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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 177

“Meaning is found in responding to the demand, meaning is found in sensing the demand.” (Who is Man pg.108)


As we move from Pandemic to Endemic, as we enter into a time in the spiritual world of great energy to be liberated and on the road to freedom, these words of Rabbi Heschel ring in my ears over and above my tinnitus. We seem to be unable to “sense the demand” of God because of the noise of our own desires, demands of ego and emotion, demands of our ‘leaders’, families, friends, employers, employees, governments, etc. There are so many demands put upon us that we easily become deaf to the demands of God, the demands of our own humanity. We default to these secondary demands, these demands to feed our egos, the egos of another, feed our fears of not ‘making it’, not being accepted, not belonging so often and so much that we have lost the authentic demands, the authentic call, the authentic message that only we can bring to the world. 


Many of us have been crushed by the weight of serving too many masters and never serving them ‘good enough’ according to them. We have had our spirits crushed much like the Israelite and other slaves had theirs crushed by the “harsh labors of the Egyptians”. We have accepted this state as part of our lives and we have accepted that this will never change-which is the antithesis of Holy Week, Ramadan, Passover. We go to Seders, we go to the Mosque, we go to Church and most of us do not immerse ourselves in the spiritual demand of this moment. Most of us are too crushed to sense there is a higher demand, a higher calling, a higher YES we can engage in. Most of us see purpose and meaning being diminished by the drudgery of going to work, being enslaved by the demands of our own egos, our employers, our family, making a living, etc. 


This is the reason this time of year is so crucial to our humanness. Without being reminded that “every person should see him/herself as if they too came out of Egypt” we would continue to accept the slaveries we find ourselves in as just part of life. Without being reminded that death is not the end of our lives, we live on in our teachings, our connections, our loving actions, we would continue to believe “eat, drink, be merry for tomorrow you may die”. Without fasting to remind ourselves that our souls need to be nourished at least as much as our bodies, we would continue to pay no attention to our inner wisdom. Yet, we have the opportunities afforded by faith communities and by mediative communities to remind ourselves that slavery can and must end! 


We are the ones who have to end it. We begin by seeing ourselves as slaves and seeing what we are still/will be enslaved by. We are able to then make decisions as to which slavery we are willing to leave this year, which slavery are we going to ask for help to leave, which slavery are we going to allow ourselves to be led out of. Which false self are we going to shed this year so we can be more authentic and sense the demand of God a little clearer this year. Without being liberated from our egotistic demands, the demands of another egotist, the demands of authoritarians, etc we will never be able to sense the demands of God, the higher demands being human entails. We are in a spiritual vortex right now, the forces of the universe are here to help us be liberated, be more attuned and begin the long journey to freedom, purpose, etc. To take advantage of this force field, we need to begin to sense the demand, sense the presence of God, sense the meaning that is beyond the mystery, meaning that is unseen and unintelligible right now in our current situations, sense the meaning in connecting with another(s) who are being liberated and give help to them and receive the help we need from them. 


In recovery, we are constantly aware of the stimuli to go back into slavery, to return to the prisons of our minds, false egos, ‘go along to get along style of living’ etc. We are also acutely aware of those Pharaoh’s who are working hard to entrap us by saying what we want to hear just to lure us in as a spider does with a fly. Yet, we are in recovery because we began to sense a demand that we hoped/thought could give our lives meaning, we began to sense a call and a path to be human rather than just function as a human being. In recovery, we continue to cultivate this inner sense-our sixth sense if you will-because without the meaning that sensing the demand brings, we would quickly go back to old and destructive ways. 


I am struck by this phrase. I have been closed to sensing the demand of this moment mainly because I have felt very irrelevant and as I wrote this blog today, I realize, once again, feelings are not facts. I am as relevant and free as I choose to be today. I am also acutely aware of the enslavements I allowed myself to be trapped in; mistrust, buying the BS of another, not attending to the call of my soul enough, getting caught up in my own ego, etc. I also realize that I need to and am committed to leaving these inauthentic ways of living. I have the know-how, we have the technology, I have the community to help me and I am leaving Egypt metaphorically and, with our move, physically. I am off to the desert to wander and relearn how to be free. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 175


“This is the most important experience in the life of every human being: something is asked of me.” (Who is Man pg.108)


As today begins Holy Week for Christians, continuation of the month of Ramadan for Muslims and the week of cleaning house for Jews prior to Passover, I am hearing Rabbi Heschel call out to all of us to not get so lost in the details, so focused on the ‘task at hand’ that we miss the true ‘ask of God’ to and for us as individuals, communities and humankind. That all three of these times of introspection, celebration and connection coincide with one another, as we are entering the endemic of Corona, is a sign that something is being asked of all of us, all of humanity is being called to remember what is important: connection, co-operation, consideration, along with justice, mercy, love, truth, kindness. 


It seems as if we have lost the ability to have this “most important experience” because we are willing to sacrifice our higher hearing, our higher calling, our higher humanity, at the altar of personal profit, success, optics, self-importance. We are seeing the insanity of Putin and his invasion of Ukraine for no reason other than he wanted to-is this really what is being asked of Putin? We are seeing the rest of the world deal with him and with Russia carefully for fear of nuclear war which is listening to what is being asked of our leaders-stop a madman and don’t destroy the world. Terrorists are killing Jews and non-Jews in Israel for the “sake of Allah” when it is really only for their sake and believing the lies of their leaders, secular and religious. God is not asking any one to take innocent lives, not Putin, not terrorists, not Assad, not the street gangs, not the criminals. God never asks us to kill innocents, in fact, there is a story about even killing the guilty that says if a court carried out a death sentence once in 7(some say 70) years, it was considered a murderous court! Yet, all of these entities, including the good citizens who sit on a jury, seem to mishear the ask of God in times when the ask of their own ego/emotions are in charge. We are mis-attuned to God in these moments and, as we have seen over and over again, the destruction that comes from this way of hearing is deadly. 


In our country, we seem to be having a renaissance of deafness to God’s ask to and for us. Rather than hear the ask to care for the stranger, the poor and the needy; which is what the Torah commands and what Jesus preached; we seem to be hearing the ask to blame the poor, the needy and the stranger. Rather than see the humanity of each and every person which is another ‘ask of God’, we seem to be seeing the differences and using the needy, poor and stranger to gain political points, rather than see them as the ask God has put in front of us. We have to hear the ask of God to care for one another, to never let another human being suffer and starve, work to end the slavery of one another and care for the best interests of one another even when we don’t want to. 


This Holy Week, month of Ramadan, this week before and then of Passover are moments to remind us of the ask of God, to remind us to search our inner self for the ways in which we are enslaved. These next two weeks in the Jewish calendar, 3 weeks in the Muslim calendar, and 8 days in the Christian calendar are gifts to us: to clean out our ears, so we can hear the ask better and clearer; to clean out the puffed up parts of our ego and our emotions so we can rise to the need God has created us for; and join hands across all of the man-made boundaries we have set up to embrace one another and to acknowledge our need for one another so we can leave the bondage of Pharaoh and the bondage of our ego.


In recovery, we are acutely aware of the “bondage of self” that is lying in wait for us, hiding in plain sight and calling to us with such logic and reason that we get fooled by it. Our egos are so cunning in the myriad of ways they trap us into believing that something selfish and self-centered is actually good, holy and right! In recovery, we do the best we can to guard against our egos enslaving us while knowing that we need our ego to propel us and our ego must help us hear and carry out the ask of God. 


Staying attuned to the ask of God is to stay attuned to the ask of another human being. Hearing the call of the soul of another, being an advocate for the soul of another, begins with hearing the call of my own soul, being an advocate for my soul. I have not always been able to do this, I sadly report. I have allowed my ego to run shit at times in my life and I have not cared for my own soul well enough at times to hear it’s crying out to me. I have been an advocate for the soul of another at times to the detriment of my own soul and these moments have always led to my being bombastic and, some would say, difficult. I realize the slavery I need to leave this year is the slavery of being too busy to hear the call of my soul and the new ask of God to me. While the ask contains using my skills, I am realizing that the ask changes as I change, the ask grows as I grow and the ask is softer and louder as I “circumcise the foreskin” of my heart, my soul, my mind more and more each year. Cleaning out the Hametz, the leavening from my inner life has begun and, I pray, will be completed by the beginning of Passover! Stay safe and God Bless, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 175


“This is the most important experience in the life of every human being: something is asked of me.” (Who is Man pg.108)


Today marks the beginning of the 30th consecutive week of writing on Rabbi Heschel’s teachings. This writing and immersing myself in Rabbi Heschel’s teachings and wisdom is giving me more freedom, more insight and more joy than I have experienced previously with Rabbi Heschel, which is saying a lot. 


Rabbi Heschel’s life, prophetic voice, teachings, his belief in the possibility of human beings to be human, his writings, his activism, his ability to deal with scorn and with ridicule, with love and friendship, with the reality of his world of his youth being utterly destroyed all speak to the wisdom above. Rabbi Heschel kept listening to what was being asked of him and he responded, Here I am (Hineni) and he knew that to live life is to serve another(s) human being. 


One of the “something”s being asked of all of us is to end slavery! As we prepare for the Seder and the Holiday of Passover beginning next Friday, as we prepare for Good Friday and Easter beginning next Friday, as we are in the midst of Ramadan now, it is incumbent upon each and every one of us to know we are able to leave the slaveries we have become accustomed to, accept the help of our own particular ‘Moses/Israelite community’ and make haste to leave quickly before the portal to liberation and freedom closes. We also have the honor and privilege to bring our families and friends with us as well as allow them to lift us up out of our enslavements. To do this we have to recognize the slaveries we are currently in, remembering that to leave Egypt is to leave a narrow place. 


Slaveries come in all shapes and sizes, most of them are very subtle and go unnoticed by people. This is why living in Radical Amazement, as Rabbi Heschel did and defines, is crucial to leaving slavery and going to the Promised Land. We are enslaved to optics- how we look, how the people we engage with make us look, what will people think of me, how many likes to have, how many followers do I have, etc. We are enslaved to ‘the right causes’- making sure we are on the ‘right’ side of any and every situation-having no impact on our actions towards another person or in any other area of our living. We are enslaved to either/or, win/lose, zero sum thinking and living. If we don’t ‘win’, if we are not ‘right’, if we don’t ‘crush and destroy’ our ‘opponent/competition’ then we have failed and will be laughed at, will be out of the club. We are enslaved to being a victim and blaming everyone else, accusing another of that of which we ourselves are guilty of. We hear and see this in the political realm, we hear and see this in the courtrooms, we hear and see this in our media, we hear and see this in our institutions, we hear and see this in our homes. Unfortunately we are unable to hear and see these behaviors and slaveries in our own selves!


Looking at the world as it is right now, listening to the outrage of some people at the injustices and knowing how they practice the same injustices, indecencies and lack of humanity towards people who are not ‘their people’ or how ‘embarrass’ them, is truly sad. Granted they are not bombing or massacring people, yet, when we take the soul of another person and denigrate it through lies, through “on advice of counsel”; when we forget what another person has done for us throughout our relationship and only judge them on the last bad action, we are truly killing their soul and their spirit. This need to do this, the need to use people and throw them away when it is convenient, this is committing spiritual murder and many of us are enslaved to this way of being without realizing it-‘it is just business’, ‘it isn’t personal’, ‘you caused this yourself’, etc are some of the tropes that denote the enslavement to transactional relationships, using and abusing people and forgetting that we owe, forgetting that “something is asked of me”. 


In recovery, we reconnect with this voice that is asking/demanding something of us. Recovery is our path out of the narrow places of self-centeredness, self-conceit, self-obsession and onto the path of freedom, service, connection, truth, etc. In our recovery, we are the Israelites and the other slaves who left Egypt and the road to the Promised Land is not smooth and easy, it has a lot of potholes that we fall into, a lot of errors we commit and, the beauty of being on the road to freedom is, we can return over and over again to our calling, to our community and to our authentic self. 


One of the slaveries I have been in is despair and I wasn’t aware of how much I was in it! I lost ‘my place’, was exiled and have watched the myriad of changes that are taking place with some sadness and some hope. I did not realize how ‘lost’ I felt until we began packing up to leave LA as home this past week. I have been lost and enslaved to looking okay so no one knows how I am, not even myself! The narrowest of places for me is the place where I lie to myself so well, I am unaware of the lies. I am both sad and excited, scared and hopeful, worried and elated, seeking the promised land and stuck in old paths. I am leaving the slavery of optics, falseness, worry about what another thinks of me and heading for more authenticity, true love, connection and kindness. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel 

Day 174

“Over and above the din of desires there is a calling, demanding, a waiting, an expectation. There is a question that follows me wherever I turn. What is expected of me? What is demanded of me? (Who is Man pg. 107-108)


We are witnessing a seminal moment in the history of humanity, again. There have been many such moments throughout the millennia and, as we prepare for both Passover and Easter as well as Ramadan, we have seen the unimaginable heroic and courageous stands that our ancestors have made precisely because they responded to the call, the demand and the expectation of something greater than themselves. Herein is the call of Rabbi Heschel’s questions, writings, teachings and wisdom. Like the prophets of antiquity, Rabbi Heschel is reminding us that we are more than our pettiness and pride, envy and enmity, we are human beings created in the Image of God, we are able to rise above impulse-driven ‘needs’ to serve a higher, truer and greater cause-our humanity and the humanity of another. 


Vladimir Putin is not our problem, our problem is the fear we have of Putin, the selfish desires to use Russian Oil, etc rather than rely on other sources because the other sources are price gouging. Our problem is the belief in what someone is saying rather than what we are seeing. Our problem is the spiritual fortitude of our leaders to say NO to atrocities, NO to war-mongering, NO to dictatorships, NO to senseless hatred and killing. We have had this problem forever, and we continue to do the same things we always have, Einstein’s definition of Insanity. Hitler, Stalin, Rwanda, Bosnia, Darfur, Congo, to name a few eras and places/people where these ‘war crimes’ have occurred and how the world turned a deaf ear to the pleas of those being persecuted. 


“What can I do” we cry out, we are only one person-yet Christ was one person, Mohammed was only one person, Moses was only one person, each soldier that liberated the camps in Europe and in the Pacific was only one person. Rabbi Heschel is calling us out to be one PERSON, a real person, a caring person, a person committed to being human. Stop caring about the money and start answering the call of our fellow suffering human beings. Stop worrying about being re-elected and pass the legislation needed to end the suffering of the very constituents who elect you! Stop worrying about nuclear destruction and worry about the spiritual and moral destruction that is, and has been, happening! Each of us can respond to the call, the demand and the expectation by being human, caring about our human race. Because of our inability to see the human in every race, color, creed and religion, we have lost our ability to be human, we have lost our ability to pay attention and respond to the call, the demand, the expectation Rabbi Heschel speaks about. We owe one another, we owe ourselves, we owe God for our lives, our livelihoods, and the bill is due and payable. We pay it with our responses, we pay it with our decency, we pay it with our compassion and we pay it with our humanity. 


We are at another crossroads in our human history, be it how we deal with the criminal Putin; how we deal with the criminals in Congress who want to deny voting rights to “those non-whites”, and/or who want to deny the attack on Jan. 6, 2020, and/or who want to accuse everyone who doesn’t agree with them ‘friends of pedophiles”, and/or who cater to the rich and treat a corporation as a person; the criminals in State Governments who want to decide the outcome of elections based on their bias’ not the will of the voters; the criminals who rob the dignity of another through using their vulnerabilities against them; etc. There are many criminals roaming our country and our globe, not mentioning the criminal price-gouging of gas, goods from China, etc, and we have to answer the call to bring justice, kindness, compassion, caring, love and truth to respond and confront these criminalities and enjoin and enforce the ways of Christ, Mohammed, and Moses-the real ways, not the bastardizations that some people have made them into. 


In recovery, we had a seminal moment that brought us to our surrender, our acknowledgment that we were in  spiritual and moral bankruptcy. We had a decision to make, continue down the path we were on causing more damage to another and to our self or be defeated by a higher truth, a truth that demands and expects us to be human, to care, to be just, to love, to practice kindness, to speak and hear truth and have compassion for another and for our self when we fall short of these ways of being. 


I have spent the past 35+ years making the decision to hear the call, the demand and the expectation. I realize my ears are not what they used to be (actually Harriet told me my hearing was going bad) and I now have hearing aids. I also have been improving the hearing of my soul, my conscience, to be attuned to the call of God, of my fellow human beings and of my teachers and friends. I lost my hearing and my sight for a little bit and I am regaining both,  hearing and seeing better than I every have before! I have faced many seminal moments in my life and I am committed to making the choice to hear the demand and respond, meet the expectation and exceed it, listen for the call and be honored to answer it. There are many such calls, demands, expectations in life and they all have the same essence-will you BE human and be good stewards of God’s world for the next generation? Stay safe and God Bless, Rabbi Mark


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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel 

Day 173


“Over and above the din of desires there is a calling, demanding, a waiting, an expectation. There is a question that follows me wherever I turn. What is expected of me? What is demanded of me? (Who is Man pg. 107-108)


In the second, third and fourth sentences above is the ‘ikar’, the main principle of being human, of being a contemporary of God, of being created in the Image of God, in being the highest evolution of the animal kingdom if “God” talk is to much for you. We are all being asked questions, not the usual ones from another person, the deep, disturbing inner questions as Rabbi Heschel illustrates above. Rabbi Heschel follows me wherever I turn, expecting, demanding and I know I fall short, don’t we all. His activism came from him hearing the demand and the expectation that nagged at him, that motivated him, that made his life have meaning, purpose and love-I believe. 


We all have these questions following us, we all know that there is an expectation for and of us. Yet, we run from these, we blame another for ‘putting them on us’, we develop psychiatric/psychological diagnosis’ from not meeting the expectations of another or that we put on ourself. We do put false expectations on ourselves, we do buy into society’s expectations and demands of us and these are not what Rabbi Heschel is teaching us about in my understanding of his words today. We use these excuses to evade and avoid the demands and expectations that our talents, purpose, gifts, call out to us to use and employ for the betterment of our corner of the world, to recognize and assist another human being and to care for one another with love, kindness, justice, truth… 


We have seen glimpses of people answering the questions that follow and haunt them. We have see the breakthroughs in the way governments work, from the Royal Family/King/Pharaoh model to more democratic governments and, of course, back to dictators and tyrants, even in the democratic models! We have seen glimpses of people responding to the demands of their souls/force in the universe by creating amazing music-Mozart, Beethoven, Sinatra, Ella, Billie, Beatles, etc all practiced their craft from their spirits, they all heard a melody, a phrase, etc in their beings and translated it into a song, score, etc. We have seen glimpses in our scientific breakthroughs, Pasteurization, Flu shots, Cancer treatments, Polio Vaccines, Covid-19 Vaccines, all represent the response by humans to a demand that not just society placed upon them, a demand that was causing them sleepless nights, an anxiety that motivated them and an inner calling that would not stop, I believe. 


What most of us miss, however, in Rabbi Heschel’s words is that all of us have a demand and expectation coming from our inner life, from our spirit/soul. We all have a call and a demand to stop whining about victimhood, to stop blaming another, to stop shunning our responsibility for our own actions and for moving forward in our care for the needy, the poor, the stranger within us and outside of us. Rabbi Heschel is not saying all of us are going to be Superman and save the world, he is reminding us that there is a demand for all of us to take better care of the planet so the world will be saved. He is disturbing us so we will all stop aiding and abetting the Putins of the world and the dictator inside of us. He is reminding us of the expectation that we will be human and not just for our own sake, rather for a higher and more meaningful purpose. Rabbi Heschel is calling us to face the demands and expectations and meet them to the best of our ability each day, I believe. 


In recovery, we say expectations are resentments waiting to happen. Yet, the expectation that Rabbi Heschel is speaking of is the purpose and goal of recovery- BE HUMAN, imperfect, responsible, just, loving, kind, truthful, caring and compassionate towards another and towards oneself. We are constantly engaged in being human in recovery and we know we fall short at times, so we have amends/T’Shuvah. We are constantly hearing and doing the best we can to respond to the questions and the demands and the expectations to live well and do the best we can today. 


I find that these questions got buried, I got deaf to these expectations and demands. I realize that the onslaught of negativity, the lack of responsibility by anyone else involved in my demise and the sadness of being exiled blinded me and deafened me to the questions, demands and expectations of God and I am embarrassed (happily). I allowed so many emotions (real and false) to cloud my inner life that I stopped hearing and looking for the demands and expectations. I am on the hunt now. I know that there are people who will never own their part, I know that I have to let them and my need for recognition go, I know that I have more to give and the demands of God are clearer and stronger. I also am realizing that I allowed people talking at me and in my ear to block the call, the demand and the expectation that is true and right for me now. While my gifts and talents haven’t changed (they have matured and gotten better), where I offer them and who needs them has. Letting go of my expectations, letting go of the expectations of another person(s) allows me to hear and respond to the expectations of God, of the universe and of humanity. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel 

Day 171

“Over and above the din of desires there is a calling, demanding, a waiting, an expectation. There is a question that follows me wherever I turn. What is expected of me? What is demanded of me? (Who is Man pg 107-108)


Having sat with these words on my heart and on my soul for over 24 hours, I realize the outrageousness of Rabbi Heschel’s words. How outrageous is it of God to have expectations, callings, demands, and then ‘sit’ and wait for humans to respond. We have free will, we can do what we want to, by Divine design I might add, and where does it say we have to meet God’s or anyone else’s expectations, demands, calls, etc? 


Putin can go into Ukraine just because he wants to. MBS can kill Khashoggi because he feels like it. Trump and his minions can lie and foment treason and no big deal. Wealthy people believe they can flout the law and get away with it (which happens most of the time), politicians like Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Lindsey Graham accuse other people of doing what they themselves are doing, a page from Goebbels playbook, hatred permeates so much of life and decisions as does optics, the most progressive along with the most regressive retreat to their exclusive country clubs and gated communities all the while decrying the actions of ‘the other’! Rabbi Heschel is teaching us, prophesizing to us about “a calling, demanding, a waiting, an expectation”? Who does God think God is? Our creator, our salvation, our neighbor, our guide, our hope, our strength, our redeemer? More than all of these, which God is and always has been, is God the creative force of the Universe whom has entrusted the growth, the maintenance and the connection of this planet Earth into the hands of human beings. 


Whether God’s calling, waiting, demanding, expecting is outrageous or not is an individual decision. What is very plain to ascertain, however is the arrogance of humanity! What is the reason we believe we are not “our brother’s keeper” when our entire moral system, and legal system I believe, is based on the Biggest Book of Morality-the Hebrew Bible! What is the reason we believe that we can take advantage of, deceive, overpower, the poor, the widow, the orphan, the stranger, the needy, etc when we are expressly told to care for all of these people? How arrogant is it of us to act as if some human life is less valuable than another/mine? How arrogant to pass laws of exclusion, to pass laws that enable slavery, pass laws that limit free speech for some and give free reign to the lies of another? How arrogant to say that men can decide the choices a woman can make with her own body? How arrogant to say God doesn’t love you if you are poor, stricken, etc? 


The call and the demand, the expectation and the waiting by God are manifest through the calls of the poor, the demands of the needy, the waiting to be free by the enslaved and the expectation that we will repay the gifts life has given us by fulfilling the call, demand and expectation right here, right now! The sub-chapter these words are taken from is title Indebtedness. Instead of seeing how we can get out of paying our debts like Donald Trump does, instead of suing God for collecting on our debt of gratitude, debt of life itself as Donald Trump and his cronies do, it is time for us to drop our false facade of arrogance, it is time to admit our need for God’s/Universe’s spiritual strength and assistance, the need for assistance and connection with another(s) human being and hear the call, respond to the demand, meet the expectation and do it today and every day. We will never complete the task, we will never get it all done, and hearing, responding, meeting the call, demand, and expectation is all that Rabbi Heschel is reminding us to do, today!


In recovery, we keep cleaning up the wreckage of our past and work hard to clean up the wreckage we cause in the present each and every day. We also are so aware of the pain of our past wreckage, we are careful to not make today’s errors as bad as our past ones. We drop our arrogance and we acknowledge our powerlessness and our need to change. We seek to serve and pray for knowledge of God’s will for us so we no longer buy into the self-deception that we are the be all/end all! In recovery, we become aware of the call, the demand, the expectation and the waiting and work hard each day to respond a little more and better. 


I am aware of my own arrogance and I know that in my recovery I heard the call of God and did not respond to it, rather I responded, in a very few incidents, to the call of my ego, my mind, my emotions. I was WRONG in doing this and I am grateful it wasn’t that often. I have seen and experienced the ‘love and gratitude’ of some people for helping them and/or their families at the time of greatest need, only to be abandoned, shamed, exiled when they had a chance to get back at me for helping them. I have learned from my experience to not be mad at the people who have helped me, even though this seems to be the conventional notion of many humans. If someone needs help, they believe they are weak and weak get taken advantage of and if you know my weakness, you have to be beat down so you can’t use it against me, is the conventional wisdom-how sad! “No good deed goes unpunished” is their motto and I am grateful for the experiences they have given me so I lessen my own arrogance each and every day. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel 

Day 171


“Over and above the din of desires there is a calling, demanding, a waiting, an expectation. There is a question that follows me wherever I turn. What is expected of me? What is demanded of me? (Who is Man pgs 107-108)


What makes Rabbi Heschel so brilliant, wise and disturbing is his ability to put into words what most people experience in our inner life and are afraid to/unable to articulate. In the first sentence above, Rabbi Heschel is disturbing a conventional notion and mental cliche, we do the right thing because we desire to do it. WRONG, as I am experiencing Rabbi Heschel’s words this morning.  I am realizing that our desire to see ourselves in this light of desire to do what is good, is another way of hiding from our self, hiding from another, hiding from God. We are afraid to admit the truth that our desires have to take a back seat to the call, the demand, so I can fulfill the expectation that my life is to fulfill and stop making God and the people who need my fulfilling the expectation wait. 


This is a complex idea, as I write it, yet, it also is simple. We are born with different drives, the drive to rule the world and the drive to connect with people. Both of these drives are part of God’s creation of us/of our natural evolution if this is more palpable than a Creator. It is also true that our desire to rule and our desire to self-satisfy is a stronger desire than our desire to create for most of our lives. In fact, as Rabbi Heschel notes in his book Insecurity of Freedom, these desires have become needs and not satisfy them results in psychological disorders for many! We have come to define our desires as needs, our desires as good, our desires as right, our desires as important and our actions are reflective of our desires to “do good”. These are the lies we tell ourselves, these are the conventional notions and mental cliches we have come to accept so we can block out the calling from our ears, the demanding from our inner life, the expectation from our soul and the waiting from our consciousness. We are engaged in the wrong inner war, as I immerse myself in Rabbi Heschel’s words today. 


The war most people engage in is a war of denial, distrust, denigration. It is an inner battle to stop the incessant demand to do the next right thing and rise above our desires, to realize that being obligated is more important than waiting to be moved to do something, more important that doing only what one ‘feels’ like doing. We deny this truth so we can continue to distrust people who know they are obligated to help the needy, the poor and welcome the stranger and denigrate both the people who hear the call and the demand of the Bible to not only love your neighbor, but to welcome the stranger and care for the poor and the needy-whether one reads the Hebrew Bible and/or the New Testament, the Koran and/or the Tibetan Book of the Dead. In the Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, at least 36 times we are commanded to care for the stranger, the widow, the poor, etc. being reminded that we were strangers in Egypt. This goes against the conventional way of life, which is to subject the stranger to the same hardships we faced when we first immigrated to the country we live in, it is wrong and yet it is conventional wisdom. We want to say our desire is to do good, yet we know that doing good when it doesn’t cost us anything is easy and doing what is right at some sacrifice to oneself, going against conventional ‘wisdom’/notions is too risky for most of us. 


This is an inner war that all human beings have, some of us engage in battle to rise above desires and conventional notions, to let go of the mental cliches that enslave us and others of us are too afraid to so we deny and stay safe, warm and cuddled in the lies we tell ourselves, wrap ourselves in all the “right and good” causes we take up no matter right or left, conservative or progressive, powerful or pauper, we would rather deceive our selves than engage in the battle to hear, much less respond, to the call, the demand, the waiting and the expectation. 


Being in recovery is a decision to engage in the battle for our inner life, to be confronted by the calling, the demand, the waiting and the expectation. While “expectations are resentments waiting to happen” between humans, the expectation of God for us to be authentic, responsive and responsible, leave our feelings aside to answer the obligation and the demand that is in front of us is what fuels and propels our recovery. Faced with difficult choices because our desire is to one thing and there is a nagging call to do another, we ask ourselves “what would God have me do” or “what is the next right thing to do without regard to my desires”. In recovery, we continue to clear away the schmutz/junk that blocks are hearing these calls, demands and expectations because God and people have waited for our gifts long enough and it is time for us to share them. 


This first sentence, as you may be able to tell, is pulsating through me. I have been shamed by others my entire life because of I live my inner war out loud. When I was ‘out there’ being a drunk and a criminal, it was my response to not being heard, not being able to accept the conventional notions and mental cliches like those mentioned above and others. My response was WRONG! And I did not know another way to respond at the time. More on this tomorrow. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 170

“The source of insight is an awareness of being called upon to answer. Over and above personal problems, there is an objective challenge to overcome inequity, injustice, helplessness, suffering, carelessness, oppression.” (Who is Man pg. 107)


The last pair in this sentence/teaching is “carelessness, oppression”. Rabbi Heschel’s words here echo for us the words of the prophets, the message of the prophets, the message of the Bible, the message of the psalmist, the message of God. Namely, we can be better than our base instincts of kill or be killed, survival of the fittest, etc. we can go beyond our own personal problems, obsessions, feelings, desires to meet and overcome the objective challenge of carelessness and oppression. Yet, while the truth of these words is beyond doubt, the ability to take the actions to make them come to fruition seem to be much more difficult for many people. John F. Kennedy told us to: “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country” and in the 60’s up to today young people join the Peace Corp and spread goodness and kindness, ingenuity and wisdom around the globe. Yet, we have lost thae spirit of camaraderie, the spirit of working together to make the necessary changes to overcome carelessness and oppression. Rather, many people have accused everyone else of being careless and seek to rule over people according to their conservative, progressive values and their prejudices and dogmas.


We have become careless with what it means to ensure the freedoms of our revolution of 1776, our constitution, our Bible. We have become careless with the ways in which we treat one another and our respect for the dignity and God Image found in every human being. We have become careless in our dealings with our own inner life-believing that we can be okay from the outside in, rather than realizing a healthy, free life begins with a healthy, rich and free inner life. We are careless with the soul of another, rather than advocating for our own soul and the souls of another(s), we seek only to advocate for what our desires are at the expense of anyone and everyone else. We are careless with our affections, living in a transactional world where our word is as good only for this moment because a better ‘deal’ may come along. We are careless with our relationships, we can stop talking to our loved ones because of a single slight, a different way of relating and children cut their parents off, siblings stop talking to one another until a funeral makes them share the same space, spouses ‘lose interest’ in one another and decide to divorce rather than caring for the soul of the marriage. 


The oppression that exists today is palpable, we see it in Ukraine, we see it in Los Angeles, we see it in China and we see it in Florida, we see it in Israel and we see it in New York. There is not a part of our earth which is oppression free and this is so sad. We oppress one another, even intimate relationships, with our inability to meet and overcome the objective challenges that are placed in front of us, be they physical health issues, mental health issues, spiritual health issues, financial issues, personality issues, etc. We oppress one another with force of will, with power, with seduction, with money, with power/position, with fear, with love. Most of us do not realize the ways we oppress one another because we do not investigate our inner life enough, we are not doing our T’Shuvah writing each day, we are not using prayer to ‘look inside of ourselves’ as the Hebrew word for prayer can be translated to. We are not seeing ourselves in every story, every chapter of the Bible and we have ceased to listen to the message of the prophets personally. Rabbi Heschel’s optimism is refreshing and, hopefully, catching/infectious. We can and must overcome the careless and oppressive ways we live. We can and must rise up to meet and overcome the challenges of “inequity, injustice, helplessness, suffering, carelessness, oppression.” We have the power of our own souls to make this happen, it is time for us to be advocates of our souls and then advocate for the souls of another so we meet, overcome, and, please God, put to rest these UnGodly ways of life. It is time for all good people to come to the aid of our country, our fellow human beings and our self. 


In recovery, we have suffered the negative consequences of our carelessness and the people who have been around us have experienced the oppressive ways we have acted towards them. Our daily goal is to live one grain of sand better, repair one careless path we had taken, make amends for the oppressive ways we interacted with another person and move forward in meeting and overcoming the challenges Rabbi Heschel speaks of. 


I have been careless and oppressive-sometimes knowingly and usually unknowingly. I am constantly seeking to rise up and meet this challenge in myself and in the world. I have done a better job helping another meet this challenge in themself and how they can repair the damage they have wrought than I do helping myself at times. I realize, in this moment, that much of my carelessness has been the result of either past oppressions, feeling oppressed in the moment or anticipating someone oppressing me. It has made me oppressive and careless as a defense mechanism rather than for my pleasure and power. My commitment is to continue to meet and overcome the challenges Rabbi Heschel speaks of a little more each day. Stay safe and God Bless, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 169

“The source of insight is an awareness of being called upon to answer. Over and above personal problems, there is an objective challenge to overcome inequity, injustice, helplessness, suffering, carelessness, oppression.” (Who is Man pg. 107)


Immersing oneself in this sentence brings a great deal of angst to some, denial to many and indifference to most. We have become a society that abhors helplessness and suffering. We have come to see these two experiences as weak and unbecoming. Rabbi Heschel is reminding us that helplessness and suffering are part of our society, they have been around since time immemorial and our challenge, today as has always been the case, is to find strategies to overcome those ‘conventional norms and mental cliches’ that allow us to ignore the helplessness of another, the suffering of so many. While to many people, this sentence seems logical and/or ‘liberal’, to me it is a call to action and an acknowledgement that there is so much more to be done!

The most heinous response to the helplessness and suffering in the world is indifference. I believe Rabbi Heschel’s use of the phrase “objective challenge to overcome” shows that there is an action to be taken by one and all, in fact, our humanity, our being human depends on the action of responding to this challenge. Yet, there are so many people who have become indifferent, unmoved by the helplessness and suffering of another human being and this is the reason we find ourselves in the situation we are in:senseless hatred and bitterness toward one another, use of mendacity and deception to gain power for self, not to serve, etc. The fact that our governing body, the US Congress cannot find ways to compromise and help every citizen vote easily and fairly, that they can figure out how to tax the middle-class and not the rich or the corporations and not be able to relieve the suffering of so many here at home is unbelievable to me.  That the people who have sworn an oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States blatantly and proudly lie about January 6, extol people who committed treason and then ask and accuse a Black Woman during a Supreme Court Nomination hearing through racist language and berate her for working to “overcome the objective challenge of helplessness and suffering” as a Federal Public Defender is mind boggling. Yet, I understand the reasoning of Ted Cruz, et al, they have to attack anyone and everyone who wants to serve, who wants to take up the challenge Rabbi Heschel is reminding us of because they are indifferent to the suffering and helplessness of another human being! They are so tied up in themselves, their careers, their lies they don’t even see the  helplessness and suffering, just their political gain. The great problem is that people who are indifferent have a lot of support. They take the vaccines and then work to get everyone else not to take it? They see the suffering and death caused by Covid-19, put a target on Dr. Fauci, withhold Federal funding for people who are suffering and helpless in the face of this pandemic and wrap themselves in God and the flag?!?!


The next group is the group that just denies that the helplessness and suffering is happening to the extent it is, they admit some but “surely you exaggerate, Rabbi”. They also deny that there is anything they can or should do about it, when they finally admit it exists. The unhoused have been living on the streets of LA and every city for years, yet it isn’t a problem to deal with until they come into the ‘upscale’ neighborhoods and the response of people is: NOT IN MY BACKYARD, NOT IN MY NEIGHBORHOOD! People who are trying to restrict people are denying their challenge and I would say obligation to overcome the helplessness and suffering of the unhoused. It is high time we all meet this challenge and stop denying the humanity of the unhoused, stop denying the needs of the unhoused, stop segregating them from us and remembering we are all “kin under the skin” as my friend Rev Mark Whitlock says. 


In recovery, we gather together to meet and overcome the helplessness and suffering of people who still drink, use, gamble, work, are anxious and/or depressed, stressed beyond to the extent they no longer can function well. We know our purpose has become reaching out to one another to help another person in spiritual and emotional distress find respite, recovery and discover their passion and purpose. In recovery, we meet this challenge daily. We are not indifferent nor in denial anymore. 


I read this teaching from Rabbi Heschel and I feel angst. I am in angst over the enormity of the challenge of overcoming the helplessness and suffering I see daily. I am in angst over the experience of people who have lost hope and feel abandoned. I am in angst over our inability to meet the challenge of being more humane and human towards people who are helpless and suffering, instead we treat them as lepers, blame them, etc. I also have hope because I know that I, along with Harriet and the staff at Beit T’Shuvah, over 33 years helped to relieve the helplessness and suffering of 1000’s of people. I am hopeful because of the many people who left BTS and now have recovery centers, sober living, business’ and careers in fields that help the helpless and relieve the sufferings of another. I am looking for the next area to bring relief and believe this blog is a path forward. Harriet and I are available for speaking and consulting as a way of meeting the challenge Rabbi Heschel gives us. I am humbled to be able to help another person overcome the suffering and helplessness they are experiencing. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 168

“The source of insight is an awareness of being called upon to answer. Over and above personal problems, there is an objective challenge to overcome inequity, injustice, helplessness, suffering, carelessness, oppression.” (Who is Man pg. 107)


Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom in the second sentence above is so overlooked today, as in every era. We have made personal problems an objective challenge with the identity politics that is happening throughout our living. Whether in Congress, on the campaign trail, in schools and in workplaces, every identity wants to stake out a place and platform for themselves, which can be good and connecting and the problem is that most of these identity groups want to exclude any other group from joining. We hear about the terrible ‘older white men’ and, being an older white man, I hear the call of women and people of color to be added to the table, where they certainly have always had a place-the problem is to exclude all ‘older white men’ is to do to another what is hateful to you. I don’t believe this is the point of Rabbi Heschel’s teaching above. It is to be inclusive and to aid and serve. 


It is time for all of us to rise above our personal problems, resentments, angers and find ways to work together-across gender lines, across color lines, across political lines, etc to honor the call and challenge “to overcome inequity and injustice”. This challenge began with the killing of Abel by Cain in the Bible; “the voice of your brother’s bloods cries to me” God says to Cain after Cain asks: “Am I my brother’s keeper?” In the 4th Chapter of the Bible, we are taught to overcome our jealousies and pride so we do not commit murder, physically, emotionally and/or spiritually. When we crush the spirit of people, as white men and women have, we are not heeding one of the earliest principles and teachings of the Bible. Yet, there are many ‘god-fearing’ men and women who continue to worship the idol of self, of personal problems and worries, at the altar of prejudice and entitlement, I am sad to say. Rabbi Heschel is reminding us that the challenge, the call to overcome inequity and injustice is a call from the Ineffable One. I know this because humanity has shown, over and over again, our incapability of holding these challenges in the forefront of our being. When the one group gains power, they are unjust and practice inequity towards all the other groups as history has proven over and over again.


The Holiday of Passover which we will begin to celebrate on Friday, April 15, 2022, is a reminder for all of us each year that slavery can, will and must end. Slavery is the highest form of injustice and inequity, I believe. We are told “ each person is to see him/her self as if she/he had been redeemed from Egypt” according to our Haggadah. I would add we all have to see how we have acted more like Pharaoh than Moses in some areas, some actions, some traits we have. If we are to answer the “objective challenge to overcome inequity, injustice,” we have to first find and face the inequity and injustice we still engage in. I know people who are in the forefront of the fight for justice and democracy who practice inequity and injustice in their daily lives without even being aware of these practices! In fact, when confronted they deny and defend-all the while being part of a country club that excludes people because of personal whims/disputes, forgetting the low wages of the people who serve them, etc.

We all have within us our own experiences of inequity and injustice that has been perpetrated upon us, as well as the epigenetic experience of inequity and injustice perpetrated upon our ancestors. To live Rabbi Heschel’s teaching above, we have to let go of those experiences-we have to dig deep in some cases to find their roots-not forget them, not deny them, let go of them because they have consciously and unconsciously been influencing our behaviors for years and causing us to do to another what is hateful to us which, according to Rabbi Hillel, is what the Torah teaches us not to do. We have to answer the challenge inside of us before we can truly respond to and, hopefully one day, end the ways of inequity and injustice that we see each and every day. 


In recovery, we do a “searching and fearless moral inventory” to seek out and bring to our consciousness the inequities and injustices we have done to another so we can find the place inside of us that had given us permission to perpetrate these evils onto another human being. In recovery, we know we have to get to the root of our feelings of inequity and injustice so we can stop treating another(s) as we were treated!


I have been responding to the challenge Rabbi Heschel speaks about all my life. Sometimes my responses have been totally inappropriate and wrong-I was coming from a hurt and wounded place so I wanted to hurt and wound the person in front of me whether they had hurt me or not-I used them as surrogates for the ones who had. I remember the experience of how unjust and inequitable life was when my father died at age 42 and I was 14. My dad answered the challenge of inequity and injustice when he raised the pay of Black men to the same as White men for doing the same work-something that just wasn’t done in 1959 Cleveland, Ohio. We were all ridiculed for this and, he died far too young. I lived this experience of injustice and inequity for over 20 years and, even in my recovery, I have carried it with me. I know that this experience also has caused me to respond to these challenges with help and aid to those in need of recovery and love. Stay safe and God Bless, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 167

“The source of insight is an awareness of being called upon to answer. Over and above personal problems, there is an objective challenge to overcome inequity, injustice, helplessness, suffering, carelessness, oppression.” (Who is Man pg. 107)


The word insight comes from the Dutch meaning ‘inner sight, wisdom’. Rabbi Heschel is teaching us, reminding us, of our gift of inner sight and inner wisdom that so often goes unnoticed and ignored. He is giving me the cause of our ignorance and blindness-we are “being called upon to answer”. The truth of this sentence is so apparent in our lives yet, as Rabbi Moshe Luzzatto teaches, precisely because a sentence, a way, an insight is true and we accept it as such, we tend to ignore it! 


While many people have insight into another person’s ways, motives, skills, etc such as employers, shrinks, therapists, social workers, clergy, con people, parents, friends, etc, very few of us take the time and make the effort to see inside of ourselves in truth, discovery and eagerness. Most people deny their inner lives, their inner truths and run from the call to answer unless it makes them money, gives them power, helps them have fun and such. Rabbi Heschel’s first sentence is the key to living well, in my opinion. It is the root cause of most great discoveries, inventions, innovations. Only by having the insight, the awareness of “being called upon to answer” can one truly prosper and flourish. 


I believe that music is an example of personal insight and awareness. While it is certainly an occupation and a way to make money, celebrity, etc. it also comes from a calling that one has to express oneself in ways that go beyond words. Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Bach, etc all had patrons and the music they wrote came from a deep calling inside of them. The Black spirituals of the 19th century came from a deep calling and awareness to answer the question of how to express the indignity and pain of slavery. The blues and jazz, big band and rock and roll all express the answer to the call of bringing a wordless path to express the emotions, the inner struggles and the outer mess of life in that moment. Rap/HipHop music is another example, the early stars were just talking about life on the street and their words, while hard to hear, are real, raw and an answer to the inner pain of being black, young and harassed by cops, society and their own people. All of these forms of music speak to the inner life of the people who hear them and touch them in their soul, causing spiritual responses that are inexplicable and real and true. 


We are all “being called upon to answer” a demand, a need, a question and most of us ignore this call in favor of another call-our ego demands, our personal desires take precedence over the call and demand of our own inner lives. We forgo our inner wisdom to satisfy our desires and wants, we lose sight of our authentic needs in favor of our need to be seen, thought of, celebrated in certain ways. We see this daily in our elected officials who are more interested in spouting lies and untruths (half-truths are untruths), being seen on National TV, accusing good hardworking people who want to serve of the actions that they themselves are taking. Many of our Senators and Representatives, Governors and Mayors, State Houses and City Councils are more interested in calling someone else out than answer the call, the demand of something greater than themselves. These charlatans are doing this because they have insight into what their constituents want to hear and how they can keep power so they play to their ‘base’ and accuse people of being ‘elites’ when they themselves graduated from Ivy League Schools! They accuse people of not caring and weighing in on their identity politics while denying the identity of another group.


In recovery, this “awareness of being called to answer” is, for most of us the doorway into our recovery. Our answer to the awareness of being called is to change the ways we have been living. Living life from the inside out rather than the outside in. We realize and admit that no amount of stuff has been able to satisfy the demand that is nagging at us, disturbing our conscience. In recovery, we begin to hear the true call of our inner life, we mature and engage with the inner wisdom we have blocked out and enjoy life anew each day. 


I answered the call in December of 1986 with a YES and have spent the past 35+ years responding to the demand, the call and the awareness of how many layers there are to my response. I have grown and matured my insight, my inner wisdom and continued to engage with it.  At times, I have not always listened to the insight and wisdom because I have, upon retrospect, been blind to it at times. I have allowed needs to override wisdom, I have allowed desires to override insight, I have denied what is in favor of what I wanted it to be. While these times have decreased immensely over time, in relearning this teaching of Rabbi Heschel, I see where I still commit these errors. I know what I know and I am committing to live more of what I know and not let my need to be liked, accepted, etc blind me to the insights I have nor my desires for a larger platform and/or to be relevant override my inner wisdom. While I know I won’t be perfect, my daily inventory, prayer, meditation will focus on this activity. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 166


“What is the truth of being human? The lack of pretension, the acknowledgement of opaqueness, shortsightedness, inadequacy. But truth also demands rising, striving for the goal is both with within and beyond us. The truth of being human is gratitude; its secret is appreciation.” (Who is Man pg 114)


This last paragraph of Rabbi Heschel’s writing on embarrassment is so important for us to lean/live into. We all hide some part of ourselves out of shame, fear of being ostracized, our negative judgements of ourselves and fear of being seen. Yet, Rabbi Heschel is saying we have to acknowledge that we do this, we have to acknowledge our fear of being found inadequate, etc. It is part and parcel of being human, I hear Rabbi Heschel teaching us, as Rabbi Twerski also taught, that unlike all other animals, we are born incomplete and our life-long task is to complete ourselves and grow into the fullness of what a human being can be. 


Unfortunately, this is not always the case. Many humans stunt their own growth out of fear: fear of not having enough, fear of lack of control, fear of being seen naked and inadequate, fear of not being accepted, fear of … So we resort to putting on pretenses, hiding ourselves/being opaque to hide our fears from another and even from ourselves. I was asked once, “if you live a false self long enough, doesn’t it become your authentic self?” This is how subtle pretension, opaqueness shows itself-the person was so afraid to be seen and they wanted to believe their pretenses, they wanted to be applauded for their opaqueness/hiding! This is not the case as I understand Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom. Yes, in some moments this person could face their authentic self, they could speak around it to me and, out of fear, out of shame, they had to retreat to their hiding place. 


The antidote to this way of being is also true for all humans. Striving and rising to our higher self, to meet God’s/Universe’s demands and calling. In each of us is that still small voice; call it God, call it intuition, what is important to acknowledge it. It calls to us all the time and we drown it out with our fears and our desires, we imprison this voice/relegate it to the back of our consciousness so we don’t have to act on it’s instructions, it’s calling to us. And, it nags at us at the most inopportune moments, when we have been shortsighted, when our inadequacies overtake us, this voice calls to us to get real, get truthful, see ourselves for who we are and use our inadequacies to grow and/or ask for help, acknowledge our shortsightedness and go the proper ‘eye’ doctor. The “goal that is both within and beyond us” I believe, is growth, is openness, is aid and service, is kindness and compassion for oneself and another self, is connection and covenantal relationships, truth and love. We can only achieve these goals through authenticity, growth, a new pair of glasses, and, of course, radical amazement-seeing the world fresh and new, seeing our self fresh and new each and every day. 


Gratitude and appreciation are the mainstays of this way of living. Being grateful that we can and need to be embarrassed by our actions, the actions of those around us and the actions of our country and the actions of people across the globe. Embarrassment is the precursor of change, as I understand this subchapter of Rabbi Heschel’s book. When we experience embarrassment, if we are to let go of the conventional notion of the word, we are aware of our inadequacies and our opaqueness, we are aware of our misdeeds and our false premises upon which we have built a life. Rabbi Heschel is teaching us to be thankful for uncovering a truth about our self, to be pleased at seeing our true self without filters. He is calling to us to realize the immense worth of our self and the high price we pay when we hide from ourselves and everyone else. Realizing the price of being human, being authentic, is mere pittance in comparison to the price we pay for hiding, lying, living in fear of being found out, etc. 


In recovery, peeling the layers of the onion one membrane at a time is our work and we engage in it with gusto, with fear, with hope and with dread. Sometimes we retrace our steps in order to put one of the membranes back on-ie hide some of the ugliness we have uncovered. Continuing the journey of recovery means we have to face the ugliness and repair it and accept that it may be our shortsightedness that calls it ugly and their is a purpose for these warts that has yet to be revealed. 


I live a really open life, what you see is what you get. I am bombastic and concerned, I am rough around the edges and totally devoted to being an advocate of the soul of another human being. I am a father and a brother, a husband and a friend, I am a lover of people and, at times, a hater of a few. I am worried about being irrelevant and fear being looked down upon. I am an outlier and want to be on the inside to effect change. I am an exile and a communal leader. I am…. Grateful and appreciative of being embarrassed 2+ years ago, being exiled at the same time. I hide my emotions at times and they leak out in a myriad of ways. Every morning I thank God for restoring me to life and I appreciate the opportunity to be one grain of sand better today than yesterday. I am more afraid of hiding than being seen for the most part and I am using my embarrassment to become more aware, to hear the call of my soul clearer and rise and strive to meet the goals within me and beyond me. Stay safe and God Bless, Rabbi Mark 


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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 165

“What is the truth of being human? The lack of pretension, the acknowledgement of opaqueness, shortsightedness, inadequacy. But truth also demands rising, striving for the goal is both with within and beyond us. The truth of being human is gratitude; its secret is appreciation.” (Who is Man pg 114)


The last sentence above captures Rabbi Heschel’s vision, promise and belief of what it means to ‘be human’. It also represents Rabbi Heschel’s hearing of God’s demand and call to him and to all humans. While there is a lot of imperfection in being human, there is so much more to appreciate and be grateful for from another human being, from God and to oneself. Every rising and striving, every demand answered, every acknowledgement of opaqueness, shortsightedness, inadequacy brings appreciation and gratitude to us because we see and hear truth, we can take steps to repair our errors and learn from them and be a more kinder human. What I believe Rabbi Heschel is telling us in this subchapter on embarrassment is we are able to find gratitude and appreciation in all of life when we are fully immersed and living our lives.


The Latin root of gratitude is ‘pleasing/thankful’. The Latin root of appreciate is ‘to price’. Reading Rabbi Heschel’s words this morning, I understand that being human is to be thankful for the myriad of gifts, friendships, assistance we receive and be able give pleasure/help to another, to accept the help, the gifts, the friendship, the covenant of another human along with accepting same from God. Living our lives with this attitude of gratitude, thankful for what another human being gives to us and the world, finding pleasure and being thankful for what we can bring to another human and the world is the key to living well, to using our embarrassments to catapult us to a higher plane of existence from the base dog-eat-dog, zero-sum ways we have become accustomed to. When we appreciate our being human and the being human of another, we are saying that this is the price of admission for me to live well and be of service and it is the price of admission for someone else to enter my intimate living space, either friendship, intimate relationship, etc. It is the way we raise our children and how we relate to our family, we set the price/value of our self and another self at being human. While it is not a usual way of seeing our existence, I believe the more we engage in being human in all our affairs, the kinder, the more connected, the less violent and our need to enslave and have power over another human being to feel alive and human will dwindle. 


Yet we continue to avoid the experiences of gratitude, appreciation, being human. We are afraid of what life would be like and who we would be. The prophets speak of “nation shall not lift up sword against nation, nor shall men learn war anymore”, yet the most ‘god-fearing’ people continue to spew hatred and seek power and glory for themselves through using the words of the Bible-Hebrew and Christian-to crush people’s spirits, to make them into robots, to ridicule their being human in their missteps and preach for them to be subservient to another human-saying God sent ____ to save us. 


We have yet to see the Messiah in our time mainly because we are unwilling to recognize her/him in our midst-each one of us. Danny Siegel adapted this from a Yiddish Poem; “if you always assume the person sitting next to you is the Messiah, waiting for some human kindness; you will come to weigh your words and watch your hands. And, if the person chooses not to be revealed in your time-it will not matter.” We have the power to bring the words of the prophets to fruition, the ability to live the words of this poem and we will only actualize both when we appreciate/set the bar for ourselves at being human, when we are grateful for being human with all of our foibles and no longer hide our opaqueness, our shortsightedness and our inadequacies. When we stop needing to crush our fellow human beings, when we, instead, help them be more human, showing kindness, love, justice, compassion and being in truth with them. When we accept the covenant with God as our blueprint and our commitment and we strive and rise to each occasion in life with our humanness and not our ego, our seeking of power and prestige, our need to put another down, etc-we will experience gratitude and appreciation, joy and wholeness, love and connection-all the ingredients for living well. 


In recovery, gratitude is a foundational principle as is appreciation. We set the price of our being human at kindness, concern, service as well as acknowledging our imperfections and repairing the harm we wrought and improving one grain of sand each and every day. We are pleased and thankful for every gift we possess and every time we help another of God’s creations and for every gift of love, kindness, direction and assistance we receive from another and a higher power.


I am grateful for all that I have, even my own tzuris/troubles. I set the price of life for myself at being of service, asking for help, accepting the rejection of another and living my covenants with God and with the people who want to have a covenantal relationship with me. I am thankful for all that I have experienced and learned from. It has taken me a long time to fully be human in these ways and, because of Rabbi Heschel, Harriet, Heather, family and friends, I am here more often! God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark 

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 164


“What is the truth of being human? The lack of pretension, the acknowledgement of opaqueness, shortsightedness, inadequacy. But truth also demands rising, striving for the goal is both with within and beyond us. The truth of being human is gratitude; its secret is appreciation.” (Who is Man pg 114)


Herein lies a truth that many of us ignore; there is a demand for rising and striving for the “goal is both within us and beyond us”. The goal, as I am understanding Rabbi Heschel today is to understand that we are the “greatest miracle on earth”, we are aware that we “live in the shadow of greatness”, and realize we are “contemporaries of God”. There is in every soul, as I hear Rabbi Heschel this morning, a demand for striving and rising up to the call and demand of decency, community, freedom, God. This demand, this call is always within us and beyond us, the voice that calls never ceases and we hear it all the time. In some of us, it lights a fire in our belly, like with the prophet Jeremiah, that can never be extinguished, Rabbi Heschel is an example. In others, this fire is nearly extinguished and the voice/call/demand is silenced by a louder call-one’s own narcissistic needs/behaviors. 


We are living in a moment where the fire and the voice, the demand and the call are being shouted down by the narcissistic, power-mad, zealots of hatred, prejudice, who try and wrap themselves in the flag of freedom, community and compromise-how ironic. As I hear Rabbi Heschel today, I hear him calling out to us for our failure to keep our alliances of the 60’s together and vibrant. I hear and see our failure to ensure that God’s voice is always heard in the halls of Congress, in the Courts of our land including the Supreme Court. Not the voice of the narcissistic ‘white power always’ crowd, nor the voice of the ‘new gospels where the poor are unloved by God’ crowd, nor by the crowd that identifies only with their ‘own people/fellow victims’. The voice that I hear from Rabbi Heschel is the voice of freedom for all, decency towards all, no more victimhood and no more oppressiveness. It is the voice of Sinai-it is the voice calling out to us to “hear, listen and understand”, it is the voice that connects us to another human being and all human beings, it is the voice of Micah the prophet: “Do justice, love kindness, and mercy, walk humbly with God”. 


To hear these voices is, of course, necessary and a good thing. Yet, hearing them is not enough, we must act on them. We must do justly in our homes, in our work, in our interactions, in our business’, in our government, in our laws. We must recognize the dignity of every human being, whether we like them or not, whether we agree with them or not, and we must keep safety, security, caring for one another front and center in our living our own lives for ourselves and for everyone else.

Freedom is not the voice of ‘do your own thing’, freedom is the call to go beyond our narcissistic desires, allow our inauthentic needs to go unmet, to rise up and strive for the greater good of our own souls, our being human and the greater good and humanity of all human beings. Freedom is justice that is tempered with mercy as we learn in Deuteronomy 16:18. Loving mercy and loving kindness are two traits that are most in need in our world, always and especially today. We have become jaded, hateful, mistrustful, unkind to one another. Rabbi Heschel, in his last interview in1972, says instead of “love your neighbor” we have come to “suspect your neighbor”. It is even more true and prevalent some 50 years later! We can do and be more than our lowest self, we can and must stop imprisoning the voice, the call and the demand to strive to be better and to rise to the particular occasion we find ourselves in. We can do this, we must do this, otherwise the world our children inherit may be extinction and annihilation. 


In recovery, the volume of this voice, this demand, this call is suddenly turned up. We are continually turning the dial of our hearing to hear the call without as much static as we had before. We are listening for the directions and opportunity to serve instead of being served, feed another before we feed ourselves, see the reflection of spirit in another that we recognize kinship with. In recovery, we are desperately aware of where our deafness brought us and we are gleeful that we can hear, follow and understand the direction of the voice in us and beyond us that we used to ignore. 


This demanding voice and call to action is incessant upon me. Rabbi Heschel is a disturbing man because he never lets me rest, he is always calling to me and reminding me of how blessed I am and to share the blessings, to reach out to another less fortunate, to love people even when I don’t like them, to do the next right thing no matter what, to cure my “eye disease and cancer of the soul” of prejudices and hatred. He calls me to rise up and above the pettiness and pride, envy and enmity that has been heaped on me and I put upon another, to care for the stranger, the poor and the needy in me and in all human beings. Rabbi Heschel speaks for the voice I cannot always hear, the call I don’t always want to answer and the demand that is incessantly hammering at my soul. I am grateful that I am able to answer the call, the demand and respond to the voice in me and beyond me with Hineni-here I am. Stay safe and God Bless, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 163

“What is the truth of being human? The lack of pretension, the acknowledgement of opaqueness, shortsightedness, inadequacy. But truth also demands risings striving for the goal is both with within and beyond us. The truth of being human is gratitude; its secret is appreciation.” (Who is Man pg 114)


Facing the truth of our shortsightedness and inadequacy is not shameful nor demeaning, as I am understanding Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom today. While we shame and blame people and ourselves for our shortsightedness/not seeing what was down the road and our not being equal to the task in front of us some days for a myriad of reasons, Rabbi Heschel’s words bring comfort and a mirror for all of us. As we all know, we cannot and must not use truth to deceive another and/or ourselves. Many people use another’s inadequacies as a weapon to take advantage of them, to use them, to abuse them and to gain power for themselves. We see this in the ways dictators convince people to go against their knowing, their truth and their best interests to support and maintain the authoritarian’s power grab and hold onto power. This is one of the reasons the Russian People have not risen up against Putin en masse, along with the way Putin deals with protestors. 


We see this behavior in our politicians and media here in the US. The racism displayed at the confirmation hearings, the anti-semitic tropes used by Representatives and Senators alike are examples of using the inadequacies and vulnerabilities of people against them. This is the definition of evil, according to Dr. M. Scott Peck! Yet, these same people wave the flag showing their patriotism. I see flags being waved in support of a liar, a cheat, a fraud and a criminal and these flag wavers say they believe in the Constitution and Declaration of Independence as taught to them by the liars, cheats, frauds and criminals who they elect to perpetrate evil upon them and the rest of us! 


Rabbi Heschel is teaching us that being shortsighted and inadequate is not a crime, it is not a fatal flaw. Rather, it is part and parcel with being human. We are all shortsighted at times, we are all not equal to the task at times and some tasks just are not ours to tackle. We do not have to be ashamed, we do not have to beat ourselves up and cause ourselves mental and spiritual anguish over these truths. In fact, we have to learn to accept our foibles, our inadequacies and our poor vision at times. We have to begin to live in acceptance of our own humanity and the humanity of another. We get to deceive ourselves less and less when we are living in this acceptance. We stop trying to deceive another(s) when we live in this truth of being human as Rabbi Heschel is teaching us. We grow our skills and our talents, we find where we have the correct vision, long and short, for the goals we are uniquely adequate and needed for. We also engage in life differently, we ask for and accept help as a gift not a weakness. We give aid and comfort to people not as a ‘marker’ to be redeemed at another time of our choosing, rather as a gift and reciprocity of the generosity that has been given to us. 


It is a truth that we are not ‘up to the task’ of perfection nor should we be, Rabbi Heschel teaches. To accept these truths that Rabbi Heschel teaches us in the second sentence above, we have to let go of our ideas that perfection is the goal, perfection is attainable and we are either perfect or horrible. We have to stop allowing our vulnerabilities to cripple us and to learn to be less and less affected when someone uses them against us. We have to remember to put on clearer glasses when making decisions and know we will not see the whole picture, we will go for quick ‘wins/fixes’ and miss the potholes down the road. We need to embrace our humanness and let go of the deceptions of self that cause us to believe the deception of liars, frauds, cheats and criminals. We need to remember that accepting the truth of being human as Rabbi Heschel teaches does not mean we are frauds, just that we are human. 


In recovery, we learn acceptance is the answer to all our problems today as Dr. Paul teaches. We learn to accept what is, not stew over what might have been and stop our self-flagellation. In recovery, we know that our inadequacies and shortsightedness may serve a higher purpose, we also know it makes us humble enough to ask for help and take direction that we normally would not have. We pray for God to remove these inadequacies except when they are in service of another. In recovery, we learn to embrace our imperfections and not need to deceive ourselves regarding them nor do we feel shame because of them. 


I know that God doesn’t remove my inadequacies totally because I need to remember to ask for help and not do things that another can do, ie stay in my lane. I have beaten myself up long enough for my shortsightedness, as Rabbi Heschel speaks to me. I am committing to leave my shame over not seeing the handwriting on the wall, people I trusted and those I did not use my vulnerabilities against me. I am letting go of my own need to be adequate in areas that I can’t be and to the hiding I have gone into during this period of the Pandemic and being exiled from ‘my place’. Rabbi Heschel is calling on me and you to end our evil ways of using our own vulnerabilities against ourselves and to end our sinking into despair and paralysis over another person doing the same to us. I commit to stand up to and embrace my inadequacies and shortsightedness rather than use them as an excuse to hide. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 162


“What is the truth of being human? The lack of pretension, the acknowledgement of opaqueness, shortsightedness, inadequacy. But truth also demands risings striving for the goal is both with within and beyond us. The truth of being human is gratitude; its secret is appreciation.” (Who is Man pg 114)


Continuing to experience Rabbi Heschel’s question and response above, we find ourselves, hopefully, discerning what he is teaching us about ourselves. Yesterday, I discussed the path out of pretense and today, I will discuss opaqueness. Opaque comes from the Latin meaning ‘to darken’ and is used in language to mean, ‘hard or impossible to understand, unfathomable’. This is a pretty apt description of most of us, we darken our outer shell, we keep ourselves less than transparent in order to not be seen. While it is wonderful we acknowledge this truth, it is horrific that we continue to live this way, that we continue to have to live this way out of fear. Think of the fear of a person of color who cannot hide the color of their skin in a whiteness society, in a racist atmosphere and, when people of color are “Black and Proud” as the 60’s chant went, the racists hurl all sorts of epithets at them. Yet, this same whiteness society is afraid of being seen so they wear hoods! The terrorists who killed Daniel Pearl for being a Jew, wore hoods, some criminals wear masks and others hide their identity on the Internet. Some creeps lure young children with false profiles online, some people post hatred and lies just because they can. While they acknowledge their opaqueness through their actions, they are unwilling to stand up and experience the consequences of their behaviors. 


We are experiencing a different type of opaqueness now as well, our Senators who are grilling the newest nominee for the Supreme Court, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, is being grilled by racist minorities like ‘lying Ted Cruz’ as his good buddy Donald J Trump calls him and white supremacists like Josh Hawley about her skin color, not her qualifications. While I know this is a ‘get back’ for questioning Brett Kavanaugh’s morality, it is disgusting and their inability to acknowledge how they are ‘darkening’ the call for freedom that our founding fathers honored with the Declaration of Independence is disgusting and terrifying at the same time.

To live in the acknowledgment of our opaqueness means we also have to become more transparent! We need to stop hiding behind the darkening of our motives, our actions, our fears and our indecency. We have to stop hiding behind the ‘rightness’ of our positions. We have to begin to see another human being’s soul, we have to allow another human being to experience our soul. We have to engage in soul to soul relationships, not just for our intimate relationships, not just for family and friends, rather in all of our affairs. I can be both in the role of Rabbi with you and show you my soul, my inner life, in fact, if I don’t what kind of Rabbi am I?  Our world is in desperate need of not just acknowledging our opaqueness, we have to do something about it! 


We are living in times that have been experienced before in our history by people and Rabbi Heschel certainly was living in times where war with Russia could mean nuclear disaster, we were mired in the Civil Rights struggle, Vietnam was beginning and he was against it, opaqueness was what we got from government and from business, from Clergy and from friends-‘what will the neighbors think’ is not a new phrase/saying. Yet, he stood up and showed himself regardless of whether he was heard, understood, ridiculed and/or followed. His way of being teaches us to acknowledge our ‘darkness’ so we can shed light on it. 


In recovery, we strive to be an open book, we continue to peel the layers of the onion, that thin membrane that, while seemingly transparent, covers and darkens our true self. In recovery, we are aware the more transparent we are, the more we can and will live well and serve another with joy and wholeness. Acknowledging our opaqueness is only the beginning, we continue to tear away the coverings we have placed on us and allow more light, more connection and more love in and out of ourselves. 


I remember reading in Torah: “Circumcise the foreskin of your heart” while in prison and Maimonidies’ teaching: “what is in your heart should be on your lips” and made a decision to stop hiding. I have worked on opening my soul up to be seen for the past 33+ years after hiding it from the hurt and pain of being real and transparent. Living this way is not easy nor painless, it is deeply wounding when another human being takes advantage of our transparency, it is difficult to keep being open when I know more bullets are coming, someone will use my vulnerabilities against me and call me their friend and Rabbi! It is difficult to keep one’s openness and hope in a world filled with ‘darkened’/opaque souls who are not even willing to acknowledge their opaqueness and the call God has given me, the demand the Ineffable One makes of me is to keep going. Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom and teaching lives on in each one of us who, despite the damage, despite the fear, continue to not only acknowledge our opaqueness, continue to “circumcise the foreskins of our hearts” and continue to be transparent and connected, kind and truthful, loving and just. God Bless and Stay Safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 161


“What is the truth of being human? The lack of pretension, the acknowledgement of opaqueness, shortsightedness, inadequacy. But truth also demands risings striving for the goal is both with within and beyond us. The truth of being human is gratitude; its secret is appreciation.” (Who is Man pg 114)


Rabbi Heschel begins this ending paragraph on embarrassment with a startling question and response. I find it so interesting the phrasing of his question, he doesn’t ask ‘what is the truth of a human being’; he is reminding us that human being is a scientific category/classification much like animal, mammal, fish, etc, and categories do not get to the heart of the individual that makes us a category. Rather by stating the question in the way he does, Rabbi Heschel is calling to us and reminding us not to categorize our self nor another self into a generality. Yet, we continue to ignore this truth, we continue to ignore this teaching as we continue to classify and categorize ourselves and all selves into inane categories; rich/poor, white/black, male/female, Jew/Christian, Muslim/Catholic, smart/dumb, powerful/weak, controller/controlled, etc. Rabbi Heschel is demanding we see truth about our self and every other self in the world-we are individuals and we all must begin, continue, renew our being human and end our preoccupation of what category we are in, what classification we qualify for and our ways of being robotic instead of being human. 


The word pretension comes from the Latin meaning ‘alleged’. We are able to, according to Rabbi Heschel, stop lying about ourselves, end our false words and actions, no longer falsify information to impress our self and/or another self. This is part of the truth of being human. What an order, given our current (and forever) state of human beings, we would have to shift our way of being seemingly completely, a 180 degree turn; impossible most people would say-after all, a leopard doesn’t change its spots. Here is another example of Rabbi Heschel’s brilliance to me; we don’t have to do a 180, all we have to do is a 2% shift! At any given moment, 49% of our being wants to live in this lack of pretension, we desire to stop our mendacity, stop believing and being under the thumb of deceptive leaders, end our need to impress another and 51% of our being overrides our desire for truth. So, the shift is from 49% to 51%-a much more palatable and doable task. 


We begin to make this shift through a practice of T’Shuvah, a daily inventory of what we did well, where we missed the mark, who was impacted, how they were impacted, what we learned and what is the plan forward to repair and change, enhance and reconnect. Doing this gives us the awareness of the what is, we take off the old glasses and old way of blame, denial, claim of innocence, explanations, clean-ups etc and begin to see our whole self through the eyes of one who wants to keep changing and growing, living one grain of sand better each day, connecting to God, to another human being, to nature; relating to our world with more kindness, love, truth, justice, and compassion  each and every day. 


Letting go of pretension, letting go of our allegations, letting go of our need to win begins with a daily accounting of our soul, a daily view of our actions with some perspective that we don’t always have in the moment. Hindsight is 20/20 and, according to the Jewish Tradition, we have the gift of T’Shuvah, which God put into the world before the world was created according to our sages, for this exact reason. God knows we are imperfect, God also knows we continue to live our false allegations about our self and another(s) selves, so God gave us the “most unnoticed miracle” T’Shuvah so we could always return, we can always change, we can always return to the “truth of being human”. 


The recovery movement uses the wisdom of the Jewish Tradition through our large inventory (much like Yom Kippur) in the beginning of our journey in recovery and through our daily mini inventories (much like our confessions and nightly T’Shuvah) looking for both what we have done well and where we have missed the mark. We are constantly seeking progress on our road to living well and not perfection! In recovery, we engage in dropping our false allegations, our pretensions, our ‘don’t you know who I think I am’ attitude. 


I know I am guilty of keeping some pretensions,  the ones that give me hope and courage to move forward, the allegations that I am capable and important, etc. I also know that some of my pretensions have put people off and I exhibited an air of arrogance and disdain. I am remorseful for people who believe this as it was never my intention to ‘put on airs’ and I can see how my actions could lead someone to experience me in this way. I know I have made the 2% shift described above, I know that I engage being human more and more each and every day. I know that I fall short at times and I know I keep seeking progress. I also know people will see what they want to see and one’s pretension will color their vision of another to soothe themselves. I welcome each day as an opportunity to enlarge my vision and let go of another false pretense upon which I was living. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel 

Day 160

“We are better than our assertions, more intricate, more profound than our theories maintain. Our thinking is behind the times.”(Who is Man pg 114)


Rabbi Heschel’s words above are ringing in my soul, in my mind and in my ears. I want to argue that our assertions are better than who we really are, and yet, I know this statement to be true. Assert comes from the Latin meaning “to join/to affirm”. We are better than some of the groups we join, the ideas we affirm and the actions that we take and defend. We are better than our worst ideas, our self-centeredness, our taking advantage of the vulnerabilities of another person/group, our prejudices, our need to be right, our ‘win at all costs’ attitude, our ‘zero-sum’ war we engage in daily, etc. As human beings, created with the ability to think, reason, empathize, understand, we do not have to continue to sink to the lowest common denominator of racism, prejudice, enslavement of another, etc. We do not have to bow down to anyone, we do not have to stay imprisoned by our negative thoughts and we are not defined by our worst behaviors! As a society, we can and must end our reign of terror on one another through innuendo, negative research, business and political espionage, support of a dictator because he/she is an enemy of our enemy, allow people to buy their way into helpful legislation (aka lobbyists) and out of criminal prosecution (ala Sackler Family). We need to rise above these mendacious affirmations that ‘in a free society’ all is fair in love and war-making the way we relate to one another a function of war??? 


It is time for us as individuals to also end out affirming the worst aspects of our character. In my work over the years, I found not using drugs and alcohol were the simplest actions of recovery, the more difficult part of recovery is changing the inner dialogue and thoughts that have taken hold for so long-much longer than the substance that brought people into treatment. I also found the same is true for families of addicts and, for almost everyone I have encountered in the past 35 years! We all suffer from believing the lies we tell ourselves, we all suffer from our own self-deceptive nature, we all are powerless before an enlarged and unchecked Yetzer HaRa (evil inclination). We join in the negative thinking and speech that another(s) have spoken to us since childhood, we believe these lies and they lead us to affirm our lack of worth-which we try and overcome through overachievement or not engaging to no avail. We affirm the worst aspects of ourselves and of others because it doesn’t require us to rise to the occasion. We join with others in gossip, in trying to win at any and all costs, in bribing admission counselors for our kids to go to the ‘right’ schools, steal intellectual property and attack computer networks so we can know the thoughts of another and use it against them. We are so stuck in our lower selves, in our reptilian brain waves of survival, we are not able to thrive, we are not able to join the winning side-humanity and humane behaviors! This beginning phrase is so positive and I pray Rabbi Heschel is correct!


We are better than our assertions, our affirmations, the groups we join. We can live this by saying no to the delicious pleasure of gossip and stand up for the one being gossiped about. If there is a warning to be given so someone else doesn’t suffer the same harms as you - we must give them. We live this by not settling for the wrong action just ‘because everyone else does’ as my father, z”l, used to say-“if they jump off the bridge are you going to jump too?” We live better than our assertions by changing the inner dialogue we have-no longer buying into our negative self-talk; reminding ourselves of the good, the truth and the fact that we are created in and with goodness, kindness, love, justice, compassion, caring and truth. We do this through a daily practice of seeing the good we do and the good we are able to do, the service we are engaged in and how we can continue and grow our service as well as ask for help from another. We can overcome our baser desires, our lower assertions and replace them with the truth-we can be human and we are human. 


In recovery, we have to let go of old ideas and patterns. As I noted above, the substance is much easier to let go of than the old ideas. We surrender, we allow ourselves to be confronted and defeated by a higher truth as the path of changing our old thoughts. We take stock of ourselves daily to see where/when we are falling back into old patterns and make the necessary adjustments as soon as we can. In recovery, we admit that we are better than our assertions, our old ways and we continue to grow our inner lives and join with groups that are engaged in the same. 


As I have written this, I realize how I have not lived it as much as I want to. I realize that my lower assertions about myself have kept me from doing more and living better. I realize that I have joined with people who were not interested in lifting me up, they wanted to help me stay mired in the lower assertions about me and others that I was in. I have not always given people the benefit of the doubt as we learn in Pirke Avot and I have given myself permission to be stuck. I also know that writing this blog every day is a way of living better than my assertions about myself and people. I know that I have lived in Radical Amazement more and more each day and I continue to believe in change and forgiveness-seeking both for myself and giving forgiveness and belief to another. I affirm today to continue to live better than my mind/negative inclinations lead me to believe I can! Stay safe and God Bless, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 159


“We are guilty of misunderstanding the meaning of existence; we are guilty of distorting our goals and misrepresenting our souls.” (Who is Man  pg 114)


The more we immerse ourselves in this sentence, the more embarrassment we can experience and then the more determined will our transformation and change be. We have a list of goals for what a ‘good life’ looks like that we have inherited, learned, adapted/adopted from history, family, society, etc. So many people live in the ‘if only’ mentality of life. ‘If only’ I had ______, everything would be okay and so many people live only to achieve the ____. Upon ‘arriving’ at their goal, they still feel empty and angry, lonely and tired, hungry and unsatisfied. Yet, we persist in distorting our goals with the lure of the ‘gold’ that flashes before our eyes. We are deceived by the shiny prize that is just out of our reach and, we think we can obtain, only to find out over and over again that the game is rigged, just like the ones at most carnivals. And still, we persist in the delusion and the distorted belief that we can, if we are good enough, lucky enough, etc, eventually achieve these distorted goals.

What is it that causes this? I believe it is a basic lack of awareness and education. We are brought up to believe we ‘can be anything we want to be’ and this is where the distortion begins. While it may be physically possible, intellectually probable that we can choose for ourselves what ‘we want to be’, there is a spiritual component that Rabbi Heschel speaks to often as does Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz in his book Thirteen Petaled Rose, that there is a divine intention, a demand from the Ineffable One that is our true calling and our authentic goal to respond to and achieve. Yet, we are not interested in these ‘spiritual matters’ as evidenced by the truth of how many parents allow their children to end their spiritual education, spiritual training and spiritual understanding at age 13 or younger! We are living in a society where every action is based on achievement, be it as a member of a gang or high society. Our society is so obsessed with optics that we will smile and play kiss/kiss with people we despise, people we have harmed and screwed over, even ask them for favors because our goals are so distorted. “Just win, Baby” was a saying of Al Davis who owned the Oakland Raiders in their heyday. This is the way we set goals today, “just win” no matter what the cost is to our own souls, the soul of another human being, the soul of our community and world-just win-this is the heart of our distortion of our goals. 


We have the opportunity, through this teaching of Rabbi Heschel, to reverse this awful trend. We have the spiritual strength to set and achieve the authentic goals of our soul-kindness, loyalty, truth, compassion, tshuvah, justice, love-our job is to build up our spiritual ‘muscles’ so this way of being, these goals become our default path of life instead of an anomaly. We can and must ask ourselves how we have continued to distort our goals, how we have continued to misrepresent the meaning of our existence from being human to ‘what’s in it for me’. We have to engage in a journey to find the truth of our souls, the true calling God is calling us to and for, the unique need only we can fill and live in these ways, live life out loud in service rather than in self-centeredness. 


Immersing ourselves in Rabbi Heschel’s teaching above is the catalyst to seeking a deeper, richer, more truthful and authentic understanding of our inner life. It is a path to finding harmony with all our parts, it is a gift of self-discovery that allows us to transform success into living a life of meaning, purpose, authenticity and one that enables us to live with at least some of the ‘trappings’ of success, remember having money, power, prestige is not a bad thing if we get them and don’t distort our goals, misrepresent our souls and misunderstand the meaning of our existence! Both of these goals are possible to attain, when we do it with an integrated beingness. 


In recovery, we are confronted with our guilt all the time, which is not to say we live a humiliated bent-over life. On the contrary, our guilt comes from our embarrassment once we become aware of our errors, our distortions, our misrepresentations. We search out our guilt in order to repair, change and hope for a better today/tomorrow. We know that without guilt, we cannot ask for forgiveness and change our behaviors, we know that confronting our self, the person we harmed, and God moves us to change our ways of being so we continue to trudge forward. 


I have been guilty of distortion and misrepresentation. I realize today that I distorted my own status with people. I deceived myself to believe that the relationships I had were not merely transactional, how foolish. I find myself being asked to do things by people who were treacherous to me at my lowest point in the past 33 years, with no acknowledgement of their treachery-in fact they believe they were right to harm me, I had it coming after all. I think about these requests and when I say yes to them, I am saying yes to a calling from God, not these people, I am saying yes to a calling to help a cause I believe in deeply and gave over 33 years to. I realize that I distort my goals when I let pettiness and pride enter into my decision making, when I say no or yes, just to “get even”. This misrepresents my soul. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 158


“We are guilty of misunderstanding the meaning of existence; we are guilty of distorting our goals and misrepresenting our souls.” (Who is Man  pg 114)


Rabbi Heschel, as usual, has put his wisdom and vision on the crux of our problems today, yesterday, tomorrow and forever, “we are guilty of misunderstanding our meaning of existence”. We do not exist to be served by another human being as our slave, our underling. In the face of the racism rampant here in the United States, the rise of authoritarianism across the globe, and Russia’s war with Ukraine to make them his serfs, we are seeing the greatest distortion of, misunderstanding of and crimes of our existence as human beings. While this goes all the way back to the ruling powers in Antiquity, we were given the Bible to help us come back to the meaning of our existence that God created us for. Yet, we continue to indulge in our self-centered, mendacious and self-serving lies and deceptions. 


This sentence is so infuriating and disturbing. We are aware of our guilt, we are aware of our misunderstanding, distortions and misrepresentations we indulge in, some of us revel in; yet we have no desire to stop acting in these ways, all the while preaching the ‘love of god’ and the ‘gospel of jesus’ and ‘this is the path’ etc, I use small letters to denote the idolatry that these mendacious deceivers are engaged in. We see some of the leadership of this nation standing by the Russian leader, like Madison Cawthorn, Marjorie Taylor Greene-defending him and his stance towards an independent and sovereign nation. Others, like “lying Ted Cruz” as the leader of the Republican Party, Donald J Trump calls him, blame this war on President Biden-again craftily absolving Putin of any responsibility! How ridiculous and how deceptive, how misunderstanding of the meaning of their existence as representatives of and elected officials of the government of the United States of America! Patrick Henry is quoted as saying: “Give me liberty or give me death” understanding the need of all people to be free; some of our elected officials twist this quote to ‘give me money, Vlad and I will give you a pass’ and/or ‘how do I not be responsible and blame my enemies, not my opponents, my enemies?’ Mitt Romney, a person of faith that is real and something he does his best to live by, said: “Vladimir Putin is responsible for what is happening in Ukraine, not Mr. Biden”. Here is a man who, at least for now, seems to have regained his understanding of the meaning of his existence: TO SERVE.


The meaning of our existence is linked to our need for and being needed by God to make our corners of the world a little better than they were. The meaning of our existence is tied to our ability to engage with another human being(s) and honor their divine image, ask for their assistance and never take them for granted. Understanding the meaning of our existence is shown by the way we free the captive, treat the widow, the orphan, the poor, and the stranger. Understanding the meaning of our existence is measured in the ways we let go of our eye disease of prejudice, our egotistical belief that only we are right, my way or the highway, our honed skill of blame and shame of another so we do not have to look at ourselves. Understanding the meaning of our existence is to live Rabbi Heschel’s words from Man is Not Alone, pg. 296 “the deepest wisdom man can attain is to know that his destiny is to aid, to serve.” When we live these words, we will truly understand the meaning of our existence, the meaning of the existence of all human beings, and treat one another with the dignity, kindness and love that God treats all of us with. 


In recovery, we are constantly seeking to repair the damage from our misunderstanding of our existence and the harm this brought. At the same time, we seek a better understanding of what our task is, how do we best  “aid, serve” today and with whom. In recovery, we reach out to people who are suffering, offer them a hand and a lifeline, attract them by the ways we are living and pray you all join us soon:) While we are still understanding, while we are still a work in progress, we know we can and must give aid and service to anyone who asks in sincerity. In recovery, the search for understanding is a daily adventure and one we revel in. 


I am still understanding the meaning of my existence. I have done well to serve many people through my work as the Founding Rabbi of Beit T’Shuvah, I have done well to serve many as a human being in the world and, in this next chapter, I am once again having to reawaken to a new way to serve and to aid. This daily blog is part of my search for understanding. I speak with many people over the week and these conversations help me deepen my understanding of the meaning of my existence. The only way I can engage in this understanding, however, is through action. I have found my pain stopped me from being in action for a while and I am back in action. I also have found that going backwards doesn’t help me nor anyone else. I am not interested in going over and rehashing old experiences. I am committed to seeing fresh and new, living in radical amazement each day as this helps me to stay present with the meaning of my existence today. I am grateful for the past experiences which gave me understanding and I use them to engage in a more meaningful life today. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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