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

Daily Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 225

“We, however, live on borrowed notions, rely on past perceptions, thrive on inertia, delight in relaxation. Insight is a strain, she shun it frequently or even permanently. The demand, as understood in biblical religion, is to be alert and open to what is happening.” (Who is Man pg. 115-116)

The issue Rabbi Heschel keeps coming back to over and over again in his teachings and wisdom for all of us to wake up! Relying on past perceptions is the root of prejudice and willful blindness, staying stuck in the same place believing that change is too scary and I like what is right now (or what was to happen again) have always been a commonplace reaction to what is happening in this moment. They have, historically, been the reason that change, the reason for all of the prejudicial ways we act towards one another in the area of human rights; the rights of all people to enjoy their “unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness”! I bolded among to show that our ‘founding fathers’ were not as arrogant as many people alive today. Unlike elected officials and Judges, the far right and the far left, etc, the founding fathers knew there were more unalienable rights than just the three mentioned above and were willing to engage in helping everyone find them and live as free and equal human beings.

Why is this important in this context? Reading Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom and living into it, not just praising it and quoting it, means we have to see how we are not living it or, in this case, living it too well. Our reliance on past perceptions is the foundation of the prejudice and hatred, fear and enabling of white people/police officers against Black people. Our reliance on past perceptions continue to influence the lies of the Charlatans of Religious Insipidness, Oppression, Irrelevance, Indifference,  These past perceptions have no relation to the truth of religious teachings, no relation to the truth of “all men are created equal”, no relation to the teaching of Rabbi Yitz Greenberg on Sanhedrin 37b, where he teaches that the Mishnah teaches us that every human being has infinite worth and dignity, every human being is equal to one another in our infinite worth and dignity, and we each are unique in our way of living by divine design. Relying on the past perceptions of slavery, immigrants are bad, Jews stink up the place, Mexicans are lazy, and all of the other stereotypical messages and ways of seeing another human being belies both our Declaration of Independence, Jewish foundational principles, the Holy Bible, Christ’s teachings and actions such as washing the feet of the poor, the needy, etc, as well as every other spiritual discipline having dignity, worth and seeing the individual uniqueness of every soul at its core.

We have to end our reliance on what we think we know, what we think we are seeing, what we saw yesterday, last week, years and years ago. Living into this teaching means we get to see our past in a new light, we can absolve ourselves of the errors we made by making the amends we need to, leaving the errors in the past where they were made, acknowledging the betrayals and hurts of our past and, while they will constantly pop up their ugly heads, no longer let them rule our present. It is not an easy prescription to fill and it is possible as well as the healthier way to live. Letting go of our reliance on the past perceptions allows us to see clearly what is and who people are, not from need but from love, not from fear but from compassion and kindness, not from blurred vision but from clarity and inacquantance.

In recovery, our old ideas will kill us, relying on them can only bring more destruction and devastation to the people around us and to our selfs. We are acutely aware of this and know we have to keep this truth uppermost in our being and in our ways of living because these old ideas keep wanting to rear their ugly heads and pull us back down into the sink hole of negativity, hatred, fear, and revert to our old ways of coping with these experiences. Living in recovery, allows us the opportunity to say no to relying on past perceptions and put on a new pair of glasses as Chuck C teaches.

I have worked so hard to keep my living fresh and, I must admit, I haven’t always done this. I see where and when I have fallen into living in past perceptions, the worst of which is, being irrelevant, not needed, unliked if I am not doing something for you now. I rely on the past perception of worthiness I had instead of seeing my worth right now and these past perceptions, when they come up, blind me from seeing what is, reveling in the now and being of service in this moment, to the person in front of me. I also am aware of how fresh I am keeping today, I am excited to wake up in the morning, I am excited to have and foster the connections I have, I am excited to make new connections and find new ways to serve, I am excited to let go of hurt and anger, I am excited to “change the things that should be changed” and have the clarity to see “the things I cannot change”. I am excited to unshackle myself from the chains of past perceptions and engage in the beauty of what is right here, right now. I am sad for my past errors, I am sad for the people who need me to be wrong, I am sad for the people who cannot/will not accept my T’Shuvah, I am sad for the people who still suffer from their past perceptions. Seeing fresh has allowed me to see the errors of my perceptions of the past and see them in fresh light and learn from them as well. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 224

“We, however, live on borrowed notions, rely on past perceptions, thrive on inertia, delight in relaxation. Insight is a strain, she shun it frequently or even permanently. The demand, as understood in biblical religion, is to be alert and open to what is happening.” (Who is Man pg. 115-116)

Rabbi Heschel’s opening paragraph from chapter 2 of Man is Not Alone, on Radical Amazement rings throughout the teaching above. Rabbi Heschel is reminding us of the perils of not reconciling our experiences with God’s view: inertia, borrowed notions, past perceptions being our experience now, seeking ‘fun’ all the time, etc. Falling into these old, desperate, and blind patterns is what surely will kill our appreciation, our being in the moment, our ability to praise, to be grateful, to truly have compassion and kindness towards one’s self and towards another self.

A borrowed notion is something that we don’t own, rather it owns us. Borrowed notions will always fail us, they will always subject ourselves to being ‘under the thumb’ of another person, we become indebted to the person from whom we have borrowed the notion and we become enslaved to following it through in the way someone else is telling us to. Because the notion is ‘on loan’ to us, because we have to repay/use it on the terms dictated to us, we become human doings, rather than being human.

Believing something is true because you heard it on Cable TV is an example of living on borrowed notions, believing something is true because you hear it from your friends, your clergy, etc are examples of living on borrowed notions. Believing anything without your experiencing it, without immersing your self in the ideas,  the experience, without taking the plunge to hear, read, think of the truth and validity of the notion/idea makes one susceptible to falsehoods, being deceived, engaging in mendacity, and being enslaved to untruths and evil people. As Hannah Arendt wrote about after the Eichmann trial, evil is very banal. It is carried out by clerks, by ordinary people who come to ‘just follow orders’ who buy into the deceptions by another person, who just want to ‘fit in’, etc. Whenever we are into extremist views, whenever we are engaging in behaviorism and spiritual plagiarism, we are living in and on borrowed notions.

We are in a time where the borrowed notions of racism, anti-semitism, Islamaphobia, white men should control a woman’s body and everything a woman does, gender inequality, anti-LGBTQ sentiments, and senseless hatred of anyone “not like me” are nearing a zenith. We see everyday where people are spouting the rhetoric of these borrowed notions and getting elected to Congress, winning seats in our State Houses, etc. They bow down and kiss the ring of Donald Drumpf and spout his conspiracy theories, his senseless hatred, etc just to get power, to be part of the authoritarian hierarchy that is trying to take over our country, that is trying to steal our democracy. Yet, many people are willing to live on these borrowed notions, many people seem excited to engage in the senseless hatred that caused the destruction of the 2nd Temple and drove the People Israel into exile for almost 2000 years.

The pathway out of these evil and enslaving ways is immersion. We have to immerse ourselves in our own lives, stop living as tourists, as victims, as ‘know-it-alls’. We have to immerse ourselves in the nuances of our beliefs, into the incongruence of what we believe and the ways we act, into the lip service we are paying to our values and ethics and into the ways we are living by rote. Immersing ourselves in our morning prayers, in our morning coffee, in our morning routines means they stop being routines, they become fresh, new and exciting. Immersing ourselves in our daily living, being aware of what is, seeking to learn something new, especially about something we have learned before, stops us from taking life for granted and helps prevent us from sinking into self-deception as well as preventing us from falling under the spell of the charlatans and pharaohs and false prophets that are calling out to us.

In recovery, we are acutely aware of our need to be fresh each day, to continue to examine and re-examine the borrowed notions we have lived on for so long. We know the dangers of falling into the clutches of these old borrowed notions-spiritual atrophy and loss of our ability to distinguish: truth from lies, the things we can change from the ones we can’t, and things, places and the people who help us in our recovery and those who seek to bring us back into the web of negativity and evil.

The borrowed notions I have lived in and on make me less of a human being and more of a robot who cannot reprogram itself. I am unashamed of who I am, I am immersed in almost every situation in my life, almost every daily action I take and I find that I have relied on borrowed notions whenever I am afraid to speak truth because “they won’t like me”, because ‘I need their approval’, because ‘who will listen to me against her/him’, etc. These borrowed notions, like ‘the one with the gold rules’ as the new golden rule come to enslave me, make me afraid, and eventually cause me to erupt-sometimes appropriately and sometimes not! I am realizing that I can no longer even give into the borrowed notions that are positive, I have to make my own experience fresh and new, otherwise I am no longer living in this world, I am living in a made-up one. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 223

“The biblical words about the genesis of heaven and earth are not words of information but words of appreciation. The story of creation is not a description of how the world came into being but a song about the glory of the world’s having come into being. “And God saw it was good” (Genesis 1:25). This is the challenge: to reconcile God’s view with our experience.” (Who is Man pg.115)

“To reconcile God’s view with our experience” means to bring back together, as the Latin root of reconcile means,  our experience with God’s view; “God saw it was good”. As we approach the Holy Day of Shavuot, which represents the summer harvest festival and the receiving of the Torah at Mount Sinai, we take the night before to do a Tikkun, a repair of our selves and our world to get ready, able and open to hear, experience and act on the words of Torah for this year to come. We ‘get’ to repair our self, reenact the cleansing of our souls and actions as we did some 3300+ years ago when we first heard, experienced and accepted Torah and the covenant with God. We are able, if we are willing, to bring back together God’s view of living things as good, God’s view of human beings as very good, and our ability to be the humans we are capable of being rather than sinking to the lowest common denominator. This is the belief Rabbi Heschel has in us, this is the belief the Prophets have in us, this is the belief that God has in us: we are capable of bringing back together “God saw it was good”, “God saw it was very good” and the way we live, the way we act, the way we encounter and experience each and every day. To do this requires a 2% shift from racism to togetherness, from senseless hatred to acceptance, from mendacity to truth, from power seeking to empowering one’s goodness, etc. We have these desires, we have the capabilities to make this 2% shift, we just need to remember this is the pathway to bringing together, “God saw it was good” and our experience of good.

LIFE IS GOOD, we are good! At the core of every one of us is goodness, kindness, truth, justice, compassion, and love. We cover our core up because of wounds and traumas, we are told from a young age to “not air our dirty laundry” and “shame on you” along with “God is going to punish you” and other such controlling phrases, we come to hide the parts of ourselves we think people won’t like, we come to hide the parts of ourselves that we believe people will think ‘silly or stupid’ like helping people in need,  loving our neighbors like we love ourselves, living an authentic lifestyle, etc. AND, we have the teaching above that comes to say NO! Do not fall into the trap our ancestors fell into, believing danger lurks around every corner, do not fall into the same path as the haters and the idolators who preach hate, preach “there is only one way and it is mine”, do not fall into the lure of mendacity and deception preached by those who only seek power for themselves and believe we, the people are here to serve them. Do not fall into the self-deception that God doesn’t care, that there is no higher self, no higher ‘authority’, no higher truth, do not cede your vision, your experience of the Ineffable One, your experience of Radical Amazement to the words and experiences of some self-proclaimed guru/wizard and be a rabid fan not caring about truth, buying the lies of the authoritarians, blindly walking into the death trap of irreconcilable differences with God’s view: “And God saw it was good”.

We can bring back together our experience with God’s view through prayer, study, and action. The V’Ahavta prayer reminds us and directs us how to do this reconciliation by meditating on the words of love and hearing, understanding and teaching our children, writing words of kindness, understanding justice, truth, love and compassion on the doorposts of our homes and on our gates so that we practice them each and every day, making the 2% shift from irreconcilable differences with God’s view to reconciling our ways of living with God’s view. It is not easy and it is simple. Allowing our souls to heal from the traumas and the hurts is the path to wholeness and a clear vision of good and holy. On this Shabbat and weekend of receiving, we get another opportunity to recover our basic goodness of being, our compassion, our kindness, our ways of being loving and seeking truth and justice.

Our recovery is wonderfully encapsulated in this teaching of Rabbi Heschel. We are on the path of reconciliation, the path of improving our vision, and living our basic goodness of being. We are letting go of “old ideas” and no longer have “contempt prior to investigation”, we are open to new ideas, new experiences and being responsible to bring back together God’s view and our experiences.

I have to continually remind myself of this teaching. I get caught up in these old ideas at times and they bring me sadness, anger, disconnection. I am blessed to be able to get the assistance I need to leave these old places, see life clearly and appreciate the good that surrounds me. I continually learn and relearn the lessons I need in order to see the good, relish the goodness that my errors, my hitting the marks, my sadness and my joys teach me daily. I am blessed with and take advantage of my ability to do T’Shuvah, be grateful for what I have and seek to be kind to everyone. I am never perfect in this, I get afraid and worried and then I refocus my vision on what truly is my north star: “And God saw it was good”. I am able to see the lessons this experience is teaching me and rejoice in bringing my experience back together with God’s view. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 222

“The biblical words about the genesis of heaven and earth are not words of information but words of appreciation. The story of creation is not a description of how the world came into being but a song about the glory of the world’s having come into being. “And God saw it was good” (Genesis 1:25). This is the challenge: to reconcile God’s view with our experience.” (Who is Man pg.115)

“To reconcile God’s view with our experience” is the greatest challenge humanity has. The verse Rabbi Heschel quotes is after everything was created except humans. “God saw it was good” is a phrase that is written often in the first chapter of Genesis and we humans keep denying this truth, this view of God. We are so busy with our own sense of what is good and not good that we have forgotten, denied, jettisoned God’s view of what is good to our detriment and the detriment of the world we live in. Yet, we seem to be unable to even take on the challenge Rabbi Heschel is giving to us, we seem to be unable to reconcile God’s view with our experience in the ways we treat ourselves and the ways we treat everyone/everything else.

Leaning in/living into this way of being requires us to let go of our false images of our self, another self and God. It requires us to see the Image of God in everything, “beasts of the earth, cattle, everything that creeps on the earth”(Genesis 1:25), and, of course one another. While we are told that we are to “subdue it”(Genesis 1:28), the Hebrew could also mean to “occupy it”. Occupying it is not the same as conquering it, it is not the same as subduing it, it means we live in, we act as stewards, shepherds of the earth and care for it. We occupy this world that God created for the sake of God’s Will, not for our pleasure, not to satisfy our whims, not to have people cater to our needs. We are entrusted with the gift of life, the gift of reason, the gift of spiritual intelligence and connection for our self and for all other creatures and creations. Nowhere are we told use them for our sake, use them carelessly, use them wantonly, yet we continue to do all of these actions that are irreconcilable with God’s view.

Yesterday was another senseless shooting, this time in Tulsa, Ok. Nowhere in God’s view that I have come to understand is the need for senseless killing, the need for assault weapons to be in the hands of anyone but the military, for people who are psychologically, emotionally, spiritually challenged to own guns. Nowhere in God’s view that I understand is there a need to bully one another, seek power for its own sake, create us/them camps and engage in and promote senseless hatred of one another. Yet, we are doing this all the time. The need of a Tucker Carlson to lie to people and spread false rumors does not meet the challenge of reconciling God’s view with our experience, in fact it does the opposite.

In Genesis 1:28 we are told to “replenish/complete the earth” not destroy it, not destroy the creations of God. We are failing in this task/view from God. We can and must begin to see the truth of our actions, we must begin to see the truth of our souls, we must begin to see the truth of our need to engage in T’Shuvah, we must begin to change our vision, we must begin to change our decision making process. We have to move from a false ego view of living to an inner life/spiritual view of living. We must move from a ‘what’s in it for me’  way of living to a ‘what can I add to God’s view’ way of living. We must have move from seeing what we want to see to vision of life what is and what God wants vision of life. We do this through letting go of the lies we tell ourselves, letting go of our need to conquer everyone and everything, letting go of our need to hurt and resent, letting go of our need to punish, letting go of our need to use anything and everything for our good, and letting go of our need to engage in mendacity, self-deception and deception of another.

In recovery, we call ourselves trusted servants, we are here to serve instead of being served. Seeking and reconciling our experiences with God’s view is the path of our recovery.  In recovery, we are seeking to recover/discover our own integrity, our own passions, our own purpose that has been placed in us by divine intention.

In writing today, I find new understandings of God’s view. The question I hear a lot in AA:”what would God have me do” has a new impact on me, after immersing myself in Rabbi Heschel’s teaching above. While I am aware of how many time my experiences met/meet Rabbi Heschel’s challenge, I am painfully aware of the times and incidents where they don’t. While my way of being is not for everyone, while my way of being, at times is a little out of control at times, I also know that my way of being is scary for many because I keep leaning into and living into the challenge of Rabbi Heschel. I am by no means perfect nor always correct, and I know I see and hear a different drummer, a different view than many. The times I have ‘been out of control’ are the times when people don’t, won’t, can’t hear me, see me, acknowledge me. This is not a clean up-it is just an observation. We are commanded from the beginning to see one another, complete our self and one another to the best of our ability, and engage in truth, kindness and love; this is God’s view as I understand it today. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 220

“The biblical words about the genesis of heaven and earth are not words of information but words of appreciation. The story of creation is not a description of how the world came into being but a song about the glory of the world’s having come into being. “And God saw it was good” (Genesis 1:25). This is the challenge: to reconcile God’s view with our experience.” (Who is Man pg.115)

Fundamentalism is, as I am immersing myself in these words above, the root of indifference. As the Latin root of the word means, indifference is “not differing/not deferring”. Fundamentalism in all of its forms is black and white thinking, absolutism thinking, and, I would add, addictive thinking. I have heard from many people who have fundamentalist beliefs and practices and they all have the same refrain: “I am certain of this”; “God doesn’t want any deviation”; “it says so in the Bible”; “I am right and you are wrong”; and other such lies. When we cannot defer to the Glory of God, the Glory of creation, the Glory of the world, we become unable to see what truly is. We become stuck in a story that is static and stale, a story that is cemented and unchangeable. This leads us to no longer appreciate the “genesis of heaven and earth”, no longer sing the song of glory that there is a world nor the miracle and majesty of the world coming into being and our role in growing/making better the world we are in. When differentiation becomes a ‘sin’, when we are unable to distinguish between information and appreciation, when we are unable to discern between a description and a song/poem, we become a minion, a “thing” as Rabbi Heschel described earlier in this subchapter.

This is the state we find ourselves in again, still. So many people are stuck in the old ideas and ways ‘things were’ that they miss the beauty of appreciating the world coming into being. They are singing both off key and the wrong words to the songs of the glory of being in the world that God has created. Our insistence on being right and knowing the answers has led us to forget the true questions and have answers to the wrong ones. We are losing one of the key elements that make us human; the ability to distinguish, the ability to differentiate between information and appreciation, between singing the song that God has placed in us and singing the song our egos, our fears write for us. Hence, we find ourselves in a state of turmoil, a state of unrest, a state of fear, a state of hatred, a state of polarization, a state of racism, antisemitism, anti-muslim, anti-immigrant, etc. We find ourselves in a state of guns, death, senseless hatred and an erroneous belief that we can ‘recapture the good old days’.

The Bible is a terse document, it is open to interpretation and is in need of interpretation. We are told there are “70 faces of Torah”, 70 ways to understand, interpret, live the words of the Bible leading us to not get stuck in one-way thinking and living. Each person who was at Sinai heard the Word(s) of God in their own way, each person was spoken to individually we are told. This is the Bible’s way, God’s way of telling us that the only absolute is God, the ways to fulfill God’s Will, the Bible’s way of living is open to our interpretation and has to change in every generation and no two situations are exactly alike. The majority of the arguments found in the Jewish Compendium of Law, the Talmud, end with the phrase: we will know for sure when Elijah the Prophet comes to tell us the Messiah is coming. Even the Rabbis of old were not sure they were correct and had the humility to know this and acknowledge this.

We need to spend more time in appreciation and less time in ‘being right’. We have to stop wrapping ourselves in the flag, in our mendacity, in using the Bible to make ourselves right. We need to sing the song that God has placed in us, the song that is uniquely ours and blend it, harmonize it with the songs of every other human being. We need to stop ‘needing to be right’ and begin to join in song and prayer with every one so we can revel in the glory of the world coming into being. We can and must begin anew to let go of our need for certainty, let go of our need to be noticed, let go of our need to rule another(s), let go of our need to wear blinders. We can and must begin anew to hold on to our knowing we can never be 100% sure and move forward as our soul/song guides us, hold on to our knowing that we are a divine need and reminder, hold on to our knowing that we have to constantly and consistently see each day as new, hold on to our knowing that the world and life is dynamic rather than static, hold on to our knowing that living in wonder and/or radical amazement is the only path to wholeness and joy.

In recovery, we relearn how to discern. We are constantly seeking to peel the layers of the onion to discover more and more of the beauty of living. We engage in doing the best we can in this moment, knowing our best is ever-changing and not static. In recovery, we are constantly seeking more appreciation, more acceptance, more clarity.

I realize there are times and areas where I have become static and stuck. I realize this truth during these writings, prayer, golf, etc. I also am acutely aware of the awe, wonder, radical amazement I live in each day. Writing this today, I realize the only times I am truly stuck is when I forget to sing my songs of glory and appreciation, when I feel I am unable to sing these songs. Yet, I am also realizing that these are lies I tell myself. I am always able to sing these songs, I just have to be willing to get over ‘me’ and join with God to be a ‘we’. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 220

“The biblical words about the genesis of heaven and earth are not words of information but words of appreciation. The story of creation is not a description of how the world came into being but a song about the glory of the world’s having come into being. “And God saw it was good” (Genesis 1:25). This is the challenge: to reconcile God’s view with our experience.” (Who is Man pg.115)

Continuing in Rabbi Heschel’s teachings on celebration, I find this paragraph particularly challenging, enlightening, and refreshing. Rabbi Heschel’s deep commitment to the Jewish Tradition is without question and here he is reminding us to not bastardize the beauty, the poetry, the spiritual meaning and message God is giving to us in Genesis. Too often, in our search for and our need for certainty we try to concretize something that can only be appreciated and experienced. I hear Rabbi Heschel calling out to us to have a new experience of appreciation and sing from our souls the song of appreciation that there is a world and we are in it.

In these sentences, I hear the call to stop making something what it isn’t and revel in what it is, be it the creation of heaven and earth, that there is a world and we are in it, the truth of our own being and gifts, our ‘station’ in life, etc. We are here now, we are alive and the opportunity to appreciate what is always beckons to us and, again too often, we are too busy to notice, we are too dissatisfied with what is to recognize, and we are too off key to sing. We compensate for this by having to ‘follow the rules’ that have been set down before us, we are regurgitating what was said before us and we put nothing of our own self into the mix. All the while congratulating ourselves on how well we are living and how well we are doing. We have found ways to take words of appreciation, words that point the way, words of glory of God and turned them into absolutes.

By doing this, we make it simple for us to live, we make it easy to control another(s), we set ourselves up as authorities and ridicule those who are appreciating, singing of the glory of life and engaging in their divine purpose. We have become not a country of laws, not religions of faith, we have become a country of rules where people serve the rules rather than the rules serving the people. We have become religions of creed, discipline, habit, and authority as Rabbi Heschel teaches in the opening of God in Search of Man. The so-called ‘creationists’ who did not, and still do not, want evolution taught in the schools, are not people of faith, they are people of power and creed, discipline and habit. They are fearful people, afraid to think, afraid to appreciate, afraid to sing from their souls because they have allowed their spiritual life to atrophy, they have allowed their voices to become dry and insipid. They have, like many of our religious leaders and political leaders, become dull, irrelevant, and oppressive. Total fealty to the ‘rules’ that man has set down is not the same as faith and commitment to God, yet they have become synonymous over the millennia. How sad!

Yet, in our Human Dignity Movement, as I am calling Rabbi Heschel’s teachings, we do not seek the information from the story of the creation of heaven and earth, we seek to appreciate there is a heaven and earth. Every morning we rejoice at the arising of the sun, at our own awakening. We make commitments to our selves to live one grain of sand more compassionately and faithfully. The prayer, Modeh Ani, that we say upon awakening can be understood as “returning my soul to me with excitement, with fire,”. This reading, which I learned last week when studying with a dear friend of mine, Daniel Friedman, reminds us to appreciate what today has in store for us, to sing our song of living with excitement and follow the “fire in our belly” as Jeremiah did. It is not always fun, it does not always produce the results we want, and it always gives us satisfaction and clarity, joy and strength to move forward towards as well as appreciate the glory of this world, this day, and in the place/palace we are.

In recovery, appreciation and singing a song of glory that we are alive, we are living in concert with the wonder of the world is a daily exercise. We are dedicated to being grateful for what we have, writing gratitude lists morning and evening, reaching out to be thankful to those who help us and acknowledging the joy of living. We know the other side of this coin and living with appreciation, recognizing the glory of life is a much better path.

We are taught in Pirke Avot, “Who is rich? One who is happy with what he has”. This is one of Harriet’s favorite teachings as well as one of mine. Living with appreciation for what is, what I have, is the foundation to my appreciation of being here now. It is the source of my ability to face adversity, do T’shuvah, keep moving forward, help those who have hurt me, reconnect with those I have hurt, accept people for who they are and no longer need them to be who I want them to be. Appreciation and singing my song of glory has allowed me to accept what is, not be personally angry at what isn’t and fight for what should be according to God. I cannot appreciate the glory of the world and stand by and do nothing as our leaders are fiddling while religion, our country, the world is burning. Each day I learn to appreciate more and more the “glory of the world’s coming into being” and I rejoice in my place and fulfilling the divine need I was created to fill. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 219

“The self is always in danger of being submerged in anonymity, of becoming a thing. To celebrate is to contemplate the singularity of the moment and to enhance the singularity of the self. What was shall not be again”. (Who is Man pg. 115)

For this movement of Human Dignity to continue and flourish, we must heed the last sentence above. As Rabbi Heschel teaches, “the greatest hinderance to knowledge is our adjustment to conventional notions and mental cliches”(Man is Not Alone, pg 11). Our constant insistence on ‘recapturing’ the “good old days” is a path to “being submerged in anonymity, of becoming a thing” as the first sentence reminds us. We are so in need of certainty that we are constantly in danger of trying to make what was be again. It is impossible, there is only one moment like this moment, what I am writing today is for today, and while wisdom is eternal, it is only eternal because it can be applied in today’s moment, today’s situation and used differently today than it was yesterday, last week, when first spoken/written. Wisdom has to be dynamic to be wisdom, I hear Rabbi Heschel teaching, and it has to be dynamic to be eternal.

So many people are seeking to ‘regain what was’ when ‘our country was great’ when ‘our family stood for something’, when “religious behaviorism and spiritual plagiarism”were good for you and the norm. We are trying to recoup the money we have squandered/lost in the market and other investments, we are trying to regain our status and our __(fill in the blank). This is what tarnishes our Human Dignity Movement, it is what society, people in power or who want power use to stamp out this movement, they do not want us to be part of this Human Dignity Movement because they then lose their control and power, each person is encouraged and able to reclaim their “unalienable rights of life, liberty and happiness” not wait for the powers that be bestow them. Attempting to regain what was is a fool’s errand, it is a denial of God, a denial of truth, a denial of today and our task/demand from God to make our corner of the world better today, use what is and follow through on the call from God to us. “I coulda been a contender” “the one that got away”, euphoric recall, family get-togethers where the discussion focuses on what was, not what is all belie the teaching of Rabbi Heschel in the last sentence above.

It is our responsibility to use the gift of today, the newness of today, the possibility that today brings to the best of our ability. We are charged by the Universe, the Ineffable One to immerse ourselves in this day, this moment, see what is, how we can make it better, how we can help more people, how we can create something new from yesterday’s cast-offs, how we can, in the words of my friend, Jack Bender, make blessings out of Junk. He constantly sculpts out of old junk he finds and makes it new for today, he paints the world he sees and gives us the message that we have power to change what was in the now.

We get stuck in the past and, even though we believe we are hip, slick and cool, we copy what another person is doing, has done. We believe if we do today what we did yesterday, everything will be okay. These lies we tell ourselves hinder our Human Dignity Movement, they block our pathway out of anonymity, “of becoming a thing”. Only as we let go of the past and see today as new, exciting, challenging; only as we see today as dynamic and in need of our presence to repair what is and enhance what can be, can we truly live life authentically and without “becoming submerged in anonymity” and we can prevent our “becoming a thing”. Being alive is more than just breathing and ‘just getting through the day,’ being alive is dynamic, it is responsive and it is fresh. Reacting is old, it is boring and it is a path to anonymity. The Human Dignity Movement is letting go of the old stereotypes, the old lies, the old notions and cliches. The Human Dignity Movement is waking up and realizing today is new, it never was, never will be again and we are different, we will never be like this and we never were like we are right now. It is time for us to claim our birthright of “You Matter”, it is time we let go of resentments and old wounds that stop us from being here now as Ram Dass used say. We have the ability, do we have the surrender to God’s Will to make the Human Dignity Movement a daily practice, a reality and a worldwide movement?

In recovery, we know the pitfalls of being in yesterday and/or tomorrow. We know the lies of euphoric recall, we know the dangers of trying to recreate what was; leaving our recovery and going back to the way things were and they were not good! We know our resentments, our not being in the present will cause us pain and, in turn, cause pain to all of the people around us. We take great care to stay in the now, to stop our minds from running away from us and enjoying the newness of today, the wonder of today and the joy of being here, now.

I have been stuck in the past at times, I have wanted to be in ‘my glory days’ again and, I realize two things: 1) they were not as glorious as I remember and I was blessed to be able to serve the Ineffable One and a lot of human beings in my unique way. 2) I have to be in today in order to respond to what the Ineffable One is showing to me, what the calling of my soul is today and the path to fulfilling the call as much as I can. I don’t need to be yesterday’s Mark Borovitz, I need to be today’s. Stay safe and God Bless, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 218

“The self is always in danger of being submerged in anonymity, of becoming a thing. To celebrate is to contemplate the singularity of the moment and to enhance the singularity of the self. What was shall not be again”. (Who is Man pg. 115)

We are all unique individuals and we are not created to be carbon copies of one another. We are not now, nor were we ever, called upon to be ‘like the Jones’ as in “keeping up with the Jones’”. This lie is society’s way of controlling our creativity and individuality. The ‘powers that be’ are afraid of our individuality and creativity because they know behind their facades is emptiness and they do not want to be found out. They do not want their power threatened, usurped, etc. This is true for governments, religious orders, business’, races, etc. Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom above speaks to our responsibility to not buy into the lies we have been told, not succumb to the tyranny of sameness, and not miss this moment to take action.

In the Talmud, we are told we have infinite worth and dignity which is equal to everyone else’s and each of us has a unique worth, as I have written about before. The paradox of this teaching is the tension we need to live in; my unique worth is comparable to no one else’s and their unique worth is no less than mine. We share the dignity of being human and each of us are human in our own unique manners. No one is worth more than me, no one is worth less than me; an outrageous statement in today’s and yesterday’s world. Of course Mitch McConnell thinks he is worth more than me because he is a Senator with power and keeping power at all costs to human life is most important. AOC and her squad value their worth as greater than mine because they are willing to condone anti-semitism, anti-Israel sentiments without ever looking at the facts that the “poor” Palestinians left Israel in 1948, participated in all of the wars to “drive the Jews into the sea” and would not go along with the UN Mandate. We hear the words of equal worth and dignity from both poles of the spectrum, the actions…not so much. Basic background checks and limiting the sale of assault weapons is a denial of rights according to the Gun Enthusiasts. Yet, the 21 people killed in Uvalde and the over 220 school shootings between 2010 and 2019 are not denial of the basic human right of dignity and worth and safety? How do you explain that Greg Abbott, Ted Cruz, Donald T Trump, et al?

We have to begin a new movement, not a civil rights movement, we did that before. We have to begin a movement of celebration of moments and celebration of our individual selves. We are being called upon each and every day to live up to our individual talents and gifts, to live into the moment we are in and own our authentic lives and our authentic souls, not the ones we are told we have, not the jobs we are told we should take. Rather, we need to begin a movement towards enhancing the moment we are in by being the truest self possible in this moment. We have to celebrate our humanity through being an ‘original’ self, unlike anyone else, respecting and needing everyone else to make our life whole and honoring their dignity and our own-never sacrificing the worth and dignity of anyone including our  self. It is time for us to stand up and repair the error of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden-hiding!

When we are living as our individual self in our own unique creative manner and joining with other individual selves living in their own unique creative manner, we create the world that God envisions in the Torah-a world of caring for the stranger, the poor, the needy, a world of justice tempered with mercy, a world of decency and kindness, a world of truth and love. After all, isn’t this in everyone’s spiritual DNA? The only thing that stops us, is our succumbing to the lies and controls of another, of society. Lets break the yoke of these societal norms and live free, celebrate this moment and celebrate our individual self.

In recovery, we wrestle with this way of being everyday. We engage in a discipline which teaches us more about our self and how to celebrate and enhance our self, living in each moment and complying with certain societal norms. There are times, however, when our authenticity rubs up against the discipline we are following and those are the times when we put our individuality, our authenticity before the norm so we live truthfully and more whole.

I have found celebrating the moment easier than celebrating the self at times. I am, through this writing and immersion in Rabbi Heschel’s teachings these 218 days (as well as over the years) finding my path to celebrating both. I am no longer afraid of someone else’s judgements of me, I am no longer afraid of being laughed at nor being shunned. I am no longer in fear of the securities I used to count on because I am engaged in celebrating the moment I am in, enhancing my self and celebrating the enhanced selves of those around me. I am throwing off the more of the yokes I have been enslaved by and living with the Yoke of Heaven more rather than the yoke of society, of people who seek power only, of people who believe they can rewrite history so as to make themselves right, people who believe any human life that is different from their ‘group’ is not as important, not as worthy, not as dignified, hence they can ignore, defame and deny them as they and their ‘group’ sees fit. Let the movement of human dignity begin/continue. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 217

“The self is always in danger of being submerged in anonymity, of becoming a thing. To celebrate is to contemplate the singularity of the moment and to enhance the singularity of the self. What was shall not be again”. (Who is Man pg. 115)

“Celebrate” comes from the Latin meaning ‘frequented or honored’. Enhance comes from the Latin for “make high”. Using these two definitions, I hear Rabbi Heschel calling to us to honor and heighten the moments we have and the self we are. It is impossible to have what was because we are in a different time, a different era, a different moment. Yet we crave the certainty, the glory, the ‘way things used to be’. I hear Rabbi Heschel reminding us to put down these old ideas, stop our conventional notions and mental cliches from hindering our learning, our knowing, our seeing and stop making our self less than it is. Each and every moment is filled with the opportunity to honor and raise up our self, our world, our community, our way of life, our standard of living. Yet, we fail to do this because we want to keep the “status quo”, we want what we used to have, we are bereft at the loss of what was.

The White Replacement Theory is an example of wanting what was-white christian men ruling and controlling the lives of anyone not like them. Even the poorest white christian in rural areas felt superior as long as white people were in charge of their women, blacks, browns, Jews, Irish, Italians, etc. While Irish and Italians were eventually let in, people of color, Jews, were thought of as making the white race impure and they were/are inferior, etc. How many people have to be killed by these god-fearing white christians, how many souls have to be raped, persecuted, marginalized, not allowed to enter the country, etc to satisfy these god-fearing white christians? How long and how far will these god-fearing white christians be used and exploited by the good old boys who control them and the Senators, Congresspeople? How long and how far will these good old boys who claim to be doing god’s work go to keep power, control, and kill the democracy that made it possible for them to have their wealth and power? I use small letters for God  and Christian because these charlatans are idolators, they are todays Pagan Priests willingly sacrificing our children and anyone not like them at the altar of power, the altar of Baal, the altar of Evil. Killing innocent children in Uvalde, in Sandy Hook, in Parkland, in the myriad of other school shootings, is not the way to honor the moment, not the way to raise up the self, it is the path to destruction, to defaming the Name of God!

A formula for honoring the moment and the self, heightening the experience of the oneness of one’s self is to begin each day with gratitude for awakening. Jewish Tradition tells us to thank God/Higher Power for returning our soul to us with compassion and acknowledge God’s faithfulness to us. Meditating on this prayer reminds one of God’s care, concern and need for one to be the one we are created to be. We are blessed by being alive, we are shown compassion for our imperfections, and God is with us all the time. A next part of a morning routine is to write, contemplate a gratitude list, writing down the gifts we are given by God, by other people, by nature, by the universe. Making sure to keep it fresh by realizing all the nuances of the day before that we might not have been aware of. All the people who impacted us by saying hello as we walked by, reached out and engaged us in conversation, the new learning we did yesterday that will make today one grain of sand better, the people we impacted by connecting with them. Awareness before  and after eating is another way to honor the moment, heighten the self by making eating an intentional experience. Doing this makes us more aware of the moment, grateful for the opportunity and ability to eat, to pay for our food, to make our food, to share our food, to sit and eat with friends and foes alike, with strangers who become known and share themselves with us as we share ourselves with them, etc. It is an action that will make the moment heightened and honor our self and another self as well. The practice of praying before and after one eats plus 3 other times during the say and before we go to bed in the Jewish Tradition is mirrored by/mirrors the Muslim Tradition of praying 5 times a day, all for the sake of awareness, celebrating and enhancing the moment and the self.

In recovery, we are keenly aware that we have only this moment, this day, this experience. We know the dangers of ‘stinking thinking’, of taking things for granted, of staying stuck and stagnant. We know the pitfalls of self-sufficiency and self-aggrandizement, of euphoric recall and mourning the ‘good old days’; a spiritual and, possibly, physical ailment leading to death. Honoring the moment and raising up our self, our uniqueness, our oneness is the path of real recovery.

I do, for the most part, follow Rabbi Heschel’s teachings and have for 35+ years. It keeps me out of resentment, “where’s mine”, feeling used, and detaching from life. I forget this teaching and way of being at times AND I feel blessed to be able to return to it more and more. I use this writing to center me, to heighten (enhance) my soul through the insights I gain each day, I use my prayer routine, never being routine about it, and I continue throughout the day to recognize the blessings in life and the things I should be changing. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 216

“The self is always in danger of being submerged in anonymity, of becoming a thing. To celebrate is to contemplate the singularity of the moment and to enhance the singularity of the self. What was shall not be again”. (Who is Man pg. 115)

Another way we are “in danger of being submerged in anonymity, of becoming a thing” is by not contemplating “the singularity of the moment”. We have become so obsessed with achieving, obtaining, amassing, living in the past and future-tripping we miss the wonder, beauty, singularity and importance of this moment. We engage in telling stories of ‘the good old days’ and pining for what was, yet we were not truly present nor appreciative of the moments we are speaking about and pining for. We live our lives in retrospect much of the time, we are looking backwards for meaning and/or staring into space trying to ‘manifest’ our dreams. This keeps us unfocused on the moment we are in, it allows for ignoring the immediate in favor of the glory of the past and the wishy-hope of the future. Of course it is healthy and necessary to look back and learn from our past and having a goal to achieve and a plan/path to get there are important and necessary, too many people are focused on these two aspects and become two-dimensional, forgetting the third dimension-the here and now. Forgetting to “contemplate the singularity of the moment” throws our plan to achieve our goals off track. Each day we need to move closer to our goal, closer to fulfilling the demand and call of our soul, closer to living our authentic script and we are unable to do this when we are not present in the moment we are in because of focusing on the past and/or future. We cannot recreate this moment nor any moment, we cannot take back the missed opportunities and missed calls. We can, of course, learn from our experiences and make this moment count, we can learn from our experiences and immerse ourselves in the here and now. We can learn from our experiences and use this moment to move ahead with our goals/plans and change them when new information tells us to.

We need to be in this moment in order to take in new information, not just the data from the analytics we run for our social media posts, not just the data we get from the books we read, not just the data we get from the media, etc; the information that each moment gives us to learn more about our self, the information we get to learn about another human being, the information we are called to about new, fresh ways to serve our purpose and passions. We miss so many opportunities because our focus is not in this moment. We get so focused on being #1, the best, the worst, the richest, the prettiest, the most likes, the best TikTok star, the darling of the press, etc. we miss the truth, the message, the learning, the beauty, the connections of this moment. We miss the nuances of what is going on in our inner life, the nuances of what is going on in the inner lives of the people around us, the people we love, the organizations/business we are part of, etc. We miss the ability to reflect, change, move forward, sideways, even retreat if and when necessary.

Celebrating this moment, celebrating the uniqueness of this moment leads us to celebrate the uniqueness of our world in the moment as well. It sets us on a course to be more aware of what is around us, to drink in the beauty and the awe of nature, of people, of our ability to breath, to be alive, to experience wonder, radical amazement, etc. Instead of “being submerged in anonymity”, contemplating “the singularity of the moment” expands our self, helps us climb the mountain of appreciation, awareness, kindness and service. It forces us to see and speak truth, to see and seek community rather than create chaos and strife, it forces us to recognize the Ineffable One in all people and all things.

In recovery, we speak often of one moment at a time. Many of us realize that we are blessed to have this moment because we engaged in activities that could have killed us.  We are acutely aware of “there but for the grace of God go I” statement and truth therein. Why are we here is not a question to contemplate in recovery I believe. What am I going to do with this moment I have been given, is the correct question for how to live in the singularity of this moment. Yet, alas, there are people who are sober and not yet in recovery, who love the why question so they can get lost and miss this moment, miss the information and the celebration of the now. In recovery, we work to not get lost and to move forward, as Rabbi Heschel teaches, to the Sovereignty of God.

In writing this today, I realize all of my “troubles” and my errors come from “becoming a thing” and not contemplating the singularity of this moment. I have reveled in the past, pined for what was, and been too focused on getting ahead, reaching the goal at times to be in the moment. I have missed the information/data being transmitted to me in those moments and, as I had/have learned before, not been able to refocus the goal, reframe my thinking and acting, see the changing landscape before me. This led to erroneous premises about people, places, things, and even me and my capabilities. In not contemplating the singularity of the moment, I became willfully blind to what was happening in front of me, I put blinders on myself and thought I could charge ahead, as I had in the past. Instead, this last time of missing the moment, I was Custer-and I am saddened for the people who went down with me because of my not contemplating the “singularity of the moment.” Stay safe and God Bless, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 215

“The self is always in danger of being submerged in anonymity, of becoming a thing. To celebrate is to contemplate the singularity of the moment and to enhance the singularity of the self. What was shall not be again”. (Who is Man pg. 115)

Another way of “being submerged in anonymity” is the way we talk about, view our daily existence. So many people see life as a sort of ‘groundhog’ day. Get up, go to work, come home, go to sleep, wake up the next day and do it over again. We look forward to the weekend to be free and do what we want to, only finding we have chores to do, obligations to meet and feeling exhausted from our days off. Many people find themselves stuck in routines not of their making and feel forced to be enslaved to ‘making ends meet’. Still others, when asked what’s happening respond with “Same stuff, different day”. All of these ways can be defended and are real life experiences, we are forced into routines to make ends meet, we are repeating our routines daily, weekly, monthly, we are working for paychecks and not fulfillment. We are living a ‘groundhog’ experience. However, this experience is true for all the economic classes, the 1% is as stuck in their routines as our the rest of us, the celebrities are as stuck in being submerged in anonymity as anyone else. Because anonymity is not about the headlines, it is about the loss of self. It is about “becoming a thing” where we lose/surrender our core sense of beingness to the societal ‘norms’ and to an outer locus of control. Anonymity is the loss of our inner being, our uniqueness to the conventional notions of the society around us.

Being one’s unique self is not always pretty, it is not always fun and it is not always accepted by the masses. While we celebrate the unique inventions of people, like Ben Franklin, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Bill Gates, Alan Turing, Steve Jobs, etc, we do not know them and have come to identify them by their inventions rather than by their essence. For many of these people, they may have cme to identify themselves with their inventions and with their success’ not with their independence of spirit, their inner lives possibly were submerged by their outer protective shells of success and brilliance. I have counseled numerous people who have had this issue and found solace in different escapes and experienced a myriad of psychological traumas that could not be ‘fixed’ by a pill. While each person was unique and different, they/we shared a common problem: Believing we only mattered based on what our last/next great action was/is. We/they did not believe they mattered just because they exist, just because they live and their fear of being not being known was as great as our fear of being known.

We become “submerged in anonymity” because of our fear of not being seen and, at the same time, of being seen as imperfect, unpolished and needy. Our fears manifest themselves by going through life, either not making waves, trying to make ourselves very small, or by being loud, gregarious, puffing ourselves up. Both have the same effect-keeping people at bay so they will not see the messy inner lives we lead. Both have the same effect-keeping us stuck in anonymity and sorrow. Both have the same effect-separation and worthlessness, fear of being ‘found out’ and more and more hiding.

The antidote to our anonymity is to live truthfully. To accept that all of us suffer from the same dilemma and everyone wants to know they matter! Telling our kids that our lives are better because they are in them, taking actions of gratitude towards people who help us and we are connected to, no longer using someone for our gain rather recognizing their worth and contribution to our lives, our shared mission/job, etc. Living life in full view of everyone, without shame nor blame, overcoming the fear of being seen for the joy of knowing we are seen, growing and deepening our connections to our inner lives, to the people around us, to the community we live in, to God and living a life of belonging, of including rather than pushing away those who love us, embracing our imperfections as well as our brilliance, all our paths to getting out of anonymity, living the truth of YOU MATTER! This, is the surest path to never “becoming a thing”!

In recovery, we are constantly seeking to improve our connection to and turn over control to our inner lives. We have lived with an outer locus of control forever, we wanted an inner locus of control and did not know how to achieve it, we mistakenly thought escaping the outer controls was enough. We have learned to grow our inner lives so they can have the control over us and in this way we throw off the yoke of ‘do as I say’ societal norms and conformity. In our rebellion, we found a new master and it wasn’t us nor God. Our recovery is based in spiritual principles.

Being immersed in this teaching helps me to see the error of my ways and the lies I told myself. It is also helping me see how I have strengthen my sense of being, how I have left the lake/ocean of anonymity by strengthening my inner core sense of self, offering my self to help another(s) and connecting with people by overcoming my fear of not being liked, not being seen, being scorned, rejected, etc. I am committed to not treating myself as a “thing” anymore and not going along with another treating my like a “thing anymore as well. I have the power and control to stay free. This independence, this freedom is precious and I pray I can stay free and not fall back into anonymity and “becoming a thing”. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 214

“The self is always in danger of being submerged in anonymity, of becoming a thing. To celebrate is to contemplate the singularity of the moment and to enhance the singularity of the self. What was shall not be again”. (Who is Man pg. 115)

Our submerging into anonymity is so insidious and nuanced, we often don’t even realize it. It takes so many forms, too numerous and too unknown to any one individual to list. We sink into anonymity by becoming a human doing instead of being human, as Rabbi Heschel teaches. What does this mean in this context? I believe the most accepted and promoted path to “being submerged in anonymity” is our misguided belief that what we do is who we are. Our titles, our paychecks, our homes, our families all are ways we define our self and other selfs. We are described by our occupations, our roles and our bank accounts. We are mistakenly driven to ‘be the best’ in every thing we do and fall into the self-deception of believing our best is the same all the time. This begins in childhood, passed down by our parents, by society and we, in turn, pass these lies down to our children and the next generation.

Anonymity is, as I am understanding Rabbi Heschel today, the loss of a true self identity, the constant push to prove we are worthy, we are deserving of praise and the seeking of both praise and wealth along with power and prestige. This is a problem for us as individuals, for our communal groups (especially religious institutions) and for nations. Upon meeting someone, as adults, the usual questions are; “what do you do, where do you work, what is your family’s business, who do you know, etc.” We are setting up a transactional relationship from the beginning of our encounter and it takes a while to develop a deeper, connected relationship, if we do at all. Even college students are focused on who can help them move them forward to the ‘best’ job, career, home, investments, etc rather than who can help them grow internally, emotionally, spiritually. We have lost the art of being human in the need of ‘being somebody’.

This begins in childhood, as I said above. When we cry as infants, toddlers for whatever reason, even no reason, we are told “don’t cry baby” because we are unable to deal with the emotions of our children, especially the ones that are unspoken. We are taught that “you shouldn’t feel that way” from an early age as well. When we talk about dreams of being a _____(fill in the blank) and are laughed at, we begin to sink into anonymity. When we offer an opinion and are told “children should be seen and not heard” in a myriad of ways, we retreat into anonymity. When we make mistakes and we are told “God is going to punish you” and/or are afraid of the punishments of family, friends, society, we begin to lie and blame another and, most of all, hide our authentic self, hide our beingness and see the world, even family, as performance art rather than as welcoming our uniqueness, embracing our divine image and accepting our individuality.

There is a solution to this: reject the conditioning of our parents, our childhood and society in favor of the truth of our souls, our inner lives. Rebel against the tyranny of the anonymity and rebel towards the freedom of expression of one’s divine need, one’s divine truth and one’s much needed unique gifts. Opting out is not the answer any more than opting in and “being submerged in anonymity” is. The solution is to go through the birth canal of freedom, as the Israelites did when they went through the Red Sea, and find our true identity and ways to live as free, authentic selves bringing the best we have in any given moment, without comparison to any other moment. The solution is to throw off the shackles of conventional notions and the mental cliches we have adopted, the lies we have been telling ourselves, the mendacity of another(s) and the self-delusion/deception we have been operating under and create a covenant with our self to hear the call of our soul/inner life and fulfill, to the best of our ability in this moment, the demand of God, the needs of another and the needs of self.

In recovery this is the goal, this is the path. Rejecting old ideas, no longer having “contempt prior to investigation”, finding the real human being that is me by casting off the old lies, the old patterns is a life long endeavor. We know we will never fully ‘get there’ and we are aware that moving one grain of sand towards the ‘there” gives us a new freedom that motivates and exhilarates us.

I have always known this wisdom and not always lived it. I realize the subtle and not so subtle ways have ‘become a thing’ in my actions, my living and my thinking. I am relearning that I am me, whether I am here, there, anywhere and I am me whether I am embraced or rejected by another person, group and/or community. I am me and the only way to leave my anonymity, my “becoming a thing” is to live life out loud, give what I have and accept the gifts of another, especially you! I need to not make a caricature of myself, not apologize for being who I am and act according to the call of my soul and not the ways of being accepted and approved by another/society. I am rough, I am loud, I am abrasive, I am difficult, I am smart, I am caring, I am a loving, I am kind, etc. Being these ways are good and, at times, not so good, and when I deny these ways, deny these attributes, deny my authentic self, I submerge myself into anonymity, I become a thing and then I rebel, I act out and I screw up. Seeing this pattern is a blessing and I I am rededicating my self to being MY SELF. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 213

“The self is always in danger of being submerged in anonymity, of becoming a thing. To celebrate is to contemplate the singularity of the moment and to enhance the singularity of the self. What was shall not be again”. (Who is Man pg. 115)

Reading this teaching reminds me of God’s need for us and the paths we often take to dehumanize our self, submerging our  selves in anonymity, making ourselves into objects, robots, automatons, rather than living, breathing, imperfect, unique selves.  I believe our need to belong, while necessary and true, often leads us astray. We often find our selves ‘going along to get along’ in order to ‘belong’ and be part of something greater than ourselves. We often are just ‘following orders’ so we are not shunned and cast out of the particular group we have joined. We begin to agree with ideas and actions that go against our Higher Self morality just to ‘belong’, all the while thinking ‘if they really knew who I am, they would not want me’.

This thinking permeates so much of our falseness, our hiding, our fears of being found out that we sink into anonymity so we don’t slip up, show our true self and be shunned. This is, I believe, the path to “becoming a thing”. We have learned to ‘not rock the boat’ for fear of reprisals, becoming unpopular, etc. Even many of the  people who supposedly shun the group are doing it from a place of hiding, of not wanting to be known, to believing they are not good enough. While many people put on the facade of ‘look at me, see how smart/successful I am’ most are afraid to be seen’warts and all’ for fear of becoming unpopular. Social media has made stars of people for their falseness, for their outrageousness, and this is another form of “being submerged in anonymity” I believe. Celebrity has become a thing, the celebrities are marketing themselves as a thing and then, when they realized they have become a thing and are being used by so many other people, they get mad, sad, upset, etc. Belonging is the greatest experience when it is real, when we belong as our whole self and it is the most excruciating experience when we belong only because we are being false.

People who join cults, movements, which seek to dehumanize another group, people who join groups which seek to set themselves above another group, people who engage in stereotyping another group of humans so they can feel good about themselves and mollify their unethical, inhumane ways of treating God’s creations, are all “submerging” themselves in anonymity, are all “becoming a thing”. They become tools of charismatic leaders who are so narcissistic they see no one but themselves and need to see their reflection in their followers. When we are engaged in the anonymity Rabbi Heschel is speaking of, we have submerged our uniqueness that is our birthright, we are sinking into the quicksand of a fool’s errand: trying to belong to groups that do not honor, want nor respect our uniqueness, brilliance, our vision.

We do this because we are afraid of being alone, of being lonely. Yet, we know, in our souls, we are more alone and lonely because we are being phony and fake. We are doing things that we may or may not believe in just to be part of something/anything. We are convinced that their is strength in numbers and we need other people to fend off the attacks by our enemies, by people who are trying to take what we have worked for and, while true to a certain extent, this belief causes us to be overtaken by our worst enemy-our inner fears and negativity, our belief in our own lack of being sufficient and not good enough, our false belief we need others to approve of us to be ok, etc. We have chosen to sink into this anonymity, this “becoming a thing” because to do otherwise is to risk disapproval, to delve deep inside of our self and turn to God for sustenance and support. We are afraid that, in “our fall from grace”, God no longer cares nor is here for us-a false fear, yet the one that drives us into anonymity, I believe.

In recovery, we chose anonymity because of the prejudice against people who were drunks, addicts, people with psychological issues, personality disorders, etc. If we were ‘found out’ we could lose jobs, friendships, relationships, etc so we became anonymous and, I believe, it was a necessary action. Yet, while it is important to identify as people who share a common goal and suffer from common ailments, it is also important to remember we are like but not the same as everyone else. We share a common goal, recovery, and we all have our unique paths to it. In recovery, we are searching for our unique path, for our own purpose and passion, our own true self.

I find this teaching fascinating. I am more and more aware of the need for authentic human connection and the myriad of faux connections I have had in my lifetime. When I could do something for someone, everyone was calling, when I had ‘power’ people sought my counsel, now, in retirement, the phone rings less and my counsel is sought less. Till reading this text, I felt as if I had become anonymous, and now I realize that it is my doing, my actions of “becoming a thing”, my submerging my self in anonymity that is the issue. It is not anyone else’s doing, it is mine. I have to remember to not be a caricature of my self, to continue to bring my whole self to the table, to offer my unique service and not submerge my self to get along nor submerge my self to stay separate. I can and commit to bring my self, be my self and serve God, another human in the ways I can. I am buoyed by this teaching and Rabbi Heschel has disturbed me again so I live well and as a whole self. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 212

“The question is not where is the event and what is the surprise, but how to see through the sham of routine, how to refute the falsehood of familiarity. Boredom is a spiritual disease, infectious and deadening, but curable.”(Who is Man pg. 115)

Boredom is curable, it is curable through the same dedication to spiritual exercises as is needed in our physical exercise routines. Just as with our physical exercise routines, we must continually change, update, add ‘weight’ to and have a daily/weekly routine we engage in. While some may say “I am not spiritual” and need to see this as mental/psychological/emotional exercises, so be it. Rabbi Heschel’s entire body of works is dedicated to ideas, pathways and actions helping us grow our inner life, grow our spirits, grow our emotional, psychological and intellectual living. It begins with being in the moment, as I wrote on Friday, and continues with appreciation. It is a given that being present is the foundation of not being bored and many people are practicing being present, appreciation for this moment is not always a given. Even people who say: “same shit, different day” can say they are in the moment and it is ‘shit’.

Appreciate is defined as “realizing the full worth of” and comes from the Latin meaning “to price”. Boredom ends and is defeated when we realize the “full worth of” this moment, when we realize the “price” this moment has on it and the worth of being present, the joy of realizing this moment only comes once and is fleeting, yet full of power, full of meaning and we can be loyal to it, remember it and use it to enhance the next. Appreciation is a key to curing our boredom, I believe. Yet, we live in a fog which prevents us from a true appraisal of this moment for what it truly is. We get so much outside noise regarding what isn’t worth it, who isn’t worth it, and these erroneous appraisals have ruined our ability to be in this moment, to reevaluate what is and to appraise it for ourselves. Th bombardment of the outside noise of social media rants, mendacity from the charlatans who proclaim themselves the TRUE believers, prophets and adherers to god’s will, from family hierarchy, from the lies we tell ourselves and our immature inner life, etc, cause us to have a misappraisal of this moment and every other moment. Hence, boredom sets in when we allow these half-truths (remember every great lie has a kernel of truth in it), this noise, our need to be accepted and belong, our fears and our “adjustment to conventional notions and mental cliches” as Rabbi Heschel teaches in Man is Not Alone, to overwhelm us and envelope us in the fog, the slavery, the self-deception of boredom.

We cure it through changing our way of being 2%, as Rabbi Jonathan Omer-man taught me back in 1989. He reminded a class Harriet and I were taking with him that the shift from this to that is only a 2%shift. At any given moment we are 49% willing to appreciate this moment for what it is, for the possibilities it has, and if we shift our perceptions, our focus, our investigations 2%, we will be 51% in appreciation and 49% in (possible) boredom, anxiety, etc. We can make this shift a lot more easily that most people realize. Going back to the exercise model, when we go to the gym for the first time, we are not expecting to have six-pack abs immediately, or even at the 100th day. Because we know so much goes into our exercise routine, so much goes in to our changing of habits, the choices we make, the attention we give to our routine, our rest, our food choices, etc. We know we cannot approach our workouts with a routine attitude and get the results we are seeking, we put a high price on how our exercise is going to help our physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual heath so we keep moving the needle one grain of sand each day.

The same is true with our spiritual exercise, we can’t become a spiritual giant in a day, we won’t ever be 100% spiritual being until we die, so to begin to release ourselves from the prison of boredom and the slavery of “the sham of routine”, “the falsehood of familiarity”, we must being with the acceptance of the 2% shift which can happen in a shorter or longer period of time depending on “the price” we set for spiritual health, for not living in boredom, and for adding to and belonging to a community of people engaging in being human. This 2% shift is not easy, I am not suggesting it is, yet it is doable, it is achievable, it is worth it. People who have left boredom, people who have made this shift,  have a light in their eyes that is difficult to ignore, they have a spirit that infuses each moment and each idea with energy, they believe in the power of we and they know that me is an important component of we. We all need to make this 2% shift in every area of our lives, one of the lies we tell ourselves is that we only need to be spiritual in church, synagogue, mosque, and the truth is we have to walk in the ways of spirit, of being human in all areas of our life, we have to appreciate, reappraise, set the correct price on our relationships, our covenants with people and on the truth so we do not fall back into the boring routines and familiarities we are leaving.

My recovery is based on the 2% shift I learned so many years ago. I have made it and I have stayed with it. I am aware of the times I have fell back into boredom and I am aware of how quickly I have left them (quick in relation to how long it took me the first time). I am also aware of the price I have set on joy, being present, letting go of resentments and letting go of needing people to agree with my vision and experience. These are the exercises I engage in every day to grow my spirit, to be better at being human each day. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 211

“The question is not where is the event and what is the surprise, but how to see through the sham of routine, how to refute the falsehood of familiarity. Boredom is a spiritual disease, infectious and deadening, but curable.”(Who is Man pg. 115)

The root cause of boredom, I believe, is our inability to take in what is authentically happening in this moment, without regard to the moment before nor the moment after this one. Rabbi Heschel teaches us that every moment is precious and unique, “no two moments are alike” he reminds Carl Stern in their televised interview that was aired after Rabbi Heschel died. When we are unaware of the grandeur and beauty of this moment, when we are willfully blind to the importance of this moment, when we forfeit our sight of what is right now for what was and/or what will be; we are living a very boring life and a vapid meaningless life.

This is not to say we don’t have plans, this is not to say we are not learning from our past success and missing the marks, I am saying we have to be present in this moment in order to have plans that are doable, goals we can actually fulfill, dreams we can pursue and achieve, and apply the lessons we learned from our missing the marks. Being present in this moment is the only way to being loving, to being human. Many people are able to lie to themselves that they are being human because of their charitable work, because they provide food and sustenance for people through employing them, because they are on the “right” side of things/issues/religious beliefs, etc. Yet, they are not connected to the moment they are in, they are thinking of who to take revenge on, how to get their way, how to win at any and all costs, how to preserve their image, how to be the ‘smartest person in the room’ or at least the loudest, etc. These people who lie to themselves, often unknowingly, are leaders of industry, media darlings and stars, politicians, husbands, wives, bosses, parents, etc-in other words, all of us to a greater or lessor degree. I don’t know of a person who is present in all moments, yet I do know many who strive to be and achieve a great deal of success in this realm; they are usually more joyous, more positive, more hopeful, more courageous, more innovative, more connected and loving than those who stay bored and not present.

When we clear our minds of the ‘shoulds’ we grew up with and with the negative self-talk we have allowed to foment, we are able to see what is, change what should be changed, as Reinhold Niebuhr teaches us in the Serenity Prayer, and accept with clarity what cannot be changed, We are able to see what truly is, see the people in front of us for who they are, no longer depend on someone to ‘save’ us and no longer put ourselves at the mercy of inauthentic people. When we see what is in this moment, with clear vision, with the foreskin of hearts circumcised, we are present and can never be bored because we will respond to the call of the moment, we will love with all that we have in this moment, we will be connected to the excitement and celebration of connection to the moment, to the people, to the cause, to the work, to the call/demand, to the text, to LIFE!

As I am writing this, I believe this is the purpose of a L’Chaim toast-to be present, to celebrate this moment we are in, to be grateful and loving and connected to the moment, to the experience and to the people we share it with. L’Chaim is not for whiskey, it is not an excuse to drink, rather it is a recognition of the moment, it is to rejoice in the moment and, in our misguided way, we have instead used a moment to become inebriated, to take ourselves out of the moment with stimulants rather than allowing this moment to stimulate us to be present in the next. This is one reason, I believe, that boredom is so infectious and deadly.

In recovery, we know that we ‘get’ to be in the moment, we know that every day we are aware, present and engaged is a gift. We are so acutely aware of this precisely because we were so unaware of this prior to our recovery. We achieved certainty in our past way of being, the certainty of boredom, the certainty of deadening our spirits, our hopes, etc. In our recovery, we seek with gusto to be present as much as possible and to welcome the moments of our life with hope and know we are able to respond to whatever comes our way.

I have not had any alcohol pass my lips for 33 years and 5 months and I have said and meant more L’Chaims than in the previous 37 years of living. Letting go of the boring way of being is joyous and authentic for me. I have gotten into trouble, I have been inappropriate and chastised, I have been lauded and thanked, I have helped people save their own lives and I have celebrated with people who moments before hated me and/or I had not so much love for. Being in the moment allows me to discern what is true and right in this moment, it allows me to welcome people who have hurt me, be joyous for their success’, meet them in their sorrows, know that they meant to hurt me and are so blind and boring they are unaware of their own duality. Being in the moment also allows me to experience change in myself and in another person and  being in the moment allows me to be excited and focused. Letting go of boredom is not easy and it is essential for me to be loving and real. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 210

“The question is not where is the event and what is the surprise, but how to see through the sham of routine, how to refute the falsehood of familiarity. Boredom is a spiritual disease, infectious and deadening, but curable.”(Who is Man pg. 115)

Boredom is “a spiritual disease” because it deadens our ability to see what is, hear the call/demand of our inner life, and take positive actions that help us immerse and engage ourselves in the joys of living. Boredom infects our entire being and is ‘caught’ from people around us, the media, and our community. We seek many ‘wrong’ paths out of boredom; hatred of another, blaming of another, addiction, workaholism, risky behaviors, etc, all for naught because they destroy our souls even more, they prejudice our minds and our emotions till we cannot tell truth from fiction, holy from profane, life from death. Boredom is a way to exist, not live.

Humans have always sought excitement as a path out of boredom and this excitement leads to the ways above. It is exciting for some to hate someone else for who they are, what they have accomplished and to tear them and their achievements down. It is exciting for some to blame their failures on another human being/group so there is no personal responsibility for ones own situation. It is exciting to ‘get high’ and leave reality for a moment, a day, year, etc in order to not have to deal with the sadness of missing the mark. It is exciting to engage in risky behaviors for the adrenaline rush we get is intoxicating. It is exciting to manipulate truth and facts so we can always ‘be right’ and convince another of our ‘rightness’, get them to join in our false narratives and ‘have our back. Excitement is another ‘wrong path’ out of boredom.

Our young people are bored with the status quo, they are bored with the need to make more than and do better than their parents’ generation. They are bored with the vapidness of life, they are bored with themselves, hence the suicide rate among young people, from teenage up, is rising. Over 100,000 people died of Opiate Overdoses this past year because people are seeking relief from their boredom in all the wrong places and manners. We are in a crisis of our own making. We have made money, celebrity, likes on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, etc the sole measure of our worth and value. Boredom leads us to deny our intrinsic infinite value and is a tool of comparison and competition for popularity, not celebration of our uniqueness.

Boredom leads to the mass shootings, I believe, we are experience. Because hatred, stereotyping, blaming another group/individual is so insidious and there are so many people promoting this with big megaphones, Tucker Carlson et al., more and more people are bored with ‘those’ people taking the place of, trying to replace ‘me’. Because of boredom and the refrain “its not my fault”, one can justify the killings, the marginalizing, the dehumanizing of another human being so one can be happy, one can take the place of another rather than find their authentic place in the world. Boredom is a motivating factor behind wars as well, I believe. When leaders are bored, they want to ‘shake things up’ so they go to war to take what isn’t theirs. When business leaders are bored, they believe their solution is to engage in ‘killing the competition’. When communities are bored, they ignore the present to focus on the glory of the past.

We are in a state of boredom today. Boredom leads to indifference and indifference, as I hear from Rabbi Heschel’s teachings,  is the birthplace of evil. We have become indifferent to evil, not the Putin evil, not the Hitler evil (although many people are revering him today and rewriting the mass destruction he committed as not true), we have become indifferent to the evil of not acknowledging the humanity of another, the infinite worth and dignity of another. This stems for being bored with our selves and not recognizing, growing and maturing our inner worth and dignity, our inner life’s needs and externalizing what is “an inside job”. Like Covid-19, boredom is easily caught and not so easily diagnosed, we go through a lot of tests, like mentioned above, and some people never accept nor seek the diagnosis of boredom as the root of their anger, indifference, and unhappiness.

In recovery, we are engaged in service as a way of staying fresh, we know the dangers of being stale. Staleness/boredom has led us to live false scripts, engage in profane paths of living and stay indifferent to the world around us. Service helps us hear the call/demand of our inner life, take action to help another and fulfill the task we are uniquely qualified for.

In my old life, I would say “I’m going to do something, even if it is wrong” and it always was. In fact, these words always came before I was arrested! The boredom I was in was choking me, killing me and, in my misguided attempts to get out of being bored, I was hurting people, I was breaking the law, I was acting against all of the morality I was brought up with and I was trashing my name, my father’s name and causing grief and pain to the people I loved. Boredom gave me the permission to be entitled, to believe the lies I was telling myself and everyone else. Boredom was killing my soul and it is so encompassing, I was unable to discern the cries of my soul from the cries of my emotions. I am grateful this is no longer the case. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 209

“The question is not where is the event and what is the surprise, but how to see through the sham of routine, how to refute the falsehood of familiarity. Boredom is a spiritual disease, infectious and deadening, but curable.”(Who is Man pg. 115)

My father, z”l, when we said we were bored used to tell us to “play the Russian game, hit your head against the wall” as a joke. He said it in Yiddish which had a particular flair and humor to it. Yet, he was also telling us that the only bored people were people who were boring. Before Rabbi Heschel reminded me, my father taught me to stay present, appreciate the moment we are in and never see things the same way twice. Looking back, I realize both through his words and his deeds, my father stayed present almost all the time. Of course he gave into routines at times, he fell into the falsehood of familiarity in moments and he left them quickly. I believe his time in the service, his occupation as a salesman, his upbringing, his nature, and having a heart condition that was life-threatening at anytime all contributed to his belief that we have today, live for it, live in it. While planning for tomorrow, live this moment because one never knows if it could be our last. While my father died at age 42, he lived a full life in those 42 years and his wisdom carries on in his children, grandchildren and his great-grandchildren.

Most of us are unaware of how important this teaching is. We have become accustomed to the routine, whether it is our daily schedules, our indifference to the evils that are being perpetrated in our names, resting on our laurels, our entitlements, etc. to the detriment to our living well. People who see awe and beauty in sunrises and sunsets, in nature and art are still susceptible to falling into the “sham of routine” and the “falsehood of familiarity”. We listen to music as background noise rather than as moments of exhalation, we listen to ourselves repeat the same actions over and over again, we seek the safety of routine and familiarity in order to defend against the fear of the unknown. We pray the same prayers with the same melodies and don’t immerse ourselves in the new meaning, hope and love that today’s prayers give us. We study different texts and use the same explanations and commentaries we have used before forgetting to see how these texts and readings impact our being today as opposed to yesterday. Yet, we are better than this enticing and tolerable slavery!

To live this first sentence above takes great courage and constant awareness. We have to continually guard against profaning our lives by falling into the same routines in the same way. This is not to say we should not have routines, we must! Yet, we can’t sleepwalk through our days and our routines and have an authentic awareness of what is truly happening. Anti-semitism and racism are old stories that keep coming back whenever someone wants people to coalesce around hatred of a group. Stereotyping is another sure path to enslaving ourselves with routine and familiarity. Euphoric recall of “the good old days” is another sure way to fall into the “sham of routine, the falsehood of familiarity” because they never were that good! We will always have moments of falling backwards, we are human after all, our challenge is to ensure that they are moments, not decades, not lifetimes.

We can do this by being grateful for the moment we are in, even if it isn’t so wonderful. We can never change things if we are stuck in misery, routine, familiarity because these ways of being blind us to any and all other possibilities. We get stuck in the routine of labeling, ourselves, another(s), situations, etc and this labeling prevents us from seeing the nuances, the newness, the possible solutions to the challenge of this moment and the beauty of the present. We have to constantly blink our eyes to change the myopic vision we are having, otherwise we easily and unconsciously fall back into the “sham of routine, the falsehood of familiarity”. Seeing this moment as an event, experiencing the surprise of awareness and newness, realizing the current challenge in front of us and exploring new solutions gives us freedom and joy that is immeasurable.

In recovery, we follow the advice of Chuck Chamberlain and wear “A New Pair of Glasses” as his book is titled. One of the main attributes we recover is our ability to see things new, see things for what and who they are in this moment and not fall into the trap of “same old, same old” thinking and acting. We recover our ability to experience and respond to life’s sorrows and joys in the moment, we recover our ability to deal with the traumas we have experienced and leave them in the past, we recover our authenticity and our uniqueness.

My father’s wisdom is still something I use at times, I have to “hit my head against the wall” to get out of the “sham of routine, the falsehood of familiarity” that I fall into when I feel scared, hurt, angry, etc. I usually “hit my head” against the situation instead of the wall, trying to change things around me prior to seeing them new and finding the solution in this moment, not trying to get my way nor attempting to make things ‘like they were’. I begin each day with hope and newness and it is a challenge to keep this vision present throughout the day, when I hear news about different situations that I thought had been solved, etc. Today’s learning reminds me to keep it fresh, keep it new and keep it real, so I can live a little freer and better each day. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 208

“The question is not where is the event and what is the surprise, but how to see through the sham of routine, how to refute the falsehood of familiarity. Boredom is a spiritual disease, infectious and deadening, but curable.”(Who is Man pg. 115)

I am struck at the powerful images the first part of the first sentence above brings to mind. We are so enamored with and engaged in looking for where the event is, what is the next event, making sure we don’t get ‘left out’, that we are unable to see the and experience the authentic, exciting, important events that are happening right in front of our eyes. We have become so obsessed with rubbernecking, with searching for the celebrity, slowing down to see an accident, looking past what is for what might be, we have lost our ability to see what is at the end of our nose, what is right in front of our eyes and what is true and real. I know that our need to not be ‘left out’, our need to be ‘part of the next event’ and our fear of boredom has led us to a life that is vapid and meaningless. It has led us to seek to blame, hate, lie about, enslave anyone ‘not like me’ and be susceptible to the deceptions of another to follow them down the path of mendacity and boredom. This past weekend we saw two terrorist attacks, I call them terrorist attacks because they were meant to terrorize all of us, to make all of us feel unsafe, to get us to capitulate to the hatred, racism, anti-semitism, of the few so they can feel powerful and strong. By continually seeking “where is the event” and “what is the surprise” we allow ourselves to become diseased, infecting all around us and dead to the here and now, dead to the call of our higher selves.

We love the routine and the familiar because it gives us the certainty we crave. We will follow the person ‘who has all the answers for us’ to the ends of the earth because there is a certainty and comfort in this way of being. Remember all of the cults who were willing to die at the command of their leader, ie Jonestown. Remember all the people who are willing to kill because of Q. See all of the people willing to become radicalized White Supremacists through the Internet and follow the call to arms by Trump and his minions. See all of the Republicans who are kowtowing to Trump for fear of losing their elections. See all of the progressives who are willing to exclude people from the table if they don’t agree 100%-I remember this happening in the ‘60s as well. This need for certainty is infecting our ability to see what is in front of us. It is putting blinders on us so that the routine looks perfectly normal and good for us. “Same shit different day” is a motto that rings true for so many people precisely because they crave the certainty this statement brings, they crave the comfort of knowing what is going to happen today and it will be the same as yesterday and tomorrow. My friend and Rabbi, Ed Feinstein, calls this the definition of Slavery. When everything becomes a routine, when certainty is the most important principle in our lives, we enslave ourselves!

Rabbi Heschel is giving us the path to life, seeing through the “sham of routine”. How do we do this? We have to let go of our need for certainty, we have to let go of the past traumas and fears, we have to let go of our need to be perfect, need to be anything other than who we authentically are. We need to be noticed and heard, we need to stop ‘going along to get along’, we need to stop selling our souls and our minds to the people who say they have all the answers. We have to begin to notice the event that is happening right now, I am writing this and you are reading this-here is an event. Waking up in the morning is an event that usually goes unnoticed. We are able to think, see, touch, feel, hear, love, connect, use our gifts and talents daily; these are all events that go unnoticed because of the sham of routine. When we pay attention, we see all kinds of events that we have been missing because we are stuck in the routine and the profane.

In recovery, we make it a point to notice what is, not what we want. We know that if we do the same things today as we did yesterday, we will be moving backwards. Just as the earth is constantly rotating, we too have to move forward in our living well each and every day. Otherwise, we fall into the old traps of mendacity and self-deception. Otherwise we miss the events that are happening in our lives today and we are bored instead of surprised.

I realize how subtle the shift from being present and aware of the events unfolding in front of me to the “sham of routine” and the “falsehood of familiarity” is. I am guilty of not being aware enough to see it, I am guilty of blaming another when it is my false belief in certainty that causes my problems. I have always known that there is no certainty, yet because of my father’s death when I was young, I have craved it and fallen prey to the dangers and damages that this craving brings. I am acutely aware of the traps I have fallen into because I have lived a routine routinely instead of with awareness and newness. I am acutely aware of the damage to my soul and to the souls of people that my succumbing to this “sham of routine” has caused. I am also rededicating myself to seeing better and truer. Yesterday, I received an Honorary Doctor of Divinity Degree from the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies for 20+ years of service and I saw people I haven’t seen in 20+ years and this event of reconnection was so powerful. Harriet woke up a few minutes ago and I saw her and knew this was an event. I am excited to live today and everyday as an event, rather than just another day. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Living Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom - A daily path to Living well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 207

“Events and the sense of surprise are not only inherent in the quintessence of reality and authentic consciousness, they are the points from which misunderstandings of human existence proceed.” (Who is Man pg.115)

Reality and authentic consciousness are important terms for us to consider and ponder. We are so enthralled with falsehoods and deceptions that many of us no longer have an authentic consciousness, most of us are engaged in creating ‘our own reality’ and have the expectation that everyone will go along with us. We are living in a time of ‘alternative facts’ and the misuse of the internet to spread whatever falsehoods, inauthentic consciousness we are able to. We see the rise in authoritarianism again and we stand by and wring our hands over everything we see rather than engaging with the reality of what is and working to change it to what ought to be.

Because we are ‘free to be me’ many people have decided to take this event, freedom, and use it as a club to subdue an individual and/or a large group, even a country. While we are, of course, ‘free to be me’ and need to be our true self, this is not the same as free to enslave you, free to do whatever I want to and free to abstain from adding to our corner of the world. Freedom, as Rabbi Heschel teaches, is an event, not a constant. Many of us believe we are free while be enslaved to ‘the way things were’ and the false belief that freedom is a one and done experience. This is an example of  an event that leads to a misunderstanding of human existence. Because people have the false idea that freedom is a constant, they do not guard it well, they take it for granted and it begins to erode. Freedom is a surprising experience because we no longer are tied to the lies and deceptions of our minds, of another person(s) and we can truly “smell the roses” authentically. It is a surprise to many of us how capable we are, how connected we are and how needed we are. We see ourselves and everyone else as partners in creation or at least potentially partners in creation, we see ourselves and everyone else as sharing in the greatest gift of religion-freedom from being enslaved by another person and freedom to search for and find our authentic way of being.

Yet, we can easily get lulled into the false belief that freedom is a one and done event and, as we see in the world; freedoms once attained have to be cultivated, nurtured and respected by all, otherwise they will atrophy, they will be challenged by the ‘enslaving’ group that did not want the first place and we will fall asleep at the wheel under our false beliefs and taking things for granted. We are involved in such a time right now. The White Supremacist movement that radicalizes men and women to such an extent they stage mass shootings, the Radical Islamists who are willing to blow themselves up for a false claim of martyrdom, the followers of Kahane, the radical left who have blown up people and places, the anti-abortionists who kill doctors, blow up buildings, and many other splinter groups. All of these have taken advantage of the freedoms our founding fathers and mothers and subsequent generations fought and died for. They are able to bastardize the event of Freedom because we stopped seeing it as such, we took it for granted and, in the process, became “indifferent to the sublime wonder of living” as Rabbi Heschel teaches in God in Search of Man. We are responsible for the misunderstanding of human existence as much as the people who take advantage of our misunderstandings are.

While we are not the bad actors, (I hope), we are responsible for their actions in so far as we have not cared for and continued to experience freedom and other states of being as events that are not one and done, continued to think that we don’t need to nurture and grow our authentic consciousness and continue to do a reality check on ourselves and with everyone around us. “In a free society, some are guilty, all are responsible” Rabbi Heschel said regarding the Vietnam War and it is important to repeat this teaching over and over again as we have allowed people to point the fingers at us and use the finger pointing to deny freedoms and truths. We are also guilty of doing the same to people around us and far away from us. Most of all, we are guilty of not staying fresh, not staying alert, not staying authentic and allowing the snake of hatred, like the snake in the Garden of Eden story, to flourish and insinuate itself into our consciousness.

In recovery, we are aware of our guilt of being irresponsible, our guilt of bastardizing freedom and of misunderstanding and promoting the misunderstanding of human existence for everyone we came in contact with. We are hyper aware of our need to experience life on life’s terms and “put principles before personalities” so we can have an authentic awareness and consciousness of reality and live a life compatible with being free.

I have misunderstood the essential and intrinsic values of events and sense of surprise. I have bastardized them and, in doing so, enslaved myself. For the past 36+ years I have been extracting myself from the falsehood of one and done, from the falsehood of blame and shame, from the indifference to the sublime wonder of living. I know I have a ways to go and I am proud of the distance I have travelled. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Living Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom - a daily path to living well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 206

“Events and the sense of surprise are not only inherent in the quintessence of reality and authentic consciousness, they are the points from which misunderstanding of human existence proceed. (Who is Man pg. 115)

Quintessence is defined as “the intrinsic and central characteristic of something” and comes from the Latin meaning “fifth essence”. Rabbi Heschel is teaching us that events and surprises are “sticking to” what is the central characteristic of “reality and authentic consciousness” and so many people are unaware of this truth, bastardize this truth and use this truth to enhance their own personal power, wealth, while contributing to the ruin of another(s).

We have lost this sense of daily surprise and of the daily events that occur in our lives. Sometimes we are just too tired and too overwhelmed with our problems, sometimes we are taught to ‘stay in your lane and accept your lot in life’, sometimes we are lied to that we are “miserable in this life to be happy in the next” as a control mechanism. Whatever the reason, we are missing out on an essential element of reality, we are missing out on an intrinsic necessity towards living a more authentic consciousness.

Every day is an event and a surprise whether we are aware of this truth, whether we recognize this truth or not. I woke up this morning and this is a miracle, whether you want to call it a miracle of science, dumb luck, ‘not my time yet’, etc-to me it is an event, I am surprised when I wake up in the morning because there was no guarantee I would. Yet, most people, even if they recite a prayer upon awakening do so routinely. We have come to regard our daily living as mundane and routine and in doing so we are in grave danger of losing what is an essential element of our humanity-surprise and awareness of the events.

We are in a terrible situation as human beings, we seek and crave certainty, we always want to know what is going to happen and what’s next, we want to see the end result before we take the first step. Yet, we also know being surprised and making each experience a unique event is the central characteristic of being human. We are always in the tug of war between what our minds want and what our souls know. This is another quintessential event in the life of every human being. We get afraid to have the experiences of surprise and event unless it is one that we decide we want-how many people really enjoy ‘SURPRISE’ birthday parties? We want the surety and the safety of our routine because we never have to move beyond our ‘comfort zone’.

Yet, going to sleep is uncertain, waking up is uncertain, death and birth are uncertain, etc what is certain is that we can have an authentic experience and engage in authentic consciousness whenever we are willing to see the events and surprises in our lives. We are taught to say blessings for everything; earthquakes and rainbows, birth and death, wins and losses, to make these daily occurrences special, make them events and mark these surprises so we can remember what is truly real, what is truly important and what is truly happening. Doing this helps relieve ourselves of the false stories we tell ourselves and is a wonderful coat of armor against the bows and arrows and gunshots of the liars who want us to follow them and their lies, serve the lower interests of self and them as well as enslave ourselves to boredom and dullness. We are alive, we have the capability of awareness and the strength to be authentically our unique self. We no longer need someone to ‘rain on our parade’, we are able to experience our daily lives with awe, reverence, joy, etc as well as being surprised and celebrating the events, big and small, that occur each and every day.

In recovery, we learn about what is intrinsic to reality and stop trying to make what we see, think, feel, etc our reality and the reality for everyone. We learn to give gratitude for what we have, who we are and what we can give. We learn to be surprised and joyful at each and every occurrence in our life rather than bitching and meaning all the time. We pray for guidance, wisdom, acceptance for our selves and for all selves.

I have struggled with this intrinsic and central characteristic of being human at times in my life. From 1966-1987, I couldn’t find authentic consciousness nor be connected to reality, I was only connected to my pain and my trauma. Rather than seeing the death of my father as an event, I experienced it as the end of hope for myself. I no longer cared about the dreams and aspirations we had talked about, I was angry, fearful, sad, bereft and vulnerable to the lies I told myself. Events, surprises, experiencing reality for what it is, not what I want to make it, and having more moments of authentic consciousness are the hallmarks of my life since 1987. I am more aware of all these things and have a heightened sense of when I check out. My daily work is to be present more often, check out less and pay attention to the important things in my life; family, friends, ideas, new possibilities, service, teaching, and, of course, golf:) God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark