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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 257

“To be human involves the ability to appreciate as well as the ability to give expression to appreciation. For thousands of years authentic existence included both manipulation and appreciation, utilization and celebration, both work and worship. In primitive society they were interdependent; in biblical religion they were interrelated. Today we face a different situation.” (Who is Man pg. 116)

I have been immersed in Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom above and am in awe of the far-reaching impact it has on all areas, crevices and corners of living. Once we determine what is genuine in our living, we have to make the decision to  take a stand for something; be it for mendacity or truth, be it for decency or indecency, be it for power only or power and service, etc. We face this decision each and every day, hour, minute and, unfortunately, most of us are willfully blind to the need for and the consequences of not making a decision, of not determining what is genuine and what isn’t. In the Jan. 6th hearings, Liz Cheney said it so well, we cannot escape responsibility by being willfully blind to what is going on around us, inside of us and by our own hands.

What do we exist for? What do we stand for? What do we stand against? America is the dynamic response to the enslavement of the colonies by King George, it stands against power for the sake of power, it is the response and the message that not only “taxation without representation” is wrong, any form of enslavement, destruction of the human spirit and/or imprisonment through prejudice, slavery, unjust limitations of freedom, forcing people to live under someone else’s religious intolerance is wrong. The Founding Fathers and Mothers took stands against tyranny, they wanted freedom to ring, they moved the needle a great deal, knowing that moving it to completion was a process and would take time. This doesn’t mean they stood for slavery, Jefferson knew it was wrong, Franklin knew it and they were powerless to move the needle, this doesn’t mean that the needle should not be moved!

We all have to think about what we are/will/must take a stand against as well as what we take a stand for. Our political climate is filled with hatred, with willful blindness, with power for the sake of power, etc and it seems as if “good people” have decided to do nothing because they are shouted down by the far right and the far left. Watching Liz Cheney and Bennie Thompson work together is a glimpse into what can be accomplished when good decent people take a stand for principles and against just following along party lines, when good decent people take a stand for ethical behavior and against unethical methods, when good decent people take a stand for freedom and against tyranny, take a stand for truth and against mendacity and deception. These two Congresspeople will oppose each other on policies and the implementation of policies that they agree on in the future. Yet, they will do it with civility and respect, with admiration and knowledge that disagreements are part of living, finding common ground is what this country is based on and how it came into being.

What are we, the rest of the populace of this great experiment in self-government, in democratic rule, in anti-authoritarianism, going to do? We need to ‘take a stand’ against prejudice, pride, envy, and enmity. We have to ‘take a stand’ against the senseless hatred that is permeating our streets and causing senseless deaths, immeasurable harms and soul-crushing experiences to and for so many of us. We have to ‘take a stand’ for freedom, we have to ‘take a stand’ for truth, we have to ‘take a stand’ for Godliness, for holiness, for the image of the divine that is in all of us. We have to ‘take a stand’ and support the physical health, mental health and spiritual health of everyone. We have to ‘take a stand’ for the Four Freedoms: Freedom of speech and worship, Freedom from fear and want, as FDR articulated on Jan. 6th, 1941. Ironic isn’t it that some 80 years later, these freedoms would come under the most vicious internal attack, America has ever seen.

In recovery, we are acutely aware and attuned to “principles before personality” and the awareness that “contempt prior to investigation” will lead us to slavery, to ignorance, to willful blindness, to hatred, prejudice and out of our recovery. We know that we are not going to like everyone nor should we. We are aware we do and will have differences of opinions on how to live the principles of living well and this is what makes us unique. What we all commit to, however, is to ‘take a stand’ against following personalities who lack the willingness to live spiritual principles and moral principles. We commit to ‘take a stand’ for truth, for decency, for recovery, for life.

I am fearful for the world my grandson is growing into. A world/country that is filled with hatred; overflowing with prejudice and anti-semitism; with regressive thoughts, actions and laws towards women, LGBTQ; with a desire to have a ‘christian nation’ that bears no resemblance to Christ’s words, no resemblance to Moses’ teachings, not a clue about Mohammed’s brilliance. I am writing, studying with people in small groups to effect the changes I believe Rabbi Heschel is speaking about, the changes the Bible insists upon and to respond to the call/demand that I hear from God. I don’t have the bully pulpit I used to and I have a voice and this is my stand. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 256

“To be human involves the ability to appreciate as well as the ability to give expression to appreciation. For thousands of years authentic existence included both manipulation and appreciation, utilization and celebration, both work and worship. In primitive society they were interdependent; in biblical religion they were interrelated. Today we face a different situation.” (Who is Man pg. 116)

Beginning with the phrase “authentic existence”, Rabbi Heschel is again awakening us to basic principles and ways of being. Authentic comes from the Latin meaning “genuine” and existence from the Latin meaning “take a stand” and/or “come into being”. Rabbi Heschel is calling to us to remember and learn from our history, from the examples that lasted “for thousands of years” to take a genuine stand in the ways we live, to stop the mendacity, to stop the deceptions, to end our own self-deception and to end our indifference to the genuine love and duty that life calls upon us to engage in. Having never looked up existence before, I am blown away with the root of it. While the dictionary definition is “continued survival/way of living/all that exist”, the root of the word gives us all much more to ponder and to live to. To ensure that his words are not bastardized, I believe, and to ensure that people can easily(?) understand him, Rabbi Heschel puts together genuine with taking a stand, so he is reminding us, teaching us, enlightening us to the fact that for thousands of years, people lived lives of taking a genuine stand on issues, on living, on caring for one another. While power has certainly always been an issue, the words above reflect the majority of people’s way of being. Families cared for one another in genuine ways, not just for how things would look, unless of course you were in the ‘ruling class’ then optics was all that mattered. Nothing can come into being unless we take a stand to make it happen, unless we take an action to cause an idea, a goal, an invention, a cure to emerge, we stay stuck in the same old ways of doing things and life is no longer dynamic, it is static, boring and oppressive.

Today, we are facing the very challenge Rabbi Heschel put in front of us in 1963, are you going to live an authentic existence or continue to live in deception of another, deception of self, mendacity? Living in deception and mendacity has its rewards, as we can see from so many people like the leader of the pack to end our democracy, Trickster Trumpster, Caving Kevin, Josh aka Judas Hawley, Moscow Mitch who believes Christ was a lion and a bully, the squad who needs someone to hate in order to flourish, etc. All of these ‘leaders’ live lives of “quiet desperation” as Thoreau spoke about and rather than face themselves, rather than have a “dark night of the soul” they engage in the self-deception of blaming another for the ills of the world and wrap themselves in the mendacity of victim and savior all at the same time. These people and their ‘soldiers’ like the Oath Keepers, Proud Boys, et al, continue to bully, cajole, lie to everyone about their motives, except for Moscow Mitch-he tells everyone he only cares about power and supporting the corporations and the ultra-rich.

“Authentic existence” is calling to our souls to overcome the mendacity and deceptions of these so-called leaders, these so-called ‘good christians’ who spout hatred rather than love, who denigrate the stranger, the poor, the needy rather than welcoming them, for whom prejudice, anti-semitism, racism, Islamaphobia, homophobia, etc are at their core and are cancers eating away at their inner life, their souls so they can continue to practice their art of indifference to the plight of their fellows and the plight of their souls. It is so sad, frightening, devastating, serious to see the level of inauthenticity being lived by so many today. It is depleting and fatiguing to do battle with the bombardment of lies, the flood of deception, the storm of spin, the assault on truth that the charlatans above and their followers, their competitors in deception are engaging in each day. Probably the saddest realization for me/us is the followers of deceptive and mendacious people are not even aware they are being duped and feel genuine in their indifference and self-deceptions.

In recovery, we take a stand every day to live as genuine, as decent, as ethically principled as possible. We are aware of our previous shortcomings, our previous self-deceptions and deceptions of another, so we are sensitive to the lies of another. We know that we have to scrape our self-deceptions away from us as people scrape barnacles off a boat. It is a never-ending job and a job that brings genuine joy each and every day.

I am so aware of deception of another, deception of self, and when I am being deceived usually. And then there are times when I fool myself, times when I get fooled. In doing my own inventory, I know my reactions to mendacity and deception seem over the top and, to some they are. Yet, I also know of how afraid I am to get near to mendacity, to be close to deception, to be inauthentic, to not take a stand. I am hyper-afraid because I was a mendacious, devious deceiver who took no prisoners prior to my last Prison Term. If I am not bombastic, if I do not have a strong inner revulsion to mendacity and deception whether practiced by me or another, I am in danger of sliding backwards on my journey to the Promised Land. I don’t expect to get there, I do not have any illusions of perfection, I only know the path to Hell is paved with deception and I refuse to go there anymore. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 255

“To be human involves the ability to appreciate as well as the ability to give expression to appreciation. For thousands of years authentic existence included both manipulation and appreciation, utilization and celebration, both work and worship. In primitive society they were interdependent; in biblical religion they were interrelated. Today we face a different situation.” (Who is Man pg. 116)

We are in the midst of a great war, both inner and outer, for the soul of our self, the soul of our country, the soul of the world and our connection to the Ineffable One. The news is full of stories recounting the Mental Health crisis of our young and not so young, accounting most of it to the Pandemic. This is another way of deflecting from the root cause of the mental health crisis we face, blame it on something out of our control, blame it on God, on the universe, etc. The first sentence above points to the cause of the crisis today, just as it was revealing the same crisis almost 60 years ago, a crisis of the spirit, a dark night of the soul, a wrestling/struggle between truth and mendacity, indifference and wonder, fulfilling the demand/call of a power greater than oneself/higher consciousness and ignoring the call in favor of power, prestige, wealth, engaging in “treating the stranger well” and taking advantage of anyone/everyone just because we can. This is the crisis we face as individuals and as members of a religion, ethnicity, country, etc. Yet, too many of us are unwilling to wrestle with these opposing forces, too many of us are unwilling to acknowledge our “ability to appreciate” and “give expression to appreciation”.

Why, you may ask, is simple. When we appreciate something, we can no longer denigrate it. When we appreciate a human being, we can no longer hate them, be prejudicial towards them or ‘their kind’, we can no longer treat them as less than and we must treat them with love, kindness, truth, justice, compassion. Just as the Bible teaches: “Love your neighbor as your self”, when we appreciate a person, we see them as our partner, a divine reminder, an image of God, an equal. From this place we can no longer engage in the senseless hatred that has plagued our society for millennia. We can no longer engage in ‘making our self look good by making another self look bad’, we no longer will seek solace in hatred, in alcohol, in drugs, in risky behaviors, in trying to control women, another ethnicity, another race, in treating the stranger poorly. We need to engage in this spiritual dark night of the soul as a people and as individuals. It is difficult, it is painful and it is the only path to wholeness that has stood the test of time, from Jacob in the Bible to today.

Appreciation, of course, begins with accepting what is and finding ways to make our corner of the world a little better. Acceptance is not the same as settling and being stuck. Acceptance is the first step in change, acceptance is acknowledging what is and then finding ways to improve the current situation. I can’t change what I don’t accept as reality, and we can’t accept mendacity, status quo, ‘this is the way it has always been’ as excused to not engage. Remembering that the only constant is change, we are constantly moving even though we don’t feel the earth turning, we can join with other appreciators to end the outer wars we experience with people who are lying about their certainty of action, their certainty of hatred, their mendacious ways of deception and enslavement. We can and must combat their mendacity with our appreciation, combat their hatred with our expressions of love, appreciation, reminders of what is truly important and holy to our mission of fulfilling the divine need we were created to fill.

In recovery, we are told in the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous: “acceptance is the answer to all my problems today”(page 417). We know we have to accept our powerlessness over people, places, things, substances, etc. We have to be in acceptance before we can control our selfs, have the strength to appreciate the power of our bad habits, stinking thinking, mental crisis’ and spiritual malady. Once we are in acceptance, the path to change, to living well, to understanding the teaching above, to opening our eyes and seeing what is in front of us is clear and we are resolved to change, to make things better, to be responsible for what our past ways have caused and what moving forward in appreciation and truth looks like.

These past 255 days have been an appreciation of Rabbi Heschel’s contribution to my life, I would say his saving my life/giving me a life worth saving. My writing is my expression of appreciation, of prizing his wisdom, of recognizing the value of spiritual health, spiritual connection, of love, truth, radical amazement, justice, kindness, compassion and activism. While I am much louder, more ‘street vernacular’ than Rabbi Heschel, I share his drive for truth, I share and have learned how to be human a little better each day, and I am indebted to him for opening my eyes, my heart, my soul to hear, listen, understand and see the wrestlings I engage in everyday are holy, our natural and are necessary. Appreciation doesn’t always win in the moment, and it always wins in the end for me. I am grateful for my losses, my ‘missing the mark’, my errors in judgement and the hurts I have incurred as much as I am grateful for the victories I have shared with so many, the times I ‘got it right’ and the joys that true connections have brought. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 253

“To be human involves the ability to appreciate as well as the ability to give expression to appreciation. For thousands of years authentic existence included both manipulation and appreciation, utilization and celebration, both work and worship. In primitive society they were interdependent; in biblical religion they were interrelated. Today we face a different situation.” (Who is Man pg. 116)

As I have immersed myself in the first sentence above, I realize that our fear of appreciation, our fear of expressing appreciation, gratitude, our fear of ‘being in someone’s debt’, has led us to prejudice and hatred. It leads us to anger, blame and shame, it has led us to the erroneous tenet perpetrated by ‘societal norms’ that we should be able to “do it on our own”. Yet, this attitude flies in the face of the wisdom above, as I am experiencing it today. Appreciate is to appraise, value, put a price on, recognize the worth of; how can we do this if we are afraid to ask for help, if we are afraid to ‘be seen as weak’, afraid to acknowledge someone else, afraid to be grateful to God, to another human being for the aid, comfort and assistance they give us. Most of all, we seem to be afraid to acknowledge the contributions, dignity and worth of another person if they are ‘not like us’, ‘not our kind’. Hence the propensity towards prejudice, senseless hatred, racism, anti-semitism, Islamaphobia, etc.

Yet, what do we have to fear really? My appreciation of Rabbi Heschel, my recognizing the value of his teachings, the dignity of his being, my gratitude for him helping immensely to give me a life worth saving and helping me save my own life, only leads me to engage more and more in ‘good living’. When one is being human as the first sentence above describes, we become propelled to a way of living that is hate-free and welcoming to all. We become excited to see people, places, things, ideas, facts, teachings new each time we encounter them. Our loved ones become more interesting, important and appreciated because we discover more and more traits to be valued and more and more reasons to hold on to their love of us and reciprocate. Rather than being ‘one of the crowd’, engaging our ability to appreciate allows and reveals more of our uniqueness which then gets appreciated more by another.

Giving expression to appreciation strengthens our commitment to being a part of rather than apart from. While this mode of being has been bastardized over the millennia, as it is being right now by the authoritarians on both ends of the continuum, it is the gold standard of living well, as I read these words of praise, wisdom and learning from Rabbi Heschel today. Appreciation is one of the basic ingredients of being human, without it we are stuck in jealousy and rage, comparisons and competitions, false ego and pride, blame and shame. We are witnesses to these inhuman ways of being every day. When a Black man is shot 60+ times for running from police on a traffic stop and a White man is peacefully apprehended after he massacred people at an Independence Day parade in a Jewish neighborhood, we see the results and effects of our lack of appreciation, our lack of being human. When “Jews will not replace us” is seen as being said by “good people” as Trump and his minions have said, we experience the hatred and prejudice of people being supported and promoted by an authoritarian ‘wanta-be’. When we witness the immoral agreements of politicians like Moscow Mitch, Caving Kevin, Lying Ted, Little Marco, to go along with the authoritarian desires of Trump, of the Federalist society, of Tucker Carlson, we are witnesses to the destruction of what being human means according to the Bibles, the Koran, to Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha, Confucius, St. Francis, Rev. King, Rabbi Heschel, and so many others!

Yet, there are so many people who would rather engage in their own self-deceptions so they can believe these liars, these charlatans, these INHUMAN beings who are homo-sapiens. Our self-deception has led to the many ills and deaths of our current society and of past societies. Too many people are content with believing the lies they tell themselves and ignoring the call to appreciate the wisdom of our Ancient Teachings which have stood the test of time, ignoring the demand of God to rise to this occasion and respond to the question: “Where are you”, and following the charlatans and practitioners of mendacity named above and all of their ilk. We are in danger of losing the freedoms that this country was founded on, I saw a poster reminding everyone that this country, “founded to allow freedom from Religious persecution is using religion to persecute freedoms?” Appreciation and expressing our appreciation, recognizing the value of real freedom, living free of the pettiness, pride, envy and emnity that seems to overpower so many is the key to a better life.

In recovery, relearning to appreciate and express our appreciation is the key to our long-term recovery and to living well. We, who have bastardized all of the teachings of love, kindness, truth, justice, and compassion when we were not in recovery, are acutely aware of our need and desire to “BE HUMAN” again. We engage in living amends through our ability to grow in appreciation, to be unafraid to express it and to enjoy the aid and comfort of those who love us.

I will write more on this tomorrow. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 253

“To be human involves the ability to appreciate as well as the ability to give expression to appreciation. For thousands of years authentic existence included both manipulation and appreciation, utilization and celebration, both work and worship. In primitive society they were interdependent; in biblical religion they were interrelated. Today we face a different situation.” (Who is Man pg. 116)

As we enter Shabbat tonight and for some on Sunday, this first sentence is so important, I believe. Rabbi Heschel is teaching/reminding us of what it means to be human in different ways than he has earlier. Appreciate comes from the Latin meaning to price, to appraise and the dictionary definition is to “recognize the full worth of; recognize the full implications of”. Ability comes from the word able which in comes from the Latin meaning “to hold”. Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom above implores us engage in holding on to the full worth of our experiences of both our inner and outer living. He is also reminding us that we can hold on to these experiences and express our recognition of them as well. Rabbi Heschel is calling upon all of us to engage in appreciation and express our appreciation so we can “be human”. This appreciation, this appraisal of life is not about the outside trappings, however. It is to experience life from the inside out, to engage in rich, disturbing, challenging inner dialogues, inner wars, inner turmoil leading to inner clarity, integration of our inner forces and voices. Yet, most people are afraid to grapple with our inner discord, our inner turmoil and, instead, seek to add more outer trappings and prize the outer rather than deal with the inner. This is surely apparent in our political state of affairs, it is the basis for Putin invading Ukraine, Trump and his sycophants pushing the mendacious “Big Lie” on our country in an effort to tear down democracy. It is apparent in the machinations of Moscow Mitch who believes he can set up an autocracy and never be out of power, out of favor and this is what God means in the teachings about taking care of the poor, the needy, the stranger! The more outer ‘success’ these politicians have with deceiving their masses, the more they “recognize the full worth of” their mendacity. This is the antithesis to both the teaching above and the call/demand of God.

We witness this bastardization of appreciation in some of the 1%. They recognize the worth of their private Jets (which I do also:) more than they recognize the worth of their inner life. Like our politicians, they have run from their inner lives by filling their outer lives with stuff, toys, money, prestige, titles, etc. I have met many people who are bewildered because they “have everything” and are still unsatisfied, still in turmoil and still unable to appreciate what they have, believing the ‘next big’ success will bring them the calm they have been searching for. We see this in families as well, parents believing they will be okay if their children are okay, fulfill their dreams for their children, rescuing them from themselves and seeking their obedience and believing obedience is love. I have witnessed children who fail to appreciate their parents for who they are, rather than who they are not. They are so intent on destroying their parents ability to recognize the worth of their lives these children are willing to destroy their own life, literally and figuratively. In my vocation and avocation of being an “advocate of the soul” for 1000’s of people and their families, I have watched the difficulty people have in recognizing the worth of their own lives, much less appreciating the worth of anyone else’s.

This is where jealousy, hatred, prejudice stem from, I believe. I am experiencing Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom today as a call to end this false foundation of life, the foundation which believes if the outer looks good, then I can hide my inner turmoil from another and myself. This is the Biggest of the Big Lie!

In recovery, we relearn/learn for the first time to be able/hold on to an authentic recognition of the value of our inner life, to be hold on to the vision our inner life is providing for us and learn to express our gratitude for being alive, for finally not needing to cover up our warts and hide our foibles. In recovery, we are able to put the highest price on our relationships with another person, with family, with God, with our true self. It just doesn’t get any better than this.

Today’s writing brings me to realize that the things I have run from in my life are the things I have to run to. First responders run towards danger, not away from it and I am recognizing the value of the many times when I have engaged in the dangerous labyrinth of my inner life. I have always recognized my hold on truth even when I was engaging in mendacity and deception. I am experiencing my past in glorious ways because of this teaching above. I am no longer living in shame for my errors, I have to recognize the value of my errors so I can improve, I can and must make T’Shuvah for the harm I have caused which I do upon realizing them. I also have to recognize the worth of my contribution to making my corner of the world better, I have to recognize how much my inner sense of God’s will to love the stranger, the neighbor and God have allowed me to be ‘angry for God, angry for the senseless hatred and treatment of people who are not like the people in power (aka white men). Recognizing the value of my dignity and your dignity forces me to be kinder, more loving, more human. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 252

“To be overtaken with awe of God is not to entertain a feeling but to share in a spirit that permeates all being…As an act of personal recognition our praise would be fatuous; it is meaningful only as an act of joining in the endless song.” (Who is Man pg.116)

The paragraph begins with being “overtaken with awe of God” and this, I believe, is the heart of “the endless song”. Immersing myself in Rabbi Heschel’s words makes me realize “joining in the endless song” is a call and response between one another and between us and God. God calls “Ayecha”, (where are you) to Adam and Eve and Adam states he was hiding. Imagine this, the first two human beings who were in the Garden of Eden and had it all, ate from the tree of knowledge of good and evil and chose to hide instead of being in truth, instead of allowing themselves “to be overtaken with awe of God”. After a while God realizes we need a manual on how to live in this state of awe, how to live with one another, how to share with one another in the spirit that permeates all being, so we receive Torah and the Bible. Because we all hear and learn differently, some of us need the New Testament, the Koran, Buddha’s vision, etc. Whatever our foundational teachings, experiences in a “power greater than ourselves”, they all lead us to the experience of being “overtaken with awe of God”.

Throughout the millennia men have sold people on awe being a feeling rather than an opportunity to “share in a spirit that permeates all being”. This manipulation and deception serves the manipulator not the person being manipulated. It gives the deceiver the power to bring false images and ideas that they claim give the ‘feeling’ of awe, they sell the people who are infatuated with them the bullshit that they alone are going to lead them to the ‘promised land’. The mendacious ones are so good at their ‘pitch’ the people who are infatuated with them and with being deceived do not realize they will never share in the ‘milk and honey’ of the promised land, they do not realize they will be the ones working to harvest the milk and honey and become a slave to these ‘leaders’ and ‘prophets’. The warning about false prophets in the Bible is still valid and true today, it is sad we don’t heed it and don’t recognize these charlatans and give them equal status as God’s prophets. They seek personal recognition and praise rather than joining in the “endless song”.

Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses and so many others in the Bible as well as St. Francis, Rev. King, Rabbi Heschel and many more had a different response to God’s call of Ayecha, they said Hineni, here I am! Not all the time and not perfectly and they had the experience of being “overtaken with awe of God” and their response, in direct opposition to Adam and Eve, was to “share in a spirit that permeates all being”. They were determined to show up to the best of their ability and, as King David shows us, to admit when they were wrong, either on their own or with help, and do T’Shuvah, return to God, to decency to joining in “the endless song”. When being “overtaken with awe of God” is an experience rather than a feeling, the experience never leaves us. Staying loyal to the experience and loyal to our response is a path of faith, is a path to joining in the “the endless song”. It is the way we engage with God in a call and response: God: “Where Are YOU?”, our response is: “Here I AM!”. Wherever we are, we are willing to be found, we are willing to return, we are asking for help because we want to have the experience of sharing “in a spirit that permeates all being.”

The song is endless because our spirits are eternal, God is eternal and, while as human forms we die, the words and the melody of our contribution to the “endless song” never die. We are faced each hour, day, week, month, year, lifetime with the choice to be fatuous (foolish) and live by feelings that can be manipulated and the other choice to truly experience the “awe of God”, “share in a spirit that permeates all being” and sing the melody of the “endless song” that comes from our souls, our spirits. We have the choice each and every day to sing Hineni, to sing the Shema, to sing of love of God and our fellow human beings. Singing these songs are the antidote to buying into the manipulation of the charlatans selling “feel good” hatred and violence, authoritarianism and prejudice.

In recovery, we are joining in the “endless song” and holding on to the experiences of being “overtaken with awe of God”. Our voice is different from the other voices around us and we no longer feel the need to be carbon copies, we know adding our voice and song to the cacophony of sound already playing is the call we have received and the path to answering Hineni, here I am.

I have confused feeling with having a “share in a spirit that permeates all beings” on some occasions, much fewer and farther in-between in my recovery than prior. Most of all, my joining in “the endless song”, as I reflect on Rabbi Heschel’s words, has been loud, off-key, brash, not always “polite and proper” and uniquely, authentically me. This, as I write today is more important and the ridicule, the exile, being ignored is part of the price one pays for authenticity, for saying Hineni, and I gladly pay it. Real is better than optics and adding my voice to God’s song is better than singing for my supper. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 251

“To be overtaken with awe of God is not to entertain a feeling but to share in a spirit that permeates all being…As an act of personal recognition our praise would be fatuous; it is meaningful only as an act of joining in the endless song.” (Who is Man pg.116)

“Joining in the endless song” is the call and the demand we hear each and every day from the Universe, from God, from people next to us and people we have never met. The situation in the Ukraine is an example of the world “joining in the endless song” because we praise the Ineffable One through our actions which then change our inner life, our inner thoughts and reflect the essence of our spiritual living. It is so interesting that in times of conflict, we are all able to join together, when we have an outside enemy, we can join together, however when we have opportunities to make meaningful changes in the living conditions of people, when we have opportunities to have a peaceful transition of power, when we have opportunities to care for the stranger, the poor, the needy, the widow and orphan we fight with one another. We cease “joining in the endless song” whenever there is a call to give voice to the voiceless, power to the powerless and speak truth to power. There is always a pushback and a violent denial of the rights of the stranger as being the same as the citizen, although the Bible says so and the United States of America came into being because strangers were seeking a better life, seeking to be free of the power of a monarch/ruler who was a liar, who did not care about the people he was supposed to be serving, rather caring about only himself and “his people”.

Rabbi Heschel gave these lectures at a time in American History when there was great upheaval and change. John F. Kennedy was President, Bobby Kennedy was Attorney General, Martin Luther King Jr. was speaking out, marching, creating peaceful civil disobedience events, Rabbi Heschel joined with Rev. King in speaking out against the injustices of prejudice and inequality, the time was ripe for people to hear what they did not want to hear-we are all created with infinite dignity and worth, all people “are created equal with certain unalienable rights, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”. Yet, just as today, some people back then did not want to acknowledge these truths in their churches nor in the town square, yet them called themselves ‘people of faith, faith leaders,’ they purported to believe in “the American Way”. Rather than work “to form a more perfect Union” the people of the 60’s worked to keep their being at the top of the power pyramid. They needed an outside enemy to keep ‘their’ people from turning on them because they were screwing the very people who supported their UnAmerican activities. Sound familiar? We are facing the same situation today, only the names have changed. Just as back in the 50’s and 60’s breathing while black is a crime to some, breathing while Jewish is a crime to some, voting for anything  other than white supremacy is a crime to some, speaking truth is a crime to some today. The House Committee on the Jan. 6th Attack on the Capital is really investigating people who are actively engaged in UnAmerican activities: people who are trying desperately to overthrow our democratic norms, legislatures that are trying to limit the rights of citizens to vote, people who are treating strangers, the poor, the needy in ways that neither God nor the founders of this Republic ever intended.

While it may seem as if we are powerless, we are not. We have to acknowledge and enhance the ways we are “joining in the endless song”. We have to stop wringing our hands, mourning what was(which it never really was we only thought change had taken hold). We need to get to work and prize the ways God prizes and praises. We have to continue to imitate God and make new paths to goodness, wholeness, equality, dignity, love, kindness, mercy and justice every day as God does in the Heavenly Court. We have to and are able to effect the changes that God wants, that decency, freedom, and living together demand. We do this through demonstrating these ways of being in our everyday living. We do this by shouting at the top of our lungs our awe of God, we do this by praising and prizing truth, justice, mercy, kindness, love and compassion. We do this by reaching out to the people who are intoxicated with the mendacity of these people who engage in UnAmerican activities like Jim Jordan, J.D.Vance, Kevin McCarthy, Mitch McConnell, these power-hungry war mongers like Giuliani, Meadows, Cruz, Hawley, DiSantis and these immoral and unGodly deceivers like Kushner, Trump, Eastman, Carlson, to help them see truth, to relate to their fears and pain while also bringing them out of the ether these people have put them in, assist them in being advocates for their true interests and find ways to reach compromises that ensure the dignity of all people.

In recovery, we are “joining in the endless song” because we know without joining this choir, we will surely die, spiritually, emotionally and, maybe even, physically. We were the people who, while looking good(or trying to/thinking we were) were practicing UnAmerican activities and unGodly activities. We took advantage of the vulnerabilities of people and we have been able to say NO to that way of living. We do this by saying YES to the awe of and call of God. We say YES by “joining in the endless song” with our authentic voice and living.

I am fighting for the voices of my grandson, my great nieces and nephews. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 250

“To be overtaken with awe of God is not to entertain a feeling but to share in a spirit that permeates all being…As an act of personal recognition our praise would be fatuous; it is meaningful only as an act of joining in the endless song.” (Who is Man pg.116)

Returning to Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom on how to celebrate rather than indulge a feeling is in direct contrast to the devastating news of yesterday. When America is supposed to celebrate the Declaration of Independence there are people who are working hard to make us come under the tyranny of MAGA, of idolatry, of mendacious people purporting to be people of faith, etc. White males who kill people at an Independence Day parade in Illinois, at a protest in Wisconsin are arrested, a Black male who runs from police for fear of death or arrest for driving while black, etc are shot 60 times? Yet some are praising the MAGA people, some are praising the Qanoners, some of our elected representatives are fawning over the treasonous Trump, the deceptive DeSantis, the bobblehead Pence, the Russian money grabbing McConnell, and call these actions ‘acts of faith’, acts of patriotism! How ridiculous and how have we sunk so deep into the quicksand of self-deception?

Rabbi Heschel is telling us in the second sentence above. We have come to use praise as personal recognition rather than recognizing the spiritual energy “that permeates all beings.” None of these so-called patriots are praising the Founding Fathers, none of these so-called conservative Supreme Court and lower Federal Court judges are interpreting the Constitution as the founding fathers meant it to be. They are trying to keep the status quo on a document that was created to be dynamic, to respond to new information, to continue to afford more freedom, not more restrictions. Yet, as we can see from the latest set of rulings, these judges are not about justice for all, they are not following the dictates of God. They are not recognizing nor joining in the endless song of justice, mercy, kindness, truth, love that God sings every day, that the Constitution offers to all of us when we are immersed in both the letter and spirit of it. They are recognizing their own political power, they are praising the money people who possibly gave them stipends in their earlier careers, to whom they are indebted to because of the ‘leg up’ they got from being associated with them (the Federalist group and others) and they prize the idolatry and mendacity of their patrons and themselves more than they prize serving something greater than themselves. Clarence Thomas spreading false rumors as good science says it all, he would rather praise and prize mendacity, he would rather praise and prize death for the people who choose to not be vaccinated and all those they come into contact with than to praise and prize life, than to praise and prize truth! I wonder if he will agree that the Loving decision is to be overturned as well?

We all have to look who and what are we praising and prizing. It is no longer enough to ‘be on the right side’ of an argument, it is no longer enough to ensure the optics of a situation look good, it is no longer enough to mouth the ‘right’ words be one a conservative or progressive. We have to join in the endless song that was begun when the world was created. We have to add our voices to the eternal song that praises life, that prizes truth, that joins as one of the voices in God’s song not having to rewrite God’s music to fit our own needs/wants/desires. It is time for us to move forward the promise God made at the Red Sea, it is time for us to move forward the Covenant God made with all people at Mount Sinai. It is time for us to move forward the words of the prophets, the gates of return and repentance our always open and the words of a central prayer in the Jewish faith, God desires our return. It is time to move forward the promise of the Constitution of the United States to stay as a ‘beacon on the hill’ for every other country to light their lights by the lamp of Lady Liberty. We only do this when we join the endless songs of Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Henry, Franklin, Hamilton, Lincoln, et al. They may have been serving their own agendas at times, yet their main agendas were to move forward the freedom they and their contemporaries fought so hard to win. They continued to praise and prize a power greater than themselves, the spirit of freedom, and joined in “the endless song” that was begun at the time the world was created.

In recovery, we let go of our false needs to puff ourselves up and find our own personal ‘right size’ way of living. We no longer need to engage in the fatuousness of personal recognition, rather we know our service is the surest sign of our praise and we prize being part of the “endless song” and sing our melody loudly and proudly as one of God’s servants.

The prayer upon awakening that I immerse myself in each day has a word that usually means compassion and can also mean ‘inflamed’. I find myself more and more inflamed with praise for God, more and more recognizing my voice in the “endless song” both preretirement and, finally, post retirement. The soul sickness I experienced last week has been replaced with praise for God, praise for the good people who ran to help the victims of these mass shootings and those who help everyday without notice. I am, again, part of the “endless song” and singing it loudly and in my own key. I hope you are also. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 249

“In the words of Thomas Jefferson, “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just”. “However, an honest estimation of the moral state of our society will disclose: some are guilty, but all are responsible.”(The Insecurity of Freedom pg. 89,93).

In honor of the 4th of July, I have chosen these two quotes from the paper Rabbi Heschel delivered on Religion and Race in January of 1963. The entire paper is so rich in spirit, in truth, in a path forward. In likening the plight of Black people to the Israelites in Egypt, Rabbi Heschel brought together the basis for everyone to be inflamed with the need for justice for all no matter the color of their skin, their gender, their sexual orientation, their political bias, their faith, etc. Yet, here we are today, some 59 years later, in as bad a morass, if not worse, then when these words were both written and spoken.

Jefferson’s quote above is what a “fearless and searching inventory” or a “Chesbon HaNefesh, accounting of the soul” produces. The author of the Declaration of Independence, knowing his owning of slaves, knowing his not considering Black People as fully human was wrong, was an affront to God and was unjust. Today, we are still not appreciating the words of Jefferson nor are some people even capable of trembling for our country because they are too busy ‘being right’, speaking of ‘righteousness’, bastardizing God’s teachings by wrapping themselves in some Bible that is not original to either Judaism, Christianity nor Islam. We are facing a moment in our history that is as bleak if not bleaker than the moments Jefferson was facing and some of the leaders are not trembling “for my country when I reflect that God is just”. The reason they are not trembling is because they think they control God, their god is an idol of their making and they are using the words and sentiments of religious thought to enhance their idolatry.

Mitt Romney where are you? How can you as a devout Mormon go along with the idolatry of Moscow Mitch? How can you as a believer in God go along with the people who want to enslave, make less than human any one who is not like them/anyone who isn’t them? How do you vote with Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley who openly and proudly supported an insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021? How do you support Moscow Mitch who wants to make corporations more equal that human beings? How do you go to Church on Sunday, how do you swear your allegiance to God and go along with these inhumane actions? I call you to account with Rabbi Heschel’s quote above: “some are guilty, but all are responsible.” You and your cronies, you and your fellow Republicans have done more to tear down this Republic, smash the democratic norms and rules that make this country “a shining city upon a hill”, as Ronald Reagan said! Yet, you go along with Moscow Mitch’s ways of grabbing power, exercising power to put down anyone who doesn’t agree with the inhumane ways of treating one another, crush anyone who isn’t willing to enslave people and to imprison children “yearning to breathe free”. What is up with all you good church-going charlatans, what is up with the idolators who put on the National Prayer Breakfasts? What is up with the rest of us who don’t stop this travesty of justice, this travesty of Godliness, this immorality we have come to accept and/or be indifferent to?

We are all responsible and those of us who feel powerless to change these immoral actions of our government and courts, GET OVER IT! We all have the power to speak out, we all have the power to write letters, we all have the power to vote, we all have the power to make phone calls to Congress people, we all have the power of Holiness and Godliness in us. We have to make the decision to change our impotence into to potency by changing the ways we speak to one another, not the language necessarily, just the tone. We can argue for the sake of being right and/or we can argue for the sake of God. Jefferson is reminding us that the later is more important and more rewarding than the former. We can stop being indifferent by indulging in our powerlessness on a global level and make the changes we can on a personal level, in our families, our communities, our workplaces, our cities, etc. We can be the pebble in the water that creates ripple effects. We can take seriously Rabbi Heschel’s words and no longer hide behind the powerlessness of changing the macro and work on changing the micro, our inner life, our family life, etc.

In recovery, we are constantly taking inventory, we are constantly reflecting on how to live our higher consciousness/divine image. We know we are responsible for all that happens and we take personal responsibility for the errors and victories we cause.

I have trembled at my own unjust ways. I have worked hard to change them. I have felt the powerlessness to make a difference and experienced what a friend called “soul sickness”. Yet, I continue to do what I can, where I can, and when I can to make changes in my inner life, changes in my family’s life, changes in my community’s life. The success and/or failure of such efforts is immaterial as I am reading today’s quotes, what is important is my engagement in them. God is just and God is merciful, hence our command to “love mercy, do justly and walk in the ways of God”. Let's all do it a little more and be the responsible Divine needs we are created to be. God Bless, stay safe and Happy 4th of July, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 248

“To be overtaken with awe of God is not to entertain a feeling but to share in a spirit that permeates all being…As an act of personal recognition our praise would be fatuous; it is meaningful only as an act of joining in the endless song.” (Who is Man pg.116)

Continuing on Friday’s writing, I have found myself asking what is going through me? Is it pride and ego that has the larger hold on me or does sharing in “a spirit that permeates all being” have the larger hold on me? While it is never always and/or never, which one of these energies has 51+% control of us is entirely dependent on us. We get to choose what is going to go through us and what we are going to make the foundation of our life. Rabbi Heschel is reminding us, teaching us, calling to us to hear the demand of God, “to be overtaken with awe of God” as a way of being not as a feeling that we like. Rather, I hear Rabbi Heschel demanding that we acknowledge the awesomeness of God, that we stop believing it is just a personal experience known only to us and we then can tell other people how to acknowledge. Immersing myself in these words, I am hearing Rabbi Heschel explain to us, more patiently than I would, the “awe of God” is not a real experience unless we are also engaged in sharing “in a spirit that permeates all being”, it is not a real experience unless we respect and engage with every other being as if they too have been “overtaken with awe of God” and are sharing in the same spiritual experience while having their own unique one.

At the Red Sea and at Mt. Sinai, everyone saw the power and glory of God, everyone heard the call of God and each person had their own experience unlike the experience of everyone else. Yet, they could all share in being “overtaken with awe of God” in their unique way and as a communal commitment. The response at the Red Sea was “this is my God and I will honor God” and the response of Mt. Sinai was “we will do and we will understand”. At the Red Sea, it was a more personal response, the people matured enough by Mt. Sinai to be able to have a communal response to their very unique individual experience because they were able to “share in a spirit that permeates all being”.

As we approach the 4th of July, I believe it is high time for “all good people to come to the aid of their country” as the typing test/challenge says. We all share in the spirit of the  founding fathers whose desire to be free is captured so beautifully in the words of Emma Lazarus on the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…”. For the ‘conservative’ impostors like Clarence Thomas, his wife Ginny, lying Ted Cruz, little Marco Rubio, Moscow Mitch and Trump-kissing Kevin McCarthy, these words have no meaning and the spirit of the Declaration of Independence is not a “spirit that permeates all being”, it is just a feeling for a day, a way to slap hands and give out phony smiles.

This July 4th we are being called by Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom and teaching, by all spiritual disciplines to rededicate ourselves to the values and the meaning, the spirit and the actions that our founding document is calling for us to do. We have to end our need to live in our pride and false egos, we have to let go of our desire to be right and make another(s) wrong, we have to stop feeding the deceptions of ourselves that lead us to deceive another(s) and to believe in the lies of the people in power. We are being called upon to answer the call and the needs of these tired, poor, huddled masses” in this country as well as those who are knocking on our door for a better life. We are being called to “share in the spirit that permeates all being” and help the poor, the needy, the stranger rather than exploit them, rather than jail them, rather than reject them. We can only respond to the demand and call of God when we are “overtaken with the awe of God” and follow the words of Moses in the Torah and the prophets: “Love mercy, do justly, and walk humbly in the ways of God.” God is always ready for our return, God desires our return as our prayers tell us 3 times each day. God needs our return so we can be the partners with God that we were created to be. God needs our return so we stop hiding, we need our return so we can take our proper place and help those who need help. This is what 51+% “share in a spirit that permeates all being” looks like and acts like.

In recovery, we are so aware of our need to let go of our false pride and false ego in order to have the ability to “share in a spirit that permeates all being” . We are aware of our need to shift the balance of power within us to 51%+ decency, kindness, truth, love, justice and mercy. We learn to live in a state where we are “overtaken with awe of God” in our daily affairs, we develop a practice of experiencing the call of the Ineffable One in all of our affairs and no two experiences are ever the same.

I know that this ‘battle’ as to what is going to have power over me is never done! I forgot this for a bit, I realize that false ego and pride has ruled me on more than one occasion in my recovery and I also know that I have continued to return to a state where I can be and am “overtaken with the awe of God” and I continue to “share in a spirit that permeates all being”. I am grateful for the people who help me return and who stand with me and by me because they know my soul, know my heart. I am grateful that God accepts my T’Shuvah and helps me return to my proper place.  God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 247

“To be overtaken with awe of God is not to entertain a feeling but to share in a spirit that permeates all being…As an act of personal recognition our praise would be fatuous; it is meaningful only as an act of joining in the endless song.” (Who is Man pg.116)

To permeate comes from the Latin meaning “pass through” and share as a verb means to have a portion of something with another. Rabbi Heschel’s teaching above is to remind us that rather than us pass through the spirit, the spirit has to pass through us. Rather than thinking and acting as if we have it all, we are entitled to do as we please, we have to live our lives as a shareholder of this spirit which “permeates all being” if we are “to be overtaken with awe of God”.

Herein lies the challenge, the question, the demand of God and of one another I believe. Are we going through life, are we going through the teachings of history or are they going through us? Are we going through the Bible or is the Bible going through us? Are we going through “awe of God” or is the “awe of God” going through us? These have been issues for humankind since our beginnings and now, more than ever I believe, these issues and our responses are crucial to our survival and our thriving.

It is clear that our democracy has been overtaken by ideology in ways never before seen. It is clear that some of our religions have been overtaken by ideology never seen nor meant in the basic texts of our religions. Yet, here we are, living in a world where “the awe of God” is overtaken by the awe of self. Narcissism has morphed into and overtaken democratic norms, our Supreme Court and some of the Justices therein, our everyday conversations and our relationships with one another. The reflection of self and ‘righteous self’ finding and fighting against the ‘enemy’ has become the prominent theme of our time. It has become the way of being for so many people that they are arming themselves with military-grade assault weapons to kill as many as their fellow country people as they can when their “revolution” begins. We called Fidel Castro and Che Guevara terrorists and some people are worshiping the terrorists that stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6th, bowing down to the organizers of this attack and others on our democracy, and taking orders from liars, cheats, charlatans and mean-spirited power-seeking men.

While these people engage in wrapping themselves in the Bible, as we saw in June of 2020, they hold it upside down because they have never allowed the teachings of either the Christian Bible nor the Hebrew Bible nor the Koran nor the sacred texts of Buddhism, etc to go through them. They have deftly and sincerely not allowed these teachings nor the “awe of God” to permeate them. Clarence Thomas’ lies about the vaccines are as outrageous as they are dangerous. The Supreme Court’s need to give priority to money rather than health and life are not the needs of those whom are “overtaken with the awe of God”. Yet, they keep using the name of God in vain. They keep violating the 3rd Commandment with impunity and pride. And the people who follow them, who hang on their every word, who are waiting for the call to rise up and kill those ‘lefties’ in California, New York and everywhere in-between, are true believers in the idolatry of these narcissists, these deceivers because the people’s need to be deceived and to engage in self-deception is so great.

We are, like Adam and Eve, facing the greatest challenge of all; allowing our selves to be seen in the raw, to be experienced in our authenticity, or to hide behind the bushes, hide when called by God and another person, be so ashamed of who we see ourselves to be that we adopt different personas so no one will truly know us. We believe if we live a false self long enough, we will become it. The authoritarian leaders people follow know this challenge well, they decided to be authentically self-absorbed and self-centered. They made a decision that God is here to serve them so they worship the god of their making. Yet, so many people will follow these religious and political and business leaders believing that their power will shield them, protect them and rub off on them. How foolish to believe the narcissists attempting to destroy our democracy from within like McConnell and the senators who no longer can vote anyway but his way, Clarence Thomas and his flock on the Supreme Court, McCarthy and his congresspeople who defend Marjorie Taylor Greene’s fascist beliefs. What part of the Bible has permeated them? How has the “awe of God” permeated them? With whom to they share in the “spirit” that flows through all things?

The masks we wear is what we take off to recover our authentic self in recovery. At a meeting last night, the leader spoke about these masks and we all shared about the difficulty of taking them off. In a teaching prior to Yom Kippur in 1989, Rabbi Jonathon Omer-man taught us that the ‘sins’ we commit are like barnacles on boat and we have to scrap them off. So too with the masks we continue to wear. Having Torah and Rabbi Heschel go through me has changed and continues to change my life, engaging with the “awe of God” every day keeps me sharing in “the spirit that permeates all being”. I am blessed by Rabbi Heschel’s teachings, they saved my life and keep me living a life of meaning and purpose. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 246

“To be overtaken with awe of God is not to entertain a feeling but to share in a spirit that permeates all being…As an act of personal recognition our praise would be fatuous; it is meaningful only as an act of joining in the endless song.” (Who is Man pg.116)

The first sentence above is the problem that is facing all of us today, yesterday and tomorrow. Can we be overtaken with the awe of God as a sharing in the “spirit that permeates all being”? Rabbi Heschel was speaking of this as a crisis/challenge almost 60 years ago in the lectures this book is based on. Today, is seems to me, that the crisis/challenge has grown and the divide between what Rabbi Heschel is describing in the first sentence above and the ‘winning’ of entertaining “a feeling” overtaking the sharing in “a spirit that permeates all being” is apparent in our political, social, religious spheres.

People stand at the Grand Canyon, etc and are overtaken with awe and wonder, of this there is little doubt or argument. However, for most people, these experiences of awe, like the awe of a ‘beautiful’ sunset are feelings that are fleeting and remembered with wistfulness. They do not, however, make a dent in the ways we interact with one another, they do not make an impact in the ways we treat the earth, they do not impact the ways we seek power for its own sake, they do not make an impact on our daily living. They are ‘special occasions’ and then we return to the ‘real world’. In our ‘real world’ we are “dog eat dog”; “anything goes as long as we win”,; obfuscate the truth; tell the Big Lies; winning is everything; take advantage of the poor, the needy, the stranger; prejudice and senseless hatred carry the day so we can stay in power; and so on. This is the problem we are facing today; are we going to truly “be overtaken with the awe of God” or are we going to stop in and recharge our feelings and beliefs that we are doing god’s work, when we are truly worshiping the idols we have set up?

We are witnessing idolatry being ‘sold’ as monotheism by people who want religion and their god to serve them rather than they serve God and follow the principles, tenets, commandments, path their religion is founded on and flourishes on. We see this at all levels of life right now. There are the people who march, demonstrate and even use violence to stop women from choosing what they want to do with their bodies, yet these same people believe in the death penalty. There are people who believe violence is called for when “their side” doesn’t get its way, as in the Jan. 6th Insurrection. There are people who are calling for an end to the freedoms so many Americans have fought and died for since 1776 because they don’t want to extend them to everyone, only to the ELITE WHITE CHRISTIANS that join with them. Yet, all of these people will describe the ‘awe of god’ they are overtaken by that is uniquely personal to them and their compatriots. No one else can share it this awe precisely because it is a personal feeling that only the people who are on the same page as they are can share, understand and feel.

For some of us, when we are “overtaken with the awe of God” we know we are part of something so much greater than ourselves and our allies and enemies. We become aware of our connection to the mountains, the deserts, the seas and the land. We rejoice in sharing with all peoples and know we are all part of the oneness of the world, the Oneness of God, the oneness of living. We are connected to “a spirit that permeates all being” and are refreshed, rejuvenated and revived by this connection. We are overcome with the vision of the world that God has given us, the part we have in making our corner of the world a little better than when we found it,  and the strength to carry out our unique mission no matter what obstacles are in front of us. We are overcome with a “fire in our belly” like Jeremiah the prophet to speak truth, to learn truth, to engage with all people in truth. We are overcome with God’s vision of all humans having infinite value, equal value and unique value, a vision that reminds us of our uniqueness so we end our comparing and competing, our need to ‘be right’,  our need to ‘crush our enemies’, and our need to ‘win at the cost of our souls/spirits’. We are aware of the difference between awe of God being a feeling and a sharing in “a spirit” when we are unable to describe the experience and we are overtaken with kindness, compassion, love and lack of prejudice for all humanity, for all of God’s creations.

In recovery, we learn to “act as if”, “fake it till you make it” in order to let the spirit of experiences rule us instead of the feelings we are having. We have learned that following our emotional feelings can get us into trouble and send us back to our old ways which harmed us and those around us. In recovery, we are always searching to be authentic, have authentic experiences and authentic relationship with God.

I have said “f*&%ck your feelings” for a long time and add “do the next right thing” after saying that. While I have confused feelings of awe with the sharing in the Spirit that is the life force which sustains all life and creation, more often than not, I have been engaged in the sharing, I have been able to see the person in front of me, I have been able to identify with all people and have let go of stereotypes and judgmental thoughts, feelings and behaviors. To do this means to be free of the inauthentic needs mentioned above and seek and engage with the “spirit that permeates all being”. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 245

“The secret of spiritual living is the power to praise. Praise is the harvest of love. Praise precedes faith. First we sing, then we believe. The fundamental issue is not faith but sensitivity and praise, being ready for faith.”(Who is Man pg. 116).

Rabbi Heschel is challenging us to be people of sensitivity and praise prior to declaring that we are people of faith, an out of the box challenge and one that is crucial to our ability to take the actions necessary to serve God/The Ineffable One. Yesterday, I wrote on the power of sensitivity and the power of insensitivity, today I am immersed in praise. I think about how some people go to Church, Temple, Synagogue, Mosque, their Crystals, etc and praise the Holy Spirit, Soul of the Universe, Allah, Adonai, Higher Consciousness, in words that are just false and those who praise their particular entity of belief in truth. What is the difference, as my wife, Harriet Rossetto asked about the people who came forward to testify and defy the final requests of Trump and those who did not! The difference is, I believe, engaging in the true nature of praise-to prize.

Each of us has a dark night of the soul, like Jacob in the Bible, where we have to make a decision as to what path we are going to follow. When we choose praise, we are going  on a path of prizing the tenets of our faith, our religion, our spiritual discipline over our personal desires and gains. This is what Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, Martin Luther King Jr. Rabbi Heschel and the Berrigan brothers, and so many others did. It is what we all need to do right here, right now. Unfortunately we see too often the droves of people who choose falseness, who choose personal desires and gains over principles of faith, decency, kindness, truth, love, etc. This is why, to me, these heroes of the Jan.6th hearings are actually cowardly heroes. They went along with the mistreatment of so many people, they went along with and helped carry out the biddings of people who were only out for themselves and gained money, prestige, etc for themselves. They aided and abetted a system that was rigged against women, Jews, Muslims, Hispanics, immigrants-legal and illegal, a system that caged innocent children and infants, keeping them away from their parents. They were cowards then AND they are heroes for not going along with the demise of democracy that Trump and Meadows and the rest of their “gang that couldn’t shoot straight” were attempting to bring about. They were faced with their own “dark night of the soul” and I am in awe of many of the witnesses, especially Cassidy Hutchinson who at age 25 showed more courage, more concern, more moral fiber and backbone, and prized principles more than her personal gains by testifying in person and on camera so truth could be known.

To prize the teachings and principles of our faiths, we have to stop making excuses for the bad behaviors we engage in. We have to wrestle with our darker angels and allow ourselves to confronted and defeated by a Higher Truth. We are able to do this when we make the decision, because of our own “dark night of the soul”  when everything we know in our soul is confronted with the mendacity of another(s) and the desires of our minds/egos/bodies and our soul wins out. Many of us think we don’t need to have this dark night of the soul, we prize these principles already and we are wrong. Everyone has to have this wrestling match, this confrontation between our desires and our soul’s knowledge of what is truth. We are witnessing the ramifications of denying this experience, of not prizing the tenets of God, the tenets of spirit, the tenets of the Universe everyday. We are witnesses to the destruction of our freedom from fear, prejudice, christian rule, one-way thinking, etc. Between the lies of the Supreme Court Justices and their personal agendas getting in the way of truth, the willingness of so many people to go along with The BIG LIE of Trump, Pence, et al, the level of discourse of so many descendants of immigrants who disparage immigrants and disparage anyone not like them, the white supremacist theology that even people of color are going along with under the guise of ‘conservatives’, the identity politics and need for optics, political correctness, etc we are slowly and quickly helping the democracy that so many people fought for and died for slip away. When we truly prize democracy, when we truly prize and praise God/Higher Power/the Ineffable One, we fight for truth, we wrestle people to the ground for kindness, we help people open their eyes and see reality with and as kindness, we welcome the stranger, the poor, the needy with open arms and let them know they are loved and belong. We stop ranking human beings and realize we all are worth an entire world, we all have infinite, equal and unique value and dignity. This is how we praise, this is the path to sensitivity!

As in recovery, placing “principles before personalities” has helped me to face my dark nights of the soul and have God win, have my soul win. I am acutely aware of when my ego has won, temporarily, because I am never settled, never able to see clearly or live easily. I just went through a bout of soul sickness with all of the freedoms that my father fought for in WWII and we all marched for and lived in the 60’s and beyond being dismantled. I had to face my fears of what America will be like for my inter-racial grandson, what it will be like for daughter, nieces and nephews, for the poor, the needy, the stranger. I had to face the fact that I don’t have the same bully pulpit I have had for years and I found the serenity(clarity) to see I am not powerless over a response to evil, I am not powerless to reach out through my writing and I am not in control of the results and my job, the gift given to me is to be in the solution that prizes and praises the teachings of God! God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 244

“The secret of spiritual living is the power to praise. Praise is the harvest of love. Praise precedes faith. First we sing, then we believe. The fundamental issue is not faith but sensitivity and praise, being ready for faith.”(Who is Man pg. 116).

As I immerse myself in Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom and call, I am more inflamed with sadness, anger and a need to speak out. We have lost our ability to be sensitive to one another on both a micro and macro scale. We have lost our ability to praise/prize the path of living that is laid out for us in the Hebrew Bible and the Gospels of the Christian Bible and the Koran. We are in a terrible state of affairs and, worse than all of this, is our indifference to our inabilities to praise/prize God’s creations/creatures and to be sensitive to the will of God. All of this coming from both ends of the spectrum-the so-called conservatives and the so-called progressives. Both are regressive, both are authoritarian, both insensitive to the call and the demands of God and the majority of people in this country.

I am angry at our insensitivity to one another. I am angry at our inability to live with one another in harmony and truth. I am angry at our need to ‘be right’ at any and all costs, even the cost of our democracy, our decency, our humanity. What right do any of us have to be insensitive to the call of a woman’s mental and/or physical well-being? What right do these so-called ‘good christians’ have to be insensitive to the needs of the poor, the stranger among us? What right do we have to endorse the falseness of the many 2nd Amendment claims about everyone having a right to bear arms when the Amendment was put because the framers wanted the States to be reassured that the Federal Government would not do what King George did. What right do the Supreme Court Justices have to be insensitive to the ever-changing needs, scientific and emotional/spiritual knowledge that becomes more available each day? What right do these so-called conservatives have to deny the idea of progress and dynamic living when the Constitution was adopted by the States only because it was immediately amended! These lying, mendacious, phony grifters like Clarence Thomas are destroying the very democracy they say they are trying to ‘conserve’. Of course the irony is that a black man is doing the bidding of white supremacists!

The far-left movement is also insensitive to the needs of people, especially those who do not agree with them. They are insensitive to the need for gradual change in some cases, they are insensitive to compromise, they are insensitive to the beliefs and truths of another whom they decree is not worthy of listening to because they are white, they are male, they are… They are insensitive to the pain they are causing by doing the same thing to white people, especially white men, that has been done to them; vilifying all whites, painting all white men with the same brush, denying the truth of the past being we have to judge things in the context they happened, not by today’s standards. Following the ‘progressive’ playbook with as much rigidity as the conservatives follow their playbook makes both extremes the same people. We have all seen the need of the progressives, like the squad, to play to the cameras, to make sure the optics are right, to bully people into being anti-semitic, anti-Israel, anti-white male, etc.

Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom above is so humbling and inviting, and so unheard and ignored. We can be sensitive to one another, we can be authentic and imperfect, we can conserve, progress and not be at extremes. Over the years, Harriet Rossetto, Rabbi Harold Shulweis, Rabbi Ed Feinstein, Rabbi Heschel have spoken about, been proponents and teachers of the “Both/And” of living. The either/or of the extremes lead us to war, to paralyzing fear and anxiety, to the mental health crisis we are seeing in both youth and adults right now, the lack of togetherness to fight Covid-19 in smart, scientific ways, the inability to see the divine Image of one another, to live in a world of darkness, meanness, mendacity and hatred. Tomorrow I will write on more of the solution that Rabbi Heschel is giving us.

In recovery, one of the fundamental resources we are recovering is our ability to be sensitive to more than the lies we have been telling ourselves. We are recovering our ability to experience life as more than either/or, me against them, my way or the highway, etc. We do this one moment at a time, one day at a time, we reach out to another people to make sure we are seeing things correctly and reflect back to them the reality they are in. In recovery, our regaining of our sensitivity is one of the keys to living well.

I have been insensitive at times, which I am sorry for and regret deeply. I have been insensitive by believing my way was right and I did not hear the call of another, I have been insensitive because I was preoccupied with something other than the person in front of me. I have been called insensitive by being a loud, in your face person that some people feel offended by my way and this I do not regret. I have also been sensitive to the needs and calls of so many people, most of all family and God. I know I have to continue to be sensitive to the call of my soul and people for the health of my soul and the continued ability to help another human being. I commit to be angry about the insensitivity of the world and more aware of my own insensitivities as well. Be safe and God Bless, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 243

“The secret of spiritual living is the power to praise. Praise is the harvest of love. Praise precedes faith. First we sing, then we believe. The fundamental issue is not faith but sensitivity and praise, being ready for faith.”(Who is Man pg. 116).

What are we really sensitive to? The word in Latin means “feel”, the English definitions are “quick to detect or respond to small changes, signals, influences”. While we are all sensitive to the slights that people throw our way, the experiences we take personally whether meant that way or not, how sensitive are we to God’s Will? How sensitive are we to our own divine Image and the divine Image in each and every human being? How do we really ‘feel’ their pain and their joy? How do we truly express our gratitude to and for our connection with another human being, with God?

As we immerse ourselves in the last sentence above, we can find that these are some of the fundament questions we need to be asking ourselves. We are living in a very narcissistic society, which has always been true to a lessor and greater degree, that is on the upswing of the narcissistic continuum. However, the narcissists in charge have worked hard to deceive all of us into believing they are acting from a religious, a faith-based, a God’s will basis. Yet, they miss the fundamental issue of sensitivity to God’s call, God’s demand. The exodus from Egypt, as I learned from Rabbi Jonathan Omer-man, is the manifestation that slavery will not last forever and, I add, that freedom is the natural state of being. We are created with Free Will and when charlatans and liars, deceivers and practitioners of mendacity, under the guise of god wants this, manipulate and convince people to believe these lies, when they are only sensitive to appealing to the lowest common denominator of human beings, fear and prejudice, “we have a problem Houston” as the Astronauts said on Apollo 13!

Be it the Justices who lied directly to the Congress, the elected officials who lie to their constituents, to the American People, the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers and other such white supremacist groups, and/or the Donald Trump/PT Barnum circus that keeps happening, we are facing the greatest crisis since the Civil War: when President Lincoln so beautifully captured our current situation “a new nation, conceived in Liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men(people) are created equal.” Will we “have a new birth of freedom” depends on what we do now!

We have to hone our sensitivity to God’s demand, to the call of the voiceless and the powerless. We have to stop serving our selfish and false egos, we have to stop listening to the liars and the deceivers, we have to hear the truth and discern our own self-deceptions. We need to stand up for justice, truth, kindness, compassion, mercy, and love if we are to meet the challenge of Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom above. It is almost 60 years since these words were spoken at Stanford University and we have shunned his wisdom rather than embraced it.

Standing for justice and truth, entails first the acknowledgement of our Sages who said every soul has infinite value, every soul is worth an entire world, every soul’s dignity and worth is equal to every other soul’s dignity and worth and, finally, every soul is unique; no two souls are exactly alike , so no need to compare and compete, to hate and deny the humanity of one another. As a country we have to stop the rhetoric of them/us, stop the degradation of one another by labelling people and using those labels to define them. We have to be sensitive, “feel” the words and actions we are about to take and, as Rabbi Hillel taught 2000+ years ago, “what is hateful to you do not do to another”. We are engaged in a “great civil war” a war for civility, a war for integrity, a war against prejudice and senseless hatred, a war for the acknowledgment of all people, based not on race, color, creed, religion, rather based on “the content of their character”.

In recovery, we are seeking to be more human each day. We are peeling away the armor we have been wearing that we, mistakenly thought, protected us and empowered us to fight the world. This armor, as we increase our sensitivity to what is and what was, we find was another lie we were telling ourselves and the key to recovering our authentic self is willingness, honesty and openness, the WHO am I going to be today.

I have always been sensitive to injustice and blind to the ways I was unjust when I was steeped in my own mendacity. I apologize to my family, my siblings, my daughter and my first wife, Linda, for my willful and unwitting blindness. Being sensitive, to me, means to review the past every so often because as I grow in sensitivity and awareness I find new gems that I have learned and given away as well as new ways I was not so nice. I have and do work hard to be sensitive to the needs/calls of another and I am being more sensitive to the call and needs of my self as well. The writing daily of this blog helps we realize more and more how wonderful life is and how much greater it can be by living Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom. I know the scales are tilted towards justice, love, truth in the way I live today. I know that mendacity is so antithetical to me I still get inflamed and loudly try to shout down the lies people are telling themselves and another. Most of the time, I am considered the crazy one, yet, like Jeremiah, I have a fire in my belly that cannot be put out with water or mendacity, only with truth speaking can I rest. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 242

“The secret of spiritual living is the power to praise. Praise is the harvest of love. Praise precedes faith. First we sing, then we believe. The fundamental issue is not faith but sensitivity and praise, being ready for faith.”(Who is Man pg. 116).

As I delve into the last sentence above, I realize the so-called conservatives, both social and religious, who have decided that women have no right to making free-will choices about their bodies, with their bodies, for their mental/spiritual/physical health, are the least faithful people one can imagine. They have no living faith in God, no living faith in the principles this country was founded on, no living faith in anyone other than men to ‘make the right choices’. As we have seen from history, looking back on all of the wars, all the hatred, all the prejudice, etc that men have caused, participated in and engineered, I have little faith in these so-called ‘people of faith’.

The people who have killed doctors, bombed clinics, legislated anti-choice laws which are not pro-life as they claim, are people of little sensitivity, little praise and prize only their power, their misguided beliefs, their deceptions. None of this ‘conservative’ agenda is about “traditional values” of our country because our Founding Fathers were agents of change, democracy is/was a revolutionary idea and experiment. The Revolutionary War happened because of the sensitivity of the rebellious leaders of the colonies to the call of the soul of humans to be free. Yet, these scammers, these charlatans, these promoters of the Big Lies continue to spew their hatred, their fears, their need for control, their prejudices on all of us. I hear Rabbi Heschel calling on clergy everywhere to stand up, to be sensitive to the call of the souls of women, the souls of the voiceless and powerless, to prize serving God by being advocates for the soul of another(s) instead of prizing power.

The misogyny that dominated most of the world from the beginning is disgusting and wrong, especially given that so many of these so-called ‘conservatives’ are libertarians. The overturning of Roe v Wade is done by the same people who say ‘I don’t have to take your vaccines, I don’t have to wear a mask and the government can’t tell me what to do with my body’ and other such poppycock. Yet, these same mendacious haters can tell a woman what to do with hers? This need for control of women by men has made domestic violence, rape, non-equal pay, denial of voting rights for so long, etc and has been driven by the fear these male losers have of women being better than they. This is not about love of life; they will allow a women to die to save the baby, they will vote for the death penalty, they do not care what happens after the baby is born because they don’t believe in vaccines. This decision and the war on progress is for power, control and enslavement of anyone who is not in “lockstep with us”.

Conservative is defined as  “averse to change or innovation and holding traditional values” and the most traditional value is change, the most traditional value is to remember we are all created in the Image of God. The most traditional value, according to a famous commentary on Genesis, is: “there is not a day where God doesn’t make new paths/laws in the Heavenly Court”. Since we are supposed to reflect what is above here below, we should follow God’s example both in this commentary and in the entire Hebrew Bible of continuing and constant change, living a dynamic way of being. The Christian Bible is/was a change from the Bible that Christ followed! Yet, these purveyors of mendacity, these power hungry deceivers, these ‘prayer breakfast bastardizers of Christ’s principles, the principles of Torah, the ways of God, all want things to stay the way they want them-white men in power is their most cherished traditional value! All the while forgetting that the cradle of civilization was in the Middle East-which they do not consider white.

In recovery, we know that we go through a psychic change, a paradigm shift in order to continue to grow. We recognize our “old ideas” led us to bad places, they brought pain, heartache, instability to those around us and were based on lies we told ourselves. We are painfully aware of the discomfort of change, the need to be constantly re-evaluating what we believed and thought we ‘knew’ last week because of what we have learned this week. In recovery, change is the constant and without change, without progress, we will die, emotionally, spiritually and physically miserable.

I have been changing each and every day of my life and my years in recovery have made me aware of my need to manage the changes, manage my self and prize truth, justice, compassion, love and kindness over everything else. At times, these principles/ways of being can seem to be at odds with each other and I have come to realize they are not-in fact without being in all of these at the same time, love and truth quickly dissolve into falseness and mendacity, love becomes a word/tool for emotional power over another and truth becomes ‘alternative facts’ in the mouths of liars. Having practiced these ways prior to my recovery-I recognize the practitioners of this way of being quickly and am sensitive to their lies. Without being able to “detect and respond to signals, slight changes…”(the definition of sensitive), we cannot live as the Hebrew Bible teaches: love mercy, seek justice, walk in the ways of God. To do this is to be dynamically alive and engaged in life, as I understand Rabbi Heschel and have been moved to do in my recovery. God Bless and Stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 241

“The secret of spiritual living is the power to praise. Praise is the harvest of love. Praise precedes faith. First we sing, then we believe. The fundamental issue is not faith but sensitivity and praise, being ready for faith.”(Who is Man pg. 116).

As we begin our 41st week of immersing ourselves in Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom on a personal, actionable level, the words above stir me, and hopefully you, to a deeper connection and understanding of self, an authentic need of our self and a path to letting of our fear of “the optics”, “what will someone else/neighbors think of me/us”, and other such nonsensical conventional notions and mental cliches; as Rabbi Heschel teaches, this is the greatest block to our knowledge. To praise is to “prize” according to the Latin, believe comes from the Latin word “cred”, meaning give credence to, and faith comes from the Latin word “fides”, in Hebrew “emunah” is the same word for both believe and faith. Rabbi Heschel, as I understand him today, is reminding us that singing bypass’ the rational mind and comes from our guts, as any singer will tell you about their breathing during singing and as other musicians have attested to me when playing their instruments. Singing is the precursor to our giving credence that spiritual living is important, that to “prize” our inner life, our inner wisdom is essential to living well and learning how to celebrate our life, how to live with love at the foundation/core of us.

Because of the mendacity being spewed over the airwaves, the internet, the newspapers and in our homes and workplaces, we have lost our way to our foundational needs; to love and be loved. This, in turn, (in my opinion) has led to our inability to sing the unique song we have inside of us, to sing and live the divine need we are created for. Instead, we keep singing the song of our ego, we keep ‘where’s mine’ at the foundation/core of our actions, we spread the deceptions of our minds, the desires of our emotions to live with a sense of certainty and power. Rather than hear the call of our imprisoned souls, rather than sing the song that is in our kishka’s(guts), we are accustomed to singing a false song with notes that harmonize and are the wrong notes for the moment, the notes of ego, not God. We are seeing the harvest of these songs in our everyday living. Homelessness, Jan.6th, addiction deaths soaring, mental ill-health abounding, war, inflation, prejudice, the vast gap in economic health of individuals as well as countries all are symptoms of the disease of mendacity, the disease of denying our need to love and be loved, our need for true connection.

I believe it is essential to find the authentic song of our soul, to acknowledge the validity, the credence and the acceptance of the truth that we all need to sing our songs of praise, our songs of knowing, our songs of love, faith and believing. It is not as important to me what your path to believe is, it is only important that this path is through one’s inner life. It is time to free our inner life from the shackles we have enchained it in by medicating a spiritual crisis with psychotropics and/or mind-altering chemicals. We don’t need hallucinogens, alcohol, opiates to medicate the spiritual pain we are all in, we don’t need meanness, inhumanity towards one another, authoritarianism to soothe the inner pain we are all in. We don’t need to follow the deceptions, the mendacious paths of the fundamentalists on either side of the spectrum.

We need to cultivate the song within, we need to see the abundance we live in, no matter what our economic health is, we have to let go of the old ideas, the lies we tell ourselves and the conventional notions and cliches that have imprisoned our souls, shackled our truth, blocked our ability to breathe/live from our inner life/soul. We can begin to do this by first acknowledging our innermost desire to sing songs of praise. We can do this by acknowledging the credence/belief of our need for love and need to love is at the core of our being human. We can do this through valid and truthful living rather than buying into our self-deceptions and the deceptions of another(s). We can do this by finding the prayers/songs that praise life instead of the prayers/songs that complain about life, singing the prayers/songs that help us see and evaluate our inner life and outer actions to ensure they are becoming more congruent rather than the prayers/songs of superiority, prejudice and hatred.

In recovery, we seek the song that is authentic to our soul, the song we need to sing and that another needs to hear. We “come to believe” that cultivating this song and our relationship to our inner life brings us clarity, stability and a path to living a more purposeful life. This is a foundational principle that we are recovering in recovery.

I am aware of singing the wrong song for many years prior to my being in recovery and, at times, of singing the wrong song in my recovery. I have continued to listen for the off-key, off-topic, off-course notes in recovery as opposed to never believing that the notes I was singing were off at all prior to recovery. I know that every wrong note brought harm to another, harm to me and I keep working to minimize these. I am also aware of the joy of praise that most of my living in recovery has produced, the songs I and many people together have been able to compose, distribute and come together in a cacophony of sound. I am aware of the abundance I live in when I am praising, singing, believing in God, and behaving  in love, in goodness, in truth, in validity, in justice, and kindness. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 240

“The secret of spiritual living is the power to praise. Praise is the harvest of love. Praise precedes faith. First we sing, then we believe. The fundamental issue is not faith but sensitivity and praise, being ready for faith.”(Who is Man pg. 116).

As we immerse ourselves in this particular wisdom of Rabbi Heschel, we can find ourselves filling up with both false ego and/or an abundance of love. The false ego comes from the deceptive use of praise, praise for oneself, praise for the charlatan, the grifter, the deceiver. We see this a lot and have over the millennia. People use mendacity to control how another sees them, hears them and follows them even though the people being deceived, the people following the mendacious one usually go against their own self interest! There is another sort, which I believe is as bad or worse than the deceiver, the false egotist, that is the people who knowingly go along for their own ends, for their own power, control and believe they will be able to stop the grifter from ‘bringing down the house’. We have seen these people-all of these deceivers and the self-deceivers throughout history. Whether it was ancient Rome or Greece, Israel or Judea, Assyria or Philistine, all were brought down by their lack of true praise, their inability to put love for something greater than their own selfish needs into action. Nazi Germany, Rwanda, and of course our own country are more recent examples of false egos driving destruction and almost complete ruin. The Tea Party people follow people like Jim Jordan and Mark Meadows who have a lot of shade on them, Jordan for his role(?) In the scandal at The Ohio State University, Meadows with his support and giving aid and comfort to the treasonous actions of Donald Trump. These egotists don’t care about people, only their power, only “white power” and are every bit as ‘down for the white race’ as any white supremacist. Yet, they couch it in politeness and ‘conservative values’. I guess ‘conservative values’ include “slight of hand”, “three-card monte” and other such money scams.

McConnell, McCarthy, Cruz, Rubio, DeSantis, Hawley, Johnson, Gohmert, et al all go /went along with Trump’s grift for their own benefit and, in the ‘name of freedom’, in the ‘name of politics’ are obstructing ways to help people live better, live freer, exercise their right to vote, their right to decide what they do with their bodies, if you are a woman, and then they support not getting vaccinated while they themselves are vaccinated. They support the right for men to control women, the right for whites to control everyone, the right to demonize immigrants (who they come from), and the right to use assault weapons to kill people! And you can see them in Church singing praises to Jesus, while denying the principles Jesus taught, lived and, one could say, died for. Jesus was a rebel, Moses was a rebel, Mohammed was a rebel, Buddha was a rebel; they rebelled against the status quo for the freedom of another, for the spiritual health of another and as advocates for the soul of another.

We need to stop supporting these mendacious grifters, these deceivers who seek power and prestige, money and authority so we can return to the lessons, the paths that Moses, Buddha, Mohammed, Jesus and so many since have laid out for us. We need to remember the teachings of MLK Jr., Rabbi Heschel, etc and find the love that is within us; the love of self, the love of our neighbor, the love of life, the love of God/Higher Power/The Ineffable One. We do this by reordering our priorities, by making service higher than selfishness, asking ourselves what is life getting out of me rather than what am I getting out of life, wanting what we have rather than having what we want, a daily practice of gratitude and prayer. As we begin to love our self more, love our neighbor more, we will love life more and be of more service to our authentic self, to the authentic self of another, we will act in loving ways with family and friends and the praise of life will burst out of us. It is not a constant, we have to cultivate this way of being in order to reap this harvest often.

Love is the goal in recovery. Love of self, love of another, love of life. Love is the only pathway than can ensure our long-term recovery from the low-grade misery we were living in before. We cultivate an attitude of gratitude as an expression of our love, our knowing we are blessed and our belief in something greater than ourselves. We cultivate an attitude of service as an expression of our newfound knowing we matter and so does everyone else. In recovery, we grow in love so we can reap the benefit of praise, joy and serenity.

I have cultivated love for my entire recovery, sometimes it grows really well and strong and, at times, it has fallen fallow. For the fallow times, I am deeply sorry to those who were harmed. I also know that the fallow times have been few and far between as evidenced by the connections I have with so many people. I realize more and more each day how the praise I have for another, for God, for family all is bases in love and the more time I spend in service, the more I appreciate and love my true self, the more I have for everyone else and the more I have for God. I send my love to all of you, I believe we can and must let go of our self-deceptions and the deceptions of another to find, cultivate, and reap the love and praise of living well. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 239

“The secret of spiritual living is the power to praise. Praise is the harvest of love. Praise precedes faith. First we sing, then we believe. The fundamental issue is not faith but sensitivity and praise, being ready for faith.”(Who is Man pg. 116).

OMG, we are struck/given/gifted with the power to praise each and every day from the moment we open our eyes to the moment we close them. Yet, we have cataracts blocking our vision much of the time we are not sleeping physically. These ‘cataracts’ make it almost impossible to praise, to see the reasons to praise, to want what we have and to stop needing what we want to ‘be happy’.

Rabbi Heschel’s teaching above reverberates inside of all of us, yet we have made it a point to cut ourselves off from this way of being, from our spiritual life. The cataracts that society has suggested strongly we wear, the fear of being laughed at, the knowing that all of our praise is, in many ways, simply not adequate to express everything in our soul that we are grateful for and appreciative of, all contribute to the denial of praise we have come to engage in as human beings. We blame science, other people, etc, yet it is our own shame, our own beliefs that we are inadequate, not ‘good enough’, too poor/too rich, too independent/too dependent, there is no entity to praise, the world is a dangerous place and we have to be on guard always, etc; to sustain our praises, to believe life is worth praise, our life is worth praise.

The history of humanity is replete with stories of people who praise being laughed at, ridiculed, shunted aside, even killed for their belief in and practice of praise. The martyrs we read about in history, the martyrs of the Civil Rights movement of the ’60’s, the leaders of todays movement to recognize the “unalienable rights” of every person all are marginalized by the people in power, by the “People of the Lie” as M.Scott Peck writes about in his book of the same name. Most of us are more willing to believe the ones who don’t praise God, who don’t praise truth, who don’t praise kindness, who don’t praise love, who don’t praise compassion, who don’t praise welcoming the stranger, rather than the people who stand for praise, who stand with God, who are willing to admit their own imperfections and use them to help another person learn, use them to help themselves grow, instead of denying them like the majority of people do.

The issue that is being raised by Rabbi Heschel’s first sentence for me today: Are we willing to engage in spiritual living? The world, as history shows, has never fully embraced “spiritual living”, society has never adopted “spiritual living” as the basic modality of life, it is only the minority that does this and, almost always, the people in power (like the Church) use “spiritual living” to control the people who are not in power, ie, “your reward will come in heaven”. Yet, to engage in “spiritual living” means we have to engage in praise, as I am understanding Rabbi Heschel today. This means we have to engage in living as worthy human beings, living life by being human a little more each day, living our purpose and passion no matter what anyone else thinks/says, cutting the ropes that bind us to the lies of the majority, the mendacity of society and the deception of ‘fitting in’.

We praise each day through prayer, of course and the words mean nothing and are not enough without the actions they implore us to take. Thanking God/universe for waking up today is wonderful and yet the prayer also reminds us that we are trusted servants of God and our gift of life today means to be compassionate, to be inflamed with passion and power to serve God, to repay the gift of arising today with faithfulness to our purpose, faithfulness to being one grain of sand better today than yesterday. Each prayer is to move us closer to living the spiritual life we were created to live, adding to our corner of the world our unique treasure of completeness, moving the needle and making life a little better for the next generation so they start at a higher level of praise than we did. Not to denigrate our parents, rather to acknowledge that “spiritual living” is constantly evolving and all of us, with our praise, raise the foundation for the next generation so they can raise the foundation of “spiritual living” for the next and so on.

In recovery, gratitude is one of the foundations of our ‘new’ way of living. We praise one another with connection, with gratitude for the wisdom they share and by embracing one another’s spirit, one another’s struggles, one another’s victories over the ‘evil inclination’. We praise God, we praise the people who assist us, we are aware of and focus on the gifts and beauty of life a little more than we focus on the negativity.

I have found praise to be the most important part of my recovery from negativity, my recovery from hurt, betrayal, loss, etc. Praise of God, praise of people, praise of nature, praise of friends, praise of enemies, praise of what has worked well and praise of what where/when/what hasn’t worked well, all praise helps me grow, all praise helps me see clearly the joy of life, the gift of spirit and the beauty of connection. I know I am not in praise/spiritual living all day long, I also know that I grow in extending my praise each day. Praise, “spiritual living” has been and is the best yardstick with which I measure my daily growth in being human. I know that each day I am more faithful than the day before, I am more inflamed with passion to serve each day and I am more faithful. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 238

“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)

The last phrase of this sentence is another blast of cold air to wake us up and a gentle reminder of the love, grace, and joy we are enveloped in by the universe/God. It is a blast of cold air because it describes another way we commit a “cardinal sin”. Our life ‘hinges’ on our ability to “raise aloft” as the Latin root of this word means. We are being shaken out of our doldrums and our sleep by a call to engage in “the action of raising high” our standard of living!

We have come to bastardize the word exaltation to mean “a state of extreme happiness” which belies the intended meaning, a state of raising our standard of living up, a path of raising aloft our devotion to something greater than ourselves/God, raising up the dignity of one another and the beauty of creation. Immersing oneself in this phrase, in this sentence, we, hopefully, find ourselves understanding more deeply and more fully the call of Rev. Dr. King to work for the day when we are judged for the “content of our character, not the color of our skin”. We can commit to no longer feed the cancer of our soul, prejudice, with the lies and deceptions of self and/or another. Immersing ourselves in this phrase is a call to action, a call to praise one another rather than denigrate one another, a demand to raise aloft our humanity rather than push down someone else for our gain.

Immersing ourselves in this phrase also leads to engage in “raising high” our search for truth, our search for learning rather than our search for power, our search for the words that will convince you of the lies, the deceptions, the ‘alternative facts’ the ‘big lie’ that people spread for their gain of power, prestige, money and to alleviate their fears of ‘not being enough’. We all have front row seats to this circus through the Jan. 6th hearings, what a wonderful job the committee and their staff have done. They are not being hysterical, over the top because the facts are the facts and they speak for themselves. This phrase reminds us, forces us to stop our manipulation of truth and, au contraire, seek the truth, seek understanding of how to use these truths to enhance our living and the life of another(s). Yet, we are still too much in denial, too deep in our need to be deceived and our need to deceive ourselves and another(s) to allow this wisdom to permeate our beingness. How sad! Our life and the life of our planet, our neighbor “hinges” on our decision to let go of the old ideas, to be maladjusted to the conventional notions and mental cliches that have been running our lives for so long, running our lives into misery, prejudice, fear-based, anger, co-dependency, addictions of all sorts, mental/emotional health issues, and spiritual bankruptcy. We have the opportunity to follow Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom and teaching of 59 years ago and engage in raising aloft our standard of living. We are being called to respond to the demand of universe/God/the Ineffable One with our higher selves rather than our lower self. We are now able to better hear the demand to choose life, to choose to engage in “raising high” our fellow human being, “raising high” their dignity, their value and their uniqueness, not at the cost of our own, rather in order to “raise aloft” our own dignity, value and uniqueness.

We begin to “hinge” our day on “raising aloft” and “the action of raising high” our day through prayer, which Rabbi Heschel defines as praise, chant, song. Our prayer becomes the song our soul sings in our daily living, not just for a set period of time during the day but the song and the inner fuel and compass for our entire existence. Prayer becomes not something we say/recite and/or experience in a moment of communion with God, rather it becomes the basis for our life, the path we follow and our daily actions reflect the call and demand of God, the call and need of the world, the demand to connect of those around us, those who love us and those whom we love. This new way of living the prayers, I believe, is the way I am understanding Rabbi Heschel’s teaching that “prayer may not save us, prayer will make us worthy of being saved”.

In recovery, we realize we were seeking exaltation in all the wrong places with all the wrong tools. Rather than have our exhalation and our connection come from within, we sought outside sources to “raise aloft” our attitude, our ability to deal with life and path of escape. In recovery, we use prayer to engage us in “the action of raising high” our standards of living, our way of living and our connection to one another.

I find myself realizing the ways I have fallen prey to this “cardinal sin”, failing to realize the “possibility of quiet exaltation”. The pandemic has forced me to engage more in this way of being, my recovery has helped me grown in the ways and frequency of living in “quiet exhalation” and, most of all my daily writing has forced me to see what truly is, to have “an authentic awareness of that which is” as Rabbi Heschel describes/defines “radical amazement”. It is and has been over the years the greatest experience to learn with so many people, to study Rabbi Heschel with a group for about 15+ years, to engage in living the prayers, the teachings, the wisdom of spiritual discipline and Judaism. I continue to feed my soul, my inner life, my mind with quiet exaltation and keep growing this way of truly being alive. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark