Living Rabbi Heschel's Wisdom - A Daily Path to Living Well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 141

“Embarrassment is the awareness of an incongruity of character and challenge, of perceptivity and reality, of knowledge and understanding, of mystery and comprehension.”(Who is Man pg.112)

Continuing to experience this teaching, I am embarrassed by the inability of so many of us to be embarrassed and/or aware of the incongruity of knowledge and understanding we display. This inability to be both aware and embarrassed has led to war, famine, rejection, slavery, racism, caste societies, bastardization of religious principles, idolatry, authoritarianism, etc. It is the root cause of the crash of 2008, our gridlock congress, the search for absolute power in government, the cruelty of authoritarianism, etc. 

The greatest problem, as I am understanding Rabbi Heschel’s teaching is we are not embarrassed at our incongruities, not that we are unaware. In some cases, of course we are, and in the majority of times we live incongruity of knowledge and understanding it is with full awareness of this fact. There is no way the Republican Party did not know what they were unleashing when they continually called the election of 2020 “a stolen election” and called upon their supports to “stop the steal”! Not only were they aware of what they knew and how they were using their knowledge, they were the perpetrators of stolen elections for years by limiting the availability of voting places in minority neighborhoods, making it harder for people of color and older people to vote, etc. Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Mitch McConnell can stand up and straight-faced lie to the people and use their knowledge of truth to twist the facts, to denigrate the actions of their opponents and turn around and do the same action is disgraceful and they are not embarrassed by it! McConnell would not entertain talking to Merritt Garland during an election year, yet pushed through a Supreme Court Justice one month prior to the 2020 election! He is aware of his incongruence  he just doesn’t care nor is he embarrassed by them-he wears them as a badge of courage and honor! 

We see this in our religious institutions as well. When we are more concerned with cozying up to power than with the principles of our faith; we are in trouble. When we use the knowledge we have as religious leaders, scholars, to take advantage of our congregants and the people who trust us, we are aware and not embarrassed. When religious institutions are more concerned with optics and lawsuits that with staying true to the foundational principles of their faith, we are aware and not embarrassed. When we take the principles of our faith-decency, love, compassion, truth, justice, kindness-and use them for our benefit or the benefit of power, we are using our knowledge in an incongruent manner from our understanding of how to use it. In the Jewish tradition, there are 70 ways to understand Torah and some ardent fervent practitioners believe their way is the only “right” way-they are using their knowledge for power, control and self-aggrandizement, not for understanding God’s Will in the moment and how to use their knowledge for the sake of God and another(s) human being. Yet, they and others like them are not embarrassed at their awareness of their incongruities, they seem proud of them while denying they are being incongruent. What a conundrum! 

In our families, we see denial of incongruities all the time. Parents try to put up a facade of all knowing, my way or the highway, if you don’t like my rules…, don’t you question your father/mother in the home or in public, etc. Parents are constantly telling children how much they love them all the while being too busy to know their inner lives. Parents forget what it was like to be a child, adolescent and treat their own children like they were treated, which they hated! We see how parents ignore the spiritual health and growth of their children just as theirs was and only want them to be happy. We parents have to be more embarrassed so we can be more congruent with our children and teach them a different path than we were given. 

In recovery, we are absolutely embarrassed by our awareness of our incongruity of knowing and understanding. We realize early on how much we understood and knew and our myriad of ways to bastardize both knowledge and understanding. We come to the awareness of our incongruities through our inner work and spiritual growth. Then we are able to put our knowledge and understanding together to hear the call of our intuition, the call of our soul. 

I have come to realize how incongruent my knowing and my understanding of the best ways to use my knowing have been, at times. I am embarrassed as I write this at my unawareness of my incongruence. Immersing myself in this teaching is helping me rectify my incongruence and be more committed to ensuring my using my understanding of a situation is in concert with my knowing and my knowing, my skills, my talents are used in concert of my understanding of how to use them in the moment, making the necessary tweaks to meet the situation at hand and not rely on yesterday’s understanding or knowing. I am embarrassed that I was aware at times of my incongruence and I fell prey to it because of fear. I am embarrassed that I failed to speak and act from my knowledge and understanding of a situation and see that every time I failed, the situation got worse and more hurt was sustained by me and another person. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Living Rabbi Heschel's Wisdom - A Daily Path to Living Well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 140

“Embarrassment is the awareness of an incongruity of character and challenge, of perceptivity and reality, of knowledge and understanding, of mystery and comprehension.”(Who is Man pg.112)

The news from the Ukraine is horrific and puts an exclamation point on how aware we should all be of the incongruity of our perceptions and reality! Yet, many of us are not embarrassed nor aware and this is the scariest, saddest truth we can face. Worrying about the people of Ukraine who participated in free and fair elections, who have been bullied by Putin, Trump, the Republican Party, etc makes our embarrassment even more poignant. We all need to write our leaders to step in more forcefully than they have, send troops, bomb Russia, etc. Putin is using Hitler’s playbook, he is using Goebbels’ belief that accusing someone else of what you are doing is a winning strategy. Chamberlain fiddled while Hitler took Europe, please God we have learned something since and from World War II!

Which brings me to wonder how the Republican Party, the party of Lincoln and Reagan, are either not embarrassed by the awareness of their incongruity of perceptivity and reality or, worse yet, not aware of their incongruities! Ted Cruz’ father fled Cuba, of course Trump told us that he was involved in Kennedy’s assassination, because of Fidel Castro and he is supported and has supported Putin and Russia. Yet he sees no incongruity here. Moscow Mitch McConnell is so reverent when talking about Ronald Reagan yet takes Russian money and supported Trump’s love for Putin. He also sees no incongruity here. I can’t even get into the incongruities of Trump, his family and his lackeys, like Steve Banyon, Mike Pence, et al.

The Republican Party is engaged in not allowing free and fair elections, making it harder for people of color to vote, and they see no incongruity in billing themselves as the Party of Lincoln and discriminating based on color of one’s skin. They see no incongruity here? The party that was so against vaccine mandates, describing them as Nazi-like cruelties, continues to negate the free choices of women about their bodies and the health. No incongruity is seen or acknowledged here by these liars. 

God put T’Shuvah into the world because God knew we would make mistakes. I hear Rabbi Heschel calling to us to stand up and stop being blind to our incongruities of perception and reality, to stop holding on to conventional notions and mental cliches, to stop worrying about how things look and see how things are. We are so worried about how we look, physically, politically, emotionally, spiritually that we are unaware of how we really are, the reality of this moment, the reality of our being needed to stand up for God, for the stranger, the poor and the needy as well as the widow and the orphan. It is time for all of us to do T’Shuvah, to take an inventory and see the truth of who we are, what we have done, make amends where necessary and take the actions that are needed whether they are convenient or not. It is time to stand up with and for God, it’s time to wear our embarrassment on our faces, our garments and change our ways of trying to make the world adapt to our concepts and take off the blinders we wear and put on the glasses God has given us at birth to see where and how we can be of service to another rather than enslave another to serve us. 

In recovery, we learn early on that one cannot save one’s ass and face at the same time. Prior to recovery, we only cared about how things looked and what reality we could create so we could get what we wanted-usually money, etc. We might have been aware of the incongruities of our lives, we just were not embarrassed by them enough to change. In recovery, we are constantly seeking to uncover our incongruities between our perceptions and reality. We know that reality begins and ends with a connection to a power greater than ourselves and without a commitment to something greater than ourselves we will continue to believe our own press, the lies we make up and the perceptions we want to hold onto. In recovery, we are committed to letting go of the lies, seeking truth, aligning ourselves with reality and being embarrassed. 

The more I immerse myself in Rabbi Heschel’s words, the more embarrassed and aware I become. I have perceptions that I have been afraid, loath to let go of for fear of being alone. I have been engaged in ways of being that have been, at their foundation, false because I started from a perceptive premise rather than a premise rooted in reality. I have been hurt emotionally because I chose to live in my perceptions rather than see what was truly happening. I also am realizing living in my perceptions is not only incongruent, it is arrogant. Staying willfully blind to the reality in front of me is also embarrassing and harmful to another human being. I realize that reality is wonderful, difficult, eye opening, painful, joyous and the only way to truly serve God, another human being and one’s self. I am embarrassed by my awareness of my incongruities of reality and perception and I am not humiliated by them, I am not humiliated by the lies, the betrayals, the public airing of my less than stellar behaviors. I am embarrassed for the people who betrayed me and Harriet, the people who have enjoyed the public flogging and humiliation they participated in as perpetrator and/or listener. I pray they get as embarrassed and aware of their incongruities as I am of mine. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Living Rabbi Heschel's Wisdom - A Daily Path to Living Well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 139

“Embarrassment is the awareness of an incongruity of character and challenge, of perceptivity and reality, of knowledge and understanding, of mystery and comprehension.”(Who is Man pg.112)

Our challenge from Rabbi Heschel is to be embarrassed by our “awareness of an incongruity of perceptivity and reality”, yet so many people are unable to distinguish the difference so there is no difference! When we listen to the grifters, liars aka politicians, power-hungry despots, ‘experts’ on what God wants, racists, haters spin their false ideologies upon an unsuspecting group of people who drink it up like guppies, we are too unaware to even be embarrassed. 

Whether it is Trump, Cruz, McConnell, McCarthy, or their minions spreading these ‘alternate facts’, or Putin, Orban, MBS, Taliban, ISIS, etc spewing their self-serving deceptions, or ‘religious’ leaders telling people they know what God wants and only their way is the right way, we are bombarded by the perceptions of another(s) so much, so loudly, so powerfully, it is almost impossible to not believe them. We fall asleep at the wheel of life when we allow the perceptions of another(s) and/or our own perceptions to become a stand-in for reality. 

The difference between perception and reality has been with us from the beginning of our humankind. We perceive a threat so we go into fight or flight mode often when there is no threat. Just because a Black young man is walking along the street in Beverly Hills in the evening doesn’t mean there is a threat to anyone’s life, wallet, etc. Yet, I have seen police cars stop this young black man just for being black because his skin color is a perceived threat by a group of people who view racism as rational! Just because one person is a Jew and another person an Arab, doesn’t mean they are threats to one another, yet the perception is, in many people’s heads, that they hate one another and they will kill one another given the opportunity. Just because a Muslim is arguing about something happening in America doesn’t mean they are a threat to be a suicide bomber, yet the perception is, in some circles, they must be and every Muslim is here to impose Sharia law on America. Just because someone says something louder and louder and at every opportunity they have does not mean it is real, just because it is on the internet, on TV, Cable, Radio, Newspapers, etc doesn’t mean it is real. 

We see the results of our unawareness of reality, our not being in agreement with reality and believing our perceptions and/or the perceptions of another(s). Germany in the 1930’s and 1940’s, Rwanda in the 1990’s, wars in the Middle East since 1948, Afghanistan in the 2000’s, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine today-all have their roots in buying the perceptions that another person(s) have conjured up because we are intellectually and spiritually lazy! We are afraid to be embarrassed so we go along with people who appeal to our baser desires; power, prestige, money. We stay unaware of our incongruities in order to not be embarrassed by them, we defend our lies and the lies we are being told in order to not be embarrassed and aware. We do this so we don’t have to change, we don’t have to stand up to our lying leaders, we don’t have to worry about ‘losing it all’, we do this because we are not willing to stand with God!

Not being embarrassed is so much worse than being embarrassed. The embarrassment  of our awareness of our incongruities between perceptivity and reality is much better than the embarrassment of believing the mendacity and engaging in the self-deception that our perceptions, the perceptions/pictures people are painting! 

In recovery, we are constantly seeking to distinguish between what is real and what is our perception. Immersing ourselves in recovery engages us in this search as we come to find out how our actions impact another, how are resentments kill us and spread poison throughout our system and the spiritual/emotional systems of another, and our need to engage in a daily practice of seeing the truth of our day, our living. 

As a former con man, I know painfully well the damage my selling another person on my perceptions and/or giving their perceptions support in the face of reality. I believed my own BS for a while and upon being arrested again in 1986, finally heard the voice of God, the voice of reality that had been speaking to me forever. I was embarrassed then and I am embarrassed now when I become aware of my own incongruities between what I perceive and what is real. I continue to study Rabbi Heschel so I stay grounded in reality. I continue to speak with Rabbi Ed Feinstein so I stay aware of reality. I continue to engage with my writing so I can compare my perceptions to what is real. I continue to argue with Harriet Rossetto so I do not become willfully blind to my incongruities. I continue to hear the voice of God, the voice of reality, the call of my own soul so I can be embarrassed. I welcome this embarrassment because it means I am aware and I can change. I have been unaware at times and it has cost me and some other people dearly and for this I am also embarrassed. I also forgive the people who sold me on their perceptions for their own needs and used me for their purposes. I also ask forgiveness from anyone who perceives that I have done this to them. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Living Rabbi Heschel's Wisdom - A Daily Path to Living Well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 138

“Embarrassment is the awareness of an incongruity of character and challenge, of perceptivity and reality, of knowledge and understanding, of mystery and comprehension.”(Who is Man pg.112)

Our willful blindness to our not being in agreement with the challenge that living our Godly Image is astounding! It is the root cause of the hatred, power-hungry despicable actions by some, unfortunately no longer the few, and the root cause of our internal strife that we believe can be healed by having enough money, prestige, alcohol, sex, gambling, action, etc. Rabbi Heschel is calling to us with a painful rebuke, I believe, as well as a deep love for humanity and God in the same moment and in every moment. In other words, Rabbi Heschel is a prophet in our times and, unfortunately, like the prophets he is misunderstood, misread, etc, remember the core of his being is to take action, not just study him. While some of us have been liberated from Egypt, we are no longer in a physical prison/slave plantation, we are standing at the foot of Mount Sinai and building, worshiping and/or watching idolatry happen in real time and doing nothing! We are not embarrassed by our incongruity of character and challenge, in fact, some of us are proud of it-ask Fox News, OAN, etc. 

Our character as individuals, as a community, and as a country are being challenged by so many issues today and some of us are unaware of these challenges because we are afraid to be embarrassed, people on both sides of any issue fall into this trap. We are so engaged in proving ‘we are right’ and ‘we have the only right way’ to fix something that we fail to see the true challenge that these issues bring-are we going to be human, are we going to live life as partners of God, are we going to fulfill the divine need we were created for? These are not right/left challenges, these are not Republican/Democrat challenges, these are challenges we all face to be human, rather than just call ourselves human beings. Rabbi Heschel teaches us we are able to and need to “enoble the common” with each of our actions, a command from God is an opportunity to refine our inner life and, unfortunately, without being embarrassed, we are unable to achieve these goals. In fact, without our awareness and our embarrassment, we are unable to even realize that our #1 challenge is to be human towards one and all. 

We are constantly faced with the inner strife of doing what we want and what is good for our self and another self. We are constantly faced with the inner strife of living a life based in and of truth and/or living a life of self-deception, deception of another and mendacity. When we succumb to the mendacity and self-deception, as many people today are and many people always have, we put on dark glasses so we cannot see the reflection of divinity in the people we choose to scapegoat and treat another human being as less human, less worthy than we are. Our inability to stay loyal to God’s call of Ayecha, where are you, and our inability to stay loyal to the response of Abraham, Hineni, here I am, are the result of trying to relieve our inner strife through external means. 

Do we really need to support Putin in his dictatorship? Do we really need to support MBS in his killing of dissidents? Do we really need to stand idly by the bloods of our neighbors, brothers, etc? Do we really need to abandon the men and women who serve in our Armed Services when they return from combat? Do we really need to ignore the unhoused, the formerly incarcerated, the newly recovering person, the families who can’t afford food, clothing, and shelter as well as medical supplies and have to choose which to buy this week? Do we really need to blame another rather than help another? Do we really need to worship at the Golden Calf’s of the Confederate States of America, the authoritarian path of some so-called leaders, the sham of the so-called religious leaders who preach the opposite of God’s challenges to us, the self-deceptions we engage in, etc? The answer, evidently is a resounding YES from many people here in America and across the world. They need to in order to stay unaware, to not be red-faced and not have to change. The challenge they meet is not the challenge God has given to us, when we ever learn? 

In recovery, Chuck C wrote a book called A New Pair of Glasses in which he speaks about the changes in ‘eyesight’ that occurred to him and he adopted in order to cure the blindness that he had about his behaviors, his alcoholism, his philosophy of life and his inability to make agreement between his character and the challenges of being human while he was drinking. This is the challenge for all of us in recovery, to put on new glasses, to see the truth of the consequences of our actions and end our ‘but we meant well’ excuses. In recovery, our intentions take a back seat to our actions, one day at a time, we bring congruency to our character and challenge. 

I keep seeing how I hide from some of the challenges life gives me through food, through frustration and each day, I am lifting another membrane of the mask I wear to stay unaware and being more responsible to and for the challenges God gives me and bringing my character more and more into line with these challenges. I am embarrassed at the weight I have put on because of my hiding from some challenges, hiding from some truths and hiding from myself! I am committed to being more congruent in character and challenge. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Living Rabbi Heschel's Wisdom - A Daily Path to Living Well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 137

“Embarrassment is the awareness of an incongruity of character and challenge, of perceptivity and reality, of knowledge and understanding, of mystery and comprehension.”(Who is Man pg.112)

The word incongruous comes from the Latin meaning ‘not suitable, not agreeing’. Rabbi Heschel is reminding us, training us and teaching us to allow our awareness of our character and challenge ‘not agreeing’ lead us to being embarrassed so we will change our current state of being. We have become so inured to our incongruous nature and so defensive of our ‘character defects’ we fight to the end not to change. Our character traits are neither good nor bad, according to Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz, how we use them determines their worth as they have no intrinsic value. The challenge is God’s call to us, God’s demand upon us and the call of God’s creations for aid and assistance no matter the cause of their hardships. In the Bible, caring for the stranger, the poor and the needy, the powerless and voiceless has no explanation of how these situations occurred, only the command/demand of God to care for them. 

Our character is developed over time. We may have a certain natural bent towards good-naturedness, melancholy, glass half-empty/half-full, etc and this doesn’t determine our character. What determines our character, I believe, is how we learn to treat ourselves and human beings in general, how we treat animals and care for our planet, how we respond to God instead of hiding as Adam and Eve did. We develop our character through the actions we take and the beliefs we adopt. When we see every human being as having equally infinite worth and dignity, we will not treat them as objects for our desires and stepping stones to our wealth, fame, endgame, etc. Religion is the path of character development that is in accordance with being a “contemporary of God” as Rabbi Heschel taught us earlier, yet we have decided it is not a life-long pursuit for most of us. We go to religious school long enough to get confirmed, Bar/Bat Mitzvah and at the tender age of 13, we decide we don’t need any more character development nor refinement and parents agree! How ridiculous and doesn’t this explain the lack of good character development and refinement that we are experiencing some 59 years after Rabbi Heschel first pointed this ‘not-agreeing’ state of being for most of humanity. 

Taking Rabbi Heschel’s teaching above seriously causes us to walk around red-faced so we feel the heat of our incongruous behaviors, we feel the discomfort of our ignoring the challenge of God, we let everyone we meet know that we are at least aware of our incongruous behaviors and we are deciding whether to change our ways of being. We inform those around us that we are considering refining and developing our character to a state that is able, willing and desires to meet the challenges of God, the needs of human beings and the call of our own soul/inner life. Being embarrassed causes us to be better citizens and not engage in deception of another(s) nor self-deception. Being embarrassed causes us to be better parents as we teach our children that blushing is an acknowledgement of our awareness of our incongruities and the commitment to live a life that is ‘in agreement’ with God’s challenges, we teach our children that character development is as important, if not more important, than their intellectual development so they will continue to seek guidance from religion, spiritual guides, and learn to immerse themselves in the Bible for new and different ways to see the same situation. Being embarrassed connects us with God and causes us to turn towards God how is always searching and calling to and for us and this connection becomes the blueprint for connecting with another human(s); i.e. covenantal relationships. Being embarrassed is recognized as a gift rather than a burden/shame. 

In recovery we engage in character refinement and development from the time we choose to be in recovery and we are acutely aware that without engaging in this endeavor, we may say we are in recovery, we are not-we are just “dry drunks” as the program of AA speaks about. Recovery is a way of being in tune with God’s call and the call of our inner life, it is a path to connect with another human being and a group of humans on a real, unvarnished and truthful way. It is the path of embarrassment that causes growth, congruity and harmony-in other words a path of joy and fulfillment. 

My engagement in character development and refinement is unending. As I write these blogs, I am learning the subtle ways I have stayed willfully blind to some of my inappropriate character traits and the subtle ways I stayed willfully blind to the signs of betrayal by people I thought were of stellar character. Some of them are of good character and simply decided to serve themselves and not see me, and I have given people reasons to not see me with my ‘different’ way of relating and caring. I continue to refine my character so I can better meet the challenges God gives me, the call to action that my soul moves me to. I was embarrassed the other day when I realized how my ego got in the way of appreciating another person promoting some teachings that I imparted to them and not receiving credit from her/him. My red-face stopped me and I experienced the gift of having my words and thoughts, which come from God, promoted and taught in such a far-reaching manner as joy instead of ‘why not me’. God Bless and Stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Living Rabbi Heschel's Wisdom - A Daily Path to Living Well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 136

“Embarrassment is the awareness of an incongruity of character and challenge, of perceptivity and reality, of knowledge and understanding, of mystery and comprehension.”(Who is Man pg.112)

Immersing ourselves in the teaching above allows us to understand and acknowledge our lack of embarrassment and our lack of action when we are embarrassed. We are not aware of the incongruity of character and challenge within ourselves much less the incongruity of character and challenge of the people we follow, we align with, we ‘count’ on. We stay willfully blind to our incongruities so we can blame another person for our lot in life and/or as the prosperity gospel believers and the people who put on the National Prayer Breakfast preach; you are poor because god doesn’t love you and god loves the people who are rich and in power. I use the small ‘g’ because they are in fact idolators who preach these lies. There are religious leaders who tell us not to worry that our lot in life is so bad here, in the next world we will be rewarded, again a push for power and subservience. There are people who keep telling us to listen to what they say and ignore what they are doing like the wizard of Oz told Dorothy and company. Whenever we fail to be aware of our incongruities, calamity and evil come roaring to the front of the line and try to devour all of the struggle and good we have achieved.

What is the basis of our denial? Our need to look good, our need to be #1, our need to win, our belief in the Zero-Sum game of life, our hope that if we get _____(fill in the blank) we will be fine, etc. Rather than understanding and embracing the path of the Bible, rather than seeing ourselves in the struggles of our ancestors and the building of a relationship within our self and with God, we are embracing the Greek lie of perfection and the Greco-Roman path of conquer and destruction. It is apparent in so many of our enjoyments as well as in the way ‘business is done’. We see this in our political realm daily and no one is embarrassed at their incongruous way of speaking, voting, governing-especially Moscow Mitch McConnell and the lackeys in his party who follow in lockstep. We saw what happened when the German people were not embarrassed at the incongruity of Nazism and decency, when the Russian people are not embarrassed at the incongruity of Putin and the Oligarchs and the fall of communism in favor of democracy. We see what happens in our family structures when parents are not embarrassed nor acknowledge their incongruities, children come to believe everyone is false and there is no point to being honest-winning is the only thing that matters. 

God created us with incongruities, religion is the path to bringing our character and challenge closer together and our religious leaders have failed to meet the challenge God has given us and we are not embarrassed, we are also defending our ways. We see religious leaders preach dogma and behaviorism rather than connection with God and developing our inner life to find our way of serving God and humanity. We listen as they berate and try and control women’s choices about their own bodies rather than engage and help women find the ‘right’ spiritual decision for the individual woman with no other agenda that what is best for her. We watch in horror as religious leaders praise the powerful for their racism, their hateful ways, their attempt to destroy the democracy that was/is America! We are finding ourselves immune to the constant assault on Godliness and Holiness, on the infinite dignity and worthiness of every human being. In so many ways, some of our religious leaders and practitioners are failing us in the worst ways and driving droves of people from God, from a path towards wholeness and a path of healing our incongruities. 

We need to be aware of our incongruities, not as failures, so we can put a ‘halter’ on ourselves and allow ourselves to be lead by faith, by decency, by being more human than we have been, by recovering our integrity and living life by principles and not by mendacity. We have been imbued with the spiritual nature to do this. 

In recovery, we are constantly searching our inner life to find our incongruities and repair them. We live in this embarrassment that Rabbi Heschel is teaching us about so we can be aware of them. We do this by doing a daily inventory, repairing  the damage our incongruities cause and repairing our mental, emotional and spiritual incongruities within us. 

I am aware of my own incongruities each and every day. Immersing myself in this teaching today I am embarrassed by my own incongruities that I have indulged myself in and, even more, I am embarrassed by my own defense of them over the years. I am thinking of my father, Jerry, who tried to make me aware of them and how to heal them and how I have not listened to him, how I have ignored his wisdom and love. I am embarrassed by the many people who pointed them out to me and my anger at them for not loving me, when pointing them out to me is the greatest sign of love I can receive. I am embarrassed enough today to be aware of these incongruities and heal them, one day at time. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Living Rabbi Heschel's Wisdom - A Daily Path to Living Well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 135

“How embarrassing for man to live in the shadow of greatness and to ignore it, to be a contemporary of God and not sense it. Religion depends upon what man does with his ultimate embarrassment.” (Who is Man pg. 112)

A person asked me about the word embarrass last evening at dinner and I have been trying to explain the joy of being embarrassed. I am hearing Rabbi Heschel call to our souls and engage with our inner life so deeply that our faces wear the glow of redness of being in contact, in awe and in radical amazement regarding our state of being both “a contemporary of God” and living “in the shadow of greatness”. The redness on our face is not shaming, rather it is freeing; the embarrassment our inner lives discover because of the state of being we finally recognize is joyous and freeing-not shaming and blaming! Rabbi Heschel is not using the word humiliation, he is not using the word shame/ashamed, he is using the word embarrass. 

Embarrass comes from the Portuguese meaning ‘halter’. Upon learning this, I understand Rabbi Heschel telling us to use our inner embarrassment to lead us to recognizing and using the fact that we live in the “shadow of greatness”, to relish the redness that comes from this discovery and allow ourselves to be a beacon for another person(s) to find their inner embarrassment and the truth of these experiences for themself. Rather than hide our blush, our redness, our glow we are being told to use it to light up and raise up our own living and the living of another(s). Moses’ face was aglow because he realized and experienced being both “a contemporary of God” and living “in the shadow of greatness”. The horns that Michelangelo put on the statue of Moses represented the light of God radiating from him caused by his ‘embarrassment’. 

The last sentence above takes on a new meaning this year: Religion comes from the latin meaning ‘to bind, to obligate and to revere” so the last sentence can be understood as Obligation, Reverence and Binding/adherence depends upon what we do with our highest level of being led, being contained. It is our responsibility to allow ourselves to use our free will and our rational minds to serve a higher and truer being/higher truth. Religion depends upon on much we revere, bind and obligate ourselves to the truth of; Rabbi Heschel’s previous sentence, how interested we are in seeking truth, deciding whom we are serving; self, another, or God. We have yet to have a definitive answer to these questions as evidenced by our desire to follow the latest fad, seek forgiveness from God without seeking forgiveness from the party we injured, seek to be deceived and engage in mendacity so we can have power, money, prestige, and/or be close to those in these positions. We have not answered Hineni, here I am, yet to Rabbi Heschel’s call for us to be embarrassed and use our embarrassment to grow and nurture our religious life, our life of reverence, binding and obligation. 

When we bind ourselves to a higher standard/level of living, when we have reverence for the teachings, ways and connection of the Bible and the people in it, when we take on the yoke of obliging ourselves to embrace God’s path for us through discovery first and then living this path, we are living our embarrassment in the holiest and highest form. We are able to impact how religion will help bring about the vision of God and the prophets that there will be a time when war will be abolished and there will be peace. While it may not happen in our lifetime, we have to allow our embarrassment shine outwardly so another can use our illumination to move this vision forward. Our embarrassment is a gift from God, it is a light for us and for another(s), lets stop hiding from it!

In recovery, we use the embarrassment we experience to move us deeper and deeper into our recovery and find new ways to make amends and do more good. We are aware that our recovery depends on our group of compatriots and their recovery depends on our cooperation and our shining the light our embarrassment onto them and the group. In recovery we embrace the warmth and the love that being embarrassed brings to our inner life, our soul and our minds. This is one of the paths to living in Rabbi Heschel’s radical amazement and connecting us to God more each day. 

I have bound myself to a way of living that I don’t always get ‘right’. I have reverence for the people I meet and fight for their souls, I am obligated to grow my inner life and my standard of living one grain of sand each day. I am embarrassed by my inabilities at times and these ‘failures’ teach me how to not do something so I continue to learn new ways to connect, to overcome my emotional dis-regulation at the betrayals of self and by another, the lunacy of the world, the mendacity of so many people, etc. I am using embarrassment as a path towards wholeness and holiness, it allows me to feel the warmth of connection to God, recognition of God’s call to me and my response of Hineni, here I am! Being obligated, bound, and revering God causes me to be obligated, bound and revere humanity-even the people that don’t like me and I don’t necessarily like. If we cannot do this, there is no hope for the vision of the prophets to become a reality. The joy and path of religion is to be obligated to living the life we were created for and let go of the comparing and competing, stop being ashamed by what we don’t have and rejoice in who we are and what we do have; contemporaries of God and life! God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Living Rabbi Heschel's Wisdom - A Daily Path to Living Well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 134

“How embarrassing for man to live in the shadow of greatness and to ignore it, to be a contemporary of God and not sense it. Religion depends upon what man does with his ultimate embarrassment.” (Who is Man pg. 112)

The more I have lived with this sentence, the more embarrassed I become. Being “a contemporary of God” means to live in together in time, according to the Latin root of the word. How frightening to consider the ways we have not sensed God, we have ignored the greatness of God, not lived in a manner that recognizes and honors our living together with God in this moment, at all moments. I am also understanding the awe and reverence Rabbi Heschel had for the Prophets because they sensed, honored and lived their lives according to the demands of their relationship with God. 

I hear Rabbi Heschel telling us to stop trying to save our faces while our souls, our inner lives, the lives of people around us are being destroyed, harmed, demeaned, and imprisoned. We are in a great war within ourselves and with human beings right now and we are not realizing that the ways we are treating one another are in direct conflict to the teachings above. We cannot hate one another, we cannot judge people on the color of their skin or their religion, we cannot preach enslavement and revere the enslavers of the 16th, 17th, 18th Centuries, we cannot bow down before the deceivers and the grifters, we cannot take away the rights our country was founded on and proclaim we are doing it for and in the name of God. 

Living together in time with God is a haunting way of being. In a Yiddish Poem, Rabbi Heschel wrote: “God follows me everywhere” and I understand the above teachings in this light-God is with us all the time and we are too dull, too egotistical, too obsessed and self-centered to sense this truth and to act accordingly. It is time for us to stop our need to be right, our need to win at any and all costs and our need to crush another human being so we can feel good about ourselves. It is time we return, do T’Shuvah to the values America was founded upon and to return to living our lives as the Bible shows us. 

Living together with God is also the greatest joy we can experience. It allows us to know ourselves better, to appreciate one another a little more, to have the capacity to love another person and keep our covenants with one another, to own up to our errors and do T’Shuvah/amends so we can repair relationships we have harmed. Living together with God gives us a smile when we realize our errors and correct them, learn from them and restore the dignity of another human being that we tarnished so harshly. Living together with God reminds us of our responsibility to and for our personal relationships as well as our global relationships, it reminds us to stay “loyal to the event” of meeting God in our time and “loyal to the response” of this event. No longer are we able to just use people for what we selfishly need and throw them away when it isn’t convenient anymore when we know that we are “a contemporary of God”, we are people who hear the demands of God and serve these demands, no longer serve our self-serving desires. 

Living as “a contemporary of God” is the message of the Bible and yet, we get so engaged in picking apart the words of the Torah, we miss the message! We are so busy bastardizing the stories and the words so we can have control of another person, engage in self-aggrandizement because we are ‘so pious’ we have missed the compassion, the love, the different ways of living joyously together with God. In this way, God is no longer to be feared, no longer the punisher, the fire and brimstone thrower. God is our guide, our teacher, our lover, our friend, the entity that never leaves us alone and always welcomes us back when we go on trips and ‘leave’ God home. As Rabbi Heschel teaches, “God is pursuing man” and “God is in search of Man”(God in Search of Man pg. 136), and it is time, past time for us to sense it, stop running away from God and start living as “a contemporary of God”. 

In recovery, we know we need God, yet most people still don’t see themselves as contemporaries of God. In recovery, we do know that we are living in God’s world and, I realize, that we are forgetting that the world belongs to both humans and God, that our ability to grow in our recovery is dependent upon our ability to live inclusively, with God, self and humanity. As soon as we compartmentalize and separate, we are no longer sensing our living together with God in realtime! In recovery, we are growing along spiritual lines to the extent that we meld our spirits with God and with one another. 

I am seeing the areas of life where I have lived this teaching and when I have not, I am also saddened by the lack of sight/vision I had to see the people who had a transactional relationship with me while I thought it was more. I am saddened by my being hurt, angry and bitter at the betrayals of another person(s) when I have had God with me all the time and I didn’t realize it. I am acutely aware, because of this teaching today, that our co-dependency, our need to be liked, our need to be important and the behaviors that we exhibit to achieve these states are all because we have forgotten and do not sense we are “a contemporary of God” and this is enough! God Bless and Stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Living Rabbi Heschel's Wisdom - A Daily Path to Living Well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 133

“How embarrassing for man to live in the shadow of greatness and to ignore it, to be a contemporary of God and not sense it. Religion depends upon what man does with his ultimate embarrassment.” (Who is Man pg. 112)

I am overwhelmingly embarrassed at our inability to experience our embarrassment at being a contemporary of God and our lack of acknowledging it through our actions and not sensing it within our self. While all faiths give credit to God, speak of the “image of the divine” we are all created in, few practitioners of these faith actually live this truth, act in these ways as opposed to the overwhelming majority who speak it. We are in a terrible spiritual condition as human beings right now, precisely because we are unable to be embarrassed at our inability to sense our being a contemporary of God, because we hide from our own embarrassment through prejudice, through lies, through self-deception and our ‘spiritual leaders’/idolators promote and enhance our hiding. Exactly the people who need to be leading us to experience this embarrassment as a joyous experience of growing our inner and outer life, are helping us hide, helping our inner lives grow darker and darker, helping our souls to wither. 

As I said before, Rabbi Heschel gave these lectures at Stanford in 1963, yet some 60 years later people are still lacking the proper measure of embarrassment at being “a contemporary of God” and not sensing it nor acting on it. What is wrong with the human race that we refuse to live this teaching. The use of the word embarrassment is not for shaming us, as I am understanding Rabbi Heschel’s teaching. Rather embarrassment is the reflection of the inner glow we have when we realize that we are a “contemporary of God” and while we don’t live up to this truth all the time, we get closer with each decent act we engage in. It is the outer reflection of experiencing love from God, from another human being, from our own soul. The embarrassment of being a contemporary of God is the reflection our inner experience of being known and accepted. Embarrassment, as I am reading Rabbi Heschel is an experience that spurs us on to growing and living one grain of sand better each day. 

Yet, we are afraid of being embarrassed, we are afraid to own up to our errors and blame another person for what we are responsible for. We use Rabbi Heschel’s phrase “a contemporary of God” to grab power and to bastardize the words of the Torah, the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, the words of Jesus, the Koran and the words of Mohammed, the teachings of Buddha, etc. How often have punishment and fire been preached as a means of control and one-upmanship as opposed to seeing the words of God as a cautionary tale? We are living in a time where the people who run the National Prayer Breakfast believe Jesus is the Lion, they promote the right for a man to choose how a woman treats her body, how she looks, etc to ensure that she is subservient to the man, where they have decided to be the ‘power brokers’ and call this Jesus’ vision. We are living in a time where people who tried to overthrow our government, our constitution are being celebrated as patriots by the Hawley’s, McCarthy’s, Cruz’, Rubio’s, etc. All of this because they are afraid to be embarrassed by their inability to sense and embrace their being a contemporary of God. In Exodus Moses calls the people “who are for God” to join him in slaying the people who worshiped the Golden Calf and while it seems a little harsh to our ears, we are witnessing and participating in the erection of another Golden Calf - authoritarianism, mendacity, prejudice and anti-semitism, anti-muslim, behaviors practiced by these treasonous leaders and their followers. 

We are contemporaries of God, we are made in the Image of God, we are partners with God in perfecting and caring for the world. This is an embarrassing fact of existence and we don’t even realize how we ignore this truth. We don’t realize when we treat another human being as ‘beneath’ us, we are treating God in the same manner. We don’t realize how often our words and actions are in conflict with each other and we keep covering up and explaining how they ‘really, really’ are congruent. We don’t realize our explanations fall on deaf ears and God is crying because we have exiled ourselves. All this because we refuse to sense our being a “contemporary of God’ and living up to this truth. 

In recovery, we are aware of our need to connect with God and many of us are aware of being a servant of God as well as a contemporary. We are constantly embarrassed from our inner light when we know we are living up to being worthy of being a contemporary of God and we are embarrassed when we know we are not. In both cases the embarrassment is a reflection of our inner dialogue and awareness. 

I am always embarrassed by my ability to recognize my being a “contemporary of God” and my inability to recognize this truth. I am aware in this moment of the times I have been unable to see this truth are all caused by fear and inauthentic desires. I am committed to being more aware of these fears and phony desires so I can let them go quicker. More on Sunday! God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Living Rabbi Heschel's Wisdom - A Daily Path to Living Well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 132

“How embarrassing for man to live in the shadow of greatness and to ignore it, to be a contemporary of God and not sense it. Religion depends upon what man does with his ultimate embarrassment.” (Who is Man pg. 112)

Rabbi Heschel wrote this book Who is Man based on lectures he gave at Stanford University in 1963. Some 60 years later, these teachings are as meaningful as they were then, his words are prophetic and many people still ignore them-how sad, how serious, how dangerous to the human race ignoring them is. I believe part of the reason for people ignoring the wonder, awe, beauty, and call to action of Rabbi Heschel’s teachings is they are so profound, so foundational to being human people are unable to refute them and don’t want to live them so they ignore them, they choose not to sense them. It is easier to ignore and not sense truth, a call to action, a demand from God than to refute any of these experiences. It is less confrontational, it is more convenient, it is more emotional soothing and it is a path to silencing the spirit within us. Yet, Rabbi Heschel’s teachings in general and above shake us out of our willful blindness, as he has called our way of being, like the prophets of old Rabbi Heschel gives us a bad conscious, he disturbs us and he is a constant voice of judgement and mercy in our souls; when we accept his wisdom and his call to action. 

By ignoring the “shadow of greatness” we live in, we work hard to deny truth, deny God’s call, deny our own humanity, and deny our own basic goodness of being. As we see what is happening in the world today and we have a keen sense of history, we can hear God’s warning that the greatness that is God, the greatness that God’s shadow provides for us is being used against us by smooth talkers and grifters. We know this in our soul and we know this to be true “in our bones” yet, we are feel powerless to do anything about the Pandemic of Prejudice that keeps spreading and growing inside some people and infecting more and affecting every one. Rabbi Heschel calls prejudice “an eye disease, a cancer of the soul” and, as we learn from the teaching above, prejudice is incongruent with living “in the shadow of greatness” and being aware of this truth. Hence, the reason so many people ignore the “shadow of greatness” we live in each and every day. 

It is time for “all good men (and women) to come to the aid of their country” a phrase used in typing books from Charles Weller, is especially pertinent right now. I would change it to: Now is the time for all People to come to the aid of God and Now is the time for all People to come to the awareness of the greatness we live in the shadow of.  When we come to the aid of God, when we become aware of the greatness we live in the shadow of, we are adopting this teaching of Rabbi Heschel and we are implementing God’s vision of us and for us. Coming to the aid of God, awareness of of the greatness we live in the shadow of is the carrot for our willful blindness, the orange juice for our scurvy of our souls, the vaccine for the pandemic of prejudice, hatred, bastardization and idolatry. We have had the solution to what ails humanity at our fingertips and we continue to ignore it and Rabbi Heschel’s words are like a hammer on the anvil trying desperately to break through the hard shell that we have encased our hearts, our souls and our connections to God and to fellow human beings. 

The so-called leaders of our country, secular and religious, who are exploiting the ignorance of ‘the masses’ and using people to further their interests, not the interests of God are the idolators and the modern day Pharaohs. We see this in the rise of authoritarianism and the unmasking of the prejudice, hatred and ill-will they and their followers are unleashing through mendacity, deception and fear-mongering. It is truly time for all GOOD PEOPLE to come to the aid of God, of our fellow human beings and of our own souls!

This is the foundational truth we who are in recovery live by: letting go of the lies and the prejudice, the anger and the hatred, the ill-will and fear-mongering that our former lives were built on. Leaving the narrowness (Egypt) of self-centeredness and journeying with the help of and guidance of God to our rightful home, our right actions and our the serenity/clarity of service to God and to humanity. In recovery, we learn to rejoice in each day, put on a new pair of glasses and hone our vision to see how to make our corner of the world a little better each day. 

As Socrates once said: “the unexamined life is not worth living” and Malcom X reminded us: “the examined life is painful” describes the both/and of Rabbi Heschel’s teachings for me. I have to examine my life, the ways I live each and every day for want of improving my actions and living the Mitzvah/demand of God to do T’Shuvah and return. I have to face myself and how I have honored the “shadow of greatness” I live in and how I have ignored it. Doing this is painful, disappointing God, neglecting the call of my own soul and the needs of another is the most excruciating pain I can experience and this daily action gives me more insight on how to live better the next day and how to serve God and humanity a little better the next day and I experience the embrace of spirit and the embrace of community, family, friends a little more each day. Taking the blinders off, seeing clearer and rejecting the idolatry of ignorance enhances me and my life each day. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Living Rabbi Heschel's Wisdom - A Daily Path to Living Well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 131

“How embarrassing for man to live in the shadow of greatness and to ignore it, to be a contemporary of God and not sense it. Religion depends upon what man does with his ultimate embarrassment.” (Who is Man pg. 112)

In the aftermath of the Super Bowl and the football playoffs there is so much talk about GOAT, the greatest of all time. Tom Brady, Muhammed Ali, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and so many more are mentioned in their respective fields and the people who were/are around them tell the stories of what it was like to be in their shadows. People revel in being able to be around them, learn from them, be beneficiaries of their greatness, even if they were ‘just’ hanger-ons. Watching Dr. Dre perform with his friends and proteges was amazing given he had a near death experience a year ago and the whole world saw the joy, the greatness and the long shadow he has as well as the joy of the people performing with him. 

Rabbi Heschel is teaching us to bask “in the shadow of greatness” of God, of our self and of one another. He is imploring us to stop ignoring it through self-deprecation, through put downs and one-ups of another person/group and to rejoice in the greatness we are surrounded by. We cannot do this in our current climate, however. We are stuck in our own ignorance and this is very troubling and scary. As long as our politicians, our citizens are willing to tear down the very institutions that reflect the foundations of our greatness, as long as our clergy are willing to ignore the “shadow of greatness” of our Biblical and Holy texts and bastardize them for their own personal power and gain, as long as we are willing to live in a zero-sum world where our relationships are transactional, we will continue to ignore the “shadow of greatness” we live in. 

It seems so simple to follow Rabbi Heschel’s teaching and warning and yet, it is so difficult for us to live. So many people are so engaged in living in a prejudicial manner towards themselves as well as towards another(s), it seems impossible for them/us to not ignore the “shadow of greatness” that surrounds us. The Latin origin of prejudice is “judgement in advance”. People today have made these “judgements in advance” of seeking and finding truth and growth so they are putting themselves down for their foibles, imperfections and vulnerabilities and they are engaged in self-aggrandizement so they can hide from these same foibles, imperfections and vulnerabilities. Many people today are using these prejudices against themselves and then against another(s) so they can be subservient and/or in power-ignoring the greatness that is within them and the “shadow of greatness” of God that surrounds all of us. 

In the current climate of Cancel Culture and MAGA, we can see how the ignoring the “shadow of greatness” we live in leads to bastardization of holy principles and the enslavement of people. This belief that “only I have the Truth on my side” and/or as Bob Dylan sings “With God on my side” has led us to become so polarized that it could be as bad as it was in the 1850’s and 1860’s prior to and during the Civil War. We venerate the Civil War by studying it in our schools and the MAGA crowd consider the traitors of the Confederacy to be heroes! Rather than living in the “shadow of greatness” that  teaches us slavery must end, every human being has dignity and equal right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”, these ‘god-fearing’ treasonous idolators are selling their lies to a great number of people so they can have power, they can be the GOAT’s! The Cancel Culture people want to “throw the baby out with the bath water”, not see the “shadow of greatness” that are the foundations of what has been built and bring more of the greatness out. They would rather keep blaming, pointing fingers and holding everyone responsible for their feelings of less than, etc. While it is true that we have been guilty of many injustices in the past, life is evolutionary as we see in the Bible-God learned that humanity takes time to adapt and adjust, to grow into their own greatness. We do this by being present and aware, learning and using the “shadow of greatness” we are living in!

In recovery we read the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous, we study it, we keep interpreting it and re-interpreting it because we know it is a path to being present and aware of “the shadow of greatness” that it gives off to us. We know that we have to live in our own way, we do not need to be Bill Wilson or Dr. Bob Smith, we just need to live our lives according to the principles of recovery, decency and connection-in our own manner. In recovery, we take actions each and every day-prayer, meditation, service-so we can continue to engage in the lessons from living in God’s “shadow of greatness”.

I get more embarrassed the more I read this phrase and the more I write on it! I have lived a life of judging myself in advance of doing something, I have engaged in ignoring the “shadow of greatness” that surrounds me, I have engaged in not hearing the Voice inside of me that tells me about the danger lurking nearby and the beauty that is in the other direction. I am embarrassed by this ignorance! I also am heartened by my appreciation for the success and the greatness of another person, my joy for the well-being of people, the covenantal relationships I have. I have learned to enjoy and relish the “shadow of greatness” that I have fall on my from my teachers, friends and loved ones. God Bless and Stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Living Rabbi Heschel's Wisdom - A Daily Path to Living Well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 130

“How embarrassing for man to live in the shadow of greatness and to ignore it, to be a contemporary of God and not sense it. Religion depends upon what man does with his ultimate embarrassment.” (Who is Man pg. 112)

Immersing oneself in Rabbi Heschel’s teaching and finding oneself in his wisdom has been a journey of mine for the past 33 years and each time I do, I find new ways to apply his brilliance to living life well. Experiencing the beginning phrase today I find myself marveling even more at Rabbi Heschel’s courage and kindness, his bravery and humility. 

Rabbi Heschel lived in the “shadow of greatness”, his ancestry goes back to the luminaries of the Hasidic Movement, yet unlike many people today he did not take his lineage as something to use to do less, to be entitled; he saw it as a blessing and an obligation. Living in the “shadow of greatness” spurred Rabbi Heschel to stand on the shoulders of his ancestors and find a path that was truly his, a path and way of being that matched the melody of his soul and answered God’s call to him. 

How different it is today-people become celebrities instead of leaders, they cash in on the merits of their ancestors instead of growing the contribution their ancestors made. They believe they are entitled to the “best” and are insulted when they are not given the ‘respect’ they believe they have coming. We see this in our politics, we see this in business, we see this in all walks of life-whether rich or poor. While its easy to point out the spoiled rich, we see this also in young people who decide they don’t want an education and make it hard for someone else to get one with their antics and disruptions so they can ‘make a name for themselves’, etc. 

We all live in the “shadow of greatness” of our founding fathers, our ancestors who fought in the different wars to preserve this Union and, as we have seen recently, there are people ready to exploit the sacrifice and trauma our ancestors experienced for their own desire for power. We are watching charlatans, politicians, whom Rabbi Heschel did not have a lot of respect for, power brokers, etc take the sacrifices of people since the Revolutionary War till today and bastardize them to serve their selfish, ego-driven need for power and absolute power at that. Rather than live in “the shadow of greatness” and enhance it, these mendacious people are using the power of the lie to destroy the “greatness” that has been bequeathed to them/us by our ancestors. As we are all immigrants, as we are all beneficiaries of the heroism of someone who came to these shores against the odds, because of injustice and hatred, lack of opportunity and hope, it is time for all of these deceivers and liars to stop ignoring the “shadow of greatness” that has been provided for them/us and begin to honor it.

Every day we see examples of people bastardizing their inheritance of greatness and using the power to serve themselves rather than serve God, serve another human being, serve humanity as a whole. We are teetering as a country, trying to decide of we are going to be ruled by another incarnation of King George and the Church of England- also known as Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, Mitch McConnell, Kevin McCarthy, the Religious Right leaders, etc. We all “live in the shadow of greatness” and we are all responsible to ensure this experiment called the USA continues to honor our revolution, not return to being ruled by Kings and Churches. Rather than create more devices and distractions, rather than appeal to the vulnerabilities of humanity, it is time for all of us to stop this bastardization, it is time for us to build on the greatness we have been blessed to inherit, to realize and relish in our uniqueness and stop comparing and competing with one another so we can join and build together. 

In recovery, we lived in the shadows and were afraid of greatness all the while falsely proclaiming how great we were/are. Living in these shadows rather than honoring the “shadow of greatness” Rabbi Heschel is teaching us about, allowed us to lie and hide, hurt and create fear for all who loved us. In recovery, we are more afraid of the hiding and lying, more afraid of harming a person and misusing the power we have than of being real, being vulnerable and being human. 

I do “live in the shadow of greatness” and no longer ignore it. My ancestors came here from Poland and the Ukraine, they were decent and honest people and created a family that lived these values. My ancestors crossed the Red Sea 3300+ years ago and 100+ years ago. I was blessed to learn from the how they tied their shoes and then I decided I was ‘entitled’ to more and this caused pain, suffering and fear to all of my family and friends. It also sullied the good name my ancestors built. These past 33+ years have been spent honoring the “shadow of greatness” that my ancestors from the Red Sea to today have cast over me and, I pray, I have enlarged this shadow to give my daughter and grandson, the people I have encountered and aided as well as the many friends and extended family something to stand on and under. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Living Rabbi Heschel's Wisdom - A Daily Path to Living Well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 129

“How embarrassing for man to live in the shadow of greatness and to ignore it, to be a contemporary of God and not sense it. Religion depends upon what man does with his ultimate embarrassment.” (Who is Man pg 112)

Continuing on with Rabbi Heschel’s concepts of embarrassment and how to use it to live better, the first part of the first sentence is reverberating within me! We live in the shadow of greatness and we ignore it-how brilliant and how true. The reverberations we all could be experiencing as we immerse ourselves in this phrase could be the reverberations of a deep truth that we have been hiding from. 

There are many ways, I am sure, to understand “live in the shadow of greatness”.  I am going to write today on one that has struck me and stayed with me lately, a personal application of this concept. Carl Jung believes we all have a shadow self, one we hide from ourselves and we hide from another(s), sometimes successfully and sometimes not. I am proposing that we are living in the “shadow of greatness” and ignoring it precisely because it is the root of our shadow self! 

The shadow self, as with the Yetzer HaRa, is not evil in and of itself, it is how we bring it to light and transform/use the energy of the shadow to do good or evil that matters. Rabbi Heschel is teaching us, maybe the first teacher/person to do so, our shadow contains greatness and we are hiding from it. It contains greatness because it comes from God, just as our Yetzer HaRa and Yetzer Tov do, ergo it has to contain greatness. We are hiding from it and we are burying our greatness because we are unable to pay attention to it for all the distractions of our mind, our surroundings and our uneducated /immature spirit/soul.

Rabbi Heschel believes we are all divine needs and we all have a purpose to fulfill that no one else can, he believes we have to live our life like work of art, as he told Carl Stern in an Eternal Light television interview. Michelangelo said his art was based on “The sculpture is already complete within the marble block before I start my work, it is already there. I just have to chisel away the superfluous material.” I am hearing Rabbi Heschel remind us to stop ignoring the greatness that is within each and every human being. He is teaching us to chisel away the false sense of security and certainty we attain by hiding from our greatness and the greatness of one another through prejudice, racism, anti-semitism, anti-asian, anti-muslim, mistreatment of the poor, the needy, the stranger, seeking power for our own self importance, engaging in mendacity, self-deception and the deception of another(s), the bastardization of goodness and holiness through using the vulnerabilities within a system against, and the vulnerabilities of another human being against them. We are seeing this marble covering our greatness today as we have in the past. Rabbi Heschel is calling out to us, I hear him as I hear the prophets of old, to take the chisel and get rid of the superfluous material within us, each of us, so we can step out of the shadows and stop ignoring our greatness and the greatness of every human being.

Rabbi Heschel’s calling upon us so we can wake up, we can come out of the deep sleep we have been in for a while, for some us our entire lives, and begin to fulfill the greatness we have inside of us, offer our unique talents to another person, our community and the world to lift up our standards of living and the ways we live well. 

In recovery, we know this is not a new call. We ran away from it, like Jonah, our recovery is rooted in chiseling away the superfluous materials in our life, inner and outer. We write inventory, we work with other people in recovery, we have a guide and a community to help us with our chiseling. In recovery, our daily goal is to rid ourselves of one superfluous piece of material each day, at least, and we call this progress. 

I have been a chiseler for a long time-55+years. For the first 22, I was chiseling a person and/or people out of their greatness and their money. I was intent on “getting mine” and using you to do it. I had a great fear that I could not just make it on my own, I didn’t want to ‘work that hard’ and I had a talent for chiseling. Of course I knew it was wrong, yet I hid from that knowledge like I hid from my “shadow of greatness” for those 22 years. I am saddened by this fact, by all the opportunities I had to be better and all the people who were hurt by my chiseling and I apologize again for this embarrassment. I know in these past 33+ years I have been chiseling away the superfluous material within me and for another person/family for their gain, not mine. I chisel away this material, I have stepped into the greatness that was in the shadow, I have accepted the gifts God has given me and I am using them to the best of my ability and my life and the lives of countless people are better for this. I know I still have marble stuck in the wrong places, I know there are ways I stay in the shadows, I know there are ways I ignore my greatness and yours; this is why the chiseling never stops, this is how we continually meet our shadow and make friends with our greatness. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Living Rabbi Heschel's Wisdom - A Daily Path to Living Well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 128

“Let not the wise man glory in his wisdom, let not the mighty man glory in his might; but let him who glories glory in this: that he has a sense of ultimate embarrassment. How embarrassing for man to be the greatest miracle on earth and not understand it! (Who is Man pg 112)

Are we embarrassed by our lack of understanding of the miracle we are? Have we truly immersed ourselves in and delight in the miraculous nature of being human? It seems not, by all accounts, unfortunately. Engaging in mendacity and self-deception are embarrassments and degradations of our miraculous nature and being. We seem to constantly forget that all of us are created in the Image of God, not just some of us, and this deception allows us, gives us cover for, our prejudices, our exclusions, our disdain for another group of people, our judgmental behaviors towards groups of people we have never met, and our mistreatment of one another. The behavior of humankind towards one another is an embarrassment and a denial of the miracle we all are. 

We have bought the lies of the people who are the interpreters of the Bible, of Philosophers, of History, etc rather than immersing ourselves in the texts themselves. We deny our miraculous nature by being lazy, by reading the Cliff Notes on how to live and what is important. All of the Hebrew Bible delineates the miraculous experience of being connected to God, connected to community, connected to family and connected to the core of one’s self. Yet we are willing to buy the BS of some people who speak about the “Angry God” of the “Old Testament” and we are willing to use the Sages and Rashi as our interpreters of the Bible rather than understanding how it speaks to each of us. While it makes sense and is a good thing to use the wisdom of our ancestors, it is not okay just to accept their experiences as our own. We all have an inner life and we all need to do our own immersion in the texts and find our unique application of these Eternal Truths and Wisdom found therein. It is time for all human beings to see themselves in the text, stop believing and going along with the lies of the charlatans and the wisdom of our ancestors alone because we are not meant to live the lives of our ancestors, we are created to live the miracles we are as individuals, the unique word of God we bring that no one else can bring and the unique and miraculous healing we bring to the world, the divine need we were created to fill/repair.

Understanding the miraculous nature of being human is a journey to the core of our soul, to the relationship with God/Higher Power/Big Bang, and an adjustment to the interrelationship every human being has with another human being. We are blessed with a sense of embarrassment in order to return to our miraculous nature, to return to a new understanding of how to return the love God gives us to God through our loving one another. No other creature on earth has the ability, the direction and the joy of living a life of holiness, a life of creating, a life of worship, a life of joy, a life of fulfillment, and we are embarrassed when we are not living these gifts that we have been given. Our prayers are meant to help us look inside ourselves to see how miraculous our bodies are, how miraculous our minds our and the miracle of being connected soul to soul to one another and to God/Higher Power. 

Staying embarrassed is not a punishment, as I am understanding Rabbi Heschel today, its a gift! It keeps us right sized, not too big and not too small. It gives us the strength to speak up and speak out for the sake of God, for the sake of another human being, for the sake of humanity. Staying embarrassed propels us to overthrow the injustices of our society, let go of the lies of the enslavers, remind ourselves that money, property, prestige does not make us more human, better humans, only in the use of our money, property and prestige can we improve our lives and the lives of another human being. We stay embarrassed in a healthy manner through service, through kindness, through acting justly, through love. 

In recovery, we are engaged in a battle within our self-one part wants to feed our egos and be ‘the most spiritual’ being possible or at least in the room-another part wants to live in harmony, right-sized, and accepting help and being of service when and where appropriate. In recovery, we are aware of the constant nature of this battle and we know our harmonious, right-sized, asking for help and helping another has to get stronger each and every day. This is one of the ways we stay embarrassed. 

Oy, while I know that I have and continue to live in the embarrassment Rabbi Heschel is speaking about, I am also aware the times I have fought this truth by overcompensating and being wrong-sized. I am aware of the times I have fought to be right rather than learn and I am embarrassed by these actions. I also know the majority of my past 33 years has been spent living an embarrassed life because of the ways I haven’t understood how to live the miraculous nature of being me. I also know I have helped many people find their own path to their own embarrassment which has propelled them to living one grain of sand better each day alongside of me. I am rejoicing in my embarrassment rather than hiding in shame, I use this experience to learn, to grow and to change. After all, isn’t the process of T’Shuvah an acknowledgement of our embarrassment and how to understand our miracle of being a little better? God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Living Rabbi Heschel's Wisdom - A Daily Path to Living Well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 127

“Let not the wise man glory in his wisdom, let not the mighty man glory in his might; but let him who glories glory in this: that he has a sense of ultimate embarrassment. How embarrassing for man to be the greatest miracle on earth and not understand it! (Who is Man pg 112)

We live in a society that believes the opposite of this teaching and the more we rely on our wisdom and our might, the more we sink in our ability to be human. We are seeing this across the globe and, truthfully, this has always been the case. We marvel at the muscles on the statues of Michelangelo, the fleetness of Mercury, the power of Zeus, the cruelty of Caesar, the terror of the Hordes, the beauty of Venus, the pathology of dictators and tyrants, the imagination of inventors and we do not even acknowledge our embarrassment! We are too ashamed to acknowledge it, I believe Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom is teaching us.

We are so weak that we cannot be embarrassed by our lack of understanding, we cannot be embarrassed by our inability to live up to our calling, our need for one another and the reality of our imperfections. We are a society that is afraid of being embarrassed, it began in the Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve hid because they realized they were naked and covered themselves up rather than marveling at the wondrous bodies God had created and the connection they had to one another. They hid because they were embarrassed and we have been hiding ever since. Cain tried to hide from the fact that he killed his brother as well as trying to hide from God that he killed Abel, to no avail, yet we keep trying to hide and cover up our errors and the ways we kill the spirits on one another through “we do it for one, we have to do it for everyone”, “what will the neighbors think”, “why can’t you just fit in and do it like everyone else”, etc.  Abraham hid that Sarah was his wife for fear of being killed, after he was promised God’s protection. Noah got drunk after being saved by God from the flood, Jacob disguised himself as his brother in order to get the blessing, Joseph hid his true identity from his brothers so he could get even and so many more stories of not being embarrassed and God’s response of sadness, allowing the logical consequences of our behavior to happen are to be found throughout the Hebrew Bible. 

These experiences have been used to show how the Jews have lost favor with God, etc and, I believe, Rabbi Heschel is teaching us the reason for the stories and the examples are for us to relate to the embarrassment of our ancestors so we can “glory in this”, our “sense of ultimate embarrassment.” Yet, we continue to worship our might, our cleverness, our wisdom, our one-upmanship, etc. Our heroes are sports figures, celebrities, businesspeople, not statesmen/women, not the great thinkers, not the clergy who spur us to rise above our pettiness and pride, our foibles and our lies. When you can join the Center for Addiction and Faith and save lives, listen to the Rev. Mark Whitlock of Reid Temple or Rev Najuma Smith-Pollard, when you can read John Pavlovitz and Rabbis Ed Feinstein and Harold Shulweis, when you can learn from Rabbi Heschel and his daughter Dr. Susannah Heschel and you sit on your couch, you work your body out, you sit in the bar shooting the breeze with strangers, etc-you are not engaging in a “sense of ultimate embarrassment”.  

Rather than revel in our money and our might, living Rabbi Heschel’s teaching causes us to make sure we donate to the causes that are helping people on the ground, on the front lines. Causes like: The Center for Addiction and Faith, Beit T’Shuvah, T’Shuvah Center, Race to Erase MS, Juvenile Diabetes, the organizations helping Refugees settle in this country like HIAS. Rather than only sit on our couches and watch the Super Bowl, or partake in activities that serve our narcissistic needs, living Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom causes us to get out and support free and fair elections, one person-one vote, Voting Rights, Fair and equitable immigration policies, a pathway for the illegal immigrants here now to obtain citizenship, TRUTH in POLITICS-no more lying and ‘alternative facts’ like Hitler tried to and succeeded in promoting to the German, Austrian, Polish people. 

In recovery, we are embarrassed by our prior actions and we slowly learn to have a “sense of ultimate embarrassment”. We spend a lot of time on our actions, both prior to our recovery and in our recovery every day-examining them and this is a good thing. Yet, we also need to allow this “ultimate embarrassment” to overwhelm us and transform us and this is the challenge of being in recovery. 

I have been overwhelmed by this “sense of ultimate embarrassment” for my entire life. I didn’t realize it was a good thing until Rabbi Heschel taught me this lesson. I hid from it and I still hide from it occasionally even now. Yet, living with this sense has caused me to be more passionate for the causes I believe in, more serious in my teaching and understanding, more immersed in life, in text and in the brilliance of another human being. Living with this sense has given me the insight and vision to help many human beings find their light, their “sense of ultimate embarrassment” and live joyously. It is a joy and a relief to live this way! God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Living Rabbi Heschel's Wisdom - A Daily Path to Living Well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 126

“Let not the wise man glory in his wisdom, let not the mighty man glory in his might; but let him who glories glory in this: that he has a sense of ultimate embarrassment. How embarrassing for man to be the greatest miracle on earth and not understand it! (Who is Man pg 112)

We are so far from Rabbi Heschel’s teaching above and we are in a frightening time for all of humanity. While we continue to exist as human beings, our glory/worship of wisdom, might, cleverness, money, celebrity, power has become a badge of honor, rather than an embarrassment and we are losing our humanity. We are desperately in need of a greater sense of embarrassment to offset/overcome our continued bigotry, prejudice and enslaving of another human being based on race, religion, sexual orientation, economic status, nationality. Because these bigotries, prejudices and enslaving have become the norm-from the person in the street to the person in Government, from the preacher to the person in the pew. No one is immune from living their prejudices, their hurts, their desire for power nor their desire to have someone else beneath them so they can feel better about themselves. The only ‘vaccine’ for these diseases of spirit, is staying embarrassed as I understand Rabbi Heschel teachings above. 

We are witnessing a depression in morality, a decay of ideals-religious and constitutional, and a deification of power and people that may be unlike any other time in history. I use the words ‘may be’ because I am sure philosophers and religious leaders in previous times also felt their eras were unprecedented. One of the problems of today’s world is that there are many religious leaders who are part of the glorifying, they seek to be glorified and they give cover, support and enthusiasm to the powerful and the clever who glory in their own cleverness and might. We are told we are seeing a religious revolution and I would submit some of the religious leaders of today are revolting against the tenets/spirit of the religion they are seeking to derive power from. I would submit some of the politicians and legal experts are revolting against the tenets/spirit of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence they are deriving power from. Herein lies our dilemma and the causes of our depression, our decay and our idolized deification of power, people, money, celebrity, cleverness, etc-everything but God! 

I remember in the 1960’s, being called names like N_____ Lover because my father paid Black men who worked for him the same hourly rate White men were being paid at the Barrel shop he thad bought in the late ’50's and every White man quite and no White man would work there because they believed it was insult to be paid the same as a Black man-even though they were doing the same job! I remember poor White people being proud that they were prejudiced because being White made them better than a Black person! I hear the same talk today about Black, Brown, Asian, Jew, Muslim, etc. The need to have someone beneath us, someone to lord over is a perfect example of glorying in might. 

Our fellow human beings who glory in their twisting and bastardizing our Holy Scriptures to use their wisdom to convince people of faith who come to their Churches, Mosques, Temples and Synagogues for spiritual sustenance have lost their sense of embarrassment. These arrogant human beings, who are so sure they are right, who are so insecure they need to be deified and followed without any questioning, who are dependent on being taskmasters and Pharaohs, need to gain some humility and we, the people, need to say NO to their arrogance, NO to their lies, NO to their prejudices! To do this, we first have to say NO to our own arrogance, mendacity, self-deception and prejudices. We have to cleanse our hearts, we have to open our souls to the light and healing of a power greater than ourselves, we have to see the infinite worth each and every human being possess and know that our worth is equal to theirs and their worth is equal to ours, and we have to appreciate the uniqueness of each and every human being including our own so we don’t compare, despair and hate. 

In recovery, we are constantly working to stay right sized. We are acutely aware of our propensity to make ourselves too big and/or too small. We know we are in constant danger of a “self will run riot” experience as we had before recovery. We pray each day for knowledge of God’s(Higher Power) will and the courage to carry it out. Staying embarrassed by our strengths and foibles keeps us in recovery. 

I have had this sense of embarrassment for as long as I can remember and, up until reading Rabbi Heschel, I believed this sense of embarrassment made me less than human and at the mercy of those who didn’t seem to portray any embarrassment nor indecisiveness. These people were friends, family members, clergy, teachers, strangers, politicians, etc. So for over 20 years I tried to be like them and it never worked. I could never shake my embarrassment, therapists called it ‘low self-esteem’ and I knew it was an anger at experiencing this inner embarrassment. Rabbi Heschel’s teaching unlocked a storehouse of tears, a warehouse of anguish and a pathway to inner freedom I never thought possible. I am still embarrassed by my inability at times to understand the miracle I am and the miracle every human being is. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Living Rabbi Heschel's Wisdom - A Daily Path to Living Well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 125

“Modern Man dwells upon the order and the power of nature; the prophets dwell upon the grandeur and creation of nature. The former directs his attention to the manageable and intelligible aspect of the universe; the later to its mystery and marvel.” (God in Search of Man pg 97)

We can follow the path of the Prophets, it is not a path that is open to a select few only, it is not the exclusive purview of the prophets. Rather, the prophets are the models, the inspirations and the leaders for us in dwelling upon the “grandeur and creation of nature” as well as “its mystery and marvel”. I also believe that Rabbi Heschel points us in this direction with his way of constantly being surprised by life. I am sure he was surprised by the inaction of some people and the amazing courage of some people. Most of all, from his interview with Carl Stern, I hear Rabbi Heschel’s call to us to stop being stale. We get stale when we live like the Greeks, believing we can control everything, put everything in order and use our intellect to have power over the universe, God and another human(s). We get stale when we fall into despair and hopelessness, we get stale when we stop seeing the divine image in every person, we get stale when we cannot discern what we are powerless over and what we should change as Rev. Niebuhr teaches us. 

The prophets were powerless over the people of Israel and of Judah, yet they had the courage to change the things they should-namely their calling out to the people to repent and to return. They could do this because they were sure they were on a sacred mission and this mission was the way they could change the world. Even though they were aware their words could and would fall on deaf ears, even though they knew that others had come before them and the people didn’t change, they were able to keep their focus and direction towards the grandeur and the mystery of nature as well as the marvel of being a messenger of the Creator of nature. They were students and teachers of human nature and they knew that beyond nature was God and, rather than try and control God with rituals and rites and then go take advantage of the poor, the needy, the stranger and promote senseless, or free, hatred amongst the people; the prophets laid out a path of appreciation, apprehension and awe of God, of nature and of humanity. 

This, I believe is the path of the prophets that Rabbi Heschel is speaking about. To “hold God and man in one thought, at one time, at all times” is the way of the prophet, according to Rabbi Heschel in his interview with Carl Stern. The prophet never lost hope for humankind to be able to repent, repair, change and return to God because the prophets knew that changing our selfish ways, changing our need to control the environment through intellect and order was the way back, the way of T’Shuvah and they knew, just as we know, that the gates of T’Shuvah are open 365 days/24 hours a day. 

We can follow the path of the prophets when we live the first paragraph of the Serenity Prayer as Rev Niebuhr wrote it: God grant us the pleasure of clarity to take to/for our self the things we cannot change, the heart/strength to change the things we can. Being actively engaged in the world around us as well as in our inner life is the path of the prophets, letting go of our need to make order in our way and have control over everything and join with God’s order and surrender our need to control things we just can’t-like other people, places and things. When we engage in changing the things we should, we will take to the streets as Rabbi Heschel did, we will fight the injustice and the racism as well as the seemingly inbred nature of hatred of anyone not like me that permeates our society-then and now. We follow the path of the prophets when we “combine a very deep love, a powerful dissent, a painful rebuke, with unwavering hope” as Rabbi Heschel describes the prophet. We have within us the power and the strength to live this-we just need to let go of our need to control everything and be in the solution. 

In recovery, we have to live the Serenity Prayer in order to survive and thrive. We are in recovery because our attempts to control everything, to be the puppet master and control people, etc failed miserably and we found ourselves lost, alone and in the depths of despair. Upon acknowledging our powerlessness, we could let go of the reins we were so tightly holding and find new and different ways of being fresh, free and join with the order of God/Higher Power. In recovery, we rediscover the path of the prophets and find clarity, pleasure and acceptance. 

I have worked hard to follow the prophet’s path in the past 33 years. What I didn’t always follow was their knowledge that the people would not always listen. There were times, I realize from this teaching, when I was sure everyone saw what I saw and would agree and we would change course/the vision I had would be followed. I was so wrong and I am realizing the harm my inability to believe I could not ‘win the day’ brought to me, to Harriet and to many people. I am truly sorry for this. I also know that I have followed the prophet’s path because I have not given up, I have continued to put out the message God has given me, the Torah I have received from Mt. Sinai, and I do it loud and proud. This teaching gives me more strength, courage and commitment to keep combining, love, dissent, rebuke, and hope in all of my affairs and to keep God close to me always. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Living Rabbi Heschel's Wisdom - A Daily Path to Living Well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 124

“Modern Man dwells upon the order and the power of nature; the prophets dwell upon the grandeur and creation of nature. The former directs his attention to the manageable and intelligible aspect of the universe; the later to its mystery and marvel.” (God in Search of Man pg 97)

Rabbi Heschel is giving us a lesson in choice, I believe. Earlier in the chapter this is found in, he is speaking about the differences between Greek philosophy and Biblical/Jewish Philosophy and these words sum it up for me. Modern humans have chosen to follow Greek philosophy even in the way they practice their religion; using order to give them power, using their power to manage people’s intellectual choices and using ‘reason’ to convince people to engage in activities which deny freedom, decency, kindness, justice, compassion, etc to another human being, another group(s). 

While these words were written in the early 1950’s, when we thought everything was wonderful… they are even more frightening today. We are engaged in a war, in our individual life, in our communal life and in our national life-no matter where we live in the world. This war is between the Greek way of seeing and living life and the Jewish/Biblical way of seeing and living life. Are we going to let order and the power of our nature rule or are we going to allow the experience of grandeur and creation rule? These two different ways of living and experiencing life have been with us for all time and, now, we are faced with this stark choice again with the stakes being our individual freedom and the freedom of people other than those White Supremacists in power/wanting power. 

Order and power are not, in and of themselves, bad. They become evil when put into the hands of those people who are not willing to “dwell upon the grandeur and creation of nature”. When order and power are used to manage our intellects and the intellects of another(s), we start down a slippery slope. The Serenity Prayer, written by Rabbi Heschel’s friend and mentor, Rev. Reinhold Niebuhr, begins with “God give us the grace to accept with serenity the things we cannot change”. Grace comes from the Latin “pleasing/thankful”, accept comes from the Latin “take something to oneself” and serenity means “clear” in the Latin. Rev Niebuhr is trying to get us to “take to our self” a basic truth that Rabbi Heschel is giving us in a different way-stop trying to put order and manage everything to your liking and for your power! It is time for all of us to acknowledge our unmanageability over life and even over our thoughts and feelings. Doing this will begin to stop us from needing to act on every thought and feeling, especially those that are in opposition to the beauty, grandeur, mystery and marvel of living in a world created not by us, rather by God. 

Seeing what is happening in Washington DC, in our statehouses, in our local communities is watching the Greeks win. These so-called ‘people of faith’ have faith in themselves, the liars and deceivers such as Trump, Pence, DeSantis, Abbott, McConnell, et al-not in God and in God’s concerns. Their concerns are for themselves, no matter how they wrap themselves in the clothing of faith-they are phony, they are mendacious and they are leading the people with them and our country to ruination. When power becomes the goal, when order according to some human being is the path, faith in God is lost, living a life of grandeur, marvel and mystery is scoffed at and abused by these ‘Greeks’ and some are all left wringing our hands, bemoaning what is happening rather than following Rabbi Heschel’s example of getting involved to make the changes God wants us to. We need to live like the prophets, according to Biblical Philosophy; with wonder, marvel, mystery and appreciation of the grandeur we live in and the beauty of being alive and free. 

In recovery, we celebrate the mystery and the marvel of living “life on life’s terms”. It is the change that keeps us in recovery rather than trying to manage life to be the way we want it to be. We are deeply attuned to the beauty of nature and we celebrate nature along with all creations of God, including our humanity and the humanity of all people. We realize the unmanageability of life when we are forcing order upon it and how much more manageable it is when we surrender to the order God has put into the world and our life. In recovery, we acknowledge the gift of unmanageability that God has given us by getting clearer and clearer regarding the things we cannot change. 

I directed my attention to order and power for a lot of years and only in surrendering to the mystery and marvel of life have I found clarity, connection and control. I am overwhelmed with sadness at the times my surrender was misinterpreted as control and the connection and love I was putting out was seen as overpowering and suffocating. Immersing myself in these words of Rabbi Heschel I am aware of how I have found the both/and of Biblical living. The order and power of nature, of God, of my inner life has manifested itself to co-create a place of refuge for those in need and a place of rebirth for those who were willing to surrender. My appreciation of the grandeur, mystery of God and my marvel of God’s Ways manifests itself in these writings, in my connections with people and with my ability to be an advocate of the Soul for so many people, in my work and in my personal life. Stay safe and God Bless, Rabbi Mark

Living Rabbi Heschel's Wisdom - A Daily Path to Living Well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel 

Day 123

“The immediate certainty that we attain in moments of insight does not retain its intensity after the moments are gone. Moreover, such experiences are rare events. To some people they are like shooting stars, passing and unremembered. In others they kindle a light that is never quenched. The remembrance of that experience and the loyalty to the response of that moment are the forces that sustain our faith. In this sense, faith is faithfulness, loyalty to an event and loyalty to our response.” (God In Search of Man pg.132) 

Living these words may seem so difficult to many people, yet-as the saying goes-it is simple, not easy. Staying loyal to the events in our lives is something that many of us do, especially the negative experiences, the ones that have hurt us, the ones that we can blame on another. Rabbi Heschel, as I said yesterday, is calling upon us to live up to our responses to our encounters with the divine, with a higher truth, with our higher moral and spiritual values. 

There are so many people that we call heroes because they followed their higher instinct, their “moment of insight” to help and care for another(s) human being. Immersing myself in Rabbi Heschel’s teaching reminds me that we all can be heroes, we all can have a new response to an old situation because of an insight we have obtained. There is none among us that has not had a “moment of insight”, I believe; the challenge is to pay attention to this experiences, to respond to these events and to stay loyal to both the awareness of the experience and our response, as Rabbi Heschel teaches us. We do this through our daily spiritual practices, we do this by being open to these “hits” of wisdom and truth, we do this by being present in as many moments as possible during each and every day. 

The challenge that we face is to not ‘fall asleep at the wheel’. When we take things for granted, we lose the ability to stay faithful to our experience and to one another. This is the great challenge of being human. Staying faithful to our experiences with one another, with God, with the universe and then being faithful to our responses throughout our lifetime. This way of living denies the betrayals and the myriad of divorces from our commitments that we engage in throughout our lifetime. When we are loyal to our “moment of insight”, we stop denying it and we stop pretending that this “insight” doesn’t apply in this situation. Every “moment of insight” applies to all areas of our living and how we treat our self and every self-regardless of their beliefs, their color, their nationality, etc. Yet, we want to compartmentalize our “moments of insight” and this is where we stop being loyal to both the experience and the response. We betray our self and another self when we decide to forget and/or bastardize our “moments of insight” for our own good rather than for the greater good, for fulfilling a divine need. We allow ourselves to have good reasons to betray our basic goodness of being and the connection we can/do have with another person by forgetting to stay loyal to our insights and responses. Rabbi Heschel is gifting us with the knowledge to use our insights “in all our affairs”. 

Living our insights “in all our affairs” gives us a freedom to like and dislike ideas and ways of being without having to hate a person. Living our responses in all our affairs gives us the ability to live congruently and without shame. Being faithful to the standards of: truth, kindness, justice, compassion, t’shuvah(repentance, repair and new responses), tzedakah(righteousness/charity) caring for the stranger, poor and needy, connection, and joy that the Bible gives us is the path to being a free human being and be a whole human being who never has to hide in shame, blame, etc. Living these “moments of insight” and their responses gives us the strength and moral fortitude to “do the next right thing, no matter how I feel”. 

In recovery, we continually seek to have a better “conscious contact with God, as we understand God”. We are doing this so we can be more aware of these “moments of insight”, understand them better and be able to respond more properly to them. It is in our response that we find the greatest applications of our insights. In recovery, we cultivate our spiritual life so we can gain more and more wisdom and ways to live from our “moments of insight”. 

Every time I have not stayed loyal to my “moments of insight” and my response to them, I have betrayed my self/my soul and life blows up. I am unhappy and know I am betraying God, my soul and another(s). I also know that staying loyal to both my insights and my responses doesn’t always make me popular and it keeps me in line with the divine. I am so remorseful for the betrayals I have done since childhood because I did not stay loyal to my insights and I am so grateful for the life I have now because I have stayed loyal to many of them. I know the pain of being betrayed and betraying another because loyalty to insights, loyalty to principles, loyalty to agreed upon responses to these insights and principles wasn’t kept. I also know that people change and our insights get sharper, yet the basic insight that truth is crucial in all relationships never changes. When I was lied to and when I deceived myself is when betrayal happened. Staying loyal built a great community and saved many lives-it doesn’t get better than that. Stay safe and God Bless, Rabbi Mark

Living Rabbi Heschel's Wisdom - A Daily Path to Living Well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 122

“The immediate certainty that we attain in moments of insight does not retain its intensity after the moments are gone. Moreover, such experiences are rare events. To some people they are like shooting stars, passing and unremembered. In others they kindle a light that is never quenched. The remembrance of that experience and the loyalty to the response of that moment are the forces that sustain our faith. In this sense, faith is faithfulness, loyalty to an event and loyalty to our response.” (God In Search of Man pg.132)

Rabbi Heschel’s teaching in the last sentence above is so simple, so profound and so important. He is, of course, speaking about the insights that come from God, from our souls, our inner life not the lies from the false prophets that have been with us since time immemorial. Faith in false prophets, which was a concern in Biblical days, has, unfortunately, seen a rise in recent times and we are all suffering because of them/this rise. I find it fascinating to watch, with horror, the faithfulness with which people will follow and defend the false prophets and their mendacious beliefs. I am also struck by the ways people will quote true prophets, people of true faith, Scriptures, etc in ways that defend their deceptions and their lies. Yet, this has been a concern of God’s forever in the life of the human being. God, however, remains steadfast in God’s belief in us, in God’s faith in us and in God’s search for us and, as I am understanding Rabbi Heschel, we have an obligation, an opportunity, a gift to remain steadfast in our belief in God, in our faith in God, and in our search for God through doing the next right thing, no matter the ‘cost’ to us.

The false prophets in the political world have always been around and we have to continually stay loyal to God and to truth instead of to a party or a person. I believe when we are asked to swear fealty to any entity other than God, we are in the presence of a false prophet, a false “moment of insight”, and attaching ourselves to this lie will bring isolation, despair and harm to our relationship with God. There is a God and we are not it, no matter what a political party says, no matter what a demagogue bellows, no matter how loud the crowd is, no matter how many charlatans wearing the robes of priesthood, rabbinate, etc stand with them. We have to use our own insights, our own “light than is never quenched” to discern truth from the deceptions of another human being, the injustice that is wrapped in a nice package and is still unjust, the meanness that sounds correct to our impaired hearing, the treif that is wrapped in a Kosher wrapper. Rabbi Heschel’s words are not for the ‘elite’, the supposedly ‘learned’; they are for all of us, they are to give each and every human being the strength, encouragement and support to appreciate our own “moments of insight”, and remain faithful to them no matter who tells us we are wrong.

Rabbi Heschel is not, in my opinion, speaking about loyalty to a person, a Rabbi, a Priest, etc-he is speaking about loyalty to an insight, to a principle, to a way of being that is compatible with being a partner of God, to a code of ethical behaviors that have at its core: truth, love, kindness, faithfulness, compassion, justice, righteousness, etc. He is teaching us to be loyal to the experience of insight, the experience of connection with God, the experience of a deep knowing that cannot be proven yet we know is truth and the path for us to follow. He is teaching us to “Shema”; hear, listen, and understand the ‘voice’ of God that gives us these insights, gives us the strength to respond to them and to grow them. Rabbi Heschel is gifting us with a way of being that can and will change our living and the world around us. We will live in “radical amazement” and wonder will be the foundation of all our interactions with another person, nature and the world.

In recovery, loyalty to our spiritual awakening, to our realization that the ways we had been living were indecent, harmful and incorrect for us and for the people around us, is the key to long-term recovery. We stay loyal through telling our story, reaching out to another person in distress, raising our children/grandchildren differently than we had, and by living our principles in all of our affairs. In recovery, we know without staying loyal to our “moments of insight” the pull of mendacity, the insidious pleasure of being “one of them” will overtake us and we will return to a life of isolation, misery and despair.

I wear my “moments of insight” proudly and I have stayed loyal to them and to the people whom have shared in my response to these moments. Staying loyal to both the insight and the response means to continue to immerse myself in them so I can hone the insight and the response more and more, I have to see the changes in the world in order to respond appropriately to the “moments of insight” I continue to have. I also have to act upon them, even when it is not “politically correct”, the “optics” are not pretty and the people who have shared these insights with me, betray me. Staying “loyal to the event and loyal to the response” has nothing to do with being liked, with receiving accolades, it has everything to do with my relationship with God, with my self and with the world. I have learned, painfully, some people are just better cons than I was and when I have this experience, it is God’s way of reminding me of the path I can never return to. Even betrayals are “moments of insight” once I get through the pain and the spiritual rape that I experience at the time. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark