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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 194

“Man cannot think of himself as human without being conscious of his indebtedness. Thus it is not a mere feeling, but rather a constitutive feature of being human. To eradicate it would be to destroy what is human in man.” (Who is Man pg. 108)


As I ponder these words of Rabbi Heschel, I am more and more amazed at their timelessness, the painful rebuke they engender, their life-affirming experiences and the deep commitment Religion, faith, spiritual disciplines have to being human. Every authoritarian and their followers do not believe in honoring their indebtedness although they are conscious of it. In fact, they are so hateful, spiteful, blaming, destructive precisely because of their dishonoring their indebtedness and all of these inhuman actions are ways of hiding, running, denying their own indebtedness. Hence, the painful rebuke to them and to all of us, painful because for Rabbi Heschel to write them he must have been so pained by the condition of humanity at that moment as many of us are at this moment and painful for people of conscious, people of depth who had to see the ways they hid from this truth and painful to the people who these words speak to directly because they had/have to either see their truth and change or deny harder and double down, correct Mr. Putin, Mr. McCarthy, et al. So many of us run from and hide from our indebtedness through the ‘protection’ of wealth, power, racism, anti-semitism, and/or the support of the people who engage in such acts. I am thinking of Rabbi Heschel’s statement in the book Insecurity of Freedom,  where he defines prejudice as “an eye disease, a cancer of the soul”. The only way we can arrive at this “eye disease” is to hide from, run from, and/or deny our indebtedness. The denial of our indebtedness is also a denial of our own humanity, our commonality, the divine need we are created to fill and the denial of the humanity of another person through our treatment of them as either a servant to/for us or a utilitarian tool/partner for us. 


We have faced this dilemma from time immemorial, every generation has had to wrestle with this issue of being human or being homo sapiens. Every generation has had homo sapiens who have eradicated or tried to their consciousness of indebtedness and brainwashed a large cadre, sometimes the majority, of people to go along with them and eradicated their own consciousness of indebtedness. I see this in all fundamentalist faiths, movements, any and all groups who are ‘all or nothing’, who refuse to see grey and nuance, who continue to be victims and, thereby victimize another with impunity, etc. Whether all the way on the right or the left, whether ‘religious’ or ‘secular,’ all of these ways of being deny indebtedness and are just covers, just ways to hide from and still ‘look’ like one is honoring their indebtedness. Blow on these groups and homo sapiens and one can see the hardness of their hearts and the cancer afflicting their souls. 


There is a solution to all of these societal ills. BE HUMAN! Acknowledge our indebtedness and ask for help to make payments. Help comes from the Ineffable One, from our fellow human beings, our family, etc. This help also comes in many forms, one of which is recovering one’s passion and discovering one’s purpose. We cannot repay the debt without passion and purpose because we are created in and with passion as well as for to fulfill a need that no one else has fulfilled before-not for lack of trying, rather because we have a unique purpose that no one else could ever know nor ever will. We are not competing nor do we have to compare, we only have to repay. We do not have to be powerful and rich nor do we have to be weak and poor/needy, we only have to live gratefully and with wonder as our normal state of being.


In recovery, we keep peeling back the onion skin, the membrane that covers our hearts, souls and minds and prevents us from acknowledging, being conscious of our indebtedness and begin the repayment of this debt. We do this through prayer, meditation, inventory, amends, asking for help and in a myriad of other ways. We know our propensity to deny, run from, hide from our indebtedness, as well as blame someone else when we ‘fail’ to meet the expectations of our false self and the false selves of others. So, we are constantly engaged in activities that cause us to face our self, our true self, repay our debt and no longer live as a victim, no longer blame another for our inadequacies, no longer need a bad guy to make us look good. 


I am, of course, writing about my experiences and self in all of these paragraphs. I see myself, and hopefully you see yourself, in each of these and all the other paragraphs I have written because Rabbi Heschel’s teachings, wisdom are about the human condition which we all experience. I have been blind at times to my indebtedness and I have been painfully rebuked by God, by the people that love me and this has been used by people who don’t love me to shame me, defame me, deny my rights as a human being. Because of the pain of this experience, I became blind to my indebtedness and stopped repaying for a moment. I believed the lie that I was irrelevant, my vision was no longer valid and my ways of being were no longer wanted. I because frozen in place, I was a person without a home, a teacher with no classroom, a Rabbi without a congregation. None of this was true and I bought into these lies and I suffered as did the people I could help. These blogs are my path to repayment, 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 193

“Man cannot think of himself as human without being conscious of his indebtedness. Thus it is not a mere feeling, but rather a constitutive feature of being human. To eradicate it would be to destroy what is human in man.” (Who is Man pg. 108)


Here again, Rabbi Heschel is discerning the difference between being our classification of Homo sapiens and being human. We keep confusing these two ways of relating to our self and another self. In every era, this confusion leads to hatred, strife, war, genocide, riots, etc. As we are commemorating the LA Uprising today and yesterday we commemorated Yom HaShoah, it seems like a good time to stop confusing these two ways of relating to one another and to one’s self. 


The Shoah, the LA Uprising, the massacre in Rwanda, the Ethnic Cleansing of Bosnia, Syria’s chemical warfare against its own citizenry, Putin’s invasion and destruction of the Ukraine, etc all have at their core the misguided belief that being human is the same as being homo sapiens. Rabbi Heschel’s teaching comes to nullify this lie. Would that the perpetrators of these crimes against humanity have been conscious of their indebtedness, none of these desecrations of human life would have happened. While this may seem a little Pollyanna-ish, it is also both a goal to strive for each and every day.

The LA Uprising is not just the riots that occurred after a jury in Simi Valley, Ca. decided to be unconscious of their indebtedness to our Creator to treat “Love thy Neighbor” as a colorblind command, as a way of seeking righteousness, holiness and justice for all people, in other words, be human towards everyone regardless of race, color, creed, etc. The Shoah, Ethnic Cleansing in Bosnia, Massacre in Rwanda, all because the people in power believed as homo sapiens they were the ones ‘owed’, they believed the people who they were supposed to serve actually “owed them” and were indebted to the them and this gave them the right to slaughter their opponents, potential opponents, make enemies so no one would see their incompetence, their selfishness and their rape and theft of the countries they were leading. Assad and Putin believe the same, everyone owes them because they are ‘strong men’ and doing so, each of these killers have called themselves human beings while actually just being a member of homo sapiens. 


Many of us are afraid to admit to ourselves as well as anyone else how indebted we are, we are taught from an early age to be self-sufficient, self-reliant.  Yet, this is not the self of being human, this is the self of being a member of homo sapiens. We are taught, some of us anyway, to be grateful for a kindness and we are taught that needing something, being indebted will only give someone else power over us. EUREKA, this is it! Society is afraid to give God, the Ineffable One, the Universe, credit for creating the world, giving us life, sustaining us, etc because then society would have to acknowledge that WE OWE! We are so engaged in power struggles; ruling class v rest of the people, money wars-is the golden rule really the one with the gold rules, male versus female, white versus people of color, my country against your country, ad nauseam. Yet, we can stop all of these false ways people get a sense of security, we can end the senseless hatred of one another, we can bring about the Messiah through being “conscious of” our indebtedness. This is the solution, while simple, so difficult to achieve. 



Religious people may pray to God for guidance and, at the same time, not acknowledge their indebtedness because their prayers are petitionary, not repaying. While it is good to pray for another human being, I hear Rabbi Heschel’s words calling me to be aware and conscious of my/your indebtedness so the prayers for another are also a commitment to help heal another human being. Prayer is not ‘get me a new car’ or ‘make another subservient to me’; prayer, in Hebrew, is to look inside oneself, to do an inventory of our daily living and see where we need to improve, and where we need to repair, where we need to return and where we need to use the wisdom, understanding and knowledge we are endowed with more and how to enhance our being human! 



I have been conscious of my indebtedness prior to my being able to identify it, prior to even being able to speak it, and I ran from it for a long time because when I tried to repay it as a child/teenager, I was ridiculed, made fun of and shunned. “Why do you want to hang out with that colored kid?”, “will you do this for me and I will do something for you-ha, ha” and other such experiences pulled me from what I knew to be true-repay the debt-into a life of misery for myself and everyone else around me! My recovery has been based on my awareness of I OWE. I owe God for sustaining me, I owe my parents for raising me, I owe my siblings for their love and their staying with me through the terrible times I caused, I owe my daughter for her allowing me to return, I owe my wife for her steadfast love and support in the face of ridicule from others. I owe my teachers and friends for their learning and wisdom, I owe my community for their taking our learning and doing great things with them. I am constantly aware of my indebtedness and it makes me BE human a little better 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 192

“Indebtedness is given with our very being. It is not derived from conceptions; it lives in us as an awareness before it is conceptualized or clarified in content. It means having a task, being called.” (Who Is Man pg. 108)


As I immerse myself in Rabbi Heschel’s words above, I realize the power and freedom our awareness of our indebtedness brings! Being indebted means I don’t own anything, everything is a partnership with me repaying the ‘loan’. I don’t even ‘own’ my life. As the last sentence above states, our indebtedness “means having a task, being called.” Everything being ‘on loan’ to us enables us to stop guarding it against someone else taking it, destroying it, etc and allows us to focus on growing our call, enhancing our task, preserving and enhancing our corner for the next person/generation to find the garden we have tended a little better than how we found it. 


Not ‘owning’, knowing we will never ‘own’ our homes doesn’t stop us from having a mortgage and paying on it. It doesn’t stop us from buying a car and making payments on it. So too is how I am understanding Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom above, I do not ‘own’ my life, I cannot ‘do my own thing’ with no regard to anyone else and/or to the Ineffable One. This way of being is so antithetical to Western/Greek philosophy that most people will find this outrageous and dismiss my words out of hand.


Fulfilling our task, responding to the call are two ways of repaying our indebtedness. Yet, many of our leaders, parents, employers, students, employees, children, feel no such need. Listening to the leaders of our world like Putin, McCarthy, Trump, MBS, Kushner, it is all about them, it is all about what they want, it is all about what they can amass and it is all about power over people, it is all about what they own. This is not the path of faith, this is not the path of Godliness, this is not the way to respond to the call nor fulfill the task. Our political leaders have been entrusted with a great responsibility and, instead, they believe their position entitles them to Mistreat the stranger, Uncare of the poor and the needy, be more Pharaoh-like and celebrate the ways of the Egyptians! All while wrapping themselves in some false version of the New Testament, all while bastardizing the kindness, love, justice, mercy and compassion of Jesus into Jesus as the Lion, as the powerful. Bastardizing the Hebrew Bible by calling God, vengeful, angry, punishing instead of recognizing how much God cares about the stranger, the poor, the needy, how much God cares about “dwelling among us”! Yet, these leaders and so many others like them continue to prove Hannah Arendt’s belief in the “banality of evil”. And we, the people, are not powerless to stop them. We, the people, have to put an end to their mendacity, to our self-deception and to the ‘“banality of evil” in our own midst and in our own self. 


Not “owning” extends to parents and children-both have to be grateful for one another instead of needing the child to make the parents dreams come true and for the parents to be the ‘parents I want you to be’. Teaching our children to be self-sufficient, raising their souls along with their minds, bodies, and emotions is a commandment in the Hebrew Bible, elucidated further in the Talmud. Seeing each child as a gift and we repay  our indebtedness by raising each child “according to their own understanding” as we are taught in Proverbs, not according to what we want and/or the way we want. Children as they age, need to understand parents do the best job they can and are themselves dealing with issues of inadequacy, ego, fear, hearing voices in their heads that are not the call nor the task-rather the voices of society, parents, peers-that cause them to compare and despair. Seeing parenthood as a repayment of our indebtedness, giving our children agency from a young age, preparing them for the difficulties of life and teaching them resilience, helping them heal the Hole in their Soul means we have to do the same for ourselves.


In recovery, we recognize our indebtedness upon engaging in the 4th step of AA, a searching and fearless inventory. By taking our own inventory, listing liabilities/errors and assets/kindness’, we see and re-experience the moments of repaying our indebtedness and the moments of incurring more debt and digging a deeper hole for us to climb out of. In recovery we climb out of the hole of debt, literally and figuratively, one day at a time. 


I had the realization that being indebted means not owning yesterday in the car with Harriet. It is freeing for me, it is also invigorating and exhilarating for me. This idea goes hand in hand with T’Shuvah. Once I have done T’Shuvah I can’t be (should not be) reminded of my past errors, according to the laws of T’Shuvah. While people continue to remind me and try and control me with my past errors, even going so far as to lie about my actions, I am realizing the true freedom of being indebted and not owning my failures past the time of my rectifying them. Once I have done the inner repair, the outer repair and the asking for forgiveness, I do not own the negativity anymore. Once I have finished the helping, I do not own the person I have helped either. While I have expected gratitude from some, I know now that no one needs to be grateful to me for the help I have given, it is my repaying my indebtedness and God is grateful and I am grateful and humbled to be able to make a payment. 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 191

“Indebtedness is given with our very being. It is not derived from conceptions; it lives in us as an awareness before it is conceptualized or clarified in content. It means having a task, being called.” (Who Is Man pg. 108)


Yesterday I spoke about the exhausting nature of this awareness for people who are unable/unwilling to accept the awareness, have had this awareness ‘beaten’ out of them by life experiences and another person. Today, I want to speak about the exhilarating aspect of this awareness. Upon realization of one’s indebtedness, we are able to understand our discontent, our need to ‘make something happen’, need to prove to ourselves that our soul’s call is real, the niggling of incompleteness comes to show us that perfection is never achieved and our job is to hear the call, fulfill the task to the best of our ability and not be stopped by other people’s prejudices, other people’s desire to control and our own need to ‘fit in’. 


Becoming aware of our indebtedness is a personal experience, I believe. While we can and must have group consciousness, we must have a Torah, Constitution, Spiritual Principles that guide us and remind us of our debt, true awareness is an individual experience. Just as spirituality cannot be plagiarized, taken from someone else, exploit another to practice the exact same way and have the exact same experience as you, so too awareness of our indebtedness is a unique experience for each person. My indebtedness is different from yours, what I owe no one else ever has nor ever will. My debt cannot be paid by anyone else either nor can yours. This is another exhilarating experience for us all. Awareness of our unique indebtedness gives each of us the opportunity to pay our debt, know that our call is a singular one to and for just us and cannot be compared to anyone else’s fulfillment nor can we compare our way to anyone else’s. There is no competition to be won because our ‘race’ is a singular one; between me and the universe. 


Becoming aware of our indebtedness and letting go of competition and comparison gives us the chance to thrive and grow into our full selves, not a caricature of our self that impresses or offends another, no more needing to prove our self ‘the best’. No more worrying about the “optics” of our living, no more needing ‘political correctness’ for show, no more racism, anti-semitism, hatred, even conquering and dividing become unnecessary. Our awareness of our uniqueness, our leaving behind the societal norm of comparing and competing, our realization that in fulfilling one’s unique call and task there is a need to rely on another(s) doing the same with their unique task and call because we cannot do it all, we are not expected to do everything and we learn to collaborate, share and relate to one another as people, we see each other as partners instead of rivals, and we create the community that the Torah and every other spiritual text/discipline envisions. How exciting and exhilarating is this!


Yet, with all of this exhilaration, all of this spiritual excitement, so many people are more comfortable living in ‘optics’, living a life that looks good on the outside and their inner life is one of misery. There are so many people who still feel the need to destroy the call and the task of another just to feel good about themselves, even those who have created something themselves seem to enjoy crushing the task of another because of comparison and competition. How sad! And we have to feel sad for these people, such unfortunates, because of how stuck in their self they are, being unaware of their indebtedness and/or being ashamed of their awareness of their indebtedness. We who are aware have to have pathos, Divine compassionate pity, for them and no longer fear nor have disdain for them; rather pray for them and put them out of our daily life-even if we have to see them. A difficult task and doable with our exhilarating awareness of our unique indebtedness, call and task. 


In recovery, we engage in this awareness, listen to and for the call and work to fulfill our task each and every day. We do a daily check-in and see what we have done well and what we need to repair from the day before and we engage in spreading more kindness than hatred, more collaboration than competition and more cooperation than comparison. 


I am exhilarated by my indebtedness. I have always felt this ‘owing’ nagging at me and, for years, I tried to escape it through alcohol, money, criminality, etc. Finally, 35.5 years ago, I could no longer run from it, I have to turn and face it. Over these years, the lessons of my father have returned to comfort me, guide me, and, sometimes, harm me. I say harm me, because I inherited his sense of loyalty and morality and when it is offended to be reactive. However, his comfort and guidance has enhanced my understanding of my indebtedness, he taught me before I could understand because he knew his time was short, about being aware and hearing the call and the task. He taught me to care for the stranger and the needy, he taught me to see everyone as equally human and in need of kindness and not a threat. Reflecting on these lessons and putting them into action in these past 35+ years is exhilarating because it connects me to my immediate past and to all of humanity. To the people who need(ed) to crush my call, my awareness I say how sorry I feel for you, it is truly sad you are so stuck and need to crush me to feel good about you. 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 190


“Indebtedness is given with our very being. It is not derived from conceptions; it lives in us as an awareness before it is conceptualized or clarified in content. It means having a task, being called.” (Who Is Man pg. 108)


Continuing to immerse ourselves in these three sentences is an exhausting and infusing endeavor. Immersing ourselves in them causes us to see our own indebtedness, of course, and to see how we have run away from it. When we truly look at the ways, subtle and not so subtle, we have run from our “awareness before it is conceptualized” we can see why we have felt so tired, rundown, depressed, anxious, etc throughout our living. We are afraid of the debt, we are sure the holder of the debt is going to ask us to do things we don’t want to do and we are going to be stuck. So, like Jonah, we run away, we deny the awareness in us and we seek refuge in a myriad of ways, fake love, work, vices, devices, etc. 


The ways and time we spend running away from our awareness exhausts us because it is wasted energy and it is unproductive energy. While many people have created wonderful works when they were running away, they became jaded, entitled, and tired without acknowledging that they were paying off their indebtedness, they were answering the call and performing the task they were created for. We have all seen the people who are ‘too cool for school’ because of their ‘successes’ and how they forget the people who helped them along the way, they take most, if not all, the credit for their achievements and believe they should be lauded, adored, etc. This is exhausting for these individuals and it is certainly exhausting for the people who serve/work for them. 


Some professional athletes, on the other hand, point to the sky as an acknowledgement that their success is not only theirs, they have had much help for people and from the Ineffable One. This gesture, while seemingly religious, actually, to me, shows an awareness of our debt, an awareness of our call and both thank you and I’m doing the best I can right now response to the call/task, awareness of my debt by using my talents/gifts in the best way I can in this moment. Awareness and acknowledgement do not mean fulfillment and completion, rather they promote progress rather than perfection. If the Ineffable One wanted us to perform each and every task with perfection, the Ineffable One would have sent an Angel, not a human. Part of our awareness of our indebtedness is an awareness that we will probably never repay it in full nor are we expected to! Our task is to keep paying on it with our deeds, answering  the call and the task in our own unique manner, fulfilling the divine need we were created for and treating one another with kindness, justice, mercy, truth and love. 


I want to acknowledge some people who have used their success to help people succeed. Bill and Melinda Gates, Lauren Powell Jobs, MacKenzie Scott, David Geffen, Steven Spielberg, and many other celebrities and business people who have used their wealth to set up foundations to give money to people in need and/or organizations who provide direct service to those in need. A pair of people whom I have the honor and pleasure of knowing, Andre Young and Jimmy Iovine have created a school at USC to promote the integration of business, art, and technology with an emphasis on underserved young people, and are creating a school within the LAUSD system to promote learning for young people who have been turned off by the ‘traditional’ educational system. Dr. Dre and Jimmy have continued to use their success to serve other people, as they have for many years, whether it is an artist that needs guidance, a young person with an idea who is asking questions, a friend in need, young people they have never and may never meet, these two spirits are responding to the awareness of their indebtedness with a rousing Here I am!


In recovery, we clear out the noise in our heads that bends us towards entitlement and listen more carefully for the voice telling us how to repay our debt. We know we are indebted because we were so lost for so long and to be found is truly “Amazing Grace”! We are recovering, in many ways, from being deaf to the call, being recalcitrant in fulfilling our task and in hiding from our awareness of our debt. 


I realize how much more, in this next chapter, I have to do, how much interest has accumulated on my indebtedness to God, to people in general, to my friends and family. I am always aware “I owe” as my friend and teacher, Glenn Goss, z”l, used to say and I am grateful for and to the people who study Rabbi Heschel with me and help me learn more and more. I am grateful and indebted to all my teachers over the years, especially the people I learned with as colleagues and as Rabbi for the insights and depth of knowledge you give me. I am committed to continue to hear the new and maybe different tasks that I am being called to, I see how I got stuck in one task and thought it was forever, being a little willfully blind to the myriad of ways I am being called to repay the debt and fulfill the divine need I was created for. Remembering that the Ineffable One gives me the breath of life, the oxygen to continue breathing, helps me fulfill the call and repay my debt with ‘I get to’ rather than ‘I have to’. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 189


“Indebtedness is given with our very being. It is not derived from conceptions; it lives in us as an awareness before it is conceptualized or clarified in content. It means having a task, being called.” (Who Is Man pg. 108)


The awareness Rabbi Heschel is speaking of is, for many, the most disturbing aspect of living and, for many, the most exhilarating aspect of living; a true both/and. We are aware of a debt, we are aware of something that we have to do and, when we are young, we can’t explain it, we can’t clarify it precisely because it is not conceptualized. Every human being is born with the awareness Rabbi Heschel is validating for us. This is the disturbing part of living: “I know there is something I am supposed to be doing, I know there is something more than just serving myself and taking from my surroundings, yet I can’t seem to put my finger on it” is an experience many people have. I believe this to be the awareness Rabbi Heschel is teaching us about. 


Another disturbing aspect of the truth Rabbi Heschel is reminding/teaching us about is that as we are maturing intellectually, spiritually and emotionally enough to begin to conceptualize and clarify our debt, society comes along and reminds us of the ME way of living. Rather than cooperation and consideration, we are worshiping those who compete and compare, we celebrate and make celebrities out of people who can annihilate another on the battlefield of commerce, academia, science, all aspects of life. We are taught from a young age to disregard the foundation of our spiritual being, pay no attention to “Love thy Neighbor”, you are an individual first, last and always and people are around to help you gain your proper status, not to be helped themselves. We have servants and treat them like help instead of as human beings who serve us to make our lives better and we have to do all we can to make their lives better. 


While many people may go to Church, Temple, the Mosque, the Ashram, etc for daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly sustenance, they are not going to deepen their spiritual connection nor mature their spiritual core/essence. They are going either out obligation to family, tradition-we have always gone on the Jewish High Holidays, or fear/as a hedge-just in case God exists I have some points with Her/Him. Many children go to school at their religious institutions as an adjunct to their secular schooling because their parents went and they want them confirmed, bar/bat mitzvah’d, etc. Yet, we allow our children to see the hypocrites we are when we send them to learn and we don’t engage in the learning with them. We give them a reason to kill the dawning conceptualizations and clarity that spiritual learning, maturing bring by not following the very lessons, truths, ways of being that our children are learning. In fact, in some cases, even the religious schools have changed to give the children less meaning and more reasons to eschew the life-giving, life-affirming tenets and paths to awareness, conceptualization and clarity that are nudging, niggling, bothering, disturbing us at any given moment. 


We are in desperate need of change. We are in desperate need of spiritual wisdom learning. The teachers are here, the tenets and paths are right in front of our eyes, read anything by Rabbi Heschel, Martin Buber, John Pavlovitz, Martin Luther King Jr., Adin Steinsaltz, et al. Listen to and study with Rev Najuma Smith, Rev Mark Whitlock Jr., Rabbi Ed Feinstein, Rabbi Roly Matalon, Imam Jihad Turk and so many others in every city, state, country. We need to return to a life of meaning and purpose, we need to acknowledge our debt, we need to repay the gift of life with action. 


In recovery, we begin to relearn the tenets we threw away in favor of ‘the good life’. We are realizing the good life is available only when we are in the process of awareness and repayment of our indebtedness. We seek to serve and we seek to join with another(s) as well as engaging in paths that lead us to spiritual maturity, spiritual growth and spiritual wholeness. In recovery we “practice these principles in all our affairs” so we can “trudge the road of happy destiny”.


I am embarrassed at my dismissal of my indebtedness when I was younger. I am saddened by the awareness and joy I threw away because I was angry, scared, felt misunderstood and so totally alone in the world after my father died when I was 14. I loved the teachings of Torah, the joy of prayer and the discussions with my father about these principles and, then, suddenly he was gone and the light of my life, the leader of the path to me was gone. I remember trying to keep it alive, I remember the war within me, that still rages at times, between my soul and my ‘well-being’, rationalization and knowing, entitled and indebted that had no mediator, no guide, no one to help me navigate it because I thought, who else would ever understand me. So, I tried to kill the conceptions, the awareness and the clarity because they were too painful and didn’t fit in with what I erroneously thought was my obligation. I am with that 14, 15 year old boy right now and letting him know his awareness has grown, his spirit has matured and he was correct and on the right path till he understandably gave into the mendacity of society and his own self-deceptions. 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 188

“Indebtedness is given with our very being. It is not derived from conceptions; it lives in us as an awareness before it is conceptualized or clarified in content. It means having a task, being called.” (Who Is Man pg. 108)


Having had the Sabbath to ponder these words of wisdom and disturbance, I am more convinced than ever at the need for us to study, immerse ourselves, engage with Rabbi Heschel’s teachings in-depth. That he is not learned in most Rabbinical Schools, most Jewish Day Schools, is atrocious to me. That Rabbi Heschel’s teachings and ways of being engaged in the world, in the Bible, in spirituality that welcomes people of all faiths and creeds, is not the way of being for most Jews and non-Jews is insane to me. And, I understand people’s reluctance to engage with him, to feel him and his words deep in their soul, to have their minds overcome with these truths would mean to be in a constant state of disturbance. It is not a way for the faint-hearted, it is the way for people who want to grow their inner life through meditation and study, through prayer and deeds. Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom and demands, to me they are demands, cause us to never be in a state of nirvana, inner peace-rather they constantly challenge us, they are pointing out the deep problems of how to live well and together in harmony and strife. This writing is not just for people who are in recovery, it is for people who want to live better, more aware lives.


The truth of the first sentence is an example of Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom that is disturbing and, at first blush, makes no sense. “I didn’t ask to be born” many people say when parents, teachers, friends, family remind us of our obligations. “Who are you to tell me what to do, it’s a free country” is another such refrain. Yet, Rabbi Heschel is telling us that upon entering the world from the womb, we have a debt to repay. This is a marvelous thought to me. We are born, our very beingness is a loan to the world as well as to us and we have to find “our home base” to repair, repave, to enhance and chisel away the stone to reveal the sculpture; in doing so, we are repaying the debt we have for being alive. Writing about this makes me realize Rabbi Heschel’s view of the preciousness of life, the joy of living, the need to repay and the awe of indebtedness even more than I have previously. 


While most of us do not want to be held responsible for our errors, we are even less desirous of being help responsible for our gifts, for our talents, for the divine need we are created to fulfill. We are seeing this in our politics with McCarthy and McConnell kissing the ring of Trump all the while knowing the danger he is to our freedom and our country. We also see it in the ways of people like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, who have done some pretty awesome things in our lifetime and rather than accept the praise and the dollars with humility, they have decided they know it all and can do what they want when they want. We also know of people who are constantly complaining about what they don’t have and how bad it is for them and how no one can understand them, etc,-sometimes with, as my grandmother uses to say, two loaves of bread under their arms. These are people who see being owed by the world, by their families and are perpetual victims. Rather than see their indebtedness, they experience life as being owed. We see this in the 2nd/3rd generations of the financially wealthy and we see this with the 2nd/3rd generations of the financially poor. We do not see this in the descendants of the those who are engaged spiritually and morally in the world, we do not see this in the descendants of those who are raised with meaning, purpose and a knowledge that their destiny is “to aid, to serve” as Rabbi Heschel teaches. “Indebtedness is given with our very being” is a view of life that is uplifting, enthralling, exciting, engaging, enlightening for those who believe that “you matter” is more than a political, advertising slogan. For those of us who believe that each person matters, beginning with our selves, “you matter” informs each and every deed we do, every breath we take, every inventory we make at the end of each day. “You matter” is another way of saying: “we owe” and we are determined to repay as much of the debt that being alive is that we can. 


In recovery, we are aware of our debt, hence our commitment to “practice these principles in all our affairs”. We stop living situational ethics and we live ethically in all of our affairs, our ethics no longer change given the personal situation, the personal gain, rather, even at the cost to ourselves we refuse to create more debt for our self and we refuse to create more damage in the world and in our own inner life. 


Over the past two years, I have gone back and forth with this truth. Being exiled for my mistake and watching what I created with a lot of help be slowly torn down hurt me and in hurt I was unable to remind myself that I still owe, that I am able to repay the debt of life to God and to God’s creations. I kept helping and I kept being available as well as forgetting at times that not only do I owe, I also am capable of still repaying and finding the next chapter is the path to continue doing this. Writing this blog for over 31 weeks and the blog of the Prophets for 40+ weeks is one way of repaying the debt for me. Continuing to work with people who are in need and offer wisdom, guidance, an ear is another way of my repaying the debt. I am seeking more ways and being more consistent. I know the way out of hurt is acceptance and the way to repay is to serve. 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 187


“Indebtedness is given with our very being. It is not derived from conceptions; it lives in us as an awareness before it is conceptualized or clarified in content. It means having a task, being called.” (Who Is Man pg. 108)


Rabbi Heschel, once again, describes the struggle between what our soul/inner life knows and what the world/society demands. Society wants people to owe the leaders, owe the rich, be grateful one has a job, etc. Society wants everyone to think their lives are dependent upon the graciousness, benevolence of the people in power, think of the Kings and Queens of old and the Authoritarians of now. Because of our self-deceptions, because of the mendacity of those in power, because of the need to be deceived, which we discussed earlier, human beings buy the wrong concepts, they are paying on their debt to the ‘wrong’ entity!


Indebtedness is not to any one person or thing, we do not owe our lives to our parents, to our friends, to mentors, etc, as I am understanding Rabbi Heschel today. We are indebted to the Ineffable One, to the “prime mover”, for our life. It is part of our spiritual and emotional DNA. In fact, as I am writing this today, it strikes me that our spiritual maladies and, possibly, much of what is termed ‘mental illness’ may just be the outward manifestations of the inner war between what our souls know and what society is trying to sell us, what our parents are demanding from us, etc. Indebted to people causes us great anxiety and we worry about what it will cost us in the long run. 


There are people who lend “hard money” also known as loan sharks. They charge exorbitant interest and are very harsh in their collection techniques. We call them criminals. Why then, do we not condemn people for the emotional and spiritual blackmail, the emotional and spiritual exorbitant “interest” they charge when they help someone else? Why are they called leaders, parents, bosses, non-profit board members, etc and these behaviors are accepted as ‘business as usual’? We see in our current political state that any bill to help the poor, the needy, the stranger is met with an uproar from one side of the aisle and these same people rush to help the powerful, the rich and friend from overseas who can contribute to their hold on power! Conversely, we see the people on the other side of the aisle who want to help the needy, the poor, the stranger want to punish the rich, successful, people with over the top taxes, regulations, etc. When a person can be fired just because they speak the truth and a person can collect Worker’s Compensation because they screwed up on the job (like being under the influence while working in a treatment center) we are not living lives of indebtedness as Rabbi Heschel is speaking about, we are living “owing our soul to the Company Store”. This is what I am calling spiritual and emotional blackmail, extortion and is criminal in its very nature. 


We need to say NO to this co-opting of spiritual principles by society, people in power in every level of existence. We have to say NO to this emotional and spiritual blackmail and extortion by the few to control the many. We have to say NO to the pull of our rational minds to go along to get along and say YES to the call of truth, the call of our souls. Doing this will lessen the existential pain we all experience, it will allow us to address the true pain and joy of living and will keep us focused on purpose and passion.

In recovery, we constantly acknowledge our debt to God, to the Universe and seek to make a payment on this debt daily. We know our debt because we engage in a spiritual and moral inventory daily to see where we have missed the mark and what we need to do to repair our errors along with seeing where we have hit the mark and how we can enhance and grow these attributes. 


I am guilty of making people ‘pay their debt’. In looking back, I realize the majority of time was for the person to ‘get right’ with God and themselves for their minimizing the debt they owed. I do believe when we accept help we take on a debt to help another person, ie pay it forward, we are part of the great ‘reciprocity of generosity’ which Rabbi Jonathan Omer-man taught me means we will receive random acts of generosity from the Universe not necessarily from the person we have been generous to. I also know that I have succumbed to the demands of people to “owe them” and each time I have ‘paid them back’ it was never enough. I have experienced people being so distraught over ‘owing a debt’ to another person for their life-saving, life-affirming, life-helping actions that they have to then destroy the person who helped them out of fear, embarrassment and guilt. One young man told me years ago that, now that he was successful, he did not come around to Beit T’Shuvah or to see me because he was disgusted with himself that he needed the help! To anyone who feels my demand for them to ‘pay their debt of being helped’ was personal, I am truly sorry. I believe it was in the service of the greater good of my/our mission and when/if it wasn’t I humbly ask for your forgiveness. 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 186

“The world is such that in its face one senses owingness rather than ownership. The world is such that in sensing its presence one must be responsive as well as responsible. (Who is Man pg.108)


Responsive and responsible seem like two peas in a pod so I am wondering about Rabbi Heschel’s phrasing: “one must be responsive as well as responsible. I am thinking about how they can be separate and I am understanding his message a little clearer. We can be responsible for oneself and not responsive to the needs of another. We can think we are being responsible to our family, friends, employers by showing up, doing our best and moving on, yet we may not be responsive to the moment in front of us. This seems to be a great challenge for many people; being both responsible and responsive. We hear, often, why it is ‘not my fault’ or as I used to say to Pauline Ledeen, z”l, when she visited me in County Jail; “you don’t understand, Pauline, I don’t need any help, they will realize who I am and their mistake and I will be set free”. We often blame another person without even thinking about it, it is almost an automatic response, even children do this-pointing one finger away from themselves while having three pointed towards themselves without realizing it. 


We hear the two political parties blame the other  party for all of the ills that are affecting our country at any given time with no claim of responsibility on their part. We have heard our former President blame everyone else for his loss in the last election, we have watched him take no responsibility for what happened during the Covid-19 Crisis while he was in the White House and has continued to influence people to this day, and he is being considered a candidate in 2024! 


Communities blame their leaders and the ‘people in charge’ for whatever is going wrong. Sports teams fire the managers/coaches and/or front office staff rather than be responsible for their part in whatever is going awry. We are seeing a resurgence of blame, shame and irresponsibility in our society today, look at Putin blaming Ukraine for his invasion, look at the ways we want to have some moral superiority/moral high-ground over another person so we are unable to admit our part in whatever went wrong and, in some circumstances, unable to own our part in whatever went right! There are people who are afraid to admit being responsible for success because they are afraid doing this makes them targets for another to blame when it isn’t perfect! 

Yet, even when we are being responsible, we may not be responsive. When a parent is working a lot to meet their financial obligations, to pay for private school for their kids, to pay for tutors, etc, they are being responsible parents and people applaud them. Yet, they are not necessarily being responsive to the immediate needs, emotional, moral and spiritual, of these same children. I have heard often from parents who cannot understand how their children are not grateful for all they did for them and cannot hear the cry of their kids’ souls, hear the cry of their kids’ hearts, hear the cry of their kids’ words. They have decided the script, they have decided what is best for their children (really what is best for themselves) and they have decided what looks good and right is what is important. Their children, meanwhile, are crying for some real human connection, for some responsiveness to their concerns, some dialogue about what is important to them-not what looks good for their parents-and they get nothing in return except guilt and shaming. 


We have a lot of entitled people in our world, in our country and in our communities-Rabbi Heschel’s words are speaking to those who believe their being ‘responsible adults/kids’ allows them certain privileges and rights above and beyond another person. He is reminding, cajoling, disturbing us to understand that being responsible is only a part, albeit at least 50%part, of the equation-being responsive to the moment and the call, demand, expectation, urgency and mitzvah waiting to be enacted is just as important. In fact,  I hear Rabbi Heschel teaching us that without responsiveness we cannot repay the debt, we cannot be engaged in the Mitzvah that the Ineffable One has put in our path. Being responsive entails being aware of what is going on in us, around us and outside of our circle. It is a statement that we are people of the world who are connected to more than our selfish concerns, we are connected to the concerns of the Ineffable One and responsive to the needs of the Divine, the animal and the human beings in our midst.


In recovery, we live one moment at a time. Without being present in this moment, it is too easy to fall back into old habits and old patterns. We are recovering our integrity, our humanness, our souls that we ‘sold’ for a few trinkets, a few feel good moments, a few recognitions, a few plaques, a few…


I have been responsible and not responsive at times in all of my relationships and I am so sorry. Writing this has made me take stock, do T’Shuvah of the moments I have been too busy being responsible, ‘taking care of me’ to be responsive to the moment I am in! I apologize to Heather, Harriet, Neal, Sheri, in-laws, nieces and nephews, friends and family for my lack of responsiveness and commit to improving in this area. 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 185


“The world is such that in its face one senses owingness rather than ownership. The world is such that in sensing its presence one must be responsive as well as responsible. (Who is Man pg.108)


How do we sense the presence of the world? For many people the world is a dangerous, frightening place to live, going all the way back to Adam and Eve in the Bible. For many people the world is full of mystery, glory and beauty and we have to navigate it carefully. For a few, the world is the Garden of God and we are blessed to be able to tend our corner/plot of God’s Garden, while we will have some fallow years, the abundance, the connection, the responsibility and the ability to respond lift us up and fill our beings with joy, sadness, love, and truth. 


When we fear the world, when the world is a dangerous place to live, we believe that the world owes us, hence the many entitled victims we encounter. This is NOT to say that people are not victimized, we all are at one point or another in our lives, it is to say, however, when we fear the world, when the danger outweighs the mystery, we tend to believe that we are owed something rather than our owingness as Rabbi Heschel is speaking about above. There are people who have destroyed another person’s work because they ‘felt assaulted’ by the other person telling them the truth. There are people who are feel entitled to sue a company, a person, because the person screwed up and wants to blame another rather than being responsible for their errors-think Donald Trump and his minions/followers like….


Adam and Eve did not know how to handle the knowledge they obtained from eating the fruit from the tree of knowledge.They mistakenly turned their knowing into shame, they wanted to hide from God, cover themselves up and thus began the “masking of the human being”. As Rabbi Heschel says in Man is Not Alone, we all wear too much mental make-up and we are forfeiting our faces, which I understand as our authenticity. Victimhood is not authentic-being victimized is. Yet, we have the ability to decide to change our story when we choose differently than Adam and Eve, when we choose differently than the ‘entitled victims’ who wear their wounds with justification and victimize everyone else. We have to rise above our feelings and “sense its presence” so we can be both responsible and responsive to the world as it is, to the Call of God as it comes and leave our state of perpetual victim. We can and must do this now, God is waiting, another human being is in need and waiting and we have a unique responsiveness to the needs of both God, the world and another human being that no one else can replicate. 


In being responsive and responsible we are acknowledging the truth of our existence, the need for our existence. We are acknowledging that we all matter-everyone is important, necessary, needed, and has the capacity for love, truth, kindness, compassion, mercy and justice. In being responsive and responsible we are declaring our adherence to the demand, the call, the expectation that lays deep in our souls and we begin to engage and grow our unique talent to add to our plot of the garden, to tend it better in good times and be less defeated in bad times. Our garden is not going to grow the same all the time, no garden does, yet by being responsive and responsible, we do not blame another for our crop failure, we do not seek to ‘game the system’ by suing another to stop them from flourishing, we do not seek to be paid for work we have not done, we no longer overpromise and underdeliver, etc, we only seek solutions to what is not the “what ifs” “could have, should have” and “if only you would have__”. 


In recovery, seeing the world for what is and living “life on life’s terms” is a cornerstone of the new/old way of relating to one another, to the world and to our selves. We have guides and mentors who we go to in order to check out our thinking and see where and in what ways/areas we are using the correct fertilizer for our plot of the garden and how we are not. We appreciate the advice and the learning to be both responsive and responsible to something greater than our false needs and our momentary feelings. In recovery, we sense the presence of the universe and our small and vital role in furthering it or retarding/destroying it. 


Covid-19 and my error at my mission/work that gave people the opportunity to exile and marginalize me have made me realize how often I was responsive and responsible to/for another person, a way of being, God, Judaism, Spirituality and non-responsive and not responsible to and for my self, my soul. I was/am filled with spirit and with joy when I am responding to the needs of another, including and especially God. I also realize that my outbursts, especially the one that led to my not being able to fulfill any Rabbinic Duties at Beit T’Shuvah, came from my not responding to and being responsible for the turmoil that I was experiencing in my inner life. While some may say “oh Mark, he couldn’t give up control” the truth is/was I couldn’t stand to see the good work, the powerful spirituality and integration be diluted and I was fearful that the robust program I and many other people had developed would wither away. Because I was fearful, I wasn’t responsive and responsible to my soul and the rest is history. 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 184

“The world is such that in its face one senses owingness rather than ownership. The world is such that in sensing its presence one must be responsive as well as responsible. (Who is Man pg.108)


We are to sense an owing to God for our life, I believe is inherent in Rabbi Heschel’s teaching above. We are under the mistaken impression that our lives are our own and we can do anything we want with them. While it is true we have free-will and we can, in fact, do whatever we want to; Rabbi Heschel’s reminding us that we are also accountable and held to the standard of being human. While we can walk by a homeless/unhoused encampment and not notice, there is a nagging inside of us to do something, even if it is only to feel empathy and compassion for the unhoused/homeless people and their plight. While we can see something terrible happening in our neighborhood and do nothing, we experience a knocking on our soul, a tugging in our inner life to help in some way. These are a few examples of why this teaching is so crucial to our humanity. 


We are commanded to “Be Holy” in the 19th Chapter of Leviticus. What does holy mean, really? It is not for the ‘sainted ones’ or the ‘holy rollers’ it is for all of us to participate in holy actions. “Do not stand idly by the blood of your brothers” is one of the ways of holiness. Yet, look how often we, even the most vocal of religious, holy rollers, conservative, progressives among us, forfeit our holiness, forfeit our humanity by doing the opposite of this commandment. We stand idly by the blood of our brothers (and sisters) each and every day without even noticing it. We watch as good people are tarnished with lies, innuendos, and do nothing and/or join in on the mendacious gossip/slander. We stand by as MBS, Putin, Assad torture and gas their own people and the people they are trying to conquer because of fear, oil, money, etc. We stand by and do nothing as the politicians rant and rail about public safety and arrest the homeless, people of color, for no good reason. The John Lewis Civil Rights act is stuck in Congress because Republican Senators would rather “stand idly by the blood of their brothers and sisters” so they can get and retain power and control! These “good god-fearing, idol worshiping religious men and women” would rather see women denied control of their choices regarding abortion, men and women, especially Black men and women,  not be able to freely vote because they are afraid of democracy. Yet, they will quote the Bible and do the opposite. They believe they should be able to own their own narratives, they believe they should be able to own another person(s), they believe they should own the power and control of 350 million people! 


We, the people, have to remind our politicians, on the right and left as well as in the middle, Republican and Democrat, that they owe us and God. They owe God and us the equality that is inherent in each human life, they owe us and God their best and highest self and service not the lowest and basest self. They owe God and us the unvarnished truth rather than the spin and the lies/deceptions they are spewing. We owe ourselves and our fellow humans honesty and voting as if we owe one another rather than voting our pocketbook. We owe ourselves and one another opportunities to improve our standard of living, helping people not just get off the streets or out of jail or abstinent from their addictive cycles, we owe ourselves and one another real jobs, real mental and spiritual help, actual recovery techniques and places to recover-no matter how long it takes nor how much money one can afford. We owe God and one another our best effort in the moment we are in, not some mythical best nor the best of yesterday-the best we can be in this moment is all we owe and it seems like such a steep price to pay for so many and most of us refuse to pay what we owe. 


In recovery, we know our recovery is dependent upon our spiritual condition. Each day, we are grateful for this day, we are aware that tomorrow is not guaranteed and we have to make the most of today by repaying the debt we owe. We owe God and the people around us a debt of decency, honesty, openmindedness, willingness to change, kindness, love and truth. Each day, in recovery, we pay at least the interest on our debt and are infused with more and more power and joy to begin to pay off the principle. 


I come from a long line of people who did not “stand idly by” while injustice happened, who did not engage in mendacity and power grabs. My relatives taught me to respect every person I met because we are all created equal, we all have the same unalienable rights and no matter the color of one’s skin, we are judged by the content of our character. My grandfathers lived this way, my parents and aunts and uncles lived this way, and my daughter and nieces and nephews live this way. I cannot “stand idly by the blood of my brothers and sisters” and this gets me in trouble a lot! I rebuke someone when they are doing the wrong thing, going down the wrong path and, while I am not always ‘nice’ about it, I am vilified at times and loved at other times. I am at peace with being rebuked for my beliefs, I am okay at being rebuked fairly and unfairly, I am engaged in acceptance of people who use my rebukes against me and claim to be victims and/or hurt by the truths I speak. I have to pay my debt in my unique way because my debt, like my soul,  is unlike anyone else’s. 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 183


“The world is such that in its face one senses owingness rather than ownership. The world is such that in sensing its presence one must be responsive as well as responsible. (Who is Man pg.108)


So, Rabbi Mark, what owing are we to sense, someone asked me. I thought, what a great question. One of the owings is found in the first chapter of the Bible, take care of our corner of God’s Garden, this world. Rather than exploit our natural resources, care for them, use them wisely, for the benefit of everyone-not just for the few. Remember, oil and gas come from God, not humans, ergo, they should be shared with all-not used to enslave people, not used as power, rather used to benefit all. Make a profit, don’t price-gouge just because you can! Our food is another resource, we are told to tend God’s Garden and too many of us forget this. We think it is our land, our crop, when all belongs to the world, we are merely tenants and travelers passing through, we die and the world remains. 


We owe ourselves and everyone else dignity. As we learn in the Talmud: “Anyone who destroys a single soul it is as if they destroyed an entire world and anyone who saves a single soul it is as if they saved an entire world”. Rabbi Yitz Greenberg taught my Rabbinic Class that this means every soul has infinite dignity and value. We owe it to ourselves to treat our self with this dignity and value. This means, as I am understanding Rabbi Greenberg today, we have to stop denigrating ourselves, we have to stop believing the lies we tell ourselves, we have to let go of our great desire to be deceived by another and buy into our own self-deceptions. We have to acknowledge the goodness of our being, we have to appreciate our uniqueness and our talents. We have to stop comparing and competing because we are unique and our task is like no one else’s. We have to see the dignity in all human beings. We have to stop seeing allies and enemies and see fellow travelers with whom we share a planet, climate, land and air for breathing. We have to cease and desist from our self-deception of superiority over another human being, another race. We have to recognize and honor the dignity and worth of everyone, whether we like them or not, whether we agree with them or not, whether we are from the same ‘tribe’ or not. After all, we all are created in the Image of God, we all are of the species-homo-sapiens, ergo: we all belong to the same large tribe, humanity!


We owe one another and ourselves freedom and release from slavery. We cannot give this to another person without first realizing our own enslavements, many of them enumerated above. Yet the greatest enslavement, in my opinion, is the enslavement of false stories, false narratives, mendacity itself. One of the largest false stories and narratives we tell ourselves; ‘not my monkey, not my circus’, ‘not my problem’, etc. We are called upon to care for the stranger, the poor, the needy, the widow, the orphan to teach us everyone matters, everything matters and to not be indifferent. Indifference is the greatest mendacity we engage in. When we feel powerless, often we become indifferent, when we feel frustrated, we become indifferent, when we see evil, we do nothing from fear and from indifference, when we experience the pain of another, we do nothing for fear of being ridiculed so we become indifferent. When we watch or listen to the racism that is rampant in our country and the world and we do nothing to stop it, we are being indifferent. When we buy Russian products, including their Vodka, while Putin massacres innocent Ukrainians, we are being indifferent. When we see people convicted of crimes because they “were driving/walking/standing while black and do nothing, we are being indifferent. When we stand idly by while people are made fun of, the butt of jokes, because they are fat, skinny, Jew, Muslim, Christian, Catholic, black, brown, etc  we are being indifferent. Indifference leads to and lends a sympathetic hand to these evils and more. We owe it to ourselves to engage in seeing the truth, of being in reality when facing the world, not the self-designed, self-seeking reality of indifference and narrow vision, the reality that the world is showing us, the reality of kindness, truth, love, justice, mercy and compassion. 


In recovery, we acknowledge the debt each day through prayer and meditation as well as action. We reach out to people and let them know they matter, we look for opportunities to be of service and aid another. When asked, we do not refuse a service request unless we are truly unable to fulfill it. We know that we have to be self-supporting through our own contributions and we have to provide for another who is less fortunate. We have to also be able to ask for the help we need and receive it with grace and dignity. In recovery, we realize we owe our lives to a power greater than ourselves, we owe the people around us the dignity they so richly deserve just for being human and we know we owe it to ourselves to treat ourselves with dignity, kindness and love. 


I am guilty of being indifferent at times and writing this made me realize the subtle ways I have succumbed to this terrible way of being. I also recognize the dignity and worth of another and always try to, even in rebuke, speak to the soul of another. More 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 182


“The world is such that in its face one senses owingness rather than ownership. The world is such that in sensing its presence one must be responsive as well as responsible. (Who is Man pg.108)


It is 59 years since Rabbi Heschel first spoke these words at Stanford University and, they are as true, valid and relevant today as they were then. We are desperately in need of heeding his words and wisdom. WE OWE! What a concept in the 21st Century when most people are trying to say they are owed. This is not to denigrate nor condemn the important social movements led by people such as Rev William Barber, nor the John Lewis Civil Rights Act that some members of the Senate refuse to pass, my statement is a response/reaction to Rabbi Heschel’s words. We are trying to own everything, homes, business, people, territory, land, governments, control of everyone else, etc. and we are willfully blind to the truth of our owing the world, our owing another person, our owing rather than our owning. It is imperative we open our eyes and see the truth of existence, the truth of being human-we owe, we are indebted and we must begin to make payments on our debt, even if it is only the interest payments. 


We are living in a culture that believes ‘if I can take it, then it is mine’. This was/is the motto of criminals for as long as I can remember-I used it often to assuage my self in my misdeeds. It is also the culture of the boardroom and the bedroom, the seat of the car and the seat in government, it is the motto on the battlefield and the sanctuary. We are all susceptible to this culture, we are all engaged in living this either overtly, subtlety, in awareness and/or in blindness. We are seeing this in the Ukraine today in 2022 and we have seen this in wars fought throughout the ages. We have seen this motto/culture in action in the ways people use God to validate their inhumanity towards one another. We are in the season of liberation, on our way to freedom in the three major Western Religions and we are still fighting for who is right? We are allowing the crazy, power-hungry, self-seeking charlatans who have convinced their followers to go against everything that is God, from the Bible, to say: “I have the only right way”!  We see this motto being played out in business all the time in their advertising, in the ways they engage in competition and subterfuge. We are able to, when we take off the blinders, to see the people who bastardize the movements that are engaged in social change. When white men from the South can call themselves the poor minority that is in danger of being eradicated so they can continue to own the narrative of this country, we are witnessing the bastardization of civil rights and the mendacity of power. 


We forget how much we owe whenever we shut someone’s opinion off because we don’t like what they are saying, when we don’t agree with them, really when they are speaking truth to us and we do not want to change. We forget that we owe a debt whenever we find it inconvenient to repay at the particular moment. We forget our debt when we want to own rather than owe. We forget our debt when we need to rewrite the story so we can ‘look” good rather than be good. We forget our debt when we seek to destroy the very people who helped us because we are disgusted that we needed help.


Sensing the owing we all have can only be realized when we actually face the world, as Rabbi Heschel teaches above. What a concept, we have to face the world just as it is and just as we are. We are not able to face the world with our “mental make-up”, with our false self, we have to face the world as we truly are, as our authentic self with no trappings, no lies, no mask. Herein is the reason acknowledging our owing is so difficult, we are afraid to see the real us, we are afraid of the changes we will be compelled to make, we are afraid we will be forced by our own nature to pay our debt rather than own the life we want to own rather than live the life we are created for. 


In recovery, we know we owe a debt. We owe a debt to the people who helped us get into recovery, our ‘eskimos’. We owe a debt to the people we have harmed while being enslaved to bad habits and erroneous principles. We owe a debt to God for giving us a path of decency and wholeness to follow so we can begin to own our true scripts and let go of the false ones. In recovery, sensing our debt is so liberating rather than trying to own our false stories, our false scripts and our false selves. 


I am in awe of the confluence of events that are happening in this moment, Easter, Ramadan, Passover, my father’s birthday, my brother’s birthday coming up in a couple of days, Putin’s inability to defeat the Ukrainian people, the fact that my parents’ grandchildren are either involved in serving people as an occupation or they are supportive of the organizations and people who are. We are in a period of awareness of our debt, we speak about it at the Seder, we hear about our owing at the Easter Table, we are subservient to the Will of God during our fast of Ramadan. I sit here and think of how much I owe to all of you, to the many who have come before me and to the ancestors I don’t even know about. To the heroes who left Egypt, England, Spain, Eastern Europe, who saw an opportunity for a better life and gave it to all of us; I acknowledge the debt we all owe you and commit to continue to repay it each and every day. To God who has “blessed me beyond my deserving”, I commit to continue to repay my owing to You. 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 180

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


As we enter Good Friday, Shabbat, Passover and continue in Ramadan, I wanted to give a few final thoughts and ways of being from this teaching. It is such a profound sentence, it is so antithetical to what many people understand as a path to a whole life of being human as Rabbi Heschel teaches us. Happy Easter and Passover. 


We are desperately searching for meaning and purpose in all the wrong places, as I understand the totality of this sentence. Just the act of searching for meaning and purpose belies the truth Rabbi Heschel is telling us. Our purpose is in sensing and responding to the demand(s) of God, of the Universe, not in finding what we love to do. I know this is radical, yet I hear Rabbi Heschel calling out to us to find what God is demanding, calling us to do and then… We will learn to, grow to love what the demand is because it is a reciprocity of the love God gives us. We will love the call and the demand because we will realize the good we are doing, the holy we are bringing and the uplifting of our own souls that is happening. Just as the Prophets did not ask to be prophets, just as Moses did not ask to be the leader of the Exodus, we too do not ask for the demand, we sense it and then we can respond to it or not. 


Jonah is the story of someone rejecting the demand while feeling entitled. He believed that God owed him something for not destroying Nineveh! He did not want to respond to the demand and tried to flee to the other side of the world and wound up in fish! Yet he cared more for a plant than he did for human life and, this is the definition of entitlement to me, when one cares more about ‘stuff’ than human life-they are demonstrating entitlement. 


Moses rejected God’s demand 5 times until he realized it was fulfill it or die. I believe this is an important lesson as well. The reason many of my colleagues walk around with dead eyes is because they have rejected God’s demand so they can keep their jobs! I am positing the reason so many people are so angry, so despondent, so lost, so addicted to being miserable and/or causing other people misery is because they are not sensing the demand of God/Universe and/or they sense it and don’t respond to it which causes vapidity in their living. Living a vapid life is the worst torture possible, as I am experiencing Rabbi Heschel’s words today. It is the end all of life, it is the defeat of one’s humanity, and it is a denial of the gift of life, the joy of life, the toil of living well. 


Rabbi Heschel is calling to us, I hear it, as demanding of us to stop living for fun, stop living in self-glorification, stop living for the next like on Instagram, Facebook, the next retweet on Twitter, the best seller on Amazon, the despair of exile, the tolerable sadness of slavery, the false joy of being in the “in crowd”/country club folks, the prestige money buys you without the inner resources to handle the prestige, etc. Rabbi Heschel is calling on us to be true to the demand that God causes us to sense, to stop denying the truth of our soul, of our 2nd brain-our gut- and embrace our unique sense of demand. Rabbi Heschel is demanding we stop talking ourselves out of the call we get, the demand that is placed on us, we acquiesce to the need we are created to fill and the healing we are created to bring to the world. 


Passover, Easter, Ramadan, all are spiritual experiences that we need to actualize and engage in. We are able to use this time, this season to marshall the forces within us and the people around us to both sense and respond to the demand. We are able, in this moment, with this spiritual light and pathway to ‘see’, respond, and walk the path of uniqueness and joy, divine need and reminder, healer and one in need of healing that we are created to be. Rabbi Heschel’s teaching above is: how to be human and how to be a partner with God. Yet, so many of us are unwilling, insensitive, and/or just willfully blind and deaf to the demand, the call, the need. 


I am not including a special recovery here because Passover, Easter and Ramadan are the paths, the spiritual experiences, the calls, the demands, the cries of God to us to be in recovery! Be in recovery, my fellow clergy from your denial of the humanity of those closest and furthest from you-be really engaged, not faux-engaged as so many clergy are. Be in recovery, members of non-profit boards who want to ‘protect’ the institutions that have helped them, their family members by taking the passion and the creativity out of the organization and make it act “on advice of counsel” instead of on the demand of God! Be in recovery, business leaders and the top 1% by paying your fair share of the tax burden, not just what you can get away with, pay your employees a fair, livable wage because without them-you have no business!! Be in recovery, government workers and department heads-remember the people calling with concerns and needs are the same people who pay your salary through their taxes, be kind and helpful rather than abrupt and unhelpful. Be in recovery, Senators and Representatives-remember God demands Justice, Mercy, Love, Truth, Compassion and Kindness, not the hate speech you are spewing nor the gridlock you are causing while people are suffering. 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 180

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


Today is the end of the 30th week of my writing, learning, immersing myself more and more in Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom, brilliance and teaching. It is also the day before Good Friday and the beginning of Passover and I hear Rabbi Heschel’s teaching above to be so important for this moment. We are in a moral, spiritual and physical crisis right now; Russia/Putin, Saudi Arabia/MBS, Syria/Assad, Iran/The Ayatollah, China/Xi, Hungary/Orban, etc are all trying to destroy the spiritual meaning of these Holy Days, the Holiness of the human being, the power of the human spirit and they are trying to bend the moral arc of the universe towards injustice! We have a two party system of government that is falling apart because these new lawmakers who do not want the government to force them to have vaccines, want the government to force women to have babies. There are lawmakers who defend the right of the gun owner and not the right of the victims of violence. There are people who believe and spread Antisemitism all the while calling themselves people of faith! There are lawmakers who still believe, enact laws and/or give lip service to the rhetoric of prejudice and hatred. These people and their supporters in the Church, Mosque, Synagogue, Temple are NOT responding to the demand of God, are not finding meaning in their lives except to hate, lie, denigrate their humanness along with the denigrating of all humanity. 


The factual basis of Easter and Passover have been argued for a long time and, frankly, who cares! What is important is the demand that both of these Holy Days, the demand that Ramadan are putting out to and for us. It is a simple demand, really, the Torah says it in Deuteronomy, God’s demand is to be Godly, to act in the ways the Bible teaches us to towards one another and towards God, to act justly, lovingly, kindly, compassionately and truthfully. Rather a simple demand and we find it so hard to fulfill. We are so interested in winning that some of us, in the name of progressive values, in the name of welcoming all, in the name of conservative values, bulldoze our way through life believing we have the one way to fulfill God’s demand. How sad and harmful is this. How meaningless are these attempts at power through ‘the right side of the issues’.  


What is being missed, ignored, etc is the demand of Easter, Passover, Ramadan, the demand of daily life is to make room at every table for every person who is hungry to “come and eat”, for every person “who is in need to partake in the Passover Sacrifice”. While these words come from the Haggadah, they are spoken daily in the Bible, we are reminded of our obligation/the demand to be open and welcoming, helpful and instructive in our prayers each and every day. Yet, we seem to miss this simple demand, this simple truth. 


At our Seders (Passover Meals), at our breaking of the fast of Ramadan, at our Easter egg hunts, dinners, let’s change the discussion from what is wrong with those people to what is the call of God to help make our corner of the world better. Instead of complaining about what we lack and how others are lucky, thieves, ruthless, etc lets give gratitude for what we have and commit to the demand of God to be loving today. Let’s commit to the demand of God to do justly in all of our affairs-rich paying their fair share along with everyone else. Let us commit to the demand of God to speak truth and be open to learn more each day so our truth can become a reality and we can let go of the false ideas we have adopted. Let us commit to the demand of God to live on and with purpose to care for our fellow human being-we are our brother’s keeper, we do not have to continue to follow in Cain’s footsteps. Let us commit to the demand of God to show up without masks, without mental make-up, without pretense-just live our soul’s script, live the divine demand we are created to fulfill. Simple demand, simple ask and it is so hard for humanity to fulfill! 


In recovery, we know it is a simple demand and we are constantly working to stop complicating our lives. Life is simple and complex, living entails: living in the both/and, the yin/yang, the black/white/grey and, most of all, living together and finding common ground to succeed in living a life of purpose and meaning.  In recovery, we are in a daily struggle with our negativity and, each day, our care and concern for another soul, our care and concern for meeting God’s demand is at stake. 


I am engaging in responding to the demands put in front of me rather than the ones that are in the past. I am realizing the demands change with my own spiritual growth and/or retardation. The number one demand is: stay the course of decency, stay the course of growing my inner life, stay the course of love, truth, kindness, compassion and justice. I hear the demand of the moment to spread the wisdom I have gained, share the experience I have and not worry about who takes it, who agrees with me and what happens after I am done. Just as with my former employment, once I leave a room, I am powerless over what people do with the wisdom, teaching, experience I have imparted. What they do is not the demand put on me- what I do with the gifts God gives me is the demand I am hearing. Get off the sidelines, get off dwelling on the past, get back into the purpose I was created for. This is the demand and in responding I will enhance meaning and purpose in my life. 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 178


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


The first half of the teaching above is so foreign to most people. The reason it is so foreign is that most people, as I said the other day, are unable to hear the demand. Most people are unable to tune into God’s frequency and they stay tuned to the frequencies that most appeal to them and give them comfort. 


The demand that God gives to all of us, individually is not supposed to comfort us! By its very nature the demand is going to disturb us and disrupt us, yet we want comfort, we want peace, we want tranquility, we want serenity without understanding the meaning of many of these words nor understanding the demand that God places upon us is never going to be easy to respond to and the only path to have meaning, purpose and passion in our living. 


The charlatans who say “follow me and all will be easy and well” want to fleece us of something, money, time, adoration, etc. They need people to feed their false sense of self-importance and they need people to do their bidding and, in some cases, they need people to become their slaves, sexually and in other ways. The deceivers who tell you, “only I can make everything better”, “only I know how to fix this”, “only I can save you” are authoritarians who don’t give a shit about anyone but themselves and seek power at any and all costs to another human being. What these two broad classifications have in common is their lack of care, concern, for the human being standing in front of them, their lack of concern for God’s demands, God’s call, God’s ways. 


Yet, they have a tremendous amount of followers, they have so many people who are willing to give them their cash, their votes, their hearts, their minds and their souls. How is this possible, one might wonder. It is possible because we are unwilling to answer the demands of God, we are unaware of and uneducated in the Ways of Godliness, ways of decency, ways of hearing the call of the soul of another human being because we are so sure of our way, our needs, our superiority. We are unable to respond to the demand of God because we are unwilling to surrender. Surrender is a dirty word to most people, yet they surrender to their egos, they surrender to the lies and deceptions of the charlatans and deceivers mentioned above and so many others! Surrender to the demand, surrender to the response that is appropriate for them to fulfill the demand-NEVER! This ‘never surrender’ mentality is good when fighting the evil of Putin, the evil of Trump, the evil of MBS, the evil of indifference, the evil of either/or living, the evil of prejudice, the evil of the deceivers and charlatans, etc. In fact it is a necessary part of the fight against these evils. This mentality does not originate in the mind, however, it is the soul that continues to battle these evils, it is the soul that promotes this  ‘never surrender’ mentality. However, it is precisely this attitude that the deceivers, the charlatans, the authoritarians, etc use to fool so many people. It is this ‘never surrender to the outside enemy that I/we have created to take your attention off of the true enemy, the true evil, the true demand of God,  the true call that is in your soul, the authentic needs of your inner life’, attitude and way of being that may, in the end, destroy us. 


Hence the need for Holy Week, Ramadan, Passover cleaning and the week of celebrating/remembering. Hence the need to get back to our basic goodness of being, clear out the schmutz, the puffed-up parts of our egos/self that block us from responding to the demand, that block us from experience true liberation, a true path to freedom, a true way of living well and going to the land God is trying to show us! More tomorrow on this. 


In recovery, we are constantly seeking to “improve our conscious contact with God” and we keep listening for the demand on God’s frequency, not our own. We know how easy it is to make our voice sound like it is God’s and we are very afraid of doing this once again-we do, after all, have priors in this way of being. We are seeking to rise above our self-centered desires and walk/trudge the path to freedom, to our place and give back to the world what we stole from it, truth, kindness, justice, compassion, love. 


I have encountered many obstacles to hearing the demand of God clearly. I realize that, while I/we are leaving a home of 45+ years and leaving with regrets and sadness, I am following the call of my soul, the call of the Torah Portion of my birth-Lech L’Cha. God is telling me, once again and this time I am listening,  to “go for yourself, go to yourself, go out from everything/person/place you know to the place I am showing you”. I know this is the demand I need to respond to, I am realizing that this demand has been in the universe for a lot longer than I have heard this, I am excited to say I have heard the call, the demand and I am responding to it a little more enthusiastically after this writing/revelation. Leaving Egypt means leaving the schumutz behind, getting rid of the lies I tell myself and being better at seeing what is, not what I want it to be. 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 178


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


To sense the demand means to be alive, to be aware and to be engaged. I heard stories of students who were upset with Rabbi Heschel because he would cancel a class to attend a rally, not understanding that if one is not engaged in life, if one is not engaged in caring for the poor, the needy, the stranger, than one can never sense the demand, one can never find real meaning in their living. Yet, like those students, so many of us are still complaining about caring for the poor, the needy and the stranger. 


We have become so stone-faced and wear so much armor that many people don’t flinch when Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Kevin McCarthy, Moscow Mitch McConnell spew their false claims, swear fealty to a person whom they call a liar and reprehensible, Donald Trump. We are deaf to their lies, we go along with their treachery, we even go so far as to applaud their hatred of the poor, the needy, the stranger while they claim they are people of deep faith! How ridiculous, yet there are a lot of Evangelicals, Jews, Catholics, Hispanics, etc who bow down to them and to Trump, who support their efforts to ‘whiten up this country a little more’, agree that ‘white is right and might’, etc. It is so antithetical to Rabbi Heschel’s teachings above and I am at  a loss to understand/explain this phenomenon, almost. 


The explanation comes from our lack of engagement in our own inner life. It comes from our inability to see the neediness of our selves. It comes from a denial of the spiritual poverty we live in and a fear of facing the ways we are a stranger both to our self and to the world. Unlike Moses who “was a stranger in a strange land” and learned to live there and thrive with wife, family, job, etc; we are afraid to acknowledge that we are a stranger by design, we are a stranger because we are endowed with a demand  from God that is like no one else’s. It is our fate to be a little lonely, knowing we are never alone. Yet, because we are still looking to fit in, looking to be rich, trying to seem self-contained and self-sufficient, we are getting more and more impoverished, more and more spiritually bankrupt, more and more of a stranger who experiences life as being on the outside looking in. 


We are in desperate need of cleaning out the fears of being authentic, the fears of getting back to the core of our being, the fears of confronting the truth about ourselves, the truth of our being a slave to the whims of our own emotions/ego. It is a perfect time in the spiritual world to confront lies we have been telling ourselves, the deceptions of others that we have been buying into for fear of facing the truth, the destructive actions that have become natural and, seemingly, constructive. During this Holy Week, this period of Ramadan, the preparation and then the 8 days of Passover, we have to begin to say no to the mendacity that has ruled our living, we have to say no to the people who continually turn the stranger away, we have to say no the lie that we are not the poor and the needy, we have to say no to the people who refuse to care for them and make the rich and powerful into the poor and the needy! 


We need to say yes to the rescuing of the captives, we need to say yes to the prophets of today, we need to say yes to ending the “eye disease/cancer of the soul” of prejudice in any and all forms. We need to say yes to seeing the Divine Image that is in every human being, we need to say yes to the caring for one another, we need to say yes to ensuring equal opportunity and yes to the individual equity that people build in themselves. We need to say yes to the call of our soul which is the only path to sensing the demand of God. 


In recovery we are taught that service is a two-way street. We both need to ask for the help we need, maybe even ask what help we need, and offer the help we can give. Welcoming the stranger is something that recovery does very well, everyone is seen as a gift to the group, an asset that makes the whole better and a human being in need of kindness and love. We are aware of our own spiritual deficiencies, which is what brought us to recovery, and we embrace the imperfections of ourselves and one another with patience, kindness and we hold on!


I have been in the spiritual poverty of despair and sadness and, I realize, for no real nor good reason. I fell prey to the lies and deceptions of another(s) and began to believe them. Doing this prevented me from adding my wisdom, service and energy to the world, it prevented me from sensing the demand from God, it stole the meaning  and joy of living from me, and I am sure I wasn’t so pleasant to be around. In the Talmud, we are asked if these sufferings are dear to us and, today, I realize that my soul said no and it was overridden by my mind and emotions because they said yes. I am shuddering at the subtlety of my experience. And, I am committed to stand up, with the help of the people who know me, love me, trust me and whom I know, love and trust, to the challenges of life today, the demands of God today and the service I can bring today. It is time for me to be liberated from the lies, the deceptions, the sufferings I have bought into and I hope you are liberated from yours. 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 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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