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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 85


“When the soul of man is asked: What is God to you?  there is only one answer that survives all theories which we carry to the grave: He is full of compassion. The Tetragrammaton, the great Name, we do not know how to pronounce, but we are taught to know what it stands for: “compassion”” (Man is Not Alone pg 148)


Earlier on this page Rabbi Heschel teaches: “His compassion is not mere emotion; it is blazing with the power of which only He is capable.” Being “full of compassion” the Ineffable One continually ‘suffers with’ us human beings, continually sends messengers and messages to us with a power and force that is so overwhelming we usually hide from them, get angry with them, reject them and find ourselves deeper and deeper in our victimhood, our rightness/righteous indignation, fear of change, protective shell, prejudice, etc. This, of course, sets us apart from authentic self, covenantal community, I/Thou connections, ability to live in the both/and, the ability to see another person with whom we disagree as a human being, etc. 


People are always trying to prove “With God on our side”, as Bob Dylan sang about in 1964, we can do anything and it is ‘right’! Slavery was/is okay because “God is on our side”, it was okay to kill the early Christians by the Romans because the ‘gods were on their side’, anti-semitism flourishes because these same early Christians believed “God is on our side”, mistreatment of Native Americans was/is defended because “God is on our side”, Christians killing indigenous populations if they did not accept Christ was congruent with their belief that “God was on our side”, racism is never far from the surface because some white people believe “God is on our side”, some authoritarians are saying that “God is on our side” too! Rabbi Heschel’s teaching above is the prooftext of the fallacy, narcissistic, male-dominated, power-grabbing, people hating lies that have been passed down for generations. 


God suffers with all of us! Beggar and thief, Clergy and non-believer, rich and poor, boss and employee, taskmaster and slave, men and women regardless of sexual orientation and/or gender identification, etc all are worthy and can experience God suffering with us. The problem is that we are not aware of our own inner suffering, our own need for compassion. Self-compassion, I believe, is to be able to sit with one’s self and allow our souls to suffer with our inner feelings, suffer with our thoughts and emotions that always seem to ‘get us’. We do not ask for these thoughts, feelings and emotions-many are from earlier traumas-and we try so hard to rid ourselves of them rather than allowing God, through our souls, ‘suffers with’ these experiences and lead us to healing, to a path out of living in these past feelings and emotions, to seeing ourselves as worthy of God’s compassion, worthy of  allowing our soul to ‘suffer with’ our self, and knowing we are worthy of authentic connection. 


God cares about the widows, the orphans, the poor, the needy and the stranger, according to the first 5 Books of the Bible. God tells us to ‘suffer with’ these people and, I would add, see ourselves in all of these categories as well. We get to ‘suffer with’, be compassionate with, another human being when we are able to see our own needs for compassion and receive it from another person and from God and our soul. I use ‘get to’ because living in compassion and love for another is, as I am understanding Rabbi Heschel today, the highest form of Imitatio Dei, being Godly, Godlike. 


The charlatans that promote hatred, fear, prejudice, towards anyone that isn’t them are NOT people of faith even though they wrap themselves in the Bible. These ‘religious conservatives are trying to co-opt God for their own power, money, narcissistic goals, not for God, not for compassion and love! 


In recovery, we seek to recover our ability to be compassionate and to ‘suffer with’ our selves and another(s) self. The difference being that to ‘suffer with’ is not the same as being in suffering. The later is a state of being that traps us into isolation, negativity, self-loathing, anger, etc. ‘Suffer with’ is a state that allows us to heal, to connect, to receive love and to give healing, connection and love to another(s) soul/self. 


I am more aware of the ways I have fallen into ‘suffering’ as opposed to allow myself to open to another person and God to ‘suffer with’ me. Tonight is the 56th Yahrzeit (anniversary) of my father’s death according to the Jewish Calendar and my ‘suffering’ led to over 20 years of denying almost everything my father believed in and stood for. My suffering kept me in a prison that made the jails and prisons I did visit/live in seem easy and comfortable. My suffering led me deeper and deeper into anger at my self, the world, even my father for abandoning me. It was in a jail cell where I heard God calling to me to ‘suffer with’ me and help lead me out of my ‘suffering’. Many people conflate these two ways of being and I have learned the difference through Rabbi Heschel, Torah, my spiritual guides and teachers, my wife and daughter, siblings and extended family. I am also celebrating 1 year of coming out of another ‘suffering’ experience which lasted “only” 8 months instead of 20+ years-progress not perfection! Stay safe and God Bless, Rabbi Mark


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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 84

“When the soul of man is asked: What is God to you?  there is only one answer that survives all theories which we carry to the grave: He is full of compassion. The Tetragrammaton, the great Name, we do not know how to pronounce, but we are taught to know what it stands for: “compassion”” (Man is Not Alone pg 148)


This teaching makes us realize all the foolishness we engage in each and every day with our callousness, our ‘knowing God’ controlling of people, places and things, etc. Of course it assumes we are interested in hearing, learning from and engaging with our soul and with the compassion of God, the compassion of the universe as well as being willing to show compassion to another human being as well as to ourselves. 


At the bottom of page 148, Rabbi Heschel adds a footnote, quoting Sifre Deuteronomy and Pesikta,  explaining the “rabbinic doctrine that the Tetragrammaton(the name of God the priests would use in prayer that has been lost), usually rendered the Lord, expresses the divine attribute of love, while the name of Elohim that of judgement”. We can infer the correlation between love and compassion from this footnote, I believe, which leads us to take a deep dive into our souls and into our ways of thinking and being. I believe Rabbi Heschel is giving us the cause of the angst, despair, mental/psychological issues and spiritual wasteland we humans suffer from. While we try to answer the problem with drugs(legal and non-legal), power and prestige, facades of wealth and smiles, exerting power over another person, etc we are missing the response that we need to be engaged in: listening to the call of our soul, listening to the compassion and love of God, accepting this love and compassion as well as giving this love and compassion to another person.

Compassion comes from the latin “suffer with” not to feel bad for, not to ignore, not to have a false sense of superiority, not to be ‘bountiful’ towards ‘those poor people’, to suffer with each and every person including oneself. Most of us are unwilling to suffer with ourselves, to see where we are need of compassion and love from a source greater than ourselves, be this source our higher consciousness, our higher power, our friends, our significant other, our children, our parents, God is of no consequence. What matters is our acknowledgement of our need for compassion so we allow our soul to fill us with love. 


Most people who are in need of compassion reject it because it makes us feel weak and needy which are negative characteristics in a Greek-dominated society. We are unwilling to go to the root cause of our angst, despair, psychological and spiritual maladies because covering them up is a more ‘accepted’ way of dealing with these realities. Yet we get angry with and treat addicts who are doing the same thing that most people do, seek  an escape from doing the soul work, silence the call of our soul/inner life, wear masks to hide from everyone else including ourselves. 


Our callousness, that Rabbi Heschel teaches about on the previous page of Man is Not Alone, is directly correlated to our lack of compassion for our self and for anyone else. We are not suffering with another person, we are trying to console them (maybe), we are trying to help them (maybe), we are trying to control them (most likely), and we are not seeing the torment of their soul, we are not seeing the need for true, authentic connection, hence we are not being authentically connected nor our we suffering with them. To suffer with entails us to look at our own needs, our own lacks, our own unmet authentic desires and touch another person from our soul to theirs. Then and only then can we truly show someone a path forward that is suitable for them, based on our experience of finding our own way forward through compassion and love for our self. This is the path out of callousness and the path of compassion and love.


In recovery, we are so desperate for a new solution as the old ones have not worked. We are desperate for love and compassion and, since we don’t have it for ourselves, we  can only receive it from a “power greater than ourselves”. In recovery, we know we have to ‘suffer with’ our deeds, the deeds of another and we are in need of someone to do this with. Sponsors, guides and/or mentors are gifts bestowed upon us and we learn to take advantage of this gifts and use them wisely. 


Being vulnerable and open, authentic and flawed, transparent and brazen, has caused me great pain many times in my life. Prior to my recovery, I soothed myself with crime, alcohol, women, action, etc. Really I was escaping and recovery put a stop to hiding and escaping and has brought me more pain and anguish at times. The difference now is that I know God is compassionate with me, I know that God is loving me and I know that with God’s compassion and love, I can survive and thrive. God’s compassion and love have helped me heal from most of the traumas and wounds of my past, they have helped me do T’Shuvah and restore the dignity of those I have harmed if they are willing to accept them. I know that I have ‘suffered with’ many people and helped them heal their wounds and learn to have self-compassion and self-love. More on this tomorrow, please know that I know I am blessed and pray that you realize the blessings in your life as well as the blessings you are to another(s)! Stay safe and God Bless, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 83

“What is the hope of man with his faithfulness being so feeble, vague, unstable and confused? The world that we have long held in trust has exploded in our hands, and a stream of guilt and misery has been unloosed which leaves no man’s integrity unmixed. But man has become callous to catastrophes. What is our hope with our callousness standing like a wall between our conscience and God?”(Man is Not Alone pg.147)


Today, the 49th Yahrtzeit of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, I am going to immerse us in the last sentence of this paragraph. This is the question and the solution to our hopelessness and our callousness. As I am hearing Rabbi Heschel, he is teaching us that hopelessness is related to and informed by our callousness. Having never thought of this relationship, I am realizing how true Rabbi Heschel’s words are. We are told in the Torah to “circumsise the foreskin of our hearts” not just to let Torah in, as I am understanding it now, it is also to let hope in and cut away the callousness, aka, the hardened skin around our hearts, our minds, our souls.

Rabbi Heschel is correct, duh, in reminding us that our hardened skin, our hardened hearts, create a wall between what our souls are telling us and what God wants from us-which are the same messages. This wall has been lauded by many as the reason for great thoughts, etc and in reality, the wall has prevented people and humanity from learning from our past, seeing what is in front of us, looking ahead to the future with hope and a plan for growing rather then what we have now; a plan for going backwards, a vision of humanity as the end all/be all, a hope by some that climate change, war, etc will create Armageddon so they can go to heaven and be saved, a hatred and suspicion between people, judging people based on the color of their skin, their political leanings, their religion, etc instead of raising the content of everyone’s character to the level that Rabbi Heschel has set for us. 


This callousness prevents us from learning and seeking new ideas, new solutions, new experiences. We are stuck in one way of thinking, one way of acting and purity is the litmus test for answering the question “are you with us or against us”, calling for an either/or reaction leaving no room for grey, no room for having a both/and response. Our callousness has not only led to hardened skin and hardened hearts, it has led us to be hard-headed as well. We are not able to use our gift from God to reason and seek solutions when we are so hardened, so calloused that we continue to spout a party line that offers no real connection to what God wants, to what our souls are calling for and what another soul needs us to help them with. Our callousness leads to the hopelessness of ever believing anyone else truly cares, it leads us to the hopelessness of believing that nothing will ever change and nothing will ever get better, the hopelessness of ‘I have to protect mine because they are coming to take it away’, all the while the people we are following are lining their pockets, being mendacious with us and feeding our self-deceptions! 


We see this on a grand scale and we also experience it on a cellular level. Think about the times our callousness has used another person for our own gain, not for their best interests. Think about the times we have engaged in deceitful gossip just to feel better about ourselves. Think about the times we have put down the ideas of another, like Rabbi Heschel, underhandedly by agreeing with the concepts and never following through on their implementation. Think about how we have turned a deaf ear to the inner calls of our spouses, children, parents, siblings, etc and blaming them for our callousness. While we can see the callousness of another, Rabbi Heschel is calling on us to see how our individual callousness has created a wall between us and God and this wall creates the hopelessness we are experiencing. 


We begin our recovery by acknowledging our callousness towards another human being and towards God. We begin our recovery by turning towards God/Higher Power/Force of the Cosmos and acknowledging how we have used the gift of mind, intuition, spirit, to create walls between us and everyone else. We acknowledge how we have lost hope and faith in our own humanity and the humanity of another human being. We begin to chip away at the wall we have created through fellowship, service and introspection allowing us to see the light that glows within us and the light that glows within each and every human being.In recovery, we get to break down walls inside of us as well. 


I understand the words in Torah where God commands Moses to “Come to Pharaoh” in a different way using Rabbi Heschel’s teaching. Moses is God’s light and is to bring the light into Pharaoh’s darkness and try once more to light up his mind and his soul. It doesn’t work and that doesn’t mean we don’t keep trying. I have been engaged in bringing light for most of my life, my Hebrew name, Meir, can be translated as bringer/causer of light. The light I was growing was walled off by me as a response to life’s occurrences as a young teen and the walls came down in 35 years ago in a jail cell and learning Rabbi Heschel in the prison yard. Callousness still rises up in me, it is a fleeting experience rather than a way of being. I am hopeful all the time because of the teachers who continue to open my heart and show me my light and the way to light up the path of another. It just doesn’t get any better than this. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 82


“What is the hope of man with his faithfulness being so feeble, vague, unstable and confused? The world that we have long held in trust has exploded in our hands, and a stream of guilt and misery has been unloosed which leaves no man’s integrity unmixed. But man has become callous to catastrophes. What is our hope with our callousness standing like a wall between our conscience and God?”(Man is Not Alone pg.147)


I have been thinking about all the seemingly ‘small’ things that we do as humans and think nothing of that God, the Prophets and Rabbi Heschel would consider catastrophes! Whenever the Jewish tradition speaks of the prophet Elijah, he is almost always portrayed as a beggar, an invalid, a person in need of shelter and/or food; never as the one in charge, the smartest person in the room, etc. In pondering this choice Jewish tradition as made, I understand better the small catastrophes we engage in all the time. Elijah is looking to see where our morals are at, he is watching in real time our spiritual condition, maturity, love for God, love for our fellow and how willing are we to do the next right thing when it doesn’t serve us.

The callousness shown to Elijah reminds me of the Hasidic saying which talks about treating the person next to us as if they were the Messiah and if she/he chooses to not reveal him/herself it will not matter. We are guilty of these ‘small’ catastrophes each and every day. When we walk by someone and do not acknowledge them it is our callousness that prevents us. I know many people will speak about their fears, that they are introverts, etc. yet all of us want to be noticed, all of us want to be acknowledged, all of us want to be seen and all of us want to be valued, not only for what we do, just for being human! Yet, we are too busy, too callous to say hello to the people we pass on the street, the people who work for us, the people we work for, the people who serve us, the people who we serve(have you ever dealt with customer service that is based overseas), and, at times, the people closest to us.

Our callousness comes out in the ‘small’ things that we do also. Making business a contact sport/war is a way of being callous and causing catastrophes while patting ourselves on the back for a good job of ‘destroying’ the competition. Think of all the exploitation that occurs in the making of many of the products we use every single day. Think of the exploitation of people’s pain/fear that happens everyday by big Pharma, doctors, pharmacists, big supply chains, etc through the ads they run on TV to get people to demand their products so their bottom line gets bigger. Not too many people see this as a catastrophe, yet it is!


The daily catastrophe of not seeing the people we work with, live with through their eyes, their experiences. We are so afraid of not being able to fix someone else, we are so in need of the ‘perfect’ family, life, friends, that we do not see the emotional, physical, psychological and spiritual suffering of our loved ones because we can’t fix it so we ignore them. We even get angry at them for ‘not snapping out of it’ in the time we think they should. We are callous and cause catastrophes because we are afraid to see the pain and suffering, the neediness and poverty of another human being. We are afraid to see all of this because 1) it would make us more responsible and force us to serve their interests and make them our concern and 2) it would be a mirror to our own pain, loneliness, sufferings, neediness and poverty and both of these outcomes are too much for many people to bear. 


Ignoring the immigrants at the border, not finding a path for the immigrants who live here without papers, ignoring the unhoused people and getting angry at them, not noticing the person walking next to you and/or at you with a hello, engaging in ‘alternative facts’ and mendacity to attain power and using the vulnerabilities of another against them, feeling helpless and powerless which leads to frustration, etc with those closest to us because we can’t fix them, all of these ways of being callous and causing catastrophes. 


In recovery, we are constantly working to improve our spiritual condition and one of the ways we do this is through service. We know we need to see another person for who they are and serve their needs not our own. We know that engaging in truth rather than mendacity is a cornerstone of our recovery and we seek to heal old wounds are create fewer and fewer catastrophes every day. 


In my recovery, I have caused fewer and fewer catastrophes and the ones I have caused have been big ones, for the people impacted by them-I am sorry and have made amends, for the chaos created in God’s world, I have made t’shuvah with God. I also know that saying hello is a big part of my daily practice, noticing the pain of another is also something I am acutely aware of  and I am working hard at being less and less callous each day. I also know my life in recovery has been a testimony for the power of healing and helping the needy, the poor and those in need of spiritual and psychological healing. I am proud of being able to work alongside Harriet Rossetto these 30+ years to achieve this. God Bless and Stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 81


“What is the hope of man with his faithfulness being so feeble, vague, unstable and confused? The world that we have long held in trust has exploded in our hands, and a stream of guilt and misery has been unloosed which leaves no man’s integrity unmixed. But man has become callous to catastrophes. What is our hope with our callousness standing like a wall between our conscience and God?”(Man is Not Alone pg.147)


We are engaged in a war for the soul of America, the soul of the world and the soul of each and every human being. The problem is that we have become callous and unaware of these forces that are attacking our very humanity. Rabbi Heschel is demanding we see the ways in which our integrity has become mixed up and our responsibility for the streams of guilt and misery that have become commonplace as well as engaging in the solution to these problems we, humans, have brought upon us. 


How many catastrophes have we become callous to and what is the reason? We see unhoused people and get angry at them. Some, if not a majority, suffer from a mental illness and/or an addiction and we are calling the police to arrest these human beings who are suffering rather than find solutions to ease their suffering. It is a catastrophe that another human being suffers, suffers in silence and we get angry and afraid rather than helpful and compassionate. How low can we go? This is a catastrophe


We are angry at the Veterans who camp out near VA buildings/property while not being responsible for their unhousedness, for the mental anguish they suffer, for the torture serving in the military causes. Most veterans do not want to talk about what happened ‘over there’ because of the unspeakable acts they witnessed and, in many cases, participated in. How many WWII vets speak freely about the ugly side of what they experienced and this was a legitimate war for the actual safety of our country and the world. Our fear of lower home values, our fear of seeing the pain we have brought to another usually overrides the compassion we are called upon to experience and this is a catastrophe!


We ignore climate change, social uplifting, etc because we are worried about taxing corporations and the top 1%? We are more concerned about an entity that only cares about its shareholders and top executives than with the plight of our world and the people who live next to us and may need the uplifting? We are more concerned with making sure that a builder gets the zoning and ease of building(not always up to standards) than the environmental impact and the social impact of gentrification, of pushing people out of the homes they have lived in for their entire lives? This is a catastrophe!


We are engaged in trying to continually live our facades, to make people believe the outside while the inside is falling apart. We do this with products that make people look good on the outside (Spanx) while being fat and unhealthy on the inside. We do this because image has become more important than reality. There is a cottage industry of ‘image makers’, ‘reputation fixers’, ‘crisis pr people’, etc to make the ‘bad’ aka truth go away or at least get buried deep in the internet. Companies, not-for-profits, individuals nor longer are as concerned with what they are doing as they are for ‘how it looks’, also known as ‘optics’. Principles, morals can be fudged when it is for the “good” of the image, the “good” of the company, the “good” of the charity. This is a catastrophe!


While it is easy to blame ‘those’ people, we are all responsible for these catastrophes. We participate in them, we stand by and watch them happen. We engage in trying to control a woman’s body and choices and never are around to help bring up the child nor make sure their pay is equal to a man’s doing the same job. We have witnessed and participated in prejudices, racism, anti-semitism, islamaphobia, hatred of immigrants, disdain for the poor and the needy and call ourselves a ‘christian’ country of ‘god-fearing men and women? I use the small g for God because these behaviors and belief that Jesus would want this is idol worship, not worship of God nor following the words of Jesus. This is the greatest catastrophe because it leads to all the rest! 


In recovery, we are constantly on guard for these catastrophes because we are constantly searching our self and our actions for the ways we did well today and the ways we missed the mark today. Our daily 10th step keeps us right-sized, caring and cleaning up the messes we created today much quicker than prior to our recovery. 


I have participated in and witnessed these catastrophes. I have spoken up and done my part to remedy these catastrophes. I am aware of the ways I have used my bluster to hide and used it to send a message of hope to another human being. I am also deeply aware of the catastrophic nature of ignoring another human being and being ignored, thrown away and I am guilty of these catastrophes as well. My imperfections stop me from hating myself for these acts and help me realize I can and do improve each day. They help me recognize how much less I engage in catastrophic actions and how painful it is that people I trusted engaged in them with me. Stay safe and God Bless, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 80

“What is the hope of man with his faithfulness being so feeble, vague, unstable and confused? The world that we have long held in trust has exploded in our hands, and a stream of guilt and misery has been unloosed which leaves no man’s integrity unmixed. But man has become callous to catastrophes. What is our hope with our callousness standing like a wall between our conscience and God?”(Man is Not Alone pg.147)


This teaching, these words is/are distressing, disturbing and distasteful. It forces us to face our selves, to do a true Chesbon HaNefesh, an accounting of our souls/our ways of being in the world. This accounting is for us to see what we have done well-as all accountings have to include assets and liabilities-and understand that what we have done well does not ‘take care of’ nor wipe out the negative ways we have done. This teaching is pointing out, to me, one of the most negative ways we behave, actions we take against self and another human being(s): callousness. 


Rabbi Heschel is reminding us that there are more catastrophes than the ones we call catastrophes. Each time we ignore the plight of the poor and the needy, this is a catastrophe. While many people just shrug their shoulders at such events and see them as ‘just the way life is’ and/or ‘they get what they deserve/work for’ and/or, the new Prosperity Gospel lie, ‘God doesn’t love them as much as God loves the rich/me’. What we are seeing as ‘business as usual’ and/or ‘get real Rabbi, this is the way of the world’; Rabbi Heschel, the Prophets and God see as catastrophes! Yet, we have become so callous, hard-skinned that we are not aware of the catastrophes we are creating each and every day. We are so stuck, so unstable, so mixed up and so lacking of integrity we are blind to these truths, we are blind and unmoved by the calls of the poor and the needy. We have come to blame them for their problems and for the issues that face many of us! We are so callous, so hard-skinned that some people rejoice in their sorrow and misery. How sad, how sick, how unGodly! 


Each time we deny righteous justice, as the Torah calls for, it is a catastrophe. Each time we engage in jury nullification we are creating a catastrophe. Each time we find a cop not guilty for the murder of another human being because she/he is a cop, the victim is black, white, asian, hispanic, and ‘had it coming to them’ we create a catastrophe. Different states favor either the employer or the employee in labor disputes and this prejudice creates catastrophes. Each time an innocent person is convicted is a catastrophe we are creating through our need to win and the deceit of the prosecution. Righteous justice means no bribes, no prejudice, can enter into our search for truth. Righteous justice is the search for compassionate and understanding and to be a person of truth seeking means to seek compassion, understanding as part of the whole story. Callousness to this is a catastrophe beyond measure that we are engaging in each and every day. 


It is a catastrophe to categorize another human being(s) according to any measure. We are all human beings-no one has more dignity and value than any one else. We are all unique human beings so no one is the same as any one else. These two seemingly contradictory statements combine to remind us of the catastrophic nature of our categorizing people, comparing people, trying to get everyone to be the same, and/or ostracizing people who are ‘not like us’ from our midst and from the same opportunities we have. Be this because of the color of their skin, the religion they practice, the sexual orientation, the creed they live by, because they are male, female, and/or other, and because of their ethnicity; hispanic, African, Middle Eastern, Jewish, Irish, Italian, etc. who have all been, at one time and, in some cases, for all time seen as less than, people to be feared, etc. This catastrophic behavior is commonplace for many people and they proclaim the right to revere the leaders of the Confederacy for their prejudicial, pro-white stance and willingness to blow up the Union to keep another human beings down! We have seen this throughout history, read up on how the Jews were expelled from almost every country, and we are continuing it today in our ‘enlightened United States’ in our ‘God-fearing Christian country’. There are people who have become so hard-skinned as to believe causing these catastrophes and more, are their ways of serving God! More on this tomorrow


In recovery, we have to cut away the callousness of our past and keep ourselves fresh and alert to not allowing the callouses to grow back even stronger and harder. We do this by making sure we continue to do our amends, we continue to grow along spiritual lines and we continue to be grateful for what we have, share with another human being the bounty God has given us and work hard to not turn errors, missing the marks into catastrophes. 


I am trembling over the ways I have been callous and the catastrophes I have caused. In looking at my recovery, I am aware of how many people have perceived me as callous and I know I am not as callous as some make me out to be. I also know that my actions have cause catastrophes that I was not aware of in the moment, I have caused heartache and hardship for another(s) without realizing it and this is another definition of callousness for me. I do T’Shuvah and change each day and learn from my errors as well. More tomorrow on this, God Bless and Stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 79

“What is the hope of man with his faithfulness being so feeble, vague, unstable and confused? The world that we have long held in trust has exploded in our hands, and a stream of guilt and misery has been unloosed which leaves no man’s integrity unmixed. But man has become callous to catastrophes. What is our hope with our callousness standing like a wall between our conscience and God?”(Man is Not Alone pg.147)


Continuing to immerse ourselves in Rabbi Heschel’s words and teachings forces us to look at how “the world we have long held in trust…” and not hide from what reality truly is. We are living in a time where some people both in and out of powerful positions are trying to hide the truth of this teaching and Rabbi Heschel said it 70 years ago; when everyone thought things were so wonderful! To see what “has exploded in our hands” we have to ponder and realize what we had/have and what happened to it. 


We had/have a promise; from the time of the Exodus from Egypt to the American Revolution to the Emancipation Proclamation the promise from God and/or the universe is that slavery is not forever and slavery will end for every group at some point. It has been a difficult promise to make into a reality from the time of Pharaoh till now, yet we in America kept our Declaration of Independence near and dear as the Spiritual goal of our revolution and the underpinnings of our nation. We have fallen short forever and, until recently, we were making progress towards seeing each human being as a worthy, dignified and important. Under our former administration, we joined with the likes of Putin, Orban, MBS, etc to move to an inauthentic, mendacious authoritarian way of living-celebrating hatred and prejudice rather than healing it, promoting the Big Lie rather than refuting it, and using the poor and needy as pawns rather than helping them as the Bible calls for us to do. 


70 years ago Rabbi Heschel told us this was happening and we did not listen, we laughed at these words and ignored his prophecy because we did not want to face ourselves in the mirror. We humans are constantly afraid to see what is and our part in it because we want to hide our imperfections and guilty actions, we want to explain them away and/or blame another. We have believed we can hide our heads in the sand and be okay, forgetting that the world which has been entrusted to us needs to be nurtured and grown in order to become the world God and we believe it can be and have envisioned it to be. We have been asleep at the wheel of this vision, this trust account that God/universe gave us to manage and now it has exploded and continues to explode “in our hands”. 

This experience that Rabbi Heschel describes 70 years ago was never taken seriously by enough people to make the necessary changes, hence, the “stream of guilt and misery” which has been unloosed has overwhelmed us to the point where we believe the lies, the deceptions of these charlatans, these authoritarians who keep saying they are fighting for American ideals and our willingness to be deceived causes people to go along with this subterfuge. 


We are suffering from a loss of integrity on the world stage as well as on the personal stage. “A man’s word is his bond” no longer applies we say one thing and do another all the time. We say what someone wants to hear to get what we want/need. We see business as war, we profess covenantal relationships with another while using them as transactional ones to get over/look good. We are willing to sell another person ‘down the river’ and/or enslave them/abuse them to attain our personal goals and perceived needs. We continue to impugn our integrity while living in denial of this truth believing we are living lives congruent with our faith, our higher thoughts, our higher consciousness, etc. We are continuing to deceive ourselves into believing it is ‘the other’ person who is in denial, who has no integrity, so we don’t have to look at ourselves. Our loss of integrity and our denial of this loss has caused us to see the world and another person as dangerous because we don’t want to be found out for our guilt, misery and shame over our current situation. More on Sunday!


In recovery, we are slowly working on recovering our integrity as every person in recovery knows. We do this “one day at a time” knowing it takes much longer to rebuild integrity than it did to tear it down. We are continuing to look ourselves in the mirror and face our guilt and misery with the commitment to use them to move forward instead of staying stuck and enslaved. In recovery, we know our forward motion is based on our daily spiritual condition and without growing our integrity one grain of sand each day, our spiritual condition suffers instead of grows. 


On my 33rd Recovery birthday, I see the times/experiences where I missed the mark in growing the world God entrusted to me. I see where my guilt and misery maimed my integrity and that of the people around me. I also see where my need to connect and believe maimed my integrity because I mistook transactional experiences for covenantal ones and the hurt upon realizing my error was/is tremendous. I also know and am grateful for the overwhelming number of times and experiences when I honored God’s trust in me and kept my covenant with another person and never hid from being me, my not so greatness and my greatness is always transparent. This is integrity for me-insides and outsides matching. Stay safe and God Bless, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 78

“What is the hope of man with his faithfulness being so feeble, vague, unstable and confused? The world that we have long held in trust has exploded in our hands, and a stream of guilt and misery has been unloosed which leaves no man’s integrity unmixed. But man has become callous to catastrophes. What is our hope with our callousness standing like a wall between our conscience and God?”(Man is Not Alone pg.147)


Immersing ourselves in Rabbi Heschel’s teaching above allows us to truly see ourselves and our current life situations, personal, communal and worldly, in a different light. While yesterday I wrote about the economic despair, the split between groups of people, today I am struck with both the inner and outer faithfulness that is “feeble, vague, unstable and confused”. 


Our faith in our self is called into question each and every day. We face a crisis of faithfulness every time we make a decision during the day. Yes, we have the science, the history, the facts, and we have to make an inner decision to follow what we ‘know in our kishkas/guts” is the best choice to make. We are being confronted with the lies, the deceptions of ‘alternative facts’, prejudice and hatred, while always under the surface, has erupted and becoming accepted as okay by police, Governors, state legislators, even a former president and his cronies/stooges! I am not going to delve into the psyches of these UnGodly people, I am struck by the feeble and confused faithfulness of their followers, their defenders, their soldiers who carry out their commands to hate, to enslave, to see the color of someone’s skin, the religion someone practices rather than the content of their character.

The people who follow these authoritarian hate-peddlers are the ones who’s faith is feeble and confused and have become an unstable source of good for God. There is no way they can be confronting their inner self, their soul, their higher consciousness and continue to proclaim that God wants them to control another person’s body (which is a lie-Scriptures doesn’t mention this), discriminate according to a persons skin color (God brought the Jews out of Egypt as a statement that slavery is inhumane), make excuses for inhumane treatment of another human being because ‘my friend’ did it; MBS killing Jamal Khashoggi (God tells us: “Do not murder). Because we do not exercise our inner life and continue to grow it by following blindly along with whatever our ‘leader’ tells us, our faithfulness has to be “vague and unstable”. People go to fundamentalist thinking because they are unwilling to engage in the inner wrestling, inner conflict that mature faith, stable faith, strong faith calls for. 

I hold the spiritual and political leaders responsible as well. We are not educating our children to ask questions and challenge ideas and events anymore. We are giving them the facts to memorize, be it in secular or spiritual classes, and reward them for regurgitating these ‘facts’ back to us. Jewish Education is meant to engage in the questions our ancestors encountered and yet, our kids are not given the proper tools nor the permission to disagree with “our sages” in some cases and in others to only disagree with them. We are not giving our children nor our adults the proper tools with which to confront the Spiritual texts that should be and need to be the foundation of our faithfulness and wonder why faithfulness is so “feeble, vague, unstable and confused”! 


We need a renaissance of learning, wrestling and engaging. We need to strengthen our faithfulness with dialogue not diatribe. We need to learn about our own faith traditions  (religious and/or secular) and how to find the path to our souls, our inner wisdom, our inner conflicts. We need to follow these paths and engage in the battle for our souls, the battle for our ability to take the next right action and go beyond our lower logic, our fundamentalist thinking, our narcissistic concerns. We have to begin to engage with people who are not like us so we can build better bridges, build smarter and more robust solutions and see the humanity, the faithfulness and the strength of another human being. It is time to stop isolating, it is time to stop killing our own souls/selves, it is time to stop going backwards to ‘the good old days’ that were actually demeaning, enslaving and hate-filled. It is time to be faithful to the principles that have sustained the world’s existence, that are responsible for the founding of the US and have continued the spiritual quest for freedom begun so long ago in Egypt by the Israelites, Moses and God. 


In recovery, we are constantly studying the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous and other spiritual texts to learn more about our own self, our way of being and a new way to be in the world. We know we have to work everyday to strengthen our inner voices, to engage with life in ways that honor the faithfulness God has in us and the trust we need to reciprocate to God and to another person. We do this because it is a living amend to all the people we were unfaithful towards. 


My education and pathways to my inner life have not stopped nor can they. Rabbi Heschel keeps me on my toes as do the people around me, the news I encounter, the texts I read and the prayers I engage in. I am constantly seeking more and more education to better understand and respond to the call of my inner life and the call of another human being as well as the call of God. Without a stable, strong, clear and purposeful faithfulness we can’t do this.  Stay safe and God Bless, Rabbi Mark 

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 77

“What is the hope of man with his faithfulness being so feeble, vague, unstable and confused? The world that we have long held in trust has exploded in our hands, and a stream of guilt and misery has been unloosed which leaves no man’s integrity unmixed. But man has become callous to catastrophes. What is our hope with our callousness standing like a wall between our conscience and God?”(Man is Not Alone pg.147)


I am trembling at these words published 70+ years ago! They come from the subchapter  titled:”Civilization hangs by a thread” and Rabbi Heschel is writing this in the shadow of WWII, the Shoah, man’s inhumanity towards man, the cold war, the atomic bomb, etc. Instead of people of faith hearing Rabbi Heschel’s call, they went the exact opposite way; our faith has become more vague, more feeble, more unstable and more confused. We have been and are led by spiritual leaders who seek to make their names great, not God’s! We are in the midst of a crisis of faith that is at least as terrifying as what Rabbi Heschel witnessed in Germany, Europe, and America during his lifetime. 


We are living in a time of great hopelessness within many people. The economic split between the “haves” and the “have-nots” has grown larger and larger. It has become harder and harder for the “haves” people to see that their reaching out to people in need is not largess on their part, it is not being ‘charitable’, it is not being ‘bountiful’, it is satisfying their urge to respond, to yield and to give. It is their need to stay in the proper gravitational pull so they keep being human. Yet, so many people have forgotten this truth, this need, this basic law of being human that they have no relationship to their urges and only act on their impulses. They are able to defend their practices of exploitation of the poor and the needy by saying how much they give to charity and how many buildings have their name on them. They are able to assuage their urges not by being connected to God, to principles, rather by getting indignant when they are called upon to do more than they want to! 


These “elites” are both democrats and republicans, they are men and women, they are ‘good church/temple/mosque going people’, they can quote anyone and any scripture that gives them cover-never once allowing scripture and eastern wisdom to penetrate their souls, to pierce their armor, to circumsize the foreskins of their hearts. They are too busy patting themselves on the back for their ‘charitable’ work while they use their money and power there to enslave the people doing the work to help the poor, the needy, the enslaved. While they purport to have the faith and commitment to the principles of “their” charity, in reality they don’t live the principles at all, personally, professionally and/or in their charity work. They live the principle of satisfying their impulses to look good and be on the “right side” of things- whatever the current “right side” is today. 


Faithfulness is a word that is thrown around by so many people it has become meaningless. We see in our political world how many people show faithfulness to the BIG LIE of Donald Trump, Kevin McCarthy, Rand Paul, Moscow Mitch, Josh Hawley, ‘lying’ Ted Cruz, “little” Marco Rubio as Trump calls these people. Faithfulness to God would entail a faithfulness to TRUTH and the continuous search for truth, knowing we will never attain complete knowledge of TRUTH nor of God. Yet the search for truth is in itself a never-ending exercise of inner growth, inner knowing and being able to balance our inner impulses with our inner urges. This is what is missing, in my opinion, today from our political process and our governing institutions as well as from some of the non-profit boards and institutions that have lost their original missionary way of treating each person as a precious gem, a unique gift from God with infinite value and dignity. 


Life prior to our being in recovery was full of feeble attempts to live with integrity and congruently. Life prior to being in recovery meant being vague and very loose with truth and honesty. Life prior to being in recovery was always unstable because we were constantly afraid to be found out for our phoniness. Being in recovery gives us the opportunity to breathe deep full breaths. It affords us the gift of never having to hide nor be confused about who we are and what we stand for and who we stand with. To paraphrase something attributed to Rabbi Heschel: I am never lost; I know where I came from-Abraham and Sarah and I know where I am going- to the sovereignty of God. This is what we get to know in recovery. 


On Friday, I will celebrate 33 years of Recovery-with the help of God and so many other people. In these 33 years, I have felt unstable and confused for moments, never forever. I have not had to live in my own feebleness as I did prior to my recovery journey, I have not had to live nor be vague about anything-always responding with the truth as I know/knew it and not hiding from anyone. In my recovery, I became the stability for many, many people and I am honored to have made these T’Shuvahs, these new responses to the calls that I used to ignore and take advantage of prior to my recovery. I am grateful that I don’t have to engage in the behaviors listed above because I stay faithful to God, to principles and to serving to the best of my ability with transparency and truth. I am even able to be grateful to the people who fooled me by being transactional when I thought we were covenantal for their teaching me to be more aware and the actions I listed above can be very subtle and convincing. Stay safe and God Bless, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 76


“The course in which human life moves is, like the orbit of heavenly bodies, an ellipse, not a circle. We are attached to two centers: to the focus of our self and to the focus of God. Driven by two forces, we have both the impulse to acquire, to enjoy, to possess and the urge to respond, to yield, to give.”(Man is Not Alone pg.146)


Immersing ourselves in Rabbi Heschel’s words and teachings above causes us to pause and look at our life as an individual, as a part of a community, society and as a part of God, I believe. Seeing one’s life move in an orbit rather than in a circle or continuum is a very fascinating viewpoint. I am experiencing this teaching as we are in a gravitational pull between these two centers, we are in a very delicate dance in between the ellipse that has self as the focus and the ellipse that has God as the focus.


Looking back at history, we see what has happened when this gravitational pull has  been out of sync and stopped the orbit of one or the other ellipse. Men have made God into a vengeful, angry, entity and used God’s name to enslave another society, kill people and rain down war and destruction. They have also jettisoned God from daily living and made every decision about a calculation and/or ‘what’s in it for me’ type of thinking. We can see in our own lives when we have been pulled in one direction or the other too much and how our equilibrium has been shifted and we have fallen into one orbit or the other too much.

I don’t experience God wanting us to do nothing but contemplate God and meditate, pray, study, etc all day. God wants us to act, God wants us to be a partner in making our corner of the world better and we cannot do this if we don’t have a sense of self and stop our faux altruistic ways of being; most of the people who speak about their altruism do so to hide what they are doing for themselves- stealing, robbing, etc. Being attached to “the focus of God” gives us the direction, the path and the way to be able to engage in our “urge to respond, yield and give”. And, we cannot engage in our urges without the strength and resources to do so, hence our need to also be attached to “the focus of our self”. 


Rabbi Heschel is telling us that we have to live in this tension, in this gravitational pull to truly be human, as I am understanding him this morning. Our problem is that rather than living attached to both centers, we are constantly seeking perfection and constantly believing, erroneously, that we have to live in one or the other. It is very difficult to live in the both/and of this orbital life. It is very difficult to surrender to the movement of human life in this manner because we want to have control over everything. We cause this weightless, rudderless, bumping into one another when we use our impulses solely for our self, solely to amass, to control, to enslave, etc. When we use God’s name and act in these ways, we are using deception and mendacity to persuade people to go against their self interests, to put us as the focus of both ellipses and this is blasphemy, this is treachery and this causes humanity to lose it’s gravitational pull to stay in the proper orbit and we experience chaos, destruction, hatred, etc. 


Living in the gravitational pull doesn’t mean we have to float weightlessly, rudderless. Rather it means that  we are  using our  impulses “to acquire, to enjoy, to possess” for the sake of ourselves and for the sake of God. We can acquire, enjoy, possess and still respond to the call of God to help another soul in the world, to yield to what is good and right according to a higher justice and give to another the opportunity to make a good life for themselves. Living in the proper orbit means we contribute what we can from what we acquire, we see helping another enjoy, possess and acquire not as competition rather as cooperation, as a way of fulfilling our urge to give, respond and yield. When we are in sync with the universe, when we are service both foci, attached to both centers, we are able to live a full human life and we deal with each situation with an equanimity and knowledge that we are moving in our proper course and proper place. 


In recovery, we are continually striving to find/regain our proper orbit. We fell out of the sky long before we made a decision to recover, in fact, recovery itself is our acknowledgement that we need to live in the tension of the gravitational pull Rabbi Heschel is speaking about. We know we were in the center of the circle of self not to serve our self really, but to destroy our self-physically, mentally and spiritually. In recovery, we are constantly seeking to find the proper measure of serving our impulses and our urges as Rabbi Heschel teaches. 


I am still working on not having these two orbits crash into each other, not focus on one or the other to the detriment of the equilibrium I need to move through life with gratitude, service, joy, possessions, giving, responding and yielding. I see where I have made a fool of myself through being too focused on one center and the other center. I see where I have been pulled to focus on either center more than the other at times by God and by ego. I also know that I am still in this heavenly orbit and I still have impulses and urges that God, another human being and my self/soul need to have met. I am in the orbit and keeping myself attuned to both centers! Stay safe and God Bless, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 75

“The course in which human life moves is, like the orbit of heavenly bodies, an ellipse, not a circle. We are attached to two centers: to the focus of our self and to the focus of God. Driven by two forces, we have both the impulse to acquire, to enjoy, to possess and the urge to respond, to yield, to give.”(Man is Not Alone pg.146)


These words from Rabbi Heschel put the human dilemma and the path of being human so beautifully, forcefully, and so bluntly. Man is Not Alone was published 70 years ago, yet we seem to have forgotten, never learned, ignored this important teaching. Many people feel adrift precisely because we in a heavenly orbit, an ellipse which has two center points instead of a circle which only has one. We are constantly being pulled towards both of them and this is the essence of being human, as I am understanding Rabbi Heschel today. At issue, is whether we will continue to live in the orbit like a heavenly body or are we going to leave this orbit and turn ourselves into less than being human? 


I am hearing Rabbi Heschel call out to us to not take the focus of self for granted, to not be so sure of what “the focus of self” actually entails. We have become enraptured with the idea of acquisitions, possessions and enjoyments. We are making this enrapture our sole focus of attention, getting it by any and all means. Whether we are enriching ourselves through using ‘slave’ labor by not paying living wages, enriching ourselves by taking advantage of the vulnerabilities of another person, enriching ourselves through theft and robbery (of all kinds-criminal and non-criminal); our society today is enamored and focused on obtaining as much as we can for our self and using this amassing of wealth and stuff to be powerful and ‘secure’. 


The “focus of our self” has become the center of the circle we live in rather than one point of the ellipse and herein lies the roots of our current situation. The anger and hatred, the power grab and mendacity  make sense to people who see human life as a circle. There is no God, no Higher Power/Consciousness, no Ineffable One to be acceptable to- just self and “it’s my life and I have free will” goes the thinking for people who’s focus on themself becomes the point in the circle that everything else revolves around. We see this politically, with some people focussed on their taking of power for their own sake, to propagate the lies they have been telling themselves to everyone else, to get people to believe that Jan.6, 2021 was a day for Freedom Fighters and Protectors of the American Way (meaning whiteness and prejudice/hatred towards anyone not with their way of whiteness)! 


Personally, we stop looking at our own actions critically, we only see what someone else has done and we are just ‘getting ours’ as the saying goes. Putting ourself in the center of the circle, we need everything to revolve around us and to get that to happen, we will do just about anything. People will tear down the reputations of anyone who stands in their way of getting what they want, of making sure that their self is served above, before and beyond the needs of another person(s) and they will do everything in their power to prove their “rightness”. Rabbi Heschel is reminding us that making human life into a circle with the self in the center and wanting everyone/everything else to revolve around my/our self is going to imbalance our individual lives and our world itself. He is gently, this time, disturbing us so we go back to living in the ellipse and leave the circle of selfishness once and for all. 


In recovery, this is our goal, to live in the ellipse that Rabbi Heschel describes above. We have lived in the circle, we have seen the destruction, the ruin, the harm, the pain we have caused by thinking that we could and should move from the ellipse to the circle, from putting us in the center where humanity and the physical world should be. We are in the process of making living amends for these behaviors, we are acutely aware of the damage we did to ourselves as well as to another persons(s). In recovery, we are searching for ways to improve the equilibrium of the ellipse and ensure we keep both centers in sync and in motion. We do this with a daily inventory, taking responsibility for our errors and our successes and being transparent and truthful. 


I have been searching for the equilibrium the ellipse can bring and I know how illusive it can be as well. I am aware of when I have made the focus of my self the center of a circle rather than the foci of the ellipse and I have made and continue to make the amends for those moments. I also am aware that in my recovery, these experiences are truly moments rather than the pattern they were prior to my recovery. As I celebrate 35 years since my last arrest, 35 years since I heard God call me, or as I like to say hit me with a baseball bat, I am so grateful for the people in my life who have continued to stand with me and help me get back to living in the ellipse rather than in the circle. I am also grateful for the people who continue to make their self the center of the circle rather than the foci of their ellipse because it gives me pause and an example of how I do not want to be. We all will, at times, move for the foci of the ellipse to the center of the circle, sometimes it is necessary to do this because we have been so out of measure through denigrating one’s self and we have to remember to return to our natural state, the two foci of the ellipse. Stay safe and God Bless, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 74

“For God is everywhere save in arrogance.” (Man is Not Alone pg.145).


I have been stuck on this sentence since Friday, when I wrote about it. Arrogance, claiming for oneself from the latin, is an insidious and subtle way of being. In fact, many of us are arrogant and would recoil and argue this fact if and when it was pointed out to us. I want to explore the lessor known ways of engaging in this arrogance that keeps God out. One of the first incidents of arrogance, I believe, is when we buy into the self-deprecating ways we speak/think of our selves, individually and collectively. While what we say about ourself may have some basis in fact, putting ourself down as inadequate and unworthy is an affront to our Creator. I would posit that much of the harm and violence that our deprecating and negative self-talk brings is an affront to God and to our souls. We keep ‘claiming for our self ‘ a way of thinking and excusing ourself that is an arrogant stance. 


We are all created in the Image of God, according to the Bible. Using this as a starting place, how can any of us be defective or damaged goods when God created us? We begin to buy into these false statements, either because we were told them by someone else or came to them because of comparing and competing, at a young age. When we are told we are “bad” for doing something that our parents/caregivers think will either harm us or make them look bad, we begin to imbibe these erroneous beliefs. As we get older, more and more authority figures use these types of negative statements to get us to believe we need follow them in order to be able to develop into ‘adulthood’ and live well. This is such BS and, yet, we still perpetrate these ways on children and adults alike.

We are created with infinite value, equal value to everyone else, and unique value. No other person has more value nor dignity than the next person and when we are bowing down to another’s value or dignity, we are being arrogant towards ourself. This is one of the ways we are “kept in our place” by society; remember the saying “Children should be seen and not heard”? These messages give us the beginning of a negative self-image that denies our infinite worth and dignity which leads to an inner arrogance. I saw a sign on a cubicle many years ago: “I must be somebody cause God don’t make no junk”; I believe all of us should read this daily to our self and to all those around us. 

When we accept the role of ‘victim’ we are being arrogant as well, I believe. Rabbi Heschel had many traumas happen to him, the anti-semitism, leaving his family for America at the start of WWII, losing much of his family in the Shoah, being marginalized by many during his lifetime, yet he was never a ‘victim’. He did not believe in despair as a response to life, according to his daughter, Dr. Susannah Heschel. I understand how he avoided this trap: he never lost his connection to God! It is how Rabbi Heschel stayed the course God gave him to follow and fulfill the divine need of helping us all be more in tune with the message of the prophets and how to fulfill their message and way of being one with God and humanity at the same time. I also understand why despair and ‘victimhood’ are such arrogant traps that disguise themselves as understandable and logical.

We are all ‘victims’ to one thing or another and using it as an excuse, adopting it as a way of being in the world defies the gifts God has given us, defies our dignity and infinite worth and is saying to God that God did make junk when we were created! How arrogant is that?? We are denying the Divine Need we are here to fulfill when we succumb to being a ‘victim’, to living in ‘low self-esteem’, speaking to and about ourselves in self-deprecating ways. Yet, we miss the arrogance of these ways, we miss the fact that we can rise above our need to be arrogant about our self by denying the spirit and the power God has invested in us.

In recovery, we remember to not confuse humility with self-humiliation. We no longer need to deny who we are and what we bring to the table, we no longer need to embellish who we are and what we contribute. We no longer live in compare and despair, we no longer need to define ourselves in relationship to another human being, rather we define ourselves by our gifts, our spirit and our being. 


I am guilty, as I said on Friday, of the arrogance of bragging, thinking I am the smartest person in the room and not needing another person in my 70+ years on the planet. Much less in my almost 33 years of recovery. Yet, I am also guilty of the self-deprecation, the not believing I have something to say that people will be interested in, my ideas are too ‘far out there’ for anyone to take seriously, etc. I have tried to prove I am worthy of breathing the air because of the negative self-talk and the negative talk from another(s) human beings. I have been told that I am ‘not a real Rabbi’, ‘a niche Rabbinate’, ‘not professional’, ‘bad person’, ‘inappropriate’, etc and, I am realizing that I have bought into these lies both from within and that I have been bombarded with from outside of me. I realize the arrogance of believing these untruths and commit to let them leave my being as soon as they rear their ugly heads! Stay safe and God Bless, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 73

“It is as easy to expel God as it is to shed blood. And yet even when He hides, even when our souls have lost His trace we may still call Him out of the depths: out of the depths of all things. For God is everywhere save in arrogance.” (Man is Not Alone pg.145)


Reading this paragraph/teaching each day for the past 4 days has impacted me greatly. Our calls to God never go unanswered, we just have to attune our hearing, clear out our inner chaos enough to hear God’s response. As the last sentence says, “God is everywhere save in arrogance.” What a brave statement to make and I believe this goes a little unnoticed about Rabbi Heschel, his courage and his bravery under fire. True, he did not serve in the military and he was a general, strategist and foot soldier in the war for the soul of Jews and the soul of America; at a time when the rest of the Jews and the rest of America was not even aware of the onslaught against their spiritual foundation. 


Arrogant comes from the latin: “to claim for oneself”, which validates the truth of Rabbi Heschel’s teaching above. We are so enamored with the Greek civilization and it has become such an insidious part of societal norms, we think nothing of claiming for oneself things that don’t belong to us, things that we are a part of and not the entirety of. Plagiarism is such a behavior and while it is condemned once known, the fact that it is done so often and with such impunity is a sign of the arrogance of our current state. The College Admissions Scandal is a sign of arrogance of the wealthy and the con man. William Singer took advantage of the arrogance of wealthy people and then took advantage of them again by ‘rolling over’ when he masterminded the whole scheme! His arrogance is mind-boggling as well as the arrogance of the wealthy involved in this scandal-God was not anywhere in this experience because arrogance and God cannot co-exist. Singer, et.al. claimed for themselves the ‘right’ to do whatever they wanted to because they were wealthy and he was ‘smarter’ than everyone else. 


We see this arrogance in some of our Spiritual Leadership today. “Come to me/us-we have the answer to your problems” “Come to us/me and I will tell you what God is saying” “Come to us and you will be saved” “Come to us and we will show you the way (there is only one and it is ours) to God, to serenity, to wealth, etc.” are all slogans we hear from churches, mosques, and temples of all different spiritual and religious traditions. How arrogant is this! God is infinite and we are finite, hence it is impossible for any human to make these and other statements. Of course we know what God wants: decency, justice, kindness, caring, love and truth; yet no one knows the totality of God nor can anyone point to only one way to understand God much less serve God. Yet, we hear all the time, Spiritual Leaders, Religious leaders claim for themselves God’s mantle and knowing. Instead of rejecting these charlatans, we follow them even to our physical deaths, we follow them to rejecting vaccines, we follow them to hate another group of people because they are not like us. These are not God-fearing people acting in this way; these are people who live in such arrogance that God cannot dwell within them, within their community and mendacity and self-deception. 


We see this with our political leadership as well. We have so many people who don’t care about what is best for all/a vast majority of people event their own constituents, they care about being seen and being an obstructionist. They cater to a Religious intolerance and deception as well as to the prejudices and vulnerabilities of some people. Being judgmental about the poor and the needy: it is their own fault after all because God doesn’t love them as much as the rich and powerful according to the mendacious prosperity gospel being preached; making the stranger an outcast: after all the problems we face today are because of them as some of our elected officials and citizens like to say; are two of the ways of claiming for themselves what God means when 36 times in the first 5 Books of the Bible we are told to care for the poor and the needy as well as the stranger because we were strangers in a strange land! All of these lying deceptive arrogant people forget they were immigrants here as well. They do not care that their constituents and their congregants are part of the poor and the needy! 


It is sad that even people who don’t have the same views, who are not so arrogant, respond to these liars and engage with them on their level instead of engaging with them on God’s level. Every compromise that keeps God out of the picture, that doesn’t uphold the principles of justice, truth, kindness, compassion, love, etc falls into the category of arrogance as I am experiencing the teaching above today. We have to look at our institutions, our families, our relationships as well as to see our own acts of arrogance and our ways of expelling God, of not crying out, not hearing the cry of another and not hearing God’s response. 


In recovery, we are constantly seeking to improve our conscious contact with God, knowing that God/the Ineffable One is so beyond our comprehension we can only stay clear enough to hear God’s call back to us and to respond to the call/cry of another human being. 


I know I have been arrogant and expelled God and each day I strive to do this less and less. Stay safe and God Bless, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 72

“It is as easy to expel God as it is to shed blood. And yet even when He hides, even when our souls have lost His trace we may still call Him out of the depths: out of the depths of all things. For God is everywhere save in arrogance.” (Man is Not Alone pg.145)


Yesterday, I was immersed in the first half of the second sentence above. Today, I am immersed in the ‘cradling’ I mentioned yesterday of the second half of the second sentence. As I read this part of the sentence, I was moved to look at Psalm 130 again and think about how return always begins with a cry from the depths. New beginnings begin with this cry from the depths, whether we realize it or not, it is a cry to the Ineffable One, to the higher consciousness of self and another, to a higher power in the universe, to the creative force of the cosmos-however one wants to think about/describe/name the part of the universe from whence our intuition, thoughts, breath come from. 


When one cries out from the depths, what are we crying for if not connection and assistance? We cry out to be heard and we cry out to hear ourselves; at that moment of calling out to God, to another human being we are saying we need help, we are unable to do everything on our own and we are stuck. We are stuck in our self-deceptions, our mendacious ways, we are stuck in stubbornness, we are stuck in slavery to another person’s whims, we are stuck in a class system, we are stuck in ___(fill in the blank). We are stuck with no where to turn except to cry out and seek the wisdom, the strength and the key to becoming unstuck whether from another person and/or the Ineffable One. Our calling out is the first step towards freedom for our self, it is the first step on the journey of recovering our integrity, our authenticity, our humanity. 


This call out of the depths is the most ‘cradling’ action we can take in that moment. We are rocking ourselves to calm ourselves so we can hear the call of our soul, the response of our call and know that help is on it’s way-whether from ‘up there’ and/or down here. In many prayer traditions, swaying back and forth happens at times people are most active in calling out to God and while some people find it humorous and ridiculous, those of us who engage in it experience both the calming and the calling, our enslavement and our being cradled and soothed. 


For the people who hear this call out of the depths and respond, we are aware of the holy action we are engaging in. It is not a burden to respond to this call, it is an honor, it is a Mitzvah, it is an encounter with another human being and something quite larger than ourselves. We get to hear and respond to the call of the widow and orphan, stranger and poor, the needy in material and in spiritual matters. We get to return the gift of the lives we live to God by sharing, caring and reaching down to the depths to pull someone else out of the shit we were once in. WOW, it can’t get any better than this. This is the ultimate in being cradled by God and then cradling another human being. 


This is why it is so important to stop scapegoating the people who are crying out from their depths-let’s stop judging whether they ‘deserve what they got’ and begin to make the society that God is calling on us to make-a society of refuge, a society of imperfection, tshuvah, return and welcoming back. None of us are so perfect we have not had the need to cry out and for those unwilling to hear the call and the cry from the depths of all things, from the border to the boardroom, from the current scapegoat to the millions who have died from addiction/use/abuse of numerous substances and behaviors because their calls and cries were not heard-THE SIN IS YOURS! We need to remind our fellow travelers on this planet to be responsible not only for their actions, but to remember what Scripture teaches: we are our brother’s keeper and “the bloods of your brother cry out”. 


In recovery, we called out from the depths of our being trapped and stuck in living a false, miserable life and we were heard. We call out to God/Higher Power each and every day in gratitude and in service. We continue to hear the call and cry from the depths by another human being and reach out to help that person up to a place of liberation knowing freedom is theirs once they connect to a way of living that is congruent with decency, love and service. 


35 years ago, I called out to God and, sitting in a jail cell, I heard God’s response to me. “I have a plan for you and you have to figure it out, Mark” was the message I heard and I have spent these 35 years continuing to figure it out and to hear the call of the soul/depths of another(s) human being. In writing this today, I realize I have needed to call out at other times during this time and I haven’t because of ego, of people pleasing, of needing to fundraise, etc. I also know that I did cry out at times inappropriately possibly, and these cries were not heard and/or misinterpreted by another. I also did not listen for God’s response at times because the pain of being stuck, the pain of seeing wrong-doing was so great. I feel very held and cradled today by remembering all I have to do is call and wait and listen for the response because it always comes. Stay safe and God Bless, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 70


“It is as easy to expel God as it is to shed blood. And yet even when He hides, even when our souls have lost His trace we may still call Him out of the depths: out of the depths of all things. For God is everywhere save in arrogance.” (Man is Not Alone pg.145)


The second sentence above is very cradling for me. While “He hides” is a little troublesome for my rational self, my ‘lower logic’, my soul knows that God always hides a little to a lot, depending on us, on our needs and on our ability to hold on to the “traces’ we have obtained through our living. God “hides” is a device we humans use to explain the imperfections in the world and/or our need to deny the existence of God/the Ineffable One, I believe. While it is ‘true’ that we cannot see the face of God or we will die as the Torah teaches us, it is also ‘true’ that God sends messengers/angels to us all the time. God “hides” could be another way to describe the immutable truth of God’s gift of free-will. God’s full presence in the world would rob us of this gift, and even when we use it poorly, God doesn’t take the gift back. “He hides” is, in my immersing myself in this thought, Rabbi Heschel’s way of pointing to the impossibility of ever really knowing God, Rabbi Heschel’s way of showing us the enigmatic nature of the Ineffable One. 


The second part of this three-part sentence is causing me to tremble. How can our souls lose “His trace”? How is this possible? Our soul is our divine image, how can we lose “His trace” from His image? I hear Rabbi Heschel is speaking to all of us to be careful and stay right-sized. We lose “His trace” when we stop hearing our inner voice of God/Intuition/knowledge/higher consciousness, whatever you want to call our connection to something greater than ourselves. We stop hearing the call of the “still, small voice” within us and in the universe when we allow our souls to atrophy, when we end our spiritual development at age 13, 16, 18, or whenever. We lose “His trace” when we end (if we even began) our spiritual growing/learning. While many people quote the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, the Koran, other Holy texts of the other religions and spiritual disciplines, many of those have lost “His trace” because they do not live the words, they only speak them. 


Our world is full of people who are narcissists and sociopaths who will quote/say the right words all the while acting totally different in private. While their public actions look good, they are all for show because they have lost “His trace” and their path of deception and mendacity is so strong, they have convinced so many of their sincerity and kindness, all the while fleecing people’s emotions, spirits, and, at times, their bank accounts. We see this in the political sphere all the time-be it about abortion, vaccines, protecting the wealthy and treating a corporation as if it is human while it engages in inhumane activities, obstructionist measures to ensure the unequal rights of one group or another, etc. We see this in advertising, especially the advertising and marketing of prescription drugs on TV and in Magazines. “Tell your doctor” is a way to force doctors to prescribe something that might not be good for a patient but the patient either is going to leave the practice or, worse yet, sue for malpractice-watch “Dopesick” on Hulu to see this practice in action and how many deaths are still occurring thanks to Purdue Pharma.

We see this behavior in small business and families as well. The different serial killers who were family men, people ‘you would least expect’! We see the parents who put on a show of how devoted to their children they are while neglecting them spiritually, emotionally and treating them as investments, props-not precious souls they are blessed to steward into adulthood. We see this in the two-faced way people are at home and at work, in church/temple/mosque and in the world.We see this in the person who prays every day and then cheats another person, who gaslights another person, who spreads gossip, true and not true, about someone they are trying to dominate, all the while speaking eloquently about their spiritual connections. 


We lose “His trace” whenever we engage in mendacious behavior, whenever we wall our souls off from the rest of our being, whenever we actively ignore the “still, small voice” inside of us and outside of us. When we choose to hide from God and when we choose to not seek God and not allow God to find us we lose “His trace”. It is not God’s hiding that makes us lose “His trace”, it is a choice we make!


In recovery, we know that our recovery is determined by the nature of our spiritual condition each and every day. We know that spirituality is not something we attain, it a way of being. We know that the moment we believe we are spiritual, we lost “His trace”. We continue to “grow along spiritual lines” so we can deepen our connection to the Ineffable One and grow “His trace” within us.


I will write more on this second sentence tomorrow including my experience with it. Stay safe and God Bless, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 70


“It is as easy to expel God as it is to shed blood. And yet even when He hides, even when our souls have lost His trace we may still call Him out of the depths: out of the depths of all things. For God is everywhere save in arrogance.” (Man is Not Alone pg.145)


I have spent 9 weeks in the Chapter titled: The Divine Concern in Rabbi Heschel’s book: Man is Not Alone. In reading the above quote, I am realizing that this chapter is holding my interest so strongly and profoundly because of my fear that we, as individuals and as a society, have forgotten the concerns of the Ineffable One, the concerns of the Universe, the concerns of Higher Consciousness-however one wants to define/label the creative force in the Cosmos. 


NEWS FLASH: GOD IS NOT DEAD!! Rabbi Heschel is reminding us that those who say this are the people who expel God from their living so they can shed blood in all manners of ways. There are the people who shed blood through mendacity and deception. Many of these people are ‘bible thumpers’ and ‘bible quoters’; they can recite chapter and verse of the Bible so they can bastardize the Holy words! These mendacious and deceptive people claim “Come to me, I have the answer to all your problems” all the while deceiving another human being to become subservient and dependent upon them. This happens in all walks of life, in all religions, in all political parties, in all movements, in all families, communities, etc. These people, while claiming to be people of faith, ‘God-fearing people’ have already expelled God from their ways, their hearts, their souls because they are shedding blood through deception and mendacity, they will, when found out and they will be eventually, cause people to lose faith, to lose hope and to become more cynical and more desperate, making us more susceptible to the next charlatan that shows up. 


We expel God and shed blood in so many ways: through dishonest speech, through the ‘delicious pleasure’ of gossip, through twisting the words of someone else to overpower them and/or embarrass them, through using the vulnerabilities of another person against them, through betraying covenantal relationships in a myriad of ways, through going to war to gain money, not for principle nor safety, through criminalizing/marginalizing certain groups of people to ‘keep order’ while really just enslaving the particular group, etc. War, when attacked, when fighting for a principle of God, while shedding blood is not expelling God. 

We are living in a world where ‘alternative facts’ have become mainstream. The insurrectionists who attacked the Capital on Jan.6 and their supporters in Congress and elsewhere have decided to promote the ‘alternative fact’ that these people were just visiting and are patriots and only killed and maimed because they had to protect themselves and …! What BS! Yet, these people also claim that God is telling them to kill anyone who disagrees with them, to prosecute and imprison people who help women make their own choice about their bodies, imprison people of color for longer terms than white people for the same/similar crimes, make it harder for people to exercise their right to vote, put the Jews in Concentration Camps, blame the Jews, the Hispanics, the Irish, the Italians, the Blacks, the Muslims, the ___(fill in the blank) for any and all problems. These are the same people who speak about personal responsibility while shunning wearing a mask to protect themselves, another human being, even their families. Exercising free-will is not freedom; Making free-will moral choices as Rabbi Abraham Twerski says is what makes us human and free. Free-will devoid of God’s Truth is the path to shed blood, enslave another(s) and try to destroy the spirit of another human being. 


In recovery, we call this type of behavior EGO: easing God out. We say this because expelling God is a gradual, almost unnoticed activity. For people who don’t ‘have faith’, ‘don’t believe’ we find agreement in what they don’t believe in nor have faith in. Since we all know that thoughts come into us from somewhere and we have all experienced our intuitive minds, as Einstein calls it, we have all experienced the Ineffable One, in my opinion. We “ease God out” by ignoring the ‘gut instinct’, the intuitive voice, the ‘knowing in our bones’ because of our ability to rationalize and validate choosing our feelings over our soul’s knowledge. In recovery, we are constantly engaged in clearing out the junk that blocks our spiritual arteries. 


I have shed blood by expelling God at times in my life, both prior to recovery and in recovery. I see how my need to be right, my ignoring signs that God and another person were giving me, having my ego puffed up by believing the bs that another person gave me and/or believing my own press pushed God out from my being in those moments and each time, I harmed someone(s) and I harmed myself and I learned. I also know that I have become pigeoned-holed as a lunatic for the ways I passionately and loudly proclaim God’s presence in my life and in everyone’s life, for promoting recovery for all people, recovering the true passion and purpose of each individual’s life. It is a bumpy road and I learn how to navigate the new pot holes each day with God’s help and the help of so many other people. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 69


“All beings are replete with the divine word which only leaves when our viciousness profanes and overbears His silent, patient presence.”(Man is Not Alone pg.145)


If we are being disturbed and concerned by this teaching, then we are also being consoled by it. The states of disturbance and concern are to remind us of what is important in the world, in our lives and in the way we live. The concern we experience about the way people are vicious and profane regarding the divine word is a good experience, though it brings worry and dismay. It is a good experience because it means that the divine word is being awakened inside of us again, we are called to act on the divine word that is in us and to act on it/them in our own unique manner. “Evil flourishes when good men/people do nothing” which is attributed to Edmund Burke, is a call to action on the divine word inside each and every one of us. We are not stuck nor trapped by the viciousness and profanity of another(s) human being and/or group, and/or country. We all have a choice to stand up against this viciousness and profanity by standing up and acting on the divine word in us. 


This brings much consolation and hope to all of us. We are living in a time(not unlike other times) where negativity, mendacity, evil, subterfuge, etc seem to be winning the day and even some of our religious and spiritual leaders are participating. We are living in a time, not unlike other times, where truths are being bastardized by a few for power over the many. We are seeing a form of minority rule that could be reminiscent of the time before the American Civil War AND we can bring the divine word in us, we can fill our world back again, ie be replete, with the divine word in us and hear the divine word from and in another human being. This is our challenge, this is our task and this is our ability. 


While finding the divine need that we fulfill may seem daunting, the teaching above from Rabbi Heschel brings joy and hope! One of our basic needs, as I am understanding this teaching today, is to bring the divine word(s) we are replete with to another human being, to allow them to shape our actions, then our thoughts and then our feelings. Hurt feelings is a major disease today and in the past; countries have gone to war and millions have died over hurt feelings and resentments. If we live Rabbi Heschel’s teaching above, then when we are hurt by another person, we will fill ourselves back up again with a divine word and a divine teaching and hear the divine words, even in the viciousness and profanity of the person who hurt us. Not that this means we had this vicious and profane attack coming to us, just that we get to ask ourselves the question: “What is the question this experience is the answer for” as I learned from Rabbi Jonathon Omer-man. In asking “what do I learn from this experience” we are able to divorce ourselves from the viciousness and the profanity, not carry a resentment nor give credence to this attack, and strengthen our ability to hear and speak the divine word(s) we are filled up with. It is one of the better ways of letting go of resentments and being able to forge ahead with our path and service to the Ineffable One, another human being and our self. 


I love the use of the word replete, the latin is “to fill back again”. The divine word never leaves us! We are constantly being filled up with the divine word, the higher truth, a way out of the slavery of our thoughts and feelings and this is joyous and consoling for us. Many of us see the negativity as continuing to flow and being refilled in the world, which it is; yet Rabbi Heschel is telling us the antidote to negativity, divine words and deeds are also continually flowing in our self and the world. While negativity gets more attention, I hear Rabbi Heschel calling us to start paying more attention to the divine word(s) and deeds that we are filled up with again and again. Isn’t it joyous and consoling to know we are filled with higher aspirations and actions than the worst we portray? Isn’t is hopeful to know that divine word can overcome viciousness and profanity? I believe it is. 


In recovery, we are able to discern the divine word(s) that fill us up and the ways we are vicious and profane, many times bastardizing divine words to be more vicious and profane. In recovery we are aware of the need to be vigilant about our actions, our words, speaking to people in ways they can hear and helping our self and another self to keep being filled back again with divine word(s) and mitigating our leanings towards viciousness and profanity.

I am thinking of a teaching that says: “Every person should see oneself as if holiness abides in one’s guts”. I am so grateful to Rabbi Heschel for reminding me that I am not my worst action, that one “oh shit” doesn’t wipe out “100 atta boys” as the saying goes. I am consoled by this teaching reminding me I am replete with the divine word and, while I have been vicious and profane, I have been kind and compassionate and of service much more often and I no longer have to resent anyone else who is vicious and I choose to not resent myself for my errors. I commit to continue to live and speak my divine word more often for my sake, for the sake of another, and for the sake of the Ineffable One. These are the best motivators of positivity and antidote to viciousness to me. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 68

“All beings are replete with the divine word which only leaves when our viciousness profanes and overbears His silent, patient presence.”(Man is Not Alone pg.145)


This sentence, coming on the heels of Friday’s quote can and must disturb, concern and console us. When we are standing for a divine concern, we are displaying our individual repleteness of the divine word. Replete’s latin origin means to ‘fill again’ and the English meaning is ‘to be well-supplied’ with. Every human being is capable of refilling her/himself with the divine word(s) that is uniquely theirs and the universal divine word(s) that brings all of us together as humanity. We are the ones who allow our viciousness to profane and overbear the Ineffable One’s “silent, patient presence”.


Today’s disturbance is understanding that viciousness is not just deliberate cruelty, it comes from the latin meaning ‘vise’. Rabbi Heschel is reminding us that when we put the divine word in a vise, when we use it for our benefit instead of the benefit of humanity, we are ignoring the divine word that fills us up. We are engaging in behaviors that are antithetical to the call of our souls, the divine word that wants to emerge and guide us. To stand for a divine concern is Rabbi Heschel’s description of being as we discussed on Friday; today he is teaching us that when we allow our cruelty, our tightening of the screws to be our modus operandi and our guiding principles, we are not only denying the presence of the Ineffable One within us, we are denying the presence of the Ineffable One in the world and, we deny our humanity. 


One of the problems of today, and in the past of course, is that the people engaged in this type of vicious behavior are neither concerned nor disturbed. They are so lost, so stuck, so without guidance and without connection to their own inner life/soul that they can’t even be disturbed nor concerned about their abandonment of the divine word and the divine concerns! It is sad and disconcerting as well as enraging to those who see this viciousness in action and are powerless to stop it because of the obtuseness and the willful blindness of these lost, sad people who are following like sheep the cold, calculating, charlatans who hide behind a misread of scriptures and our constitution to hold power and enslave ‘those’ people, ie, ‘anyone who isn’t us’. It is also disturbing to people who are students of the prophets and learn to see the humanity and the Ineffable One together in one moment and in every moment, as Rabbi Heschel teaches us to do. We are able to see how the charlatans are seeking, maintaining and abusing the power they have. We are able to speak about this twisted, dangerous path that a person is taking and it falls on deaf ears. The problem with viciousness is that is like a drug, one needs more and more of it to be satisfied and there is never enough! 


Another concerning and disturbing aspect to our world today is that profane comes from the latin ‘before the Temple/not sacred’ and as a verb means ‘treat something with irreverence, disdain’. When people put ideas, ways of being that they don’t agree with into the vise of viciousness, what is produced is disdain, irreverence as well as unholy behavior towards another human being, our planet and the Ineffable One! The ‘sin’ here isn’t just against our fellow human beings, we are harming the Ineffable One’s creation, the spirit that the Ineffable One placed in us and in the universe. We are ‘using this drug’ (vicious, profane behavior) and wrapping ourselves in different flags, Christ, God, Allah, Freedom, Woke, Victimized One, etc. What we are not aware of is that even in fighting the injustices of our times, when we use viciousness, when we profane the divine word that is within us and within another human being, we are no longer fighting the injustices, we are committing them!! This is the most disturbing and concerning thought this morning. 


In recovery, we know what our viciousness brought to the people around us, to our own life-destruction, denial, disruption, discord, disarray, etc. We realize the reason people crossed the street to stay out of our paths. In recovery, we continue to improve our awareness of the divine word that fills us up, we continue to hear the call of the Ineffable One so we can live the divine word and not the viciousness that we are capable of. 


In my life I have used profanity and been told how offensive it is to some. Yet, these same people are not offended by the profane ways they and another vitiate the divine word within them and within another human being. I realize today, while my ways are not everyone’s ways, I spoke/speak to people in ways they could hear, I exhibited my passionate belief in another human being, and I have been able to be an advocate for the soul of another. The viciousness that Rabbi Heschel is speaking about, I believe, is the bastardization of the divine word within each us and bastardizing the divine word in another thereby using the vulnerabilities of another against that person. While I have, of course, been guilty of this along with everyone else, I also know that I have been accused and convicted of these crimes much more than I have committed them. I see how I have made myself a scapegoat and an easy target for people to point at me rather than see themselves. I feel deep remorse in giving someone an out from self-reflection by pointing a finger at me. I commit to stay me, continue to speak the divine word(s) in my soul and, if I am a target, be a target for God and not have my ego get bruised. Stay safe and God Bless, Rabbi Mark

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

 Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 67


“What is a thing to us is a concern to God; what is part of the physical world is also a part of a divine world of meaning. To be is to stand for, to stand for a divine concern.”(Man is Not Alone, pg 145). 


“To be is to stand for” is a reverberation of a calling to us from Mount Sinai, from Jesus’ Temple Mount, from Mohammed’s Mecca, from Buddha, Confucius, from Freud, etc. For   those of us who believe in a faith, this is a calling from the Ineffable One. I am hearing Rabbi Heschel remind us that if we don’t “stand for” we are merely breathing/existing-not living and being human. 


It would seem if we just stopped there, Hitler, Putin, Orban, Trump, Hirohito, Jung-un, etc would fall into the category of being because they stand for something: authoritarian power, wealth, etc. To be clear about what “to be is to stand for”  is not bastardized, as so many spiritual truths and tenets have been in the past and are in the present, Rabbi Heschel further clarifies what stand for means: “to stand for a divine concern”. 


What is a divine concern? 36 times in the Torah (the first 5 books of the Bible), God reminds us to care for the widow, the orphan, the poor, the needy and the stranger, 36 times; more than any other commandment! Yet, we have forever tried to and been successful at finding workarounds to this call that reverberates through our Torah, through Jesus, from Mount Sinai and from our souls. It began when people would not lend money in the 5th and 6th years before the 7th year of release so Hillel proposed a workaround and it was adopted-even in ancient Israel, wealthy people did not want to help the poor. Even in a place where pilgrimages to Jerusalem were common to worship God, wealthy people were afraid of ‘getting beat’. They stood for something, however, it was selfishness, power, money, prestige, success, not the interests of another who was hurting, needy, not knowing the way of the land. 


We are hearing from ‘people of faith’ that the asylum seeker should be sent back, the immigrant is bad, people who have abortions, who perform abortions, are abominable, trickle-down economics, which did not work in President Reagan’s time is wonderful for the country, the rich paying their fair share is wrong-the middle class should pay more taxes than the wealthy. Be afraid of the stranger, the LGBTQI, the Jew, the Muslim and, before now, the Irish, the Italian, etc. Anyone who is not like us, we don’t have to nor should we care for. Of course, ‘like us’ is used very loosely because many of the followers of these ‘people of faith’ are the very ones who are in need. These ‘people of faith’ are not believers in Jesus’ teachings, they are believers in their power, their rightness, their ‘whiteness’, their entitlement, their superiority, etc. They are spouting the words of Christ in ways that Christ would be aghast at if he were here to hear them. 

The woke crowd is not too much better as they are willing to write off and treat the people they feel hurt them and they are against are less than human as well. They are against so much and, while they say they are for the people God is telling us to be for, they are ignoring and mean to the poor, widows, strangers, needy and orphans that don’t agree with them. 


Standing for a divine concern means we get to take the actions that our inner being is calling us to take, We get to be in action to help another person in the ways they need, not the ways we want to. We get to see how to help the stranger and needy inside of us, we get to see the way we are orphaned from our essence, from our Divine Image, from our core gifts. We get to experience a connection with another human being that is real, truthful, transparent and whole. Our soul is calling us to be one with the universe, one with our self, one with humanity. Standing for a divine concern is the path of being human, the path of a fulfilling life, the path of meaning, purpose and passion. Standing for a divine concern is true Beingness. 


In recovery, we know that we have to stand for divine concerns because standing for our concerns got us nowhere good. We crashed into a wall from our selfishness, our self-centeredness and total self-reliance. When we are standing for our own concerns only, we are stuck in a narrow prison that leads to depression, anxiety, addiction, need for more, more, and there is never enough. In recovery, standing for divine concerns becomes the greatest gift to fulfill our own concerns as well.

I have been standing for divine concerns throughout my recovery, not perfectly nor always, and consistently and constantly. I have had all of my needs met by standing for divine concerns and I have the honor of being a trusted servant of the Ineffable One! “To be is to stand for” has gotten me into trouble when I am standing for ego-mine or someone elses’- and when what God is telling me/my soul is calling me to stand for goes against the conventional notions/‘wisdom’ of the people around me or the mood of the times. Divine concerns have not changed, the ways we fulfill them may have, however the concerns haven’t. I have erred in standing for divine concerns in ways that are ‘outdated’ though effective, in ways that leave me and another vulnerable to attacks and lawsuits. I am sorry for this and am more careful now, while still standing for divine concerns. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 66

“What is a thing to us is a concern to God; what is part of the physical world is also a part of a divine world of meaning. To be is to stand for, to stand for a divine concern.”(Man is Not Alone, pg 145). 


Yesterday I wrote about the inner war and some of the different ways it manifests in human beings. These two sentences set the stage for maturing, growing and recognizing our Ineffable spirit and the Ineffable spirit in the universe. Realizing that every thing we see, touch, feel, ignore, disdain, profane is a “concern to God” overwhelms us, so we tend to ignore this truth. Yet, immersing ourselves in this truth will not bring us instant and complete awareness of all things, it will begin to awaken us to both the beauty and the holy in things that we have ignored, taken for granted, desired for less than Godly reasons, etc. Beginning with our selves! Accepting that we are a concern to the Ineffable One is, I believe, an important place to begin to mature and grow our own “spirit of concern for life”. 


Many people are concerned with/about their lives without ever realizing that their concerns are actually harming them rather than growing and maturing them. Sure, they obtain things, money, comfort, etc and, in many people I have met who are nor ‘addicts’, they always feel something is missing, they are afraid of losing everything. When one realizes, immerses oneself in being “a concern to God”, we see life differently. We no longer look for ‘where’s mine’; we see what is ours. We no longer are playing a ‘zero sum’ game; we are looking for win/win solutions. We no longer see life as a battle; we see life as a gift that we have to grow and pass on to the next generation. Accepting and living as “a concern to God” gives a new set of eyes with which to see ourselves, our gifts and our ability to make a difference in our world. Living as “a concern to God” gives our life a new meaning and new goal: being a better partner through listening to our souls and, while our minds/selfishness will burst thru our thinking, our souls will gently thank them for their opinion, consider what they are saying and choose to honor our being a “concern to God”. 


Once we accept our being “a concern to God” we begin to look at our surroundings as concerns to God as well. We are more aware of our environment and what we do to it and for it. We are more aware of health issues and what we do to promote healthy plants, farms, animals and humans. Politics takes a back seat to what is healthy and safe for humanity, nature and the animal world. In fact, once we begin to see our surroundings, the “things” around us as “a concern to God”; politics becomes a vehicle for robust and dedicated ‘arguments for the sake of heaven’; no longer a zero-sum game of power and ugliness. In fact, politicians become statesmen, more Daniel Webster than Mitch McConnell. 


Seeing another human being as “a concern to God” is intrinsic to healing this war within us, the inner conflict between ‘where’s mine’ and ‘how can I be of service’. When one sees another human being as “a concern to God”, there is no longer a war as to which do I choose, because we are able to choose both, serving oneself and another at the same time.. This is the problem that has faced humanity for millennia: How do I live with dual concerns, for you and me? The answer is found in Rabbi Heschel’s teachings, of course, and especially in today’s quote. Knowing and accepting that another human being is of as much concern to God as oneself is a humbling and uplifting experience. One is reminded that we are not the center of the universe and we get to share the spotlight, the dignity, value with another unique individual who is someone who can do things that one can’t and one returns the gift of doing what one can and another can’t. This relieves us of the “less than”, “poor me”, anxiety and depress that these messages of our emotions and thoughts bring to us. Instead we are know that we are connected to other concerns of God and to the universal “spirit of concern for life”. These are some of the ways of healing our inner conflicts and maturing and growing our souls. 


In recovery, our goal is to continue to heal the inner war/conflict so we can live without the angst and anxiety, depression and despair that our conflicts bring to us. We seek to be of service each and every day, helping people in the ways they need help, not the ways we want to help. In recovery, knowing that we all are “a concern to God” makes us more accountable to heal and grow. 


I have, at times in my recovery, acted in ways where people thought I believed I was the only concern to God and not anyone else. Had they looked into my being, they would have seen how much I yearned for them, how much of a concern they were/are to me! Yet, I realize in transactional relationships, which is what most people believe in, the only looking one does is to see what one can get from the transactions. I have not always acted as if another human being is a concern to me and I have always known and tried to honor that they are a concern to God. My ways are not conventional and the covenantal relationships I am engaged in have strengthened my commitment to living as a concern to God and another as well as seeing another as a concern to God and therefore to me. Stay safe and God Bless, Rabbi Mark  


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