Comment

Living Rabbi Heschel’s Wisdom - A Daily path to living well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 237

“The cardinal sin is in our failure not to sense the grandeur of the moment, the marvel and mystery of being, the possibility of quiet exaltation.” (Who is Man pg.116)

Our ability to live well, to “live a life compatible with being a contemporary of God” as Rabbi Heschel teaches, ‘hinges on’ our ability to live into “the marvel and mystery of being”. Marvel comes from the Latin meaning “wonder at” and mystery comes from the Greek meaning “difficult/impossible to explain”. I believe this is one of the many reasons that Rabbi Heschel has, over the past 33+years, spoken so deeply and clearly to the souls of recovering people at Beit T’Shuvah. Rabbi Heschel does not deny the science of life, in fact he embraces it while at the same time he is able to live in and through the “wonder at” life itself, he is able to show us all how to live into doing the next right thing even though it is, at times, “difficult/impossible to explain” how we know what we know. Our failure to adopt and adapt to the manner of living that Rabbi Heschel is teaching us both above and with the way he lived life is, in my opinion, one of the major sources of the chaos, the mendacity, the misery and the denigration of the human spirit, the “eye disease” of prejudice, the “cancer of the soul” of racism, anti-semitism, and all other senseless hatred we are witnessing today. We are in desperate need of letting go of these “cardinal sins”, our inability to sense the marvel and the mystery of being, of being in this moment, and our inability to control everything. We are in desperate need of responding to what is, not what we want it to be, not what we can deceive ourselves and another(s) into believing what is, not reacting, not stereotyping, not believing we have seen this movie before. Rather, we have to begin anew to see what truly is, see what truly could be. We are at war within ourselves because we cannot/will not hear the call of our inner life, our souls, and follow the path that mystery and marvel lead us on.

One of the journeys we have witnessed in our lifetime is from Nazi Germany-standing up for the white aryan race as masters of the universe- to the defeat of senseless hatred and prejudice. Eisenhower wanted the Concentration Camps documented because he was sure someone later on would deny they ever occurred, how prescient was he! From JFK reminding us to “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country” to Trump, Tea Party Jordan and Meadows, McCarthy and McConnell seeking power and money from their non-serving the best interests of the country and working diligently to make the country do for and serve them. We are seeing this in real time in the hearings of the Jan.6th Committee and we can also see how none of these people, the thieves, the prostitutes who kiss the ass of Trump and the money people who back them, the people who have “seen the light” all of a sudden yet were happy to be on the train of mendacity and ‘hinged’ their future on serving a liar, cheat, grifter! All of these people, many of whom are still bowing down to the man and/or the ideals of the man who put himself first and the country last. All of these people who committed the “cardinal sin” of failing to sense the mystery and marvel of being, of this moment we are in.

We have the opportunity to change what is and repair what was. To do so is to do an accounting of the soul of the nation as Jon Meecham has written a book about, to do so is to do an accounting of our own soul and investigate the areas of our lives where we have failed to “wonder at” the fact we are alive at all, to “wonder at” the great possibilities we have in front of us, to “wonder at” our ability to sense the marvel of the moment, the marvel of our connection to God, to a force that is too much for us to explain and/or understand yet know it is here, know this force is within us, know that they mystery of being and living is what has driven so many discoveries that have enhanced our ability to live better. We have the ability to stop committing the “cardinal sin” Rabbi Heschel is talking about, we just have not had the will, the determination, we have been deaf to the call of our inner life, deaf to the neediness of our soul and deaf to demand of God. We need to “shema” hear, listen and understand to the best of our ability the call of our inner life, the demand of God and appreciate and lean into “the marvel and mystery of being”.

In recovery, we do this daily from when we arise till we go to sleep, honing our ability to  marvel at the fact we are alive at all, engage in the mystery of being rather than need to explain it, control it, rule it. In recovery, we are grateful for the call, for the awakening to the marvel and mystery of life!

I have been engaged in the mystery and marvel of being, honoring it, relishing it, reveling in it since 1988. It is a much better way to live than the way I used to. I know I am not here every minute, all the time and when I commit the “cardinal sin”, I am immediately(?) aware of the emptiness and loneliness I experience. Our documentary premiered last night at the Chinese Theaters in LA and I am still in awe of the work of Barry Rosenthal and in wonder at and experiencing the mystery of the wonderful reception by the audience as well as the support of so many people. Being grateful for Vered Kollek and Farrell Meisel, our PR team and Justin Rosenberg our Social Media Guru is one of the ways I know I am not committing the “cardinal sin”. Gratitude, service, love are the antidotes to the “cardinal sin”. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Comment

Comment

Living Rabbi Heschel’s Wisdom - A Daily Path to living well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 236

“The cardinal sin is in our failure not to sense the grandeur of the moment, the marvel and mystery of being, the possibility of quiet exaltation.” (Who is Man pg.116)

“Our failure not to sense the grandeur of the moment” is rooted in our self-deception and our need to be deceived as well as deceive another. It is rooted in our seeking power for the sake of power, seeking to be more than equal to every other soul in dignity and worth (going against the wishes of Jewish Tradition and how many people read the Bible), and our inability and/or unwillingness to accept our place and divine mission-wanting some other place and/or mission than the one that is right for us and the one we were created to fill. We see this constantly and consistently with people who want to either victimize and/or be victims, we see this constantly with people who forget their debt to God and to one another to be decent, loyal, seeking truth, justice, being kind and loving, etc. We see this consistently in our political realm where so many unqualified people are running for and winning political office on the campaign of fear, appealing to the senseless hatred of “the other” and being “the only one who can fix it/save you” and well as other such lies. There is no sense of the grandeur of the moment, there is no acknowledgment of the moment except for how it serves me, rather than how I serve the moment, the people around me, God, then myself. Instead, these people, of which there are many, serve themselves first, last and always forgetting their debt, forgetting that this moment is precious beyond our understanding and the grandeur is overwhelming. We forget that the moment we are in is great, has infinite splendor, beauty and is the crown on top of the head of our existence. Grandeur comes from the French meaning great/grand, the definition is splendor and the Hebrew is Tiferet, which can mean beauty and/or glory. Our issue is not only that we don’t “sense the grandeur of the moment” we are not even aware of the moment, except in how we can use it, abuse it for our personal gain. We all have experienced the manipulation of a moment by someone (and ourselves if we are to be in truth) using the moment for their/our benefit and spoke about this manipulation, this using/abusing as smart, awesome, brilliant, feeling envy and awe watching how they used/abused many moments to ‘get ahead’, ‘make a killing’, etc.

Yet we are unable to stop our selves from bastardizing the moment and more than we can stop another from doing this as well. We seem to be ‘programmed’ to ignore the grandeur, miss the beauty and splendor and glorify ourselves rather than the moment, rather than God. We have come to believe that getting our way, getting ahead is what the moments are for, not appreciating, sensing the grandeur of the moment, not being grateful for this moment and seeing how we can be changed by the experience of grandeur. We are so intent on self-satisfaction since infancy, we have not learned the lesson, the commandment, the call and demand to delay our own gratification in order to serve a higher consciousness, a higher power, a higher Truth. “Our failure not to sense the grandeur of the moment” is the end product of our egotistical, narcissistic, entitled ways of living. This is why, I believe, the Bible says our thoughts are evil “from our youth”; instead of maturing our thoughts, learning to delay gratification so we can serve something greater than ourselves, we use the learning to enhance our entitlement, grow our self-deceptive ways and learn how to deceive another(s) into serving us, against their own self-interest. Donald Trump and his minions, his enablers, his supporters throughout the Congress and Senate, his supporters in the country are examples of how far we have fallen, how “evil from our youth” we have become and how scary it is to be ruled, under the control of people who commit the “cardinal sin” Rabbi Heschel is speaking of.

The antidote, of course, is a daily inventory of what we have done well this day and where we have missed the mark this day. In the Book of Deuteronomy, Moses speaks “which I command you this day” to remind us of the importance, the need to respect and envelop ourselves in this day, to sense the grandeur, the potential, the opportunity that this day brings to all of us. Doing our daily Chesbon HaNefesh, our accounting of our soul, we then have a plan on how to sense the grandeur of tomorrow better than today, appreciate how we have sensed the grandeur of this day and repair our errors tomorrow that we have made this day. Another gift this inventory gives us is a look at patterns and ways of being that have served us, another and God well and those that haven’t. Being able to change the patterns that have not served us, another and God well is another way to “sense the grandeur of the moment” knowing that change is the only constant and we are never stuck in a pattern, there is always a way out and a hand to help. Also the realization that even the patterns that are serving another and God as well as our selves have to be kept fresh, enhanced and updated constantly.

In recovery, we know how major a disease self-deception is, how devastating the deception of another is to them, to God, to us. We have a discipline of taking personal inventory each and every day, admitting our errors, repairing them and moving forward as soon as we become aware of them and taking credit for our goodness of being, of our sensing and responding to the grandeur of the moment as well as making plans to enhance this way of being. More on this tomorrow- God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Comment

Comment

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 235

“The cardinal sin is in our failure not to sense the grandeur of the moment, the marvel and mystery of being, the possibility of quiet exaltation.” (Who is Man pg.116)

Rabbi Heschel’s brilliance is in his prose, his poetry, his message and his love for all humanity. His use of the word “cardinal” above is so appropriate and powerful, so impactful and useful for all of us. “Cardinal” comes from the Latin meaning “hinge” and the dictionary defines it as meaning “fundamental, of greatest importance”. Everything we do hinges on our failure to sense the grandeur of the moment and/or our ability to sense the grandeur of the moment, as I am understanding Rabbi Heschel today. I use the phrase “understanding Rabbi Heschel today” and a more apt description would be “as I experience Rabbi Heschel today”. Each day, each time I encounter and experience Rabbi Heschel, it is different and new, otherwise I am failing “to sense the grandeur of the moment”. We are living in a time, like many other times, where the majority of the world is unable, unwilling to sense the grandeur of the moment, where so many people are willfully blind to the grandeur of the moment and where so many people are having their lives hinge on desperation, despair, anger, ego, where’s mine attitude, disconnection from the human experience of community and camaraderie. So many people are unable to remember they too were immigrants, they too had ancestors who struggled to make it here in America, they too had people come in illegally or before the restrictive immigration laws were cemented in our legal system. They have forgotten, lost, thrown away the truth that their ability to live fully and wholly is dependent on their ability to “sense the grandeur of the moment”.

I am struck by the need of people in power, in charge to go along with both the “big lie” and the many little lies in order to hold, gain, exert power over their ‘enemies’. Our political system, like our legal system, was set up as a way to have all voices heard and truth sought and found. Instead, we have a legal system that is interested in pushing a political/religious agenda that does not represent all of the people and a government that “the Party of Lincoln” has decided should not be dedicated to a “government of the people, by the people and for the people shall not perish from the earth”. Rather government should be dedicated and dictated by the few, the rich and powerful and the rest of us should serve them. We are being held hostage by people who believe the poor and the middle class should pay a larger percentage of actual income in taxes than the rich and the mega-rich, the exact same “taxation without representation” that was at the heart of the Revolutionary War! Yet, because these charlatans, these mendacious authoritarians, are so hellbent on power we find ourselves in constant gridlock rather than smart compromises, constant war rather than seeking peaceful ways to work things out and constant hatred rather than seeking paths to common interests and dialogue.


The two wars mentioned above were for freedom for white people and then freedom for people of color. They happened because enough people could “sense the grandeur of the moment”, they knew their very existence, happiness, connection to a power greater than themselves, God, depended on their ability to ”sense the grandeur of the moment”, they knew their ability to ‘meet their maker’ without fear and shame depended on seeking freedom for all people and to remember that we are all created equal. Yet, so many people have decided their lives ‘hinge’ on their need to crush anyone not like them, anyone that doesn’t think like them, anyone that doesn’t vote like them, anyone that doesn’t lie like them, anyone that doesn’t engage in self-deception like them. Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom from some 59 years ago is so prescient and so needed right now. We need to have a new experience of Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom, the wisdom of the founding fathers, the wisdom of Lincoln, et al.

In recovery, we are acutely aware that our lives depend on sensing the grandeur of the moment. We wake up and pray each day in one form or another, we write gratitude lists, amends lists, to do lists. We make calls and attend meetings to connect with other people in recovery and to check in so we don’t stray too far from our sensing the grandeur of this moment and every moment. We don’t achieve this goal, usually, and we are never not in pursuit of making every moment count, immersing ourselves in the grandeur and beauty of the moment we are in. In recovery, we are committed to no longer committing this “cardinal sin”.

Once again, I am, like Jacob, made small by the kindness and truth of Rabbi Heschel and God. I know of so many instances of my inability to “sense the grandeur of the moment” and commit this “cardinal sin”. In reviewing these times, I also know how deeply sad, lonely, misunderstood, defeated I felt which led directly to my inability to “sense the grandeur of the moment”. I am excited and uplifted right now because I know the formula out of despair, sadness, feeling misunderstood, etc-sensing the “grandeur of the moment” I am in rather than staying stuck in the moments that are past. I see so clearly, as I have many times in the past without realizing the formula/path to achieving this state of connecting to/with the “grandeur of the moment”. Sunday I will discuss more ways to live in this grandeur, more ways to cease and desist from committing this “cardinal sin”. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Comment

Comment

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 234

“Every moment is a new arrival, a new bestowal. How to welcome the moment? How to respond to the marvel?” (Who is Man pg. 116)

Living each moment as the marvel it is takes a lot of training and retraining. We have to retrain ourselves from taking things for granted, namely that one moment is the same as another. We have to stop believing we have all the time in the world and/or no time at all. We have to retrain our brain to not overwhelm our soul with rationalizations, conventional notions and mental cliches in order to ‘prove’ an illegitimate point of view, a false and self-deceptive way of being. We are in desperate need of welcoming the moment and responding to the marvel in our society today. While we have always been in desperate need to do this, it seems especially crucial in today’s world.


Russia invades Ukraine and makes a fortune in the sale of oil to the world, Saudi Arabia kills a journalist who is living in the United States and reaps the benefits of the Trump era and the oil gouging. Oil Companies, out of fear of losing money and their business are helping to put us into a recession and one of the causes of inflation, so they can make more. Covid-19 begins to ravage the world, over 1 million deaths just here in the US, and we are told lies and given remedies like bleach, that will kill us from our “fearless leader” and people believe him, refuse to wear masks, don’t get vaccinated all because we are still allowing ourselves to be overwhelmed by our own need to deceive our selves and the need of another(s) to deceive in order to gain/hold onto power. This is part of the retraining we need to engage in so we can “respond to the marvel” as Rabb Heschel is imploring us to do.


In order “to respond to the marvel” we have to remind ourselves that respond comes from the Latin meaning “to pledge again” and marvel from the Latin meaning “wonder at”. So we have to stop being so sure of ourselves, being so smug and blithe about life and this moment and we have to “pledge again” to appreciate and be aware enough to “wonder at” the joy, uniqueness and gift this moment brings.

“To respond to the marvel” entails a training of our inner life, our souls to stop taking this moment, this day, etc for granted. We need to experience a debt of gratitude for this moment, not an entitlement. We need to retrain our inner life to recognize that this moment is a marvel, that our breathing is a marvel, that our life is a marvel and marvelous as well as a debt and we are here to fulfill a divine need as Rabbi Heschel speaks about in his interview with Carl Stern 10 days before his death.

We are in desperate need of both being aware of the marvel and responding appropriately to each and every moment. We are in need of heroes like Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, Bennie Thompson, and the rest of the House Committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection and treasonous actions by Trump, some Senators, some House members who worked to not certify the true and fair election of Joe Biden and were willing to support not having a peaceful transfer of power. I don’t know if the rest of our government can show the courage of these House members in the way they navigate us out of our current economic crisis or one party or faction wants to block every way to help the people they are supposedly ‘serving’ so they can hold onto/regain power.

“To respond to the marvel” is to let go of our need for power over another and have our soul, our spirit, our ‘gut’ have power over our intellect and our emotions. This is the retraining of recovery, it is the retraining a life of faith and spirituality so we can “pledge again to wonder at” the beauty of the moment, the possibility of the moment, the ability to fulfill a purpose in the moment and to be humble enough to recognize our greatness and the greatness of every other person and the need for every creation God has given us. This is the retraining we are in engaged in when we enter, immerse and commit to being In Recovery. It is the only path we can take to regain our sense of wonder, to be able to pledge with sincerity and to live as free people.

I know how “to respond to the marvel” of the moment and I get waylaid at times by fear, by future-tripping, by giving into my desires rather than fulfilling my needs, by having what I want rather than wanting what I have. I wrestle with these opposing forces and in doing so, I stay in the moment more often, I use this moment to better understand the world around me and the world going on inside of me. I “respond to the marvel” by “pledging again” to improve my ability to surrender to truth rather than the self-deceptions/lies I indulge in, I “respond to the marvel” by opening myself up to show my vulnerabilities even though they may be used against me. I know that if I am not vulnerable enough to be hurt, I am not vulnerable to receive and take in love. I “respond the marvel” by increasing my capacity to be in wonder and awe at all that is around me, people, places, things, animals, mountains, etc. I “respond to the marvel” by improving my connections with God, with the universe, with another people, with life itself. I am no longer interested in bending life to my will, rather I bend my will to life. I “respond to the marvel” by growing in compassion, truth, love, kindness and justice towards another and my self. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Comment

Comment

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 233

“Every moment is a new arrival, a new bestowal. How to welcome the moment? How to respond to the marvel?” (Who is Man pg. 116)

In welcoming the moment, we first have to realize the preciousness of each moment. As Rabbi Heschel teaches, every moment is new, different and will never happen again. All of us who have lost loved ones, friends, know the ache for one more conversation, the things we want to say to them that were not in our consciousness when they died, the exciting events we want them to be part of, etc. This is one of the ways we know that there is no other moment like this one and welcoming it, embracing it is crucial for our well-being and having little to no regrets or ‘shoulda, coulda, woulda’ thoughts. Welcoming the moment is the key to living well, it is the key to living in joy and harmony with the universe, it is the key to fulfilling the divine purpose we were created for. It is the key to living in truth, decency, kindness, justice, love, and compassion. Welcoming the moment is the gift that keeps on giving, it gives us new, refreshing ideas, it gives us the opportunity to repair the errors of the moments before and the sight to see the road ahead and navigate it with dignity and grace.

Welcoming the moment gives us allows us to be present, be alert, be aware, to celebrate what is and to acknowledge the preciousness, the glory, the beauty, the joy each moment is pregnant with. It also gives the strength to face the pain, heartache, sadness, betrayals, fears we may have from the previous moments/experiences. Welcoming the moment is the only path to wholeness and holiness because both are fleeting events that pass many people by through their ignorance of a moment’s “new arrival, a new bestowal”.

“How to welcome the moment” is the spiritual challenge that we all face each and every day. Some people believe and practice subterfuge, mendacity, deception of another human being as what moments are for and welcome each opportunity to practice their deceit, their con as we see from the Jan 6 hearings. The charlatans who are the true RINO’s like Trump and his minions, the elected officials like Kevin McCarthy who are standing by, with and alongside of Trump and his lies, Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Sarah Palin, et al who are promoting the ‘BIG LIE” and trying to tear down the American Democratic System all welcome each moment as an opportunity to spread more lies and grab more power. While they seem to be ‘winning’ this is not what Rabbi Heschel means, in my understanding of this teaching.

We welcome the moment by being alert, being aware, staying fresh, not dwelling on past moments. Rather we use the knowledge we have gained, the inner insights we have added to from past moments and we immerse ourselves in this moment, knowing we are going to learn, experience and connect with people, places and things that can inspire us, awe us and bring us closer to the Ineffable One, the creative source of the universe and use the power, the insight and the energy we are given in this moment to propel us closer to one another, repel the racist, Anti-Semitic, senseless hatred that we face from other people and, overcome our own prejudices, our own “eye disease” and “cancer of our soul”.


We welcome the moment, I believe, through radical amazement, never taking anything for granted. Staying open to the newness and being able to let go of our old ideas, our being stuck in the interpretations of laws, ways to live, conventional notions and mental cliches that have been handed down. Instead, we see the moment as new with fresh eyes, with fresh intuition, with fresh spirit and respond to this moment in real time, not in past time. “We have always done it this way”, “it was good enough for me, so it is good enough for you”, etc are not the ways to welcome the moment, they are the paths to denying the newness, the preciousness and the gift of every moment. Welcoming the moment is achieved when we first realize our lives are a gift, we get to live in this moment and embracing this moment makes us aware of our surroundings, aware of the people we love and love us, aware of the beauty that God has filled the earth with and the joy of true covenantal connections.

In recovery, we all know how close we came to physical and/or spiritual death so each moment becomes precious, each moment is a gift and we want to make sure we are not blowing by the moments, the people we encounter and the wisdom of the moment we are in. In recovery, “one day at a time” sometimes becomes “one moment at a time” when we realize days are going by and we were not immersed in them, not fully aware of them.

I am thinking about the conversations I never had with my father since he died on Jan.12,  1966. While I loved and appreciated and adored and was known by my father, I wish I could have one more conversation, one more “I love you Dad” and “I love you Mark”, one more word of advice and wisdom. I welcome each moment with anticipation and excitement, with insight and acceptance. I welcome each moment as an opportunity to repair the damage I have caused and to plan for and envision what’s next. I welcome each moment by staying in truth, kindness, self-compassion, love and justice as much as I possibly can. Stay safe and God Bless, Rabbi Mark

Comment

Comment

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 232

“Every moment is a new arrival, a new bestowal. How to welcome the moment? How to respond to the marvel?” (Who is Man pg. 116)

Rabbi Heschel’s teaching above brings us to a “dark night of the soul” experience when we actually immerse ourselves in this wisdom and seek the truth of his brilliance in our own lives. I am calling it a “dark night of the soul”, even though the phrase was coined by  the Spanish mystic and poet, St. John of the Cross, because this phrase has come to connote the journey from hiding from God, from our self, to becoming one with oneself, with God’s call/demand. It is the experience of Jacob when he wrestled with the “ish” in the Torah prior to meeting Esau, his brother who he had conned so many years ago. It is the experience of facing one’s self and the wrestling with the Yetzer HaRa to transform the energy usually used for negativity into energy used to promote our “better angels”.

We live in a time where the arrival of every moment is usually taken for granted, seen as a burden by many, seen as ‘no big deal’ by most unless there is something gigantic going to happen. We are alive in a moment that is fraught with historical significance and we have the opportunity to rise to the moral grandeur and spiritual audacity that Rabbi Heschel asked President Kennedy to rise to or sink lower into the morass that Donald Trump and his minions want us to get stuck in. Each and every moment is a new opportunity to engage in the “dark night of the soul”, to immerse ourselves in an experience of T’Shuvah that is worthy of the gift that T’Shuvah is. Each and every moment is pregnant with the bestowing of newness, of change, of improvement, of joy, of awareness and of love upon us and, in turn, we can bestow the same on another and on community. To do this, we have to leave the ‘comfort’ of the conventional notions we have been accepting and leaning into, we have to leave the acceptance of the mendacity, aka bullshit, some people are slinging and many in this country have been buying. We have to leave our addiction to self-deception and the deception of another, we have to leave our addiction to us/them, we have to leave our addiction to power for our sake, etc.

We are not hopeless and our current situation will pass, each moment that arrives gives us the assurance that it can/will. The bestowal of every moment, the gift of every new moment is our opportunity to change, to repent, to admit our previous errors of judgement and actions, admit to our mendacious behaviors, admit to the spurious use of previous moments, admit to our mistrust of God, of people, of decency, etc. Rabbi Eliezer, in Tractate Shabbat of the Babylonian Talmud, pg 103b, teaches we should do T’Shuvah one day before we die and since no one knows the day of their death, we should do T’Shuvah every day. Yet, very few people take this teaching seriously, very few people believe in the power of facing oneself each day, admitting our errors and finding ways to repair them and the damage they cause, finding ways to no longer act in the same way; seeing our strengths and our acts of goodness and Godliness, accepting our basic goodness of being, taking as much credit for our goodness and good acts as we do for our erroneous ones, and finding ways to enhance and add to our caring for the stranger, the widow, the orphan, the poor, the needy around us and inside of us. Until we are willing to engage in T’Shuvah each day/every other day/on a regular basis, we cannot appreciate the arrival of every moment, we cannot experience the true nature of the “honor/gift”, as the dictionary defines bestow, that is “placed” (Latin root) upon us in each and every moment. We are in a time where the threat to our humanness is greater than when Rabbi Heschel wrote this wisdom, a time like no other because the mendacity, the deceptions, the hatred, the puffing up of one’s errors as great and admirable, are able to spread quicker than wildfire by the internet with no one to vet their truth. Liars, charlatans, haters, white supremacists are taking over the airwaves, because like Rush Limbaugh, Tucker Carlson, Donald Trump, et al., they are louder, more evil and motivated by money, money, money, and power. Yet, we have the power to defeat them, recognize that each moment is “a new arrival, a new bestowal”.

In recovery, we are constantly engaged in self-reflection, not for narcissistic reasons, rather for betterment of our self, finding the nuanced ways we have fallen back into old behaviors and old ways of thinking and acting. We know the conventional notions and mental cliches, the lies we have told ourselves in the past creep back into our unconscious and begin to influence us or try to. Our recognition of the newness of each moment, the gift every moment gives us reminds us we are never stuck unless we want to be, we are never doomed, fated, etc, rather we have the power and this moment to change and improve our way of living.

I have not always used each moment as “a new arrival, a new bestowal”. Today, I recognize this error and commit to appreciate each moment more, even the ones that don’t “feel” so good. I know that my constant self-reflection has made life so much better over the years, my ability to acknowledge my own errors, even when others cannot admit theirs, has kept me strong and resolved to live my life according to God’s demands and call, to live in this moment and not the past one and to embrace every moment for the pregnant possibilities it contains. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Comment

Comment

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 231

“Every moment is a new arrival, a new bestowal. How to welcome the moment? How to respond to the marvel?” (Who is Man pg. 116)

We recorded the Jan. 6 hearings and began watching them yesterday. I am so saddened and outraged at the assault on our democracy, at the mendacity of elected officials, and so proud of the men and women of the Capital Police and the other Law Enforcement agencies who did not stand down even though they were injured, outnumbered and assaulted with clubs, etc. Then I read this wisdom from Rabbi Heschel and wonder how do we stay so willfully blind to the truth of the first sentence? I wonder how can we denigrate the words of the people who fought so our democracy could stand? How can the very people who were saved by the Capital Police, these fine Republicans who are the “guardians of our democracy”, who encouraged the rioters at the Ellipse, who joined in promoting the ‘big lie’ of Trump, who are basically calling the police who died, were injured, were traumatized defending these Republicans’ lives, liars! I wonder how they can ignore the arrival of each moment, the bestowal of grace, love, kindness, clarity, truth, compassion, mercy that each moment brings. I wonder what they believe they will gain by surrendering to mendacity, promoting words and phrases of deception and feeding their addiction to kissing the Tuches’ of Tucker Carlson, Donald Trump, et al. Most of all, I wonder how they face themselves in the mirror each day knowing they are treating the arrival of each moment as they are treating the arrival of immigrants to our country-with disdain, with haughtiness, with inhospitable treatment, etc.

Yet, it is not only these charlatans who call themselves ‘good Americans’, like Kevin McCarthy, Mitch McConnell, et al, it is all of us who fail to treat each moment as “a new arrival”, a new opportunity, a new possibility, “a new bestowal”. We fail to experience each moment as a gift and an opportunity to learn anew, a chance to do inventory and T’shuvah, a renewal of love and fidelity to God, to our principles, to our spouses, to our families, community and country. Each moment is a gift to be able to redo the errors of the moment before, of moments in the past and to be present and looking forward at the same time. Each moment bestows upon us the gift of wisdom and  new insights, we are able to realize we are arriving at new places in each and every moment.

Failure to treat each moment as a new arrival is the foundation of  being stuck, believing the lie of ‘same shit, different day’, giving into ‘it’s my fate’, or one of my favorites ‘it must be God’s will for me to be stuck, there is a reward in heaven for my suffering!’. The reward for this pitiful and pathetic way of being, which society fully accepts as a conventional notion, is being a victim, holding onto and/or gaining power, validating through deception behaviors that go against all morality, all decency and all faithfulness to God, and, the old standby of those Republican cowards who deny the bravery of the Capital Police and the lawlessness of the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and the rest of the mob who gathered at and breached our shining symbol of democracy, the People’s House, the Capital Building, white supremacy-white people are better equipped to have power than any other race and white Christians are at the top of the hierarchy of whiteness! All of these lies and self-deceptions are employed by people to validate their failure to treat each moment as “a new arrival, a new bestowal”.

There is a cure for this disease to see each moment as one saw the last, the disease of deception of self and/or believing the deceptions of another, the descent into the conventional notion of believing someone because they are ‘rich’, ‘successful’, etc. The cure, the chemo to put this disease of mendacity and willful blindness in remission is this moment. Treating this moment as “a new arrival” means being open to the wisdom of the moment, the preciousness of this moment, knowing this moment will never be repeated and welcoming it like we welcome friends and family to our homes, in our houses of worship, at the supermarket, school, reunions, etc. Living in the moment, being excited for it’s arrival and being present in it, knowing each moment brings us new wisdom, new chances for a ‘do-over’ and bestows upon us the ability to change the course of our living in this new moment based on the new information we take in from the last gift of a moment. Living in this moment, means we have to give up the deceptions and mendacious patterns that have governed my living, everyone has some deceptions and tells themselves lies sometimes. We have to renew my faithfulness to truth, a higher and truer way of life and to our ability to see what is and not be willfully blind. We get to welcome this moment as we welcome life each morning upon arising.

In recovery we know that it is one day at a time, one moment at a time. We are becoming more and more aware of our need to take in each moment, appreciate each moment and use each moment wisely as we are beginning to use our lives wisely as well.

I am constantly living in the moment and seeing where I am blind to the moment’s bestowal and when I have failed to welcome it’s arrival, which is an affront to God, to the universe, to living well. I will write more on this tomorrow, as we watch the hearings, let’s honor the service of heroes and not fall into the mendacity of politics and liars. God Bless, Rabbi Mark

Comment

Comment

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

Daily Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 230

“We, however, live on borrowed notions, rely on past perceptions, thrive on inertia, delight in relaxation. Insight is a strain, we 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)

Being “alert and open to what is happening” is a very difficult task. It calls for all of us to not only stop living in/on all of the lies we have been telling ourselves and another(s) for so long, it also demands that we stay fresh, in touch with our inner life and see through different lens, through new glasses each moment as well. Being “alert and open to what is happening” calls for us to suspend our judgmental attitudes, beliefs that we are the smartest people in the room, stubbornness of thought that doesn’t allow for change when new facts, new experiences present themselves, suspending our disbelief and not needing any more certainty than change is constant and more will be revealed.

As I am writing this, I am realizing the enormity of Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom, the depth and necessity to live this way and the arduous road to get here as well. Most of us view what is happening through our old lenses, be they “everything is beautiful”, “life is hard and then you die”, “let me get mine”, “take everything, I don’t need it”, “they are out to get me”, “everyone is love”, etc. and therefore, we cannot be alert to what is happening because we are stuck in old thinking, in old eyes and old ways of reacting, rather than responding to this moment, right here, right now. I am in awe and wonder with this teaching and how, no matter how ‘spiritual’ we claim to be, we are so stuck in these old ways of seeing what is happening now, rather than being “alert and open”.

Even those of us who believe we are “alert and open” fail to realize how much of our old ideas, past traumas’, past errors, past glories, past views color what we are seeing and experiencing. We fail to acknowledge and take into account our how our egos, our goals, our desired outcomes create a film through which we are viewing “what is happening” in this moment. Many of us often fail to realize how much of our “own press” we are buying into and need to prove to everyone how “right” we are, no matter which ‘side’ of an issue we stand, no matter if we are progressive, conservative, and/or middle of the political spectrum, religious spectrum, spiritual spectrum. Some spiritual people fall prey to buying their own press, to seeing things only through one lens and trying to fit everything into their neat, philosophical box and this could help people fall deeper into their own self deception and make them more susceptible to being deceived themselves.

Then we have our politicians and religious leaders who are unable to “be alert and open to what is happening” in the way Rabbi Heschel is speaking about. They are alert to what is happening and they have a canned pitch as to why it is right, wrong, weak, fascist, communistic, socialistic, undemocratic, not what the founding fathers wanted, etc. They are alert to what is happening in order to exploit it for their own gains, not for the sake of nor the betterment of their country, their flock, the stranger, the poor, the needy as Jesus taught, as Moses received from God on Mt. Sinai, as the Buddha imagined once he experienced enlightenment, etc. Our so-called leaders are actually stuck in their own shit and unable to be “open to what is happening” and respond appropriately in real time because of their prejudices, because of their self-deceptions, because of their egos, their hunger for power and their need to be right-none of which allow any of us to be truly able to answer the “demand, as understood in biblical religion”.


In recovery, we call our inability to be “alert and open to what is happening”, “stinking thinking”. It is a way of thinking that can only lead us back to the disastrous way we were prior to our recovery. Remember, recovery, as I am using it, is the path of living that restores our integrity, our decency, our living in truth, kindness, compassion, mercy, and justice without regard to whom we are dealing with and without needing to be right. When we are in recovery, we let go of our need to be right, our need to not forgive, our need to punish, because we can see our own errors, our own need to be forgiven and the suffering we have experienced because of the punishments by another and by ourselves.

OY! With all of my visionary ways, all of my abilities to adapt to what is happening, I also see when I was stuck in old thinking and/or my thinking and unable to hear the call/demand of another who was as, if not more, “alert and open to what is happening” than me. I see how I have deceived myself in this area, at times, and am sitting here with a wry grin at how smart I thought I was. I know, however, I was alert and open more often than not, I know I approach text, wisdom learning, prayer, people with an alertness and an openness the vast majority of time and, immersing myself in this teaching more and more, shows me where I need to improve. I am grateful for my errors as it gives me a better sense of where I need to be more “alert and open to what is happening” in my daily living. From golf to politics, from text to prayer, from fear to hearing the call of today, rather than trying to live in yesterday’s demand, yesterday’s call, yesterday’s deceptions. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Comment

Comment

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

Daily Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 229

“We, however, live on borrowed notions, rely on past perceptions, thrive on inertia, delight in relaxation. Insight is a strain, we 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 last sentence of Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom, warning and teaching above is the key to a good life, a life that is “compatible with being a contemporary of God”, a life that “reconciles God’s view with our experience”. It is the key to living in radical amazement, honoring the moments of insight and our response to them. Yet it seems to be the key that many people have lost and/or misplaced. We are living in a time where, it seems to me, the majority of people have lost their alertness and openness to what is happening around them. This is for the ‘woke’ and the ‘unwoke’, the conservatives and the progressives, and, most of all, for the majority that live in between the extremes. We are living in a time where the liars are alert to the advantages they can take, the money they can make, the power they can grab. They are not alert to their exposure to being taken in by a better liar/con, their being overpowered by a stronger authoritarian, being ‘outwoked’ by a more ‘woke’ person, being fleeced by a better flimflam man/woman. They are not aware of the damage they are doing to the very systems that allowed them to take advantage, to engage in mendacity, to propose ‘alternate facts’ and to steal from everyone who listens to them.

While it can also be said that these mendacious human beings do have their fingers on the pulse of the anger, the fear, the mood of the people (especially white people and those who get convinced that white supremacists are their friends); being “alert and open to what is happening” as I understand Rabbi Heschel’s brilliance today, is to fulfill God’s view, God’s call, God’s demand. These calls, views, demands include: “Love your neighbor as yourself,” “care for the stranger, the poor, the needy, the widow, the orphan,” “don’t follow the false prophets who arise,”“you must redeem your kinsman,” “love mercy, do justly, walk humbly with your God,” et al. The liars, the flimflam people we see propagating their lies and their unvarnished seeking of power use all of God’s demands, God’s views, God’s calls as the pathways of suckers, the weak, the stupid. Their view of themselves is so great, their belief in their own minds and abilities so overwhelming, they are unable to be “alert and open to what is happening”. There are liars on both ends of the spectrum, let us not forget. In fact, I would posit that to be all the way on either side of the continuum of life, you have to lie to your self. This is the danger of the either/or way of thinking, living, acting.

The “demand” is to live into the both/and. Living in a manner that is both just and righteous, living in a way that is both alert and open, living in a way that is willing to be wrong, to do T’Shuvah, living in a manner of forgiveness for self and for another, living in a manner where “love your neighbor like yourself” is no longer a slogan but a daily practice of self-love and love for all, even those with whom you disagree and have harmed you. Living a path of communal responsibility, personal responsibility, asking for help and offering the same when needed. No longer seeing good through the eyes of achievements and agreements, rather seeing the basic goodness of every human being, seeing the divine image in every person, animal, all of nature, etc. Acknowledging that along with the goodness and divine image in ourselves and everyone else, we fall, we fail and we err which doesn’t negate the goodness and the divine image. One ‘oh shit’ no longer wipes our 100 ‘atta boy/girls’, rather we live in the tension, the marriage, the joy of both being true. We fall into self-deception at times and we hear, see, act on the demand of our higher consciousness, God, etc at times as well. This means we are not all good nor all bad, we no longer wrap ourselves in the cloths of good/right and/or wrong/evil; we no longer define another(s) in these terms either; we see that we are both and so is everyone else!

In recovery, we are alert so we do not fall back into old habits and ways of being unkind to our self and to everyone around us. We learn to be open to what is happening in the moment so we can respond in new and fresh ways rather than react in old ways that harmed everyone involved. In recovery, we work hard to find the middle ground, knowing the only absolute is to cease and desist from the actions that blocked our goodness and our authentic self from flourishing.

I am thinking of all my alertness and openness and I am overwhelmed with gratitude and joy at my achieving this state of being most of the time. I am also painfully aware of the times I was not alert, was not open to what was  happening in real time and the scars of those times that I live with. That they are scars is progress because for a while, actually too long of a while, they were open wounds that I would not let heal. I have found that being alert and open to what is happening means allowing old wounds to heal, old traumas to stay in the past and not have them rule this moment, put trigger locks on the things that used to send me over the edge. I live with serenity/clarity and joy, even when things are not going my way, even when I am afraid of what is happening, I am able to be alert and open so I can better hear God’s demand. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Comment

Comment

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

Daily Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 227

“We, however, live on borrowed notions, rely on past perceptions, thrive on inertia, delight in relaxation. Insight is a strain, we 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)

Reading the news, listening to politicians, seeing the reversal of the humanness we fought for in the 1960’s leads us back to this wisdom of Rabbi Heschel’s. Being led by Dr King, Rabbi Heschel, the Berrigan Brothers, and so many more, we ushered in an era where we reconciled God’s view with our experience and now, there are a lot of people working hard to undo the humanness we fought so hard for.


The borrowed notions and past perceptions of immigrants is disgustingly ignorant since all of our ancestors were immigrants at some time, unless we are of Native American descent. This is a fact and there is no “alternative facts” that are valid in the face of this fact, yet there are people who have the misguided belief that America is theirs, America is the white man’s domain and those that let immigrants in for anything other than servitude are wrong. These people are led by liars and thieves, power-hungry and prestige seeking people who use them to get their way, to get their dirty money gains and the power to crush anyone who isn’t like them and doesn’t go along with them. Yet, we seem powerless to stop them, the people who believe in being human seem unable to communicate to their deceived followers any modicum of truth and reality. Here is the great challenge as I am understanding Rabbi Heschel’s teaching above in the real time of today: Never losing our humanness, never stop “loving thy neighbor” no matter how much we disagree with them, are frustrated by them, hated by them, outshouted by them. We cannot live on the past perceptions of “the man” and have disdain and hatred towards them, we can and must resist the lies, the deceptions, the actions of hatred they are perpetrating on our country, our neighbors, our women, our children, our selves and not become them. We cannot live in God’s view, live in God’s principles, want to win it all for God and act UnGodly, act with vengeance, malice and hatred, be mendacious and mean, ‘fight fire with fire’. Doing this brings us back to the borrowed notion that this is the only way to ‘win’ and ‘winning is everything’. It isn’t, it can be one of the most spiritually devastating and debilitating things to happen to us, when it comes at the cost of our dignity, our humanity, our souls.

Ron DeSantis and his bullying of the Special Olympics is an example of  borrowed notions relying on past perceptions.  DeSantis is playing on people’s fears and catering to knowledge of science that people have. He is not doing this to help the people he governs, he is not practicing any humanness, he is not reconciling God’s view with his/our experience, he is seeking power, he is seeking absolute power, he is using the vulnerabilities of the people who support him to cheer him on and using the most vulnerable people to exploit them, make them ‘kiss the ring’ and bow down to and succumb to his hatred, his authoritarianism, his mendacious way of being! DeSantis, the people who put on the National Prayer Breakfast, the people who groom lawyers to be conservative judges, the politicians who take their money, etc all live on borrowed notions and past perceptions, wanting to return to “the good old days” of white supremacy, anti-immigrant, anti-semitism, racism, etc.

We, people of faith, people who believe in the dynamic nature of the American experiment of democracy, who believe in the dynamic nature of spiritual paths, have to stand up and say NO! We have to use our inner sight, our inner wisdom, our connection to something greater than our pride and prejudice, our false ego and rise up, shake off the inertia that has been gripping us and holding us back. We know that not using our insight to reconcile our experiences with God’s view leads to ruin and death. It is time to vote, it is time to march, it is time to resist and it is time to plan our future by living each and every day differently. The message of the Exodus from Egypt is: Slavery will and must end. The message of standing at Mount Sinai is: You matter and God has made a covenant with each individual to help all of us live better and together. It is high time we move closer to fulfilling these messages.

In recovery, holding onto old ideas, engaging in euphoric recall never ends well for any of us. We have to be in this moment, we know we cannot have the experience this moment is calling for while being stuck in borrowed notions and past perceptions. In recovery, we keep recovering our insight, reconciling the opposing voices in our inner life and transforming our negativity into positive energy so we can move forward.

I have not always been human, even in my recovery. I see this through the teaching above, I have fallen prey to inertia, to relaxation, to borrowed notions and past perceptions which have led me to trust the wrong people and suspect the people who ‘had my back’. I realize that every time I am in this place, I am forfeiting my humanness and harming the humanness of those around me. I am deeply sorry for this. I also know that I have been more human today than I was yesterday, or 36 years ago! I am a work in progress and I, like you, have to celebrate the progress. “Judge me not for where I am, but  for the distance I’ve travelled” is a quote from Henry Ward Beecher that we all need to appreciate and live by. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Comment

Comment

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

Daily Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 227

“We, however, live on borrowed notions, rely on past perceptions, thrive on inertia, delight in relaxation. Insight is a strain, we 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 teaching above regarding insight is so true and valid that we often do not pay attention to it! “Insight is a strain” because it takes energy, courage, discernment and a journey to the inner life. Most of us are unwilling to take this journey, discern truth from deception, courage to stand up for what we know to be true and right, and the energy to follow through on our insights no matter what. Rabbi Heschel is reminding us that we are too afraid to take the journey into our inner life, too afraid to see what is true and right within us, too deaf at times to hear the call, the demand, the urging, the love of a force we cannot explain nor can we logically validate. We are afraid to ‘go with what we know’ in our inner life, our souls because we would have to be, at times, like the Prophets-speaking a higher truth that most people do not want to hear, a solution that most people do not want to expend the energy on to make it reality, a path that will not make us popular and, in some cases, get us killed.

This journey is also the path to the good and the joy we have in living. It is also the path of serenity and clear-sightedness so we can live joyously. It is the only way to live as free people, with the ability to make Free-Will Moral Choices as Rabbi Abraham Twerski,z”l,  teaches. It is, in my estimation, the only journey that makes life bearable, worth living and gives us the truest direction and purpose to our lives. Without taking this journey, believing it to be too much of a strain, shunning it because it is too hard, we lose the freedom to be unique divine reminders and, instead, become automatons, parroting someone else’s lies, someone else’s manners, coming under the thumb of whomever is ‘on top’ in the moment. We are seeing this in our politics, we see this in our refusal to battle Covid-19 with the science, we see this in our inability to have sensible gun laws, we see this is the blame game and finger pointing every time there is a mass shooting, which there are way too many. We see this when a young man can cross state lines, kill two people and be acquitted for defending his life? We see this when Tucker Carlson and his band of merry liars are praised, worshipped and never questioned. We see this when companies pay fines and do not admit guilt. We see this when, rather than have a difference of opinion, we use ‘alternative facts’ of known liars to justify our positions. We see this when we are willing to elect people who want to take freedoms and rights away from any group other than our own. We see this when we are willing to sacrifice our “knowing in our bones” for popularity, for dominance, and for power.

The journey to our inner life is not a long journey, however. It is a journey we always are making, our inner life is constantly calling out to us, the problem is we are not answering the call, we are not taking the time and the energy to hear the voices that are constantly debating one another in our inner life. We are shunning the dialogue, we are refusing to discern truth from lies, reality from our fantasies,  our authentic voice and unique purpose from our self-deception and the deception of another. We all have experienced our ‘stomach tied up in knots”, this, for me, is the sign that my inner life is calling out to me and wants me to pay attention. It is the moment when one has to stop what they are doing, put the car in park and check the map to make sure the destination and the route are the correct ones for this moment. This is not easy nor does it come natural to most people. We can, however, learn this skill, we can, however, cultivate our inner life rather than passing the ‘stomach in knots’ off to something we must have eaten. This is the challenge for all of us, every day, every hour, every moment. We will never achieve perfection and we can, and must, seek progress if we are to grow as human beings, as a society and fulfill the commandment to care for the earth, for the creatures and for one another.

What we are recovering in recovery, I believe, is our authenticity, our integrity, our uniqueness and purpose. We begin by saying I have a problem with reality, I can’t solve it on my own, and I am willing to live in concert with moral and spiritual principles. This is the beginning of our journey to our inner life, to living free and to living in truth.

I sit here embarrassed by the many times I shunned insight, both my own and the insight of another person/people. I owe amends to my daughter Heather for not seeing her more clearly and not hearing her more clearly, for not seeing her situation clearer and letting my fears for her overrule what my inner life was trying to tell me. I owe amends to Yeshaia Blakeney for not hearing his insight clearer and allowing him to lead rather than me try to stay ‘in control’. I owe amends to the alumni who have needed me when I was not able to respond because of the politics of organizational life and my own inappropriate action. I owe amends to Harriet for not seeing clearer what was unfolding and being more prepared and more responsive instead of reactive. I owe Harriet amends for not protecting “our child” better and letting my ego get in the way. I owe myself an amend for not listening to my inner voice more and fighting against what I knew was happening. Stay safe and God Bless, Rabbi Mark

Comment

Comment

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

Daily Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 226

“We, however, live on borrowed notions, rely on past perceptions, thrive on inertia, delight in relaxation. Insight is a strain, we 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)

Inertia is the killer of progress, the killer of spirit, the killer of connection and the killer of making our world a little better than how we found it. Inertia comes from the Latin meaning unskilled and/or inactive. When we are unskilled, which every one is in some areas of life, we either explore to learn more or we hire people who are craftspeople, skilled at what we need to have done to get the ‘job’ done. When we are inactive, we just don’t give a damn enough to call the people who can get it done and we just go along with the way things are. Being/staying inactive doesn’t work for physical repairs to buildings, property, merchandise, bodies nor does it our spiritual health, our moral engagement nor our stewardship of our governmental process’.

We are in a period of great inertia, unfortunately, I believe. We are witnessing people calling in ‘skilled liars’ as craftsmen to do their thinking for them. We are witnessing the inactivity of people to learn for themselves the facts of what is happening in their own world, the truth of their being used by authoritarians (both right and left) to be sheep following along down the primrose path of their destruction, their enslavement, the future of their children and grandchildren being mortgaged and leveraged so a few white men can enjoy their power for a little longer. We are witnessing the destruction of the democracy founded in 1776 and enshrined in 1789 with the ratification of the Constitution along with the Bill of Rights. Yet, like Nero in old Rome, people are fiddling around because of inertia while our democracy is burning up, people are either joining in wholeheartedly because someone else has done their thinking for them and they are guppies lapping up the lies and/or people are sitting back like Jews did in Nazi Germany saying ‘it is bad now and we have been through this before, it too will pass’ and we all know what happened there.

When we are thriving on inertia and seeking relaxation rather than being engaged in, aware of, and steering what is happening, we relinquish our power and our birthright. We are so intent to either ‘go along to get along’, so inactive as to not listen for nor search out truth, we just let our spiritual life, our mental acuity and, most of all, the truth go lax, we let them loose from our grasp and they are no longer the foundation of our living, mendacity and self-deception take over and we become pawns in the hands of the ‘grand Poobah leader’! We relinquish our Self to the control of another person/group and make false images of our self, another self and the ‘other’ (anyone not on my side). This is the way the Israelites went into slavery in Egypt when they were more numerous and mighty than the Egyptians, this is how the Russians came to be ruled by Stalin, Putin, et al, this is the path the Hungarians took to be ruled by Orban, this is the way MBS is ruling Saudi Arabia, etc.

We have a choice, each and every day, to continue down the path of broken promises, worship false idols, engage in mendacity and self-deception, thrive on inertia and delight in letting our moral and spiritual foundations go/rot and a choice to say NO to the lies of our minds, the lies of the charlatans and liars who are saying one thing to us-‘we care so deeply for our fellow human beings’ and stopping all attempts to make life better for those most vulnerable, to have common-sense gun control (who needs an assault weapon to hunt with) and to compromise. We have to say YES to the call of our soul, to “love God with all of our heart, all our soul and all of our everything” as the V’Ahavta prayer teaches, say YES to “guard and do” the teachings for today that will make our lives better and the lives of those around us better as we learn in Deuteronomy, say YES to living as children on the Sovereign of the earth and make sure we replenish and care for our planet, our country, our freedoms and those of everyone else.

In recovery, we know we cannot rest on our laurels. We are aware we are in recovery or not based on the nature of our spiritual condition. When we become too engaged in relaxation, when we become either stuck in our place, thinking we can do today what we did yesterday and everything will be ok, when we seek out the wrong people to listen to because they are the loudest and appeal to our lower self, we are in deep shit, we are in relapse mode and we will cause suffering to many and to our self. Staying the course of spiritual growth, spiritual progress keeps us on the path that we are meant to be on and we will recover our passion and discover our purpose.

I have, I realize, sought out the wrong craftspeople to help me. In hindsight, I realize their agenda and mine were not meshing, I realize that my arrogance and my inattention led me to believe that “you want what I want” and I found out, as the song says, “send in the clowns, don’t bother they’re here”. I have been the clown, the fool because I have given into inertia and sought relaxation. I have learned a hard lesson again! I am grateful that I keep learning, I am grateful that I can discern quicker the ways I thrive on inertia, the ways I no longer buy the lies of another person just to get along, that I can stand for and by myself in truth, in love, in connection to God. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Comment

Comment

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

Comment

1 Comment

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

1 Comment

Comment

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

Comment

Comment

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

Comment

Comment

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

Comment

Comment

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

Comment

Comment

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

Comment

Comment

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

Comment