedom without first acknowledging that we are more than matter, we are more than ideas, that we are more than individuals coming together for protection, needs, etc. We have to acknowledge our souls, our spirits and, instead of stunting the soul’s growth as an adolescent, provide space, engagement and teachings for ourselves, our family, our children to grow their souls in their unique manner and way that is appropriate to them.

 Rabbi Heschel is screaming at me right now: “Mark, why are you stuck in slavery, you have been free and can achieve inner freedom again and stay there longer!” This is the call that I am hearing from him right now, for me and for you and for everyone. The miracle of the soul is inner freedom and this happens when we grow our spirits, our souls in conjunction with our unique calling/talent/gift from the Ineffable One, when we acknowledge that there is something greater than ourselves in this universe and we are not the end all/be all of the world. The miracle is taking place right now, possibly , if you are engaging in soul maturing and growing practices today and every day. When you pray with intention, you are engaging in soul maturing activities, when you meditate, in whatever way you choose, you are engaging in soul maturing activities, when you connect with another person’s soul and stop wondering/worrying about what they can do for you, when you stop objectifying another person and see them as a reflection of some part of the force of the universe, the Ineffable One, you are growing your soul. Surrendering our need to be right, to look good, to be in power, to ‘one-up’ everyone else, is a path to soul maturation. Letting go of always trying to ‘look good’, be politically correct, up with the latest fad, etc is an action that leads to soul growth. 

We live in a ‘where’s mine’ world and we are constantly blaming, shaming, bullying, another(s) for our own gain, not for their betterment. While teaching responsibility, the acceptance of guilt and the power of constant messaging can be used to enhance the soul and spirit of another as well as oneself, today these assets are turned against the people who need them in order to make them believe lies, manipulations, ‘alternative facts’ as well as stopping them from taking life-saving measures for themselves by some of the people in power. We have allowed some people to unleash their soul killing, spirit suffocating, words and ways to permeate us and, set back the inner freedom and miracle of the soul. Authoritarians do not want us to achieve inner freedom, the charlatans parading as keepers of the faith who do not want us to achieve inner freedom by their coziness to power, the ways they bastardize the words of spiritual freedom and maturity to enhance their image, the sheep who are so deep in their own self-deception and mendacity they cannot discern the Word of the Soul, the Ineffable One, are to be dealt with using strength, decisiveness and compassion. Otherwise, without compassion, we become them and we are all lost and enslaved. 

In recovery, we are witnesses and recipients of the miracle of the soul each and every day! We have a daily practice of soul enhancing, growing, maturing activities. We know that we never stay in one place, we know we are either moving forward or backwards in our spiritual condition. We are also aware that sometimes we take one step back in order to move two steps forward. In recovery, we are not looking for perfection, only progress. 

I have many more moments of Inner freedom than inner slavery. Because I have experienced the miracle, the moments of slavery are all the more painful and debilitating. I know, however, the path back-through connection with another, through study and love, through service and truth, through random acts of kindness and compassion, through taking time for my self, golf, family, friends, and through connection to the Ineffable One. More tomorrow, stay safe and God Bless, Rabbi Mark

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel - a daily path to living well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 43

“But inner freedom is spiritual ecstasy, the state of being beyond all interests and selfishness. Inner freedom is a miracle of the soul.” (Man is Not Alone pg.142)

In the next few days we will learn Rabbi Heschel’s teachings on how to achieve this miracle and for today, as we head into the Sabbath for all of the Abrahamic Faiths, I want to delve into these words. So many people are trying to achieve this spiritual ecstasy through artificial means and, while achieving it for a moment or longer, it is not an inner shift usually. Ayahuasca, peyote, dope, monastic prayer and living, crystals, etc may and do get people to a spiritual ecstasy and, sometimes keep them there with repeated treatments, and the inner freedom Rabbi Heschel is teaching us about is the inner freedom that comes from growing our soul organically, not trying to achieve spiritual ecstasy through artificial means rather through connection to the Ineffable One and to one another. The artificial means that people use to achieve this spiritual ecstasy  do work and may even propel people to seek inner freedom more, yet my concern is by artificial means alone, there is no regular practice for achieving inner freedom more often, growing our inner freedom and, of course, becoming reliant on the artificial to get us to the real.

Ecstatic moments are just that, moments! Spiritual ecstasy is not going to be a once and for all lifetime ride, rather, as I am immersing myself in these words and teachings, it is a place we can and will visit and then leave. It is not an experience of fairy dust and moonbeams, it is not an experience of escape and hiding, it is an experience of deep connection to the Ineffable One, to another human being and to all of humanity as well as connected to eternity I believe. The error that many of us make is that we want to stay here, we want to dwell so close to the Ineffable One so we try and imitate Aaron’s two sons, Nadav and Avihu, who burned themselves up by trying to getting too close to God, through meditative and/or artificial (distilled spirits) means. Inner freedom is achieved in moments, not hours, days, weeks, etc and these moments grow into hours, weeks, years for some people and for others of us we keep getting there more often during a day, week, month and year until we are in a regular practice/routine of taking the actions to achieve this inner freedom and spiritual ecstasy. 

“The state of being beyond all interests and selfishness” is not a state most of us can sustain for long periods of time, much less forever. As I think back, my grandfathers achieved and lived in this state most of their lives. Neither one cared much about material things, they were always ready and willing to help another human being, they did not talk bad about another person and would not let anyone in their midst berate someone else, and they came from Eastern Europe, experienced the progroms, came over here in steerage, without much if any resources and made a life for themselves and their families. We have many other examples, Nathan Hale who regretted that he “only had one life to give” before he was hung, Mother Theresa, Rev King, Rabbi Heschel, Bobby Kennedy, Daniel Webster, All the people who fought at the Alamo, all of the men and women who have fought to keep our democracy alive, etc. Yet even most of them had moments of selfishness and interests- again not as a bad thing, rather as a human thing. We are all capable of attaining these moments of spiritual ecstasy, however and this is the place where self-deception and mendacity rear their ugly heads.

We are experiencing a moral and spiritual depression right now in the world, even though there are so many seekers of spirituality, so many people waving the flag of morality as rallying cries, we are in a moral and spiritual depression. Many of the flag wavers and gurus of spirituality and morality are charlatans! They are people who want, need, and depend on power and control to exist. They are people who prey upon the weaknesses and vulnerabilities of another(s) in order to gain, keep and extend their power. These are not people who are in “the state beyond all interests and selfishness”, they are deeply committed to their interests and selfish ways. Rather than care for another human beings needs and interests, they are constantly calculating how to get another person to do their bidding so they can stay blameless, shocked, give alternative facts, bastardize the principles they so eloquently espouse. This is true of people all along the continuum of faith, morality, etc. We, the people, have to stand up against the selfishness inside of us, we have to let go of the self-interests that we constantly are thinking about and engage in the interests of the Ineffable One, the interests of another human being and serve them, which in turn serves us because we reach the state of spiritual ecstasy.

In recovery, we know that our recovery is based on our spiritual condition each day. We are very aware and engaged in getting out of ourselves to serve the Ineffable One. We take stock of ourselves each day to catch the selfishness and disinterest in another quickly and turn our moral and spiritual compass back to due north. 

I have achieved moments of spiritual ecstasy often and realize that the state of “beyond all interests…” is not always a happy state. My soul cries for the needs and treatment of another(s) both by me, which I do T’Shuvah for and by another(s) and by society. Each day, I am blessed to experience more inner freedom for longer periods and I am grateful to everyone who helps me get out of me! God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel - a daily path to living well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 42

“For integrity is the fruit of freedom. The slave will always ask: What will serve my interests? It is the free man who is able to transcend the causality of interest and deed, of act and the desire for personal reward.”(Man is Not Alone pg. 142)

Who is truly free according to Rabbi Heschel’s description above and how do we get to freedom? I am realizing how many people, believing they are free are actually slaves. Many of us equate freedom with doing what we want to, what we think is best/right, etc. Yet, here comes Rabbi Heschel and he tears this way of thinking/being apart with this teaching. Freedom involves choice of course, yet it also involves what choices we make, whom we are serving with our choices, and which type of choices we are making. 

We make choices each and every moment, from the time we get up till we lay down to sleep, yet making choices is not necessarily freedom, as I am understanding Rabbi Heschel this morning. Rabbi/Dr. Abraham Twerski, of Blessed Memory, says being human means making “free-will moral choices”. Putting Rabbi Twerski’s wisdom with Rabbi Heschel’s teachings, we can see that to be free means ‘the what choices we are making’ have to be moral choices, they have to be choices where we are taking the next right moral action for ourselves and for another human being, for another animal being and/or for our planet’s well-being. The what cannot be about what is good for us only, the what cannot be for our desires alone, the what cannot be about the actions we take to gain power, prestige, reputation, etc, if we want to be free. The what entails transcending beyond our self interest, going beyond our desires, going beyond even the interests of a group, political party, leader, etc , to serve the interests of God, Higher Power, Higher Consciousness, Greater Good. 

This is an important distinction to make. It is so easy to fool ourselves, to buy into the self-deception of freedom because we choose to serve the ‘interests’ of another person who is interested in only themselves, their power, their personal greater good and not the greater good of humanity. We see this with people who vote in authoritarian governments, we see this in elections in this country where people support people who care nothing about  serving, only about having power. We see this with the gridlock that happens in state and federal governing bodies so often. We see this in the ways people have shielded a Jeffery Epstein, an Elon Musk, etc to gain favor and get wealthy and powerful. We see this in the ways our lobbyists serve the clients who give them the money and will go against their own moral compass to win. We see this type of behaviors in everyday people who defend the right to kill another, harm another, with guns, with Covid-19, with domestic violence, etc all the while denying the right to choose for women. The ends that some of us are serving are the ends that God, that morality, that being human calls for, they are the selfish ends and we fool ourselves by believing this makes us free people. 

On a personal level, so many of us suffer from this self-deception that we have even distorted what is moral, what is transcending our desire for personal reward. Many people buy into the lie that the people leading the Confederate Army are American Heroes, when they tried to bring down the entire democratic experiment. Can you imagine revering people who are trying to bring chaos, anger, mendacity to you, your family, your country? Can you imagine revering people who state openly that all they want is power and they want to cater to the rich and that poor people are poor because God doesn’t love them? Can you imagine revering religious leaders who preach hatred based on color, creed, religion, socio-economic status? Can you imagine revering people who are so quick to be anti-Semitic and call it anti-Israel? Can you imaging revering people who want to upend our system to ‘help the poor like themselves’ while they are wearing designer clothes, making speeches, promoting themselves? I hope so because so many of us are doing just this. We are slaves to the words people speak, the emotions they engender in us and we don’t hear the truth of their words. We must be continually on-guard to recognize when we are deceiving ourselves and when we are hearing the lies/deceptions of another. This is the path to transcending our desire for personal reward.

In recovery, we know all too well how enslaved we have been and we are constantly exploring our actions and thoughts to root out the lies we tell ourselves and the lies we perpetrate onto another human being. We can only harm another person when we lie to ourselves about them even being human, we deceive ourselves into believing they are objects to serve our needs, rather than we are blessed to be able to serve another. In recovery, we are continually walking on the road of freedom, moving forward one step at a time each day. 

I have been blessed and rewarded with freedom by transcending my own interests and desire for personal reward most of the time. While recognition is wonderful and I like it, what is and has been more important is: how do I serve another human being. How can my story, my wisdom help another human being live better. Being recognized for this is not a personal reward, it is an honor, a blessing and a ‘good’ report card to and for God. I have witnessed 1000’s of people achieve true freedom and I pray we all help more on this journey. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel - a daily path to living well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 41

“For integrity is the fruit of freedom. The slave will always ask: What will serve my interests? It is the free man who is able to transcend the causality of interest and deed, of act and the desire for personal reward.”(Man is Not Alone pg. 142)

Rabbi Heschel’s words are ringing so loudly in my mind, and even more so in my soul. “Integrity is the fruit of freedom” is so pregnant with understandings and with images, it is almost too much to even process. Yet, process it we must:)  Integrity comes from the latin word meaning “intact” as I said yesterday and the Hebrew for Integrity is Shlemut, wholeness. Fruit, I believe is being used as  reward/result. Here is a way to understand this first sentence: Wholeness and being intact is the reward/result/logical consequence of freedom.I am blown away by a new thought: we cannot get whole and be intact until we achieve freedom, not the other way around. 

Many people think that once they get whole, they will achieve freedom and I hear Rabbi Heschel telling us it is the other way around. We have to get free of our unhealthy egos, our falseness, our selfishness, our need to be right/seen, our entitlements and our arrogance in order to begin to achieve freedom, as I understand Rabbi Heschel. While he was criticized for cancelling a class in order to take a stand against an injustice like racism or a stand against the killing of 1000’s of innocent Vietnamese children, he did this because he had to stand up for the interests of another. In the Torah we are commanded at least 36 times to take care of the stranger, the widow, the orphan, the poor and the needy to drive home the teachings of Rabbi Heschel. We keep trying to find wholeness in and of our self and we cannot find it, as I am hearing Rabbi Heschel, until we join with another, until the interests of another become our concerns. All of the  ‘alone paths’ to wholeness, intactness, freedom are self-indulgent and self-serving which is why we are always left feeling enslaved and angry. 

We are slaves to ourselves so often that we become oblivious to our self-centeredness, according to the way Rabbi Heschel’s words pummel my soul and mind. When we need to be seen as philanthropic, when we need to be seen as helping, when we need to be seen as author, expert, etc, when we need to have our names on buildings, when we need to _____(fill in the blank) in order to be whole, we are enslaved to our egos, to our self-image and to societal norms/notions. Reading these first two sentences through the prism of Radical Amazement allows us to see the path to freedom is to let go of the self-serving actions and thoughts that we disguise as altruistic, that we disguise as concern for another. The self-serving ones are the ones where we need/have to be seen as. All of us fall into this path, all of us visit here, we are human after all. The danger becomes when we are oblivious to this way of being, when we actually believe the lies we are telling ourselves and we get more and more enslaved to our false selves each and every day. 

“What will serve my interests” is a common refrain among people, within a person. It is so subtle and so blatant at the same time. Asking this question is the precursor to finding the way to deceive another and to convince another self to become enslaved through being oblivious because the subtlety allows another self to believe the deceiver. We see this in the political realm, we see this in the stories about Purdue Pharma and other drug-makers, just look at the ads on TV, people smiling while they are telling you about the ways the drug could kill you! We see this in the religious realm, spiritual leaders being anything but spiritual by serving their interests, political and personal, rather than God’s interests and/or the interests of the people they are supposed to serve. We see this in business and education, entertainment and sports, in all walks of life, “what will serve my interests” is a looming question that the people in charge are constantly asking themselves and, in all fairness, they care about their shareholders, their fellow deceivers, their bottom-line needs. 

In recovery, we know that we have to be free of our false ego, false self, we are so aware of the self-deception we have engaged in that we are hyper-vigilant to the lies we tell ourselves and the lies we spread to another. We review our day each evening to see where we achieved freedom from “the bondage of self” as the AA Big Book talks about and where we are still stuck on ourselves and our lies. In recovery, we are seeking to improve our spiritual condition a little more/one grain of sand each day, thereby being able to taste, enjoy and live better by knowing we are more whole than yesterday, more intact than yesterday and more integrated than yesterday. It doesn’t get better than this. 

I taste this fruit of freedom most of my time in my recovery. I have also tasted the bitterness of being enslaved to my false ego at times in recovery as well. It is the taste of the bitterness that propels me back to freedom. I am blessed to have a conscious contact with God each day. I am blessed to hear the voices of my ancestors ringing in my soul every day, especially when I am being a slave to my interests. I am blessed to be able to root out the lies I tell myself and the ways I engage in self-deception quickly, knowing that I will fall into the trap of them if I don’t recognize them early on. I am grateful to everyone who holds me accountable, asks for my assistance and allows me to serve them because each time I am lucky enough to serve, I take another step towards freedom. God Bless and Stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel - a daily path to living well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 40

It is a useless endeavor to fight the ego with intellectual arguments, since like a wounded hydra it produces two heads for every one cut off. Reason alone is incapable of forcing the soul to love or of saying why we ought to love for no profit, for no reward. The great battle for integrity must be fought by aiming at the very heart of the ego and by enhancing the soul’s power of freedom.”(Man is Not Alone pg.141/2).

Immersing ourselves in the last sentence above seems like too much to do. The Latin origin of the word integrity is ‘intact’ and the Hebrew word is Shlemut ‘ wholeness’. Rabbi Heschel is advising us to gear up and do battle with our egos so we can remain both intact and achieve wholeness. What a mind-blowing experience/thought. While many people believe we live in an one and done world, constantly looking for what is next after we climb this rung of the ladder, Rabbi Heschel is informing us that we have to be aware that the battle for integrity, the battle for wholeness and to stay intact is an ongoing one. We have to be on guard each and every day, we have to stay aware and not go through life willfully blind, blocking our ears, inattentive to our souls’ call to us. Rabbi Heschel is informing us, reminding us and cajoling us to grow our souls’ power of freedom each and every day, I believe. 

How do we do this? OY!! This is where the work begins. To “aim at the very heart of the ego” I have to be aware of what is a healthy and necessary ego and what is a false and unhealthy ego. Without ego, we would be unable to fulfill the Ineffable One’s call for us, unable to live in a way compatible with being a partner of/with Universe. This is an important distinction, I believe, because to have no ego is to be a slave and, in my understanding and belief, even being a slave to Force of the Cosmos is not healthy nor is it freedom. A healthy ego is an ego that knows its/our capabilities, knows how to achieve realistic and needed goals we set for ourselves in conjunction with God’s plan for us, and continue to learn and grow without blame nor shame-always making honest appraisals of our situations, learning/failing forward, and grateful for each of life’s experiences. A healthy ego is an ego that is in service of our soul, in service of another human being, in service of something that is greater than ourselves and in service of our authentic needs. This takes an awareness that we need to build on each and every day, it takes a dedication to knowing oneself and being able to say yes to oneself whenever our healthy ego is serving a greater good for the sake of the greater good and not for the sake of ourself. A healthy ego is achievable by all of us when we accept our flaws and our strengths, our talents and our need for assistance in the areas we are not talented in. 

To aim at “the very heart of the ego” is to get out of the self-deception we are living in, to break out of our need to engage in mendacity with another(s) and to be in truth as to our assets and our deficiencies. Going to “the very heart of the ego” is to let go of our need to be right all the time, our need to be perfect and our need to rule over another to feel good about ourselves. The weapons of this “great battle for integrity” are teachings/books/teachers/guides of spiritual living, constant awareness of what is, living in wonder/radical amazement, letting go of ‘where’s mine’ attitude, letting go of ‘don’t you know who I think I am’ way of being, carrying on a positive truthful inner dialogue, blocking out the lies that the world/society are bombarding us with, leaving the prisons and slaveries of needing someone’s approval, permission and/or self-loathing. We need to adopt, enhance and continue to live our lives as children of the Creator, as royalty if you will, knowing that each of us has a patch of the garden, called Earth, to tend and commit to tending it each and every day. Knowing that our corner is neither less than nor greater than the corner of another, just different and that is okay. Becoming aware of and engaging in the need for another to help and heal us just as we are needed to help and heal another. This battle is ongoing, we engage in it each day because the false ego gets subtler and subtler each day, because we continue to grow and need to keep adjusting/readjusting where we bring our gifts and talents to those who need them now. 

Leaving self-deception, mendacity, conventional notions and mental cliches is a difficult journey and we can make it, it is a difficult battle and we can win it. Are you willing to engage in this battle to achieve wholeness and be intact for today’s experience? 

In recovery, we are engaged in this battle each and every day, sometimes moment by moment, hour by hour. We know that our false ego lures us to take actions that seem to make sense and yet, lead to the destruction of connections, love, spirit and leave us wanting and shattered. In recovery we are constantly engaged in seeking the right questions for the experience we are in and finding solutions knowing the results are out of our control. Just this recognition is a weapon in the “great battle for integrity”. 

I have to wrestle with my ego daily. I do this by remembering Whom I am serving and making sure it is not me alone. I pray each morning a prayer of gratitude and I engage in this writing to ensure that I learn something new each day. I consistently check in with my ego and my soul at regular intervals, sometimes I buy into my own self-deception and over the years less and less. I engage in seeing people for who they are and holding out hope that can be/becoming the spirits I see in them. I am blessed to know I am intact and a whole human being from these battles with all the scars and wounds. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel - a daily path to living well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel 

Day 39

“It is a useless endeavor to fight the ego with intellectual arguments, since like a wounded hydra it produces two heads for every one cut off. Reason alone is incapable of forcing the soul to love or of saying why we ought to love for no profit, for no reward. The great battle for integrity must be fought by aiming at the very heart of the ego and by enhancing the soul’s power of freedom.”(Man is Not Alone pg.141/2).

As I continue to immerse myself (and all of you reading this) in this paragraph, I continue to experience more wisdom, truth and strength. Continuing to engage with the second sentence above; when we love from reason and/or fall in love with reason, we are creating a transactional relationship rather than a covenantal relationship. This is why, I believe, “reason alone is incapable of forcing the soul to love” rings so loud, so true, so deep into our souls. Love from reason alone will usually bring about a love that is one-sided, a love that is based upon the needs of the one using reason and, in many cases, a love that is based in/on a lie. Reason is a wonderful path to self-deception and when we use reason alone to decide we are in love, we deceive ourselves and another into believing we are in a covenantal relationship, all the while creating the relationship from a transactional basis. We cannot create a covenant using transactional ways, transactional paths. Yet, many of us are so unaware of this truth that we do fool ourselves into believing we can; many of us are so concerned with only ourselves that we believe we are making a covenant because we take the vows that say we are. 

Reason cannot force the soul to love because our souls are more knowledgeable than our reasoning can ever be. When we use our souls’ knowledge, we are using the higher wisdom of ourselves, the higher wisdom of the universe and the collective higher wisdom of our family, friends, community. We are able to combine all of these higher knowings precisely because all of our soul-to-soul relationships are covenantal, they involve more than our humanness, they involve the Ineffable One as well. While many people believe they can outthink, cajole, bribe, force the Ineffable One to do their bidding, they are just fooling themselves and those around them. While we can see how this mendacity, this self-deception harms so many on a grand scale, ie politics, business’, healthcare, etc; many of us are unable to see the harm we bring on a personal level. Whether we are aware of our deception/practice of mendacity and/or are deep into our own self-deception, when we convince another person that our love is covenantal, we are making a commitment that involves the Ineffable One, that involves making the interests of our partner our deep concern and covenanting to be in truth, kindness, love, etc with our partner. Using reason will never get us there because when we use reason we don’t care about love, kindness, truth, etc-we care about getting what we want in the moment. Love is not reasonable, love is spiritual! Doing something for no profit, for no reward doesn’t make sense to most people, I am going to spend my time, money, energy and get nothing back for it- how ridiculous, our reason tells us. “What’s in it for me” is a constant question when we use our reasoning faculty, “how do I serve, how do I connect” is the constant question when we use our soul’s knowledge/reasoning. 

In his book, Insecurity of Freedom, Rabbi Heschel says: “Modern man continues to ponder: What will I get out of life? What escapes his attention is the fundamental, yet forgotten question, What will life get out of me?”(Insecurity of Freedom pg.4/5). Our reasoning is based on self, so to love is to get out of self, hence Rabbi Heschel’s brilliance in the sentence I am writing about. While many of us want to argue this point, we all know-somewhere inside of us- that when we ‘love’ from reason, it is a transactional love and if the other.person believes it to be covenantal, there will be a betrayal and we will deny it, etc. Yet, there has to be a betrayal when we use reason alone to love, when we use reason to fool another person into thinking we really care about them as a human being, when we are so uncaring as to abandon this person we “love” when they need us the most. This lie we tell ourselves that our love is covenantal when it is through reason, not soul, hence transactional is, in my opinion, the cause for divorce, business breakups, family feuds, etc. 

In recovery, we are aware of how reason got us into trouble. We are aware of how reasoning alone caused us to wind up lonely, isolated, imprisoned in our own mind, paranoid, unable to live from our souls, etc. In recovery, we connect with a Higher Power, the Ineffable One, God, however one wants to label the Creative Force of the Universe, in order to be more that our reasoning tells us, to let go of the conventional notions and mental cliches so we can live in the wonder of now, the wonder of true love and the wonder of being human. 

I have found that when I use reasoning alone, I am left alone in my skin, in my mind and in my heart. In these last 33+ years, I have worked hard to live from my soul’s knowledge, used my reasoning to serve my soul instead of using reason to shut down my soul. I have found that entering into covenantal relationships is much more fulfilling and comfortable for me and if another person is having a transactional relationship, I will get hurt, feel betrayed and move on because my soul is stronger for loving another human being and making the interests of another my concern. This is my way of living this wisdom today:) Stay safe and God Bless, Rabbi Mark

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel - a daily path to living well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 38

“It is a useless endeavor to fight the ego with intellectual arguments, since like a wounded hydra it produces two heads for every one cut off. Reason alone is incapable of forcing the soul to love or of saying why we ought to love for no profit, for no reward. The great battle for integrity must be fought by aiming at the very heart of the ego and by enhancing the soul’s power of freedom.”(Man is Not Alone pg.141/2).

Continuing to immerse ourselves in Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom above allows us the opportunity to take stock of how we use our egos; do we use them to serve ourselves and/or do we use them to serve our souls and God. Ego, used in the service of our soul and in the service of God is the proper way to live, as I am reading Rabbi Heschel. To give us his wisdom, to give us the example of his way of living, to fight for rights and dignity of the needy, the stranger, etc took a healthy ego being used by his soul, in my estimation and experience. We can see how our egos serving our souls propel us to greatness, to joy, to wisdom and to action through so many examples of people like John Lewis, Rabbi Heschel, Brene Brown, Harriet Rossetto, Father Greg Boyle, John Pavlovitz, Dr. Lisa Miller, Martin Luther King Jr., the Freedom Riders, Billy Planer, Greg Asbed, and 1000’s more people of fame and who live this path and are unnamed and unnoticed publicly. 

To live this way, we have to let go of our need to be run by reason, for as Rabbi Heschel teaches: “reason alone is incapable of forcing the soul to love”. We are a society that believes Descartes: “I think therefore I am” rather than ‘I am therefore I can think’. I believe Rabbi Heschel is reminding us that our reasoning cannot connect us with God, it cannot even connect us to our souls and/or our inner lives. Reason ends at some point and living by reason/ego alone stunts our humanity and our search for knowledge, hence the need to live in radical amazement. We, as a society, have become obsessed with using reason to prove points, to win power and to control another(s) human being. We buy into the lies our egos tell us and we follow any path that we can make sense of, any path that feeds our insatiable egos in order to fulfill the lies we tell ourselves. We encourage another(s) to feed our egos, we use the fears of another(s) to feed our egos, and we subjugate another(s) in order to prove we are the best and brightest.

Reason and ego in service of our souls, in service of God, is a totally different experience. It is an experience of living from the inside out, an experience of knowing the next right action to take in order to serve God, another and our authentic self. We do this by maturing, growing and engaging in our inner life, our soul’s life. Rather than keeping our souls imprisoned, rather than shutting off our inner voices, we participate in the inner dialogue that is constantly happening. This is not the same as a mental dialogue, it is listening to our bodies, it is listening to the call of our souls, hearing and respecting our “gut instinct” and the churning of our stomachs in our daily living. We have to continue to seek our God/Higher Power/Higher Consciousness often throughout the day through prayer, meditation, study and by being immersed in the moment we are in. We have to set our goals on serving God, caring about the interests of another(s) and fulfilling our passion and purpose. Each morning reminding ourselves of how grateful we are to be alive, knowing that today is a new day, knowing we do not have to be weighed down by the past nor fearful of the future, and excited to use our knowledge to learn more today. When we use reason and ego in service of our souls and in service of God, we ask ourselves the correct questions for the experience we are in and find new and exciting responses, we see each experience during the day as a new opportunity, we see life with new/fresh eyes and we experience connections to God, to another(s), to life and to our true self. 

In recovery, we are aware that our ego’s can and often do Ease God Out of our lives. We are aware of how often we did this prior to our recovery. We engage in connecting to the Higher Consciousness we get from engaging with another human being and with a group of people, we are deeply committed to letting the reasoning that leads us to seek false goals through false means go. In recovery, we know that serving God, serving another and serving self begins with shifting the locus of control from ego and reason to soul and higher reasoning. 

I have wrestled with my ego forever. I have always been in a war between the false ego of pride, being right, ‘don’t you know who I think I am’ and the false ego of ‘I am nothing, what can I offer, I am no good,’ etc. In my recovery, I have been engaged in the war of using my ego and reason to serve my soul, to serve God through serving another human being. I know I have won many of these battles and lost some as well. I also know that the war doesn’t end! Each morning I gear up for this wrestling match with prayer, with study, with writing, with Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom. I know that my soul is the arbiter of my living most of the time and when my soul is in charge, I am safe, secure and able to deal with everything that comes my way. When my ego/reason is in charge, I am anxious, angry, bewildered and hurt beyond repair, until my soul takes over and I am calm, in sync, aware and healed. I write this today as I am about to turn 70 years old tomorrow and I am entering a new phase in my life, retirement from Beit T’Shuvah and hello to my next act. Thank you for being on this journey with me, God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel - a daily path to living well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 37

“It is a useless endeavor to fight the ego with intellectual arguments, since like a wounded hydra it produces two heads for every one cut off. Reason alone is incapable of forcing the soul to love or of saying why we ought to love for no profit, for no reward. The great battle for integrity must be fought by aiming at the very heart of the ego and by enhancing the soul’s power of freedom.”(Man is Not Alone pg.141/2).

We spend so much time in our intellectual arguments within our own brains and with another person(s), that we get lost in our need to be right, our need to prove, our need to win, our need puff ourselves up, etc. What is sad to/for me is that we have seen what these intellectual arguments can and do lead to: war; extermination; destruction of democratic ways of governments; family separations; prejudice; hatred of women, LGBTQI, Jews, Muslims, Catholics, foreigners, people of color; inner anxiety, depression, addiction, etc. When we look back at our human history, we see how our intellectual arguments have bastardized God, spirit, religious tenets, etc. God is not asking us to fight wars anymore, not since the battle for the Promised Land in the 2nd Book of the Hebrew Bible, “Na” for the “history” of the Judges, Kings, Prophets. Yet, how many wars have people said they are fighting for “god”, how many terrorists have wreaked untold damage on innocent people in the name of their “god”? All of this comes from our egos and our intellectual arguments that the ego creates and our minds numbingly go along with. 

Germany had an immense intellectual community and it did not stop Hitler, et al, Russia has always had a large creative community within in and it hasn’t stopped Stalin, Putin, etc. America has always had a rebel spirit and openness to new ways of seeing and thinking and creating and it did not stop Trumpism, Tea Party, etc. We are seeing one of two people control what our government can and cannot do, not from any ideological stand rather from a power grab. The Republicans are not ideologically opposed to helping the needy and fairness-it is just their egos demand they decide how, who and what help is and they want to define fairness in their terms. The same is true of today’s Democrats as well. It is true in business and even in helping organizations, our intellects and egos get in the way of serving another(s) in the ways needed and with all of our beingness. 

In our personal lives, we are constantly confronted and controlled by our egos through needing to be right, afraid of looking foolish, our old wounds, trying to be #1, etc. We are using our intellectual arguments to bolster our egos, not fight them. While ego is an important quality for our survival and our endeavors to grow our purpose and engage in our passions, it is also the reason that we get so depressed, anxious, addicted, overbearing, etc. It is also the reason that we feel like we have to go to war/battle each and every day with the world to be heard, seen, powerful and insecure. Our egos tell us lies and we believe them, our egos help us stay in self-deception and mendacity. Our egos are the hydra that keep fueling our incessant need to dominate and rule another person(s), our ‘world’ and they fuel our fear of being dominated and ruled by another person. Fighting these unchecked ego urges and actions with our intellects only lead us deeper and deeper into the abyss. Fighting our egos with intellectual arguments leads to parents ‘knowing’ what is best according to their standards for their children and not truly seeing who their kids are. It leads to bullies believing they have the right to bully another human being, it leads to organizations being obsessed with the bottom line and not caring about the people who buy, use, depend on the goods and services they are selling. 

Intra-personally, our egos use our intellects to fuel our lies about ourselves such as we are not “good/good enough”. This leads us to constantly measure up to some false standard and not be real. Our egos fuel our false selves, sometimes to the extent that we are constantly adopting new personas to fit in with whatever crowd we are with. Our egos tell us our falseness is a good thing and we have the right to what we can get by any and all means because everyone else does it, ie cheat on taxes, portray ourselves as someone we are not, etc. Our egos force us into a life of one-upmanship and/or servitude, go it alone or go along to get along, etc. Our intellects are constantly telling us to assert ourselves and insert ourselves in matters where we don’t necessarily belong. The combination of ego and intellect drives us to silence the call of our souls. Our intellects and egos, when they are in charge of us, lead us to be concerned for another person’s situation only to the extent that it serves us by being seen as caring and kind, all the while really seeking credit, not service for the sake of another(s). 

In recovery, we know that we need our egos, we know that our egos can propel us to be the person we were created to be; decent, kind, loving, caring, truthful, just, compassionate. We also know that unchecked, fueled by our intellects,  our egos take us to the other end of the spectrum and we stop being human and care about ourselves only. In recovery, we are well aware of the sentence; “enough about me, what do you think of me” and how insidious this way of thinking and being is. 

More tomorrow on how I live in this constant battleground of ego, intellect and soul. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel - a daily path to living well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 36

“The self is not evil. The precept: “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself,” includes the care for one’s own self as a duty. It is as mistaken to consider the duty to oneself and the will of God as opposites as it is to identify them. To serve does not mean to surrender but to share.” (Man is Not Alone pg.141).

Today, I want to focus on the last sentence of this paragraph: “To serve does not mean to surrender but to share”. I believe Rabbi Heschel is reminding us, teaching us, cajoling us, smacking some of us upside our heads as to what is important in living and how to truly engage in life, with God, with our whole self and with another self. 

Applying this truth to any aspect of living and we can see how it enhances, elevates, and enables common everyday activities. When I seek to share with my wife, daughter, siblings, nieces, nephews, family, friends, co-workers, strangers, I do not have to be right, I am not under any “pressure to perform”, I am not governed by the edicts of another, I am able to and privileged to present the real, authentic me, sharing wisdom, battle scars, holding out my hand for them to grab hold of, etc as well as learning from them, taking their outstretched hand and together, truly making a “fence around the Torah”, a connection that helps all of us live better, a connection that states we are responsible for and to each other, a connection that enables each other, and a connection that screams YOU MATTER. 

Many people have a terrific problem with the word surrender, I am reminded of Rabbi Harold Shulweis, z”l, screaming at me to never surrender when we were having a debate about the word in the context of recovery. Re-reading Rabbi Heschel’s words today, I understand better what he was saying. Sharing in and with another human being allows us to retain our individuality, our dignity, our freedom and our self-worth. Surrender, to Rabbis Shulweis and Heschel, as I am understanding these words today, was a negative because of the Shoah, because, to them, surrender meant slavery, becoming like another, a loss of dignity and self-worth. Even in relationship to God does surrender sound like the wrong word, as I am reading it today. Sharing with God, sharing in God’s bounty for and to us, sharing with God our soul’s desire, our sadness, our pain, our joy and our health, is a much different experience than surrendering/giving up and not being an active participant in the relationship with God. 

All of the prayers we recite at different times have a new meaning in immersing myself into Rabbi Heschel’s thoughts. We recite prayers to share our soul, our questions, pour fears, our  hopes with God and us. We pause between the words to hear and share in the words back from God. We pause between the words, prayers to hear and share in the dreams, hopes, questions, pain, fears, etc from the people in our prayer community. We pray as a people for our self and for the self of another human being(s). We share in the tragedies, pain, loss, victories, joys, healings and connections of one another in prayer, in community, in life as well as with God. As I am reading this, we do not come to God as a supplicant, with our hats in our hands, rather we come to God as a partner, as one who has something to share and something to receive. 

When we experience service as sharing, we no longer need to have power struggles with one another. We no longer have to force another person to surrender to our will and do what we want to do or want them to do in our to serve. Service is no longer about a hierarchy, it is about equality. Someone serving us is not longer something we are entitled to, rather it is something we are privileged to receive, it is a gift from another person and from God. Service as sharing means that we are gifted with the opportunity to share with another our gifts to compliment, enhance, fill a gap in their life so they can share with another, maybe us maybe not us, their gifts to do the same for another. It is the ultimate pay-it-forward and/or, as Rabbi Jonathan Omer-man taught me 30+years ago, it is the reciprocity of generosity that fuels the world and our souls. 

In recovery surrender is not a bad word, we have to surrender our false egos, our “drug of choice” in order to be able to share with another. In recovery, service is all about sharing our experience, strength, and hope. We find ourselves on both the giving and receiving end of these shares, the speakers at meetings don’t lecture, they share and in sharing we are able to express our humanity and receive the humanity of another, no matter their background, faith, race, socio-economic status, etc. In recovery, we share our secrets and our gifts in equal measure fearlessly so someone else can benefit. 

I have been blessed to be able to share my experience, strength, hope, joy, pain, sadness, betrayals by me and against me out loud to a community of seekers and sharers. In the 33 years I have worked at Beit T’Shuvah, my service has been all about sharing in the lives of 1000’s of people. I realize from today’s reading that my way of being is to share my ego’s energy with my soul’s vision and this is the path of maximum service to God, to my self, to another self(s). It is the path of to experience the maximum joy, comfort, dignity and self-worth possible. It is the path to the inner peace that we all seek, not the “ohm” inner peace, rather then inner peace of being an active partner with God, with another sharing soul(s) to make our corner of the world a little better and us a little more responsible. Stay safe and God Bless, Rabbi Mark

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel - a daily path for living well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 35

“The self is not evil. The precept: “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself,” includes the care for one’s own self as a duty. It is as mistaken to consider the duty to oneself and the will of God as opposites as it is to identify them. To serve does not mean to surrender but to share.” (Man is Not Alone pg.141).

I find myself being so immersed in Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom that I have to engage in the same few sentences over and over again. This is how I first began to read Rabbi Heschel, I would read a page, turn to the next page and have to turn back to re-encounter the mind-blowing, soul-opening wisdom of Rabbi Heschel. I hope you keep turning these pages over and over.

In the second major idea of this paragraph, Rabbi Heschel is again blowing up so many peoples’ ideas about the duty to oneself and the will of God. He is reminding us that caring for our self is following the will of God. This does not mean that our will is God’s will, that selfish desires, power plays, deceptions, denials, mendacity that we as people engage in daily, weekly, sometimes minute by minute, are God’s will. Rather the duty to oneself, the obligation we have to care for our self:  not our false egos, not our prestige and power, not our money-hungry deceptions, rather our true and authentic self. While we cannot say that our self is the same as God, we can say we are reminders of God, we are created to fulfill a divine need, we are capable of “nullifying our will before God’s will so that God’s will becomes our will” as we are taught in Pirke Avot. 

Caring for our self is so misunderstood by most people. I believe Rabbi Heschel is speaking about physical well-being for sure and, more importantly spiritual and emotional well-being. Using the phrase above about loving one’s neighbor, speaking about life being holy earlier on the same page, all point to his deep concern with our spiritual life, our inner life and, if we are not duty bound to care for our spirit, our soul, our inner life, our emotional life, then we will sink into an illness that no pill can bring us out of. We see this all the time with people we know and love, people we have never met and, in some cases, the people who lead cities, states, our country even. 

The illness of which I speak is the illness of mendacity, deception of another and self-deception. Just as someone of medication who is feeling better will decide to go off their medication and then all hell breaks loose, so too when we stop caring for our spiritual life, our inner life, does all hell break loose inside of us. We begin to blame everyone else for our issues, we point fingers at another(s) without taking responsibility for our part. We engage in the depravity of willful blindness about our self, we engage in the misbelief that something/someone will fix us. We are stuck in a bottomless pit and we seem to be incapable of getting out of it so we sink further and further into the mud of retaliation, being deceived by another and ‘victim’ mode. 

When we are not caring for our inner life/our spiritual life, the rest of us begins the descent into the hell of selfishness, the descent into the purgatory of blame and shame, the descent into the ruin of losing our humanity, our ability to see the worth of another person as equal to our own. We see these descents all the time, we hear the words of the people who are suffering this spiritual/inner life sickness and we do nothing for them because we are afraid to, lest we have to deal with our own. Actually worse than doing nothing for another person who is suffering from these spiritual/inner life maladies, we extol them, we buy into their mendacity, we follow them, make them our leaders as well as make them our followers. We have perfected the art of hiding so well from our spiritual/inner life maladies that we make fun of, demean, take advantage of those of us who wrestle with them every day. How sad, how terrifying. 

In recovery, we are aware that ‘our recovery is dependent upon the nature of our spiritual condition’. Each and every day we wake up, grateful to be alive, we write/think gratitude lists, we let the people around us know how much we love them, need them and shower them with the love they deserve and need. Each day as we start and continue on through the day, we “turn our will over the care of God…” so we stay out of self-centerness and self-obsession. We say the serenity prayer often during the day to remind ourself of our powerlessness over people, places and things so we can add our unique gift from God to our current situation and not need someone else to ‘do it our way’. In recovery, we know that our will isn’t the same as God’s AND caring for our self is part of God’s will for us as well. 

I know this teaching from both sides of the coin! I have made the mistake of identifying my duty to myself as God’s will by caring only for myself pre-recovery. I have made the mistake of not considering “the duty to one self” by caring too much for my job, the people I was/am helping, etc. What I am sure of is that I have not stayed in self-deception nor mendacity once my eyes were opened by me, God and/or another person. I have been blinded over the years by the duty to help another, more than the duty to my self and this has been a disrespect of God and me. I am not the center of the universe and no one is more valuable or less valuable than me. I have been gifted with a connection to God, an ability to hear Rabbi Heschel and Torah speak to me and honoring this as well as my spiritual life/inner life is the way I repay God for all the gifts I have received. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel - a daily path to living well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 34

“The self is not evil. The precept: “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself,” includes the care for one’s own self as a duty. It is as mistaken to consider the duty to oneself and the will of God as opposites as it is to identify them. To serve does not mean to surrender but to share.” (Man is Not Alone pg.141).

Rabbi Heschel is again teaching us to see the nuances of living, engage with them and find the proper amount of self-care/regard that leads to care/regard of another self and God. “The self is not evil” is a radical statement for some religions, some sects, some people. When one believes one is born in sin, the self has to be evil by its very nature. Yet, Rabbi Heschel is confronting us with God’s words and our deep inner truth, we are not evil by design, by nature, nor by birth. This idea negates the idea of self-flagellation, starving oneself, being obesely overweight, taking unnecessary risks with our being in search of thrills, any addictive behavior, etc. Since our self is not evil, we need to stop treating our self as if it is! I am hearing a deep plea from Rabbi Heschel to see ourselves as imperfect, by design, partners with God in making our corner of the world a little better for our being alive. Rabbi Heschel’s teaching, if adopted by all of us, would lessen the hatred, anger, depression, anxiety, addiction, and other spiritual and mental/emotional maladies we currently suffer from and see in another(s). “The self is not evil” frees us from our self-loathing, our less-than/better-than thinking, as well as our comparative and competitive/win at all costs ways of being. “The self is not evil” is freedom from the chains of conventional notions and mental cliches, it is freedom from the self-deception and mendacity we live in and put our to another(s), and it is freedom to serving God with our whole self in joy, gladness, and harmony. 

The freedom that we can gain from this teaching is not meant to be exclusive nor to overfeed our egos. This freedom is for us to “love thy neighbour as thyself”; in other words, this teaching frees us up to truly care for our self, which is our duty according to Rabbi Heschel and care for another self; a both/and not and either/or. We are living in a world that is so bifurcated and separated, we forget that the people we disagree with most, are the same people Rabbi Heschel is speaking about and the Torah is speaking about. We are not living in some bubble, we are not in a cocoon, we live in the world and our neighbors may hold different political views, they may even believe in bunk science, they may be vaxxers and/or anti-vaxxers, they may believe in mendacity and engage in self-deception to a greater extent than we do AND they are still our neighbors, as I am understanding Rabbi Heschel. While we may vehemently disagree with some people, while we may be acutely aware of how some people have hurt us, not cared about our concerns, not loved us as they love themselves, we still have to love them, we still have to see them as human beings, not clogs, not idiots, not hate them in our hearts if we are to live today’s teaching. While we can make up all the excuses in the world and we can justify our anger and our disagreements, this does not allow us to consider another self as less than human, no matter what their actions may say. 

When we engage in seeing another self as less than human, when we engage in treating another self as less than human, we are giving up our freedom to live well, to live as a partner of God and our freedom to live in joy, gladness and harmony. While it makes ‘sense’ in a perverted way of thinking, I realize that all of our hatreds of another self(s) is going against God, going against our best interests even. We can ‘hate’ the sin, we can feel really badly about the hurts that another does to us, we can be devastated by the betrayals we experience from another(s), we can be afraid of being around people who make choices that could endanger them and us, we just can’t hate the self of another human being. While schadenfreude is an experience that just happens, when we dwell in the joy of seeing another person experience the consequences of their behaviors we are imprisoning ourselves and relinquishing our free will and our freedom to choose to “love thy neighbour, as thyself”, because we are not caring for our self, we are caring for our false ego. 

In recovery, we learn to not hate the parts of our self that are underdeveloped, immature, that have led us to ‘evil actions’. We learn/relearn what it means to love our self and to love another self as well as not confusing the two. We are constantly growing our true self and shedding the false self/ego that propelled us into bad actions, selfish actions. In recovery, we care for our own self by being in truth with our self, with another self(s), and with God. We no longer act as chameleons, we no longer hide behind false pretenses, we no longer imprison our true self(s), rather we let it all hang out for everyone to see us as we are, imperfect and growing each day. 

I am blown away by today’s teaching. I see where I still consider my self as evil, forgetting to separate my negative actions from my self. I also see how I have given up my freedom because of what some people think of me and how they have treated me. I see how I became obsessed with proving something that these people just did not want to believe and how it caused me to not care for my self nor the self(s) of those nearest and dearest to me as well as I could have. I have let go of resentments, released any ‘debts’ owed me and now I leave the obsession of proving myself to people who just don’t get me, nor want to. God Bless them. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark 

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel- a path to living well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 33

“If life is holy, as we believe it is, then self-regard is that which maintains the holy. Regard for the self becomes only a vice by association: when associated with complete or partial disregard for other selves. Thus the moral task is not how to disregard one’s own self but how to discover and be attentive to another self.”(Man is Not Alone pg.141)

I have spent the 3 days on 3 sentences, which may seem excessive to some and, for me, it is my honoring of Rabbi Heschel’s teaching to “immerse” ourselves in text study. While Rabbi Heschel’s words, wisdom, teachings are not “Torah from Sinai”, they give me the same strength, embarrassment, hope, rebuke and love that the prophets gave to Israel and to us today-if we experience them. This, for me, is the key to Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom, to experience the teachings by immersing ourselves in them and in all areas of living, breathing and being human. The last sentence above is, of course, the solution and the problem/challenge for all of us. While Rabbi Heschel calls it a moral task, I believe it is a spiritual task as well. 

This sentence brings up one of the great challenges of being human: How do I allow my ego to be defeated by my morality and my soul/spirituality? Most of us have been raised in a moral atmosphere, we know right from wrong, we know the 10 Commandments, etc, yet we are, at any and all times, subject to an assault from our ego to go against our moral fiber, our spiritual calling to, in this case, ignore what is right in front of us-another self. How is this possible? Living in a ‘dog eat dog’ world such as we have since the CavePeople, misinterpreting the phrase from the Bible to ‘have rule and dominion over the  animal world’ to mean we have to rule other selves, we have to make other people serve us, as pack animals, animals raised for food and pleasure do. How disgustingly egotistical and it is the way of the world since humans began to populate the earth, it seems. We have perpetuated this way of thinking/being for the millennium and it impedes our ability to “discover and be attentive to another self”. When we realize there is another self with needs, wants, desires just like us in the room, we are shocked many times. I have heard people say: “who does he/she think they are to drive the same car as me, live in the same neighborhood as me, etc.” We have Country Clubs that blackball people from joining if one member doesn’t like them! Yet, they will defend their fellow club members/friends for doing the same thing they blackball someone else for! We have many opportunities to engage in this “moral task” and, all too often, we fail to, enhancing the anger, the separation, the turning our backs on God and morality as well as thickening the wall around our souls/spirits. 

Rabbi Heschel is not telling us to have no self-regard in this sentence, he is telling us that we have to engage in and surrender to the moral task God has given to us. We have to let go of our puffed-up ego, our self-deception, our deception of another, and our desire to be a chameleon. We have to see another human being as that, a human being who needs connection and assistance at times, who needs to be recognized and exalted rather than ignored and enslaved, just as we do. 

To “discover and be attentive to another self” is to also discover and be attentive to one’s true self. Jacob, when he met Esau, was unable to do this, sadly. He could not truly embrace Esau because, in my opinion, he would have had to embrace his true self and been responsible for the harms he caused as well as the good he had done. Rabbi Heschel’s words point out the challenge of keeping a healthy, true sense for oneself while also seeing and holding a healthy true sense of “another self”.  There can be no prejudice, racism, anti-semitism, Islamaphobia, hatred of any kind when we accept, engage and ‘win’ this moral challenge. When we “discover and be attentive to another self” we are unable to engage in senseless hatred and prejudice, we are unable to engage with another self from race, color, ethnicity, creed, religion, etc- we can only engage on a self to self level. 

In recovery, we realize how we gave up on this challenge and moral task prior to being in recovery. We are also acutely aware that what we are recovering is our integrity, our moral compass and the power to live a life based on spiritual and moral principles instead of ‘what’s in it for me’. In recovery, each day is measured by how we were attentive to another human being, how we were attentive to God and God’s will and how we were attentive to our self, remembering, realizing and relearning that these three seemingly separate actions all mesh with each other to make us better human beings today than we were yesterday. 

I have been engaging in the war between my ego and my soul for almost 70 years. In the first 36/37 years, my ego won out more often than not and in the past 33/34 years, my soul has won out more often than not. I hear my ego try to win whenever I begin to think that I have to “win” an argument, a negotiation, and/or ‘why don’t I have 1million followers, etc. This still comes up and being attentive to another self, also means being attentive to both selves that I am comprised of. I have to be attentive to my ego, as it helps me take the action that my soul directs me to, I have to be attentive to my soul so it can direct my ego and I have to be in attentive in proper measure to both of these internal parts so I can be of maximum service to another self and God! Oy!! God Bless and stay safe.  

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel - a path to living well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 32

“If life is holy, as we believe it is, then self-regard is that which maintains the holy. Regard for the self becomes only a vice by association: when associated with complete or partial disregard for other selves. Thus the moral task is not how to disregard one’s own self but how to discover and be attentive to another self.”(Man is Not Alone pg.141)

Rabbi Heschel is speaking to us in a language not all of us can hear, not because the words are unintelligible, not because there is any hidden or secret meaning to them, rather because we are deaf to them! Like our willful blindness to see what truly and authentically is, we also practice willful deafness. We purposely have not heard nor do we can to hear now  this teaching of Rabbi Heschel for doing so would change our responses to life, to the interests of another(s), to ensuring the freedoms of our Declaration of Independence, the four freedoms FDR articulated, the freedoms of our Holy Torah, the New Testament, the Koran, the myriad of Eastern philosphies/religions. As long as we stay willfully deaf to the cries of pain, sorrow, joy, laughter of ‘those people’, we can continue on with the lie we tell ourselves that we are engaging in “self-regard”; all the while engaging in self-centeredness. 

This is not a progressive rant nor is it a conservative bashing. This is a truth that I hear from deep inside my soul, I experience Rabbi Heschel speaking to me at this moment. There is a tension between conservative and progressive and our duty, according to Rabbi Heschel, is to live in the tension. Just as the sentences above, speak to us of the tension of taking care of oneself and one’s family and taking care of, being attentive to  the interests and the presence of another self. We have become so attuned to our own needs and how someone else can fill our needs, we have come to not see another human being for their Divine Image, for their separateness from us, for their humanity. We have come to regard another self as a tool for our gratification, an excuse for our ‘missing the marks’, the cause of all troubles we have and we cause. We engage in the vice described above, often. 

Every time we speak of ‘those people/you people’ we have “complete or partial disregard” for another human being. Every time we spread a lie to someone because it makes us seem smarter, bigger, gains us money, prestige, power, etc we have “complete or partial disregard” for another self. When we flex our muscles just because we/to exert power and get what we can rather than seeing how our strength can imbue another self with hope, purpose, a path to joy; we are in “complete or partial disregard” for another human. We see our leaders on both sides of the aisle engaging in this “complete or partial” disregard by not truly seeing each other as another self, seeing the followers of our opponents as ‘despicable, seeing the people with whom we agree as pawns and tools to raise money from (I get an obscene amount of political fundraising solicitations), etc.

In our personal relationships, when we are in transactional relationships, we can still have regard for another self, yet we have become deaf to the calls and cries of the people we transact ‘business’ with. The use of the word ‘business’, here, is any interaction we have with another human being. We see the regard for another self in companies who have decided to ensure a minimum living wage for workers, we see it in the amount of volunteering that happens across the world, we see it in the scientific research and discoveries that lead to vaccines and cures/remissions for the diseases that are trying to kill us, we see it in the work of organizations and business that help and interact with people regardless of their ability to pay. Transactional relationships do not mean a lack of self-regard nor a lack of regard for another self. 

This lack of regard, complete and/or partial, happens when we engage in willful blindness and willful deafness. When we hear someone with our ears attuned only to what they can do for us, we are in “complete or partial regard” for that self/those selves. When we see another human being and hear another human being as merely some object that we can step on to feel good about our self, some object we can step on to achieve our goals, some object we can step on to ‘get even’ for all the hurts we have suffered, some object we can step on, laugh at, deny their right to be human and treated humanely, we are in “complete or partial regard” for another human being and for ourselves. More on this tomorrow. 

In recovery, “having had a spiritual awakening… we carry the message to alcoholics who still suffer”, from the 12th step of AA. We are recovering a way of having regard for our selves and regard for another self/selves. We know we are not in this thing called living alone and, in recovery, we learn and practice service for the sake of both parties, I receive more than I give and my giving allows another to receive.

I am looking backward and forward, seeing how the best of times have been when I have served another’s interests and found myself by doing this. Sure I have had “complete or partial disregard” for another at times, however they were few and far between. I have been misunderstood, mis-attuned, in some of the times I have seemed to have disregard. Every human life is important, mine and yours I commit to continue to display this. More tomorrow on this. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark