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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 281

“The man of our time is losing the power of celebration. Instead of celebrating, he seeks to be amused or entertained. Celebration is an active state, an act of expressing reverence or appreciation. To be entertained is a passive state-it is to receive pleasure afforded by an amusing act or spectacle.” (Who is Man pg.117)

In his interview with Carl Stern, Rabbi Heschel speaks about reverence in different ways, his reverence for his relatives, his community who taught him of the importance of the inner life, his concern over whether his living is worthy of his daughter’s reverence, the reverence for truth, for love, for humanity, etc. I am concerned as to what we revere today, in our fast-paced, get it now, need more likes, celebrity adoring ways of being. It seems we are willing to revere mendacity and deception more than we are willing to revere truth, God, love, human beings!

We are in desperate need of a Spiritual Revolution. We are in desperate need of some “Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity” as Rabbi Heschel said to President John F. Kennedy. We are in desperate need of an exodus from the slavery of lies, of deception, of self-deception, of idol-worship, of bastardizing the Holy Texts that are the foundations of democracies, of decency, of growing our inner life! We are in need of more than a Moses or Jesus or Mohammed or Buddha, we are in need of a spiritual awakening for all of us. We are being called to throw off the yoke of mendacity; get out from under the burden of “optics”; the harsh labor of “being like everyone else”; the false need of having what someone else has rather than being content with what one has. We are in need of a leader, the question is: would we follow one, would we leave the Egypts we find ourselves in, especially if it means going against the grain, being maladjusted to the “conventional wisdom” of our day? I am not so sure we would.

My skepticism arises from our inability to use the lessons of the past to leave these slaveries we find ourselves in. We have been at the edge of the Red Sea and, unfortunately, more people have turned back to slavery than willing to cross the Red Sea into the unknown of freedom. A commentary on the Bible says only 20% of the Israelites left Egypt, if only 20% of us were willing to leave slavery today. The far right and the far left are making so much noise that the 80% of us who are ‘in the middle’ can’t even hear ourselves think and so we just give up and go along with one extreme or the other knowing it is wrong and just too tired to fight.

Hence, Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom above, our revolution begins, our exodus happens when we begin to revere truth, have appreciation for the struggle of freedom that has been with us forever, revere our teachers, revere the wisdom of the Bible, of the Constitution, understand our Holy Texts and our foundational principles in light of today. We are being called upon to live in this moment, to follow the elders and wise people of today, to Choose Life! It all begins with us rising up to the level of Moral Grandeur without heeding our baser instincts that ask “is it good for me” and instead asking “is this the next right action to take”. The frauds that were perpetrated by people in regards to the PPP money during the Pandemic, the frauds around Unemployment Money, the frauds of Congress and the Supreme Court that are still being engaged in all happen because the people running these institutions and/or having control/power in these institutions are asking “is it good for me”. Instead of Moral Grandeur, they live in Moral Ignominy!

We, the People have the power and the call to extricate ourselves from these ways of being. We have the strength, the numbers, the path to leave these slaveries, these oppressive paths and patterns as well as these authoritarian leaders. What we need is the will to do this. Rather than clap for these liars who say Jesus was the Lion who devours people, rather than cheer on senseless hatred, rather than “stand idly by the blood of our neighbor”, rather than wring our hands, we have to DO something to end this charade by these charlatans. Kevin McCarthy has told us if he is Speaker of the House, the people’s business will come in a distant last to his need to humiliate the people seeking truth about what has been going on in government recently. His actions show his disdain for the Capital Police who protected him and gave their lives, their bodies for his safety on Jan. 6th! To defeat the Kinless Kevin we have to have the WILL to rise up and speak truth to the people who want to live in deception. We have to have the will to rise up and say with our actions: “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore” as Howard Beale declared in the movie Network.

In recovery we know we can only have a personal exodus from the slavery we have willingly marched into when we take action on the demand, the call of freedom, of family, of the universe. Our actions and our lives become testaments to Howard Beale’s words and to the uprising of, as Rabbi Abraham Twerski told me, true faith in action. In recovery we do not know exactly where we are going or how we are going to get there, we only know we are marching towards living a life of Godliness, of decency, of a richness of our inner life that propels us forward each and every day. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 280

“The man of our time is losing the power of celebration. Instead of celebrating, he seeks to be amused or entertained. Celebration is an active state, an act of expressing reverence or appreciation. To be entertained is a passive state-it is to receive pleasure afforded by an amusing act or spectacle.” (Who is Man pg.117)

The third sentence above is the goal of living, as I understand Rabbi Heschel this morning, yet it is very hard to maintain and even harder to sustain for most people. At least in the manner Rabbi Heschel is speaking about celebration. Because of the confusion of celebration and amusement/entertainment, people have become deceived and/or have deceived themselves that they are in the active state of celebration, they are “expressing reverence or appreciation” to God, to the Universe, to the Ineffable One all the while they are being entertained by idolators, by charlatans, by fascists, by wolves in sheep’s clothing, and, in turn, amusing their puppet masters greatly.

To express reverence to God one must stop engaging in idolatry, in self-deception and this is much too difficult for most people, judging by the state of the world and seeing the world through a historical lens. The prophets called out the Kings, the Priests, the wealthy for their substituting entertainment for celebration, for substituting mendacity for truth, for substituting empty rituals for authentic engagement, for substituting lip service for T’Shuvah. We have the record of this, which in itself proves the concerns of the Rabbis at the time for the human ability to forget, to deceive, to engage in self-deception so the Prophets are included in the Bible. The farther we get from truth, the deeper we engage in self-deception, the louder are the lies we are hearing, the closer we are to confusing celebration and entertainment/amusement. The more confusion we experience and engage in the more freedom we let go of; which leads us to liars and falsehoods. Which leads to the destruction of the human spirit, the deconstruction of the Bible, and the imprisonment of the spirit.

Today, we are finding ourselves in the midst of an onslaught of amusement and entertainment. We are being berated by so-called ‘freedom fighters’ who want to make Capitalism king-who want to have a Plutocracy-and want to control every aspect of how everyone but them lives. Reading about Blake Masters and J.D.Vance is pretty scary because they are graduates from “elite schools” consider themselves above everyone else and attack the “elites”. They are willing to kill anyone who stands in their way, according to some of their campaign ads. They are bought and paid for by Peter Thiel who only complains that Donald Trump did not go far enough and destroy enough of our norms so the Plutocracy could take over. Masters, Vance, and their comrades are talking about “a hundred year reign”. Sound familiar, it should because this is what the Nazi’s promised. Yet, many people are showing reverence or appreciation for these people who want to take their freedoms from them, who excel in deception and selling their lies!

We are unable to be in the active state of celebration whenever we take positions that are extreme in nature, when we want to blow up the Biblical mandates and paths it is impossible to be appreciating what God has given us, it is antithetical to revering and loving God. Yet, we are seeing this a lot right now with the Midterms coming closer and with the polarization of our society. The Bible is a manual for how to live together with one another, how to appreciate the different visions, understandings each person has in order for us to get a better and truer picture of what is. The Talmud is a book chronicling 800 years of conversations regarding the best ways, in their time, to fulfill God’s instructions, commandments, desires and revere the Covenant we have with God. This is our inheritance from our ancestors as well as the inheritance of evil, of mendacity, of power-seeking, of slavery. We have a choice to make each and every day-celebration of Godliness, celebration of self and power.

In recovery, we are engaging in being more consistent in the active state of celebration, more consistent in appreciating this moment, this day, the people around us, the ability to learn and discuss similarities and differences in opinion and in ways of being. Learning about traditions of other faiths, other people, other recovery groups across the nation brings us a wider lens in which to see life and how to live well.

I am enraged at the lies of the Peter Thiel’s the Blake Masters’ Keri Lake’s et al, I am aghast that Kevin McCarthy is so focused on himself that he will kiss the ring of Trump, kiss the ring of Thiel and the Koch’s and the rest of the Plutocrats in order to be ‘speaker of the House’. I am enraged at my own lies, my own confusion of deception and reverence. I am grateful for the awareness of my self enough to recognize and return to celebrating Truth, revering God, connecting with humanity. 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 279

“The man of our time is losing the power of celebration. Instead of celebrating, he seeks to be amused or entertained. Celebration is an active state, an act of expressing reverence or appreciation. To be entertained is a passive state-it is to receive pleasure afforded by an amusing act or spectacle.” (Who is Man pg.117)

Last week’s decision against Alex Jones points out the grave danger in seeking “to be amused or entertained”. Alex Jones and his ilk are merely puppet masters of the “bread and circus” entertainment show that has overtaken the world. Like the Roman circus of Christians versus the Lions, the Salem Witch Trials, the House on UnAmerican Activities of Joe McCarthy, we are experiencing a new level of amusement and entertainment from our political leaders, from the social media experts and from one another.

We are sinking more and more each day, week, month, year into the “suspect your neighbor” that Rabbi Heschel spoke about in 1972. Alex Jones has created a multi-million dollar empire on this theme, Donald Trump won the Presidency on this theme, the Republican Party of today has become more about this theme than about governing, about democracy, about truth. This not so gradual sinking into this snake pit is amusing and entertaining to the ring leaders and very serious and believable to the followers, believers of these lies, these deceptions. And, the ring leaders know this, they relish it and, when held accountable like Alex Jones is being held accountable, they cry foul, they are victims, they shield their money or try to so they can continue to rant, rave, lie and destroy with impunity. This is how far our substituting amusement and entertainment has come, this is how far down the rabbit hole we have gone and this is how desperate these white men are to hold on to power, prestige and money. Alex Jones is a con man, a grifter, a flim-flam man, who may or may not believe anything he says and just ‘plays to his base’. Sound familiar Moscow Mitch, Mendacious McCarthy, Crooked Cruz, Greedy Greene, Molesting Matt? Yet, somehow these charlatans, these deceivers are still powerful, still can confuse and screw up the principles of the Constitution and the needs/will of the people! Why?

The reason is in the second sentence above, I believe. We, the People seek “to be amused and entertained” more than we seek to celebrate, more than we seek to be responsible and loyal, more than we seek to be free! Isn’t this a sad commentary on our state of being, isn’t it a sad commentary that we complain about people being on their devices while supporting the tech companies that have caused it? Is it a sad state of affairs when Mark Zuckerberg has more sway over what we believe than truth does? When the Internet and Google are teaching our children and ourselves more than schools and our own critical thinking is? Yet, we are here because we love “to be amused and entertained”! At issue is the entertainment has turned dangerous, it is rotting the minds and the souls of young and old. It is leading a group of people to believe they have the right to kill people with whom they disagree, they have the right to enslave/make second class citizens anyone who isn’t like them (white) and who doesn’t agree with them. LGBTQ, people of color, Jews, Muslims all should leave the country unless they want to take their proper place as workers and underlings to these elite and brilliant people without morals, without belief in the words of the Bible, who have bastardized Jesus’, Moses’ and Mohammed’s words and teachings. This is happening because these charlatans, these fake preachers, these unprincipled white people and their lackeys have found the key to ‘winning’, entertain and amuse the masses and they will follow one anywhere, even to ruin.

“We are engaged in a great civil war” Abraham Lincoln said in his Gettysburg address and we are still engaged in this civil war, we are still testing whether a nation “conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men(humans) are created equal…can long endure”. These words ring true, ring deeply in the souls of people who are Republicans like Lincoln, people who are Democrats like Kennedy, people who still believe the soul of our nation are the words on the Statue of Liberty. People who believe we are beacon for those “tired, poor …yearning to breathe free” people and welcome the stranger, care for the poor, the needy, as a demand of God, as a fulfillment of the teachings of Jesus, Moses, Mohammed.

In recovery, we learn to celebrate by engaging “life on life’s terms”. We no longer seek to substitute celebration with amusement, we no longer go along with mendacity so we are accepted. We have, as Rabbi Heschel believed we could, become the solution to the problem of amusement, of entertainment by a return to celebrating the good, welcoming the stranger and never shutting the doors of our meetings, the doors of our hearts, the doors of our souls to anyone.

I am guilty of being entertained by devices, wondering how many likes this blog will get and I celebrate life rather than need to be entertained or entertain another with lies, with deceptions. I do not seek power for my sake nor for the sake of power itself, I have a power within me that I use each and every day to benefit another person, to serve God and to fulfill me. Bread and Circus’ of the past no longer amuse me, they disgust me; watching those of today scare me and disgust me. 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 278

“The man of our time is losing the power of celebration. Instead of celebrating, he seeks to amused or entertained. Celebration is an active state, an act of expressing reverence or appreciation. To be entertained is a passive state-it is to receive pleasure afforded by an amusing act or spectacle.” (Who is Man pg.117)

Today is Tisha B’Av-the 9th day of the Hebrew month of Av where we commemorate the destruction of the Temples, the loss of Jerusalem and many other tragedies that have befallen the Jewish people. All of these losses are, however, losses that we ourselves caused by turning away from God, away from celebration, towards amusement and entertainment. We are warned of this happening exactly because we wanted to entertain ourselves or be amused by another and the consequences are prophesied in the Torah, yet we failed to heed the call, the demand of the Ineffable One. After these traumatic events happen, we ask “how could You let this happen” and other God-blaming questions. We do this because we are afraid, too embarrassed, too stubborn to admit our responsibility and our errors. We do this rather than wear the sackcloth, fast and repent like the people of Nineveh in the story of Jonah. We do this because our addiction to amusement and entertainment could be the longest and most pervasive addiction humankind has engaged in.

Our insatiable need to be amused, entertained, which leads us to destruction and ruin, leads us to a natural and, for a long while, invisible descent. We go to entertainment to escape the real world we are living in, and the real world we are living in is constantly seeking to amuse the powerful, entertain the ‘masses’ so they go along with ways of being that harm themselves, their families, their cities and their country. We see this all the time with Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity, they are not commentators or newscasters, they are entertainers playing to a large audience to serve a very small audience. What is their payoff for their entertaining ways? They make a lot of money, they get a lot of attention and they participate in the evil of indifference, the evil of destruction, the evil of standing “idly by the blood of their brothers/sisters”. And the ‘masses’ lap it up, swallow their mendacity and entertainment as truth and gospel. This allows these ‘masses’ to storm the Capital, elect people who want to overthrow democracy in favor of authoritarianism, and to engage in senseless hatred towards ‘the rest of us’. These ‘masses’ are amused by their actions, entertained by the ‘celebrities’ who ‘fire up the base’ and applaud an authoritarian who is bigoted, prejudiced, hateful! Viktor Orban received a standing ovation at CPAC in Dallas, embraced by conservative Republicans?! He entertained his crowd with rants against anyone who wasn’t White, Christian, like him-he was celebrated as the one of the two last bastions of hope for White Europeans, the other being Vladimir Putin! Entertainment and amusement has rotted the souls of these ‘masses’ and made it impossible for them to distinguish truth from lies.

Tisha B’Av, commemorating our errors is a day of mourning. It is not, however, as I immerse myself in Rabbi Heschel’s teaching, a day of mourning our losses, it is a day of mourning our errors, our senseless hatred, our need to be entertained at the cost of the dignity of another human being, our need to amuse ourselves by destroying truth in favor of ‘alternate facts’, by playing with the minds, hearts, and souls of people who are desperate to hold on the “old order” for fear of change. Caring for the widow, the orphan, the stranger, the poor, the needy is spoken about 36 times in the first 5 Books of the Bible, yet it is the commandment we trample the most in our search for entertainment and our engaging in amusement. Jews will be in Temple today as they were last evening, they will chant the prayers of sadness and loss, they will not put T’fillin on till this afternoon, and most of our people will not consider their perpetuation of the ways and actions that brought about the destruction we are commemorating. We can and must take note of, be responsible for, make amends for and change these paths of murdering the soul of another and ourselves.

In recovery, as with so much of Rabbi Heschel’s teachings, we are acutely aware of the distinction between celebration and entertainment/amusement. We destroyed our lives and the lives of our loved ones and the lives of people we don’t even know through our race to be entertained and amused. We used people as means to our ends without caring what being used did to them. In recovery, we engage in celebration and connection, building and re-enforcing, truth and joy.

I am blessed to celebrate the milestones in my life in recovery with people I love and I am beyond grateful. I am blessed to celebrate milestones with many other human beings in their recovery. I am blessed to celebrate with family and friends their milestones. I am blessed to be able to celebrate the lives of people whom have died at their funerals and beyond. I work hard to stay away from amusement, from entertainment as Rabbi Heschel is describing above for fear of the addictive power they both have. I have created my own destructions, I have done things that allow people to amuse themselves at my expense and then point their fingers at me rather than be responsible for their part; each Tisha B’Av I remember these moments and commit to not repeat them. Those who are entertained by my errors, my ways I say: “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 277

“The man of our time is losing the power of celebration. Instead of celebrating, he seeks to amused or entertained. Celebration is an active state, an act of expressing reverence or appreciation. To be entertained is a passive state-it is to receive pleasure afforded by an amusing act or spectacle.” (Who is Man pg.117)

Politics has become a sporting event, a blood sport for sure. Yet, instead of celebrating the democratic norms we have established, we amuse ourselves with vile and despicable “dirty tricks” (thanks Richard Nixon, Spiro Agnew, Roger Stone, Lee Atwater et al), reveling in false flags, alternative facts and a laundry list of ways to laugh at the “other guy” for running a moral and ethical race. We saw this with the performing enhancing drugs that baseball players like Roger Clemens, Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire, Alex Rodriguez among many others when they were already at the top of their  game.

Mitch McConnell is/was proud of his blocking President Obama from nominating a Supreme Court Justice, of his promise to “make Obama a one-term President” and so much more like making a corporation be considered a human being! So many other politicians are excited to blow up the norms, go against the very principles their party espouses, hence the path they took to be elected, like Kyrsten Sinema, the Squad, etc. They engage in these and other behaviors to amuse themselves, to entertain their “base”, their big-money supporters, their own image and celebrity, not to celebrate the opportunity to serve, not to celebrate the principles which have made us willing to go to war and “give the last full measure” that many young people have given to protect our freedoms. Instead of reverence or appreciation, these people have treated their ability to get elected, their ability to fool enough of the people all of the time as an entitlement, a right which gives them the authority to continue to amuse themselves at the expense of our country, our democracy, truth, decency and kindness. This must stop and we all have to participate in defeating these charlatans, these self-serving, power-hungry, traitors to the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and to freedom!

While it would be easy and simple to just focus on “them”, it is also important and necessary to look at how each one of us engaged in being amused and entertained rather than celebrating. We have become so accustomed to muck-raking, to putting someone else down so we can elevate our self, to listening to and believing the worst about another human being, to see another in black/white terms and this is killing our power to celebrate, it is reenforcing our need to be amused and entertained. Along with this need is our need to crush another individual in the process. How many of us are always looking to hear ‘the dirt’ on someone or another? How many of us dish this same dirt, be it true or not? We will sit and watch with glee as another person implodes, we will be so excited when a rival falters. We are so competitive that we will do anything to ‘win’. Be it a significant other, a friend, a job, a company, a game, doesn’t matter, winning is what amuses and entertains us, it is what gives many of us a sense of esteem, power, meaning, purpose. We have become a society who’s main purpose is to be entertained, amused and served; in other words we have become the same society that tried to build the Tower of Babel, the same society that was on earth prior to “the flood”, the same society that hides from God, deceives one another and revels in these behaviors, just as the snake in the Garden of Eden story does. Instead of struggling to fulfill God’s Will as the Israelites committed to at Mount Sinai, we have become the people described in Deuteronomy, believing that we can do what we want, follow our hearts desires and nothing will happen. All because we want to be entertained rather than celebrate.

We can return from the precipice of the Abyss, however. We can prevent the Armageddon we have created through our need to be entertained and amused. We can, if we choose, return and recharge our power to celebrate, our power to say yes to service and no to self-centeredness. We have the path to do this and this path is through our inner lives. Maturing, growing our inner life and cleaning out the lies and shmutz that have hampered our ability to hear our soul’s calling is the path of recovering our ability and power to celebrate. It will take a concerted effort to “not stand idly by the blood(s) of your brother/sister”, to not revel in the fall of another, to reach out a helping hand to those who are in need, to welcome the stranger rather than fear/loathe her/him. We can do this by accepting our birthright of service, our birthright of love, our birthright of taking our proper place and our experience of treating the stranger, the needy, the poor well.

In recovery, we know our propensity to enjoy the downfall of another is antithetical to our need to be of service, our need to love and be loved, our need to live in acceptance and our need to live at a higher level than just catering to our baser instincts and our desire to escape. In recovery, we are recovering the strength to celebrate, the power to say no to entertainment and yes to celebrations.

More on Sunday, 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 276

“The man of our time is losing the power of celebration. Instead of celebrating, he seeks to amused or entertained. Celebration is an active state, an act of expressing reverence or appreciation. To be entertained is a passive state-it is to receive pleasure afforded by an amusing act or spectacle.” (Who is Man pg.117)

Can you believe this was written 59+ years ago? Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom above is the perfect description of our current state of affairs. He was aghast at the cruelty we perpetrated during the Vietnam War on the Vietnamese and on our own soldiers, he could not understand how the “powers that be” would be ‘celebrating’ the destruction of cities, people, life and spirit, I believe. I can only imagine what he would be thinking in this moment, at this time.

We are witnessing the destruction of our democracy, the destruction of our morality, the destruction of our humanity for the sake of the few’s entertainment and amusement. Putin, Orban, Trump, Mendacious McConnell and McCarthy, who I am labeling the M&M boys, the far left and, of course the Koch’s and their cronies all are having a good laugh at the explosions they have detonated with their lies, their pitting one person against another employing fear, prejudice and anti-semitism. And, we are being the marionettes on the strings, their puppets going along with every twitch and tug they make. While it is customary and right to blame these charlatans for their deceptions and shameless grab for power, land, prestige and money, it is as correct to blame us for not saying NO!

When an accident occurs on the road and it is off to the side, have you ever noticed how traffic slows down so people can gawk? There is no reason to look upon the pain, the hurt of another person, especially when you are not going to render aid, except for one’s own entertainment. We are constantly seeking more and more ways of being amused and entertained. We are giving our kids tablets as babysitters, we are constantly looking for the next fad to keep up with, phones to elementary schoolers, etc. Before that there was the television as babysitter, it is still the place to be amused and veg out. Television was and is an education tool when one wants to be educated. Many of the streaming services are offering a glimpse inside the history of our current state of affairs and give us a road map to how we got here. I know of people who watch programs about WWII and still wonder why Hitler didn’t kill all the Jews, why he didn’t kill all the homosexuals, why the “America First” people couldn’t stop Roosevelt from entering the war. I watch as people at Trump rallies are exuberant every time he expressed hatred and contempt for someone. Trump who made his fortune because of the media(if he actually has a fortune) amuses himself and his ‘fans’ by bashing the media, telling the BIG lie, as well as a lot of big lies and everyone is amused, entertained and, to our horror, follow him, do his bidding and attack our democracy, our morality, our humanity.

We are not following the dictates of the Bible, Hebrew and/or Christian, no matter what the lying preachers say. These deceivers worship at the altar of idolatry, not Christianity, not Judaism, not Islam, not Buddhism, etc. They are leading their flock, like lambs to the slaughter; only they are leading them there to watch the slaughter of the basic tenets of the faiths they claim to be fighting for. They are only fighting for their own power, money, prestige not for God’s prestige, not the for the Glory of God, not for the sake of humanity  nor morality. I say this often-God wants us to love mercy, do justly and walk in the ways of God-non of the ways of the M&M boys and their supporters  who put on the National Prayer Breakfast are doing this. The leaders of this movement to control women’s bodies, control women’s right to make their own choices is not a religious movement-it is a movement of control, it is to amuse these perverted men with the power to do whatever they want to any women they want. A very sick game and this is what they call celebration of God’s will? This is what they call doing justly? This is what they call loving mercy? This is what they call “love your neighbor as you love yourself?” How sad and frightening!

In recovery, we know the difference between entertainment and celebration. Our past was a search for amusement, a need to be entertained. We did all sorts of immoral actions to be amused and entertained, we engaged in soul crushing activities for far too long and almost lost our opportunity to return to decency, to our own humanity and honor the dignity and humanity of people.

I am quite familiar with entertainment and amusement. I sought it for many years prior to recovery, prior to my spiritual awakening. While I can and do ‘shoot the sh**t” with people, I am not amused by my bouts with schadenfreude, my engaging in gossip and my need to defend myself whether I am being defensive because I was wrong or standing up because I wasn’t wrong. All of these behaviors, some of which I still engage just not as much, often or deeply, prevent me from truly celebrating, from loving mercy and doing justly, from walking in God’s ways and honoring the Divine Image in another. Stay safe and God Bless, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 275

“Man may forfeit his sense of the ineffable. To be alive is commonplace; the sense of radical amazement is gone; the world is familiar and familiarity does not breed exaltation or even appreciation.” (Who is Man pg. 116)

We crave familiarity because we crave certainty. This is what causes us to believe the lies and deceptions of another and our own self-deceptions. Familiarity allows us to take things for granted and not “worry” about or question anything that has been ‘decided’. Like the “stop the steal”, the lies of “not good enough”; “the deck is stacked against me”; “if only I was that lucky”; etc are all familiar refrains. Blaming our mothers, fathers, siblings, etc for our childhood traumas, while possibly true, doesn’t help us heal them. Our familiarity with blaming another, beating ourselves up, believing the lies of people who are trying to control us, accepting our “fate” makes us more susceptible to the Pharaoh within us and the Pharaoh outside of us.

We are taught that there are 70 ways to understand/interpret the Torah, there are numerous ‘arguments’ over 800 years in the Talmud and it is still being interpreted today, Rabbi Heschel’s words can be and need to be understood differently each time we read them if we are to live in radical amazement; science is constantly discovering new facts about the earth, space, pictures from the Webb telescope give us new understandings; given these circumstances how can we ever be “familiar” with the world? The only way to believe “the world is familiar” is to be lazy and dull. Rabbi Heschel, in his interview with Carl Stern described a person who had no problems and he called him an Idiot, because we always have problems/challenges and to see them the same way twice is to be dull, stupid, insipid. Yet, there are so many of us who crave consistency, sameness and ‘inner peace’. These are the people who will turn a blind eye to mendacity, who will willingly go along with the unethical actions of power-grabbing and participate in crushing the spirit of everyone and anyone who doesn’t ‘fall into line’ with the lies of the Pharaoh, the supreme leader, the Hitler, Putin, Orban, et al.

We, however, have the antidote, radical amazement, prayer, study, introspection and, of course, T’Shuvah. Making a conscious decision to live in radical amazement means giving our selves the gift of freshness, authenticity and excitement. We allow ourselves to be surprised, to immerse ourselves in the moment without knowing the outcome of our actions, embrace uncertainty with joy and curiosity, and finding contentment in our souls, in our core beingness that we will deal with whatever comes our way. Radical amazement is the state of being where nothing is boring except people who want to be boring, it is the state of noticing the things we take for granted and experiencing them anew and with fresh eyes. It is the pathway to a deeper, more robust knowing of self, another, nature, life, God, faith, joy, etc.

Prayer and study are integral parts of keeping it fresh. Immersing ourselves in the melody of prayer, in the melody of our study is allows the words, thoughts, commandments, enter us and become a part of our daily living, sometimes without our awareness. Our morning prayers awaken us to the day, to the miracle of life, to gratitude for this day, they inflame us with energy and intention to serve something greater than ourselves, to ensure that we are not engaging in self-serving activities and, instead, are using our talents and gifts to help another human being. Prayer and study are two of the pathways to saving our own souls and saving the souls of more human beings. Introspection and T’Shuvah are for tomorrow.

In recovery, we agree with Einstein’s definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results. We are acutely aware of how often we used to take things for granted, how often we sought ‘inner peace’ through chaotic actions. We know the dangers of being familiar with our recovery, it leads to our destruction. We know we are not an island and can’t handle everything in life alone, we seek out partners, mentors, sponsors, family, intimate friends to share and learn from and with. We are open to new ideas, to new ways of seeing what is right in front of me because when we are familiar with a situation,  we tend to repeat yesterday’s solution to today’s challenges and this never works out well.

For the past 35+ years I have been blessed to be in radical amazement for at least part of each day. I am continuing to see life anew each morning, I am continuing to believe in God’s grace, I am continuing to know that where I am to be of service next will present itself, I am continuing to accept that things happen in God’s time, not mine, that other people are not as concerned with my timeline as I am and everything will work out well as long as I don’t screw it up with my shit. I also know that I stay unfamiliar with people and with life in order to be surprised in both positive and negative ways. I realize I took it for granted that; “people had my back” when, in fact, they did not-they had their own. I am realizing my inability to be maladjusted to the notions and agreements that I thought I had with people meant that I was willfully blind to the changes in relationships and I became devastated by the surprise of betrayal. I have also been buoyed by the surprise of connection and being lifted up by so many people as well over the years. My goal is to stay unfamiliar with life, to not take anything for granted and to live in amazement and wonder! 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 274

“Man may forfeit his sense of the ineffable. To be alive is commonplace; the sense of radical amazement is gone; the world is familiar and familiarity does not breed exaltation or even appreciation.” (Who is Man pg. 116)

“Familiarity breeds contempt” is a proverb that I am reminded of when immersing myself in the last phrase above. Einstein remarked: “The intuitive mind is a gift and the rational mind a servant, we have come to forget the gift and worship the servant”. Both of these teachings re-enforce Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom above. Exaltation comes from the Latin meaning “to raise aloft” and appreciation means “set at a price/appraise” and neither is possible when familiarity is contemptuous and we worship a servant rather than God, rather than our gift. Herein lies the challenge for us today even more than in 1963 when Rabbi Heschel spoke these words at Stanford University! We are witnessing today, at the polls in some States, a slate of candidates who adhere to the Big Lie, white supremacy, senseless hatred, power for their own sake, anti-semitism, prejudice and racist views, etc promoted by the Devious Donny and supported by Mealy-mouthed McCarthy. Yet, the Senate cannot pass a bill designed to honor a promise made to our young people who put it all on the line to serve our Country in Afghanistan and Iraq. Whether the war there was correct or not, they served and deserve our support and assistance with the healing of the wounds that we inflicted upon them. Is this on the ballot, no! What is on the ballot today is the call to hatred because familiarity is breeding hatred, it is breeding an underbelly of seething anger to wave the false flag of “I’m right and good as are all of my people and you(whomever I point my finger at) are bad and wrong as are anyone who agrees with you”. We are in a state where we are so sure we know what it right, we cannot hear, listen, compromise nor respect anyone who is not in lockstep with us. This is true on both ends of the spectrum and we are in danger of losing our democracy, our freedom and our hopes and dreams to this type of extremism.

We have used familiarity to have disdain for one another as witnessed by Devious Donny hoping Patsy Pence would be hung on Jan. 6th, 2021! We have watched in horror the anti-semitism of the far left in order to be woke. We are in grave danger of falling into the abyss of taking everything for granted, of being indifferent to wonder, to beauty, to logic, to truth and to evil. We have come to the precipice of this abyss and the Republican Party is truly in danger of falling into it. Mendacious Mitch, Devious Donny, Patsy Pence, Crooked Cruz, Molesting Matt Gaetz, Jester Josh Hawley, Seditious Steve Bannon all believe the rule of law is theirs to interpret and doesn’t apply to them. They are totally familiar with the Constitution, they just believe they can use it as a weapon and a shield, weapon against everyone else, a shield for themselves. We are watching the destruction of exhalation which brings about a depressive emotional state for everyone, for our country because instead of raising aloft the banner of freedom, instead of raising aloft the beacon of hope and possibility, these people who are so familiar with what this country is based on are using their rational minds to raise aloft mendacity, deception, slavery and indifference. We are watching these charlatans enlist the aid of people of faith to appraise the dignity of every human being as being very low, to set the price of truth at a bargain basement price and to appraise the need to serve God instead of them at zero. This is what the familiarity of our time is producing. This is one of the examples of how prejudice is a “cancer of the soul”, an “eye disease” that has infected the entire body of our democracy.

We can, however, take the cure for this cancer that is infecting and killing our democratic norms and our chance to make our country more in line with freedom. This cure is a return to core principles of democracy as found in every spiritual discipline: Truth, Kindness, Justice, Mercy, Compassion and Love. This return begins with our acknowledgement of how far  we have strayed from these principles, whom we impacted including God and our selves, how we have impacted, what we have learned and how we are going to change. It continues with “circumcising the foreskin of our hearts” so we can open our selves up to the truth of infinite worth and dignity that each human being possesses. More tomorrow on the solution!

In recovery, we experience a new freedom when we do our 4th step, when we are able to be in truth with ourselves, when we fearlessly and thoroughly see our errors of judgement and actions when we missed the mark as well as our ‘stinking thinking’ at those moments. This is when our return truly begins to be real, to be possible and we are inspired to move forward in our recovery.

I knew I had an intuitive mind and I squandered it for many years to serve my own mendacity, my own selfish needs. My recovery is to use my intuitive mind in service of another, to advocate for the soul of another human being. I am realizing that familiarity with people did breed appreciation and trust in me and some, a few, used this trust and appreciation to skewer me, while so many more honor our relationship. My intuitive mind reminds me to let go of the few and hold on to the many, while my rational mind tells me the opposite. I know how to make the rational mind serve the intuitive one and I have to employ these skills every day or I will fall into the abyss of mendacity, deception and prejudice. 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 273

“Man may forfeit his sense of the ineffable. To be alive is commonplace; the sense of radical amazement is gone; the world is familiar and familiarity does not breed exaltation or even appreciation.” (Who is Man pg. 116)

The last phrase above is the disease of our time and this was written/spoken 59+ years ago! Familiar comes from the Latin meaning ‘family’, ‘household servants’ and in Hebrew it is the word used for knowing someone as a friend, acquaintance, etc. I believe the way Rabbi Heschel is using the word is as ‘family’, ‘well-known’, etc and in this way he is challenging our belief that we only know what we can see, prove, convince. We are treating the world as a servant to us rather than us serving the world. Instead of caring for the world, we have grown into believing the world should serve us no matter what we do, how little we care for it, how much we abuse it. In the ways I hear Rabbi Heschel speaking to us in this phrase is much like the Prophets of old who called the people Israel, the people Judea out over their similar beliefs to ours today. We all know what happened to those countries; exiled into assimilation and exiled from the land for almost 1900 years!

Treating the world and people like ‘family’ might sound wonderful, yet we see how the family has disintegrated so much to be a safe place for mendacity and lies, deception and anger. We know how often people treat family poorly because they can and know they can always come back and “blood is thicker than water”. Yet, the abuse in families is tremendous, be it sibling rivalry, parental expectations and emotional neglect, physical abuse and the pressure to perform, be perfect, realize the dreams another family member has for one. It is subtle and powerful. One can see the addiction epidemic as a manifestation of what is going on under the surface in families, schools, synagogues, churches, etc. It is a rebellion against the mendacity of optics, against the deception of another to serve us, against the senseless hatred of someone else so one doesn’t have to look at oneself in truth and change. We have problem in our families that is reflective of the larger societal problem: a loss of radical amazement, a loss of our sense of the ineffable, a loss of the dynamism of being alive. Yet, we are happy with the status quo, we are happy being deceived and engaging in self-deception because truth seems to hard to take. Seeing what is happening in our country today is a mirror of this. People are willing to lie to themselves, follow mendacious Mitch, lying Ted, deceiving Donny, minion Mike Pence, destructive De Santis, et al, all to avoid seeing themselves, growing their inner lives, following the demand and call of the Universe/God to make our corner of the world a little better than how we found it, and living a life of “love your neighbor”.

It is time for us to stop believing we know this story, we have seen this movie before and realize that today is new, there has never been another day like this. We will not have another day/time like right now and there never has been. Our need to make daily life “familiar” is our belief that slavery is okay, following the Pharaoh is better than being free. The boss is our friend and needs us and cares for us, so what if he charges 3 times as much at the “company store”, so what if he abuses us in front of his friends and they all laugh in our faces and behind our backs, so what if he beats me occasionally, he is my master! What poppycock,  what self-deception! Yet, we buy into this belief overtly and subtly whenever we believe the world is here to serve us, whenever we believe we have to go along to get along, whenever we buy into the lies of another because we are too lazy, too afraid to speak truth to power, truth to ourselves, truth to another. We were freed from Egypt over 3300 years ago and told not to go back, the entire Hebrew Bible is the story of how to stay away from Egypt and the desire, pull to go back. We have, in our society, in our ways of living in optics, fear, mendacity, returned to Egypt and don’t even realize it. We have fallen under the spell of Pharaoh and he has “dealt shrewdly” with us, enslaved us even though we were “more numerous and mighty” than he and his crowd.

In recovery, we use family to help us be free, we engage in a new family dynamic because the old one was a sick system that served us and our family to stay in denial, anger, stuck, dependent and co-dependent. It kept us in roles and prevented our souls from speaking and connecting with one another. In recovery, family is part of our core recovery tools, it is what supports our core contentment and knowing we are enough.

I have abused family when I was drinking and stealing. In my recovery, I cherish family and I refuse to buy into the old system. It caused some issues with my mother at times and it brought me and my siblings closer because they too did not want the old system. Family is a gift which needs to be engaged with in joy, truth, anger, sorrow, kindness, mercy, justice and love. In our family, “having one’s back” means telling the truth and believing in one another. No mendacity, no cover-up, no throwing away!  We help one another stay out of Egypt by keeping it real, caring for one another and teaching our children the same way. 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 272

“Man may forfeit his sense of the ineffable. To be alive is commonplace; the sense of radical amazement is gone; the world is familiar and familiarity does not breed exaltation or even appreciation.” (Who is Man pg. 116)

The more I immerse myself in these words, this wisdom, the more I am convinced of our desperate need to regain our sense of the ineffable, to experience being alive as dynamic and commit to being/living in radical amazement in order to meet the challenges of today, tomorrow and beyond. We have been given a world to help create, an inheritance we received that must be passed on to our heirs and then theirs, and a covenant to one another and with one another to live together in dignity, kindness, truth, justice, mercy and love. This is the mandate from God, this is the basis of the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, the Koran and every book of the other myriad of spiritual disciplines in our world. There is no ‘one size fits all’ way of spiritual living, there is no ‘my way is better than your way’ in the spiritual world, in the Jewish world we are taught that there are 70 ways to understand each principle!

It is time for the “stop the steal”, “so-called social conservatives”, authoritarian-loving people and clergy to recognize the pathetic path they are taking, the path that is antithetical to the Gospels they are teaching and preaching (Gospels are not limited to Christianity here). It is time for these charlatans, these money-grabbing, power-hungry clergy, idolators and puppet-masters to learn that the Ineffable One is patient and allows them/us to bring about our own destruction, that slavery will end, the enslavers will go into the sea and be drowned, mendacity will not carry the day and people will awaken from their self-deception and rise up to meet the truth and overthrow the authoritarians who have usurped seats of power through lies. While the wisdom above sometimes takes a while to seep in, as was the case in Europe and the US in the 1930’s and 1940’s, it does eventually and we respond with dynamism and with maladjustment to the conventional notions and mental cliches we had been enthralled with before. I am calling out the people who support these authoritarian ways and leaders to remember the poem by Martin Niemoller, the prominent Lutheran pastor who supported Nazi ideas and was politically right-wing until he saw the actual implementation of these ideas, then he became critical and spent from 1937-1945 in prisons and concentration camps.

Our inability to recognize the wisdom, the prophetic calling of the teaching above will be our downfall. What I am sure of, however, is that we will always have a remnant of people who will keep the faith, who will hold on to their sense of the ineffable, appreciate the miracle of being alive and live with awe, wonder and radical amazement. This is the truth of our history and this will be the truth of our present and future. In every age, as the song at Hanukkah goes, there have been people who wanted to destroy the Jews and the ineffable one saves us each time. We, Jew, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, etc, have to accept the wisdom above into our hearts, into our souls so that our inner life is saved from the self-deceptions, the mendacity of another, the lure of authoritarianism, the corruption power brings, so we never have to repeat the statement of Martin Niemoller, “first they came for the socialists and I did not speak out-because I wasn’t a socialist; etc.” We are all one race, Human, we are all connected through our spirit, through our Divine Image, through our shared humanity and the wisdom above is calling us to recognize this truth, live this truth and share in the joy of this truth!

In recovery, we are so aware of the similarities in one another. We all, no matter how far up or down the ladder of success, no matter what our faith tradition is, no matter what the color of our skin is, are in recovery together, in the struggle to live well and to live a life of principles and kindness,  truth and compassion, love and mercy. This is what we strive for each and every day; to recover our integrity, a little more humanness, a little more love and a little more connection to the universe.

As my friend and teacher, Rev Mark Whitlock, teaches: we are all “kin under the skin” and, as Father Greg Boyle teaches we need to engage in “radical kinship”. In my years of living T’Shuvah, living Jewishly, I learned that the world for redemption in Hebrew also means “kin”. I know that I cannot be redeemed unless and until I see everyone as “kinfolk”, everyone is a ‘relative’ of mine. I have worked hard to do this all these years and, at times, I have reacted to “my kinfolk” engaging in the murdering of their soul, of the soul of another, of the soul of an organization. I react in a Prophetic voice, loud, ‘uncouth’, and an outstretched hand to bring the person back from their soul-crushing, murderous ways which has saved many, many people. It has also caused problems for the authoritarians, of the right and left, so they worked together to eliminate the uncontrollable one-as has been done in our history and in our present. Rabbi Heschel was a threat to the establishment so he had to be marginalized somewhat and he spoke out and wrote truth wherever he was. This is the example I follow, I hope to follow more because the call from above to me is coming through loud and clear-keep preaching, keep teaching, live my life, be maladjusted so I can bring the message of my soul, the Torah I was created to speak and teach. The same is true for all of us, in this way we defeat the charlatans. 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 271

“Man may forfeit his sense of the ineffable. To be alive is commonplace; the sense of radical amazement is gone; the world is familiar and familiarity does not breed exaltation or even appreciation.” (Who is Man pg. 116)

Most of the challenges facing us today, as in the past, are challenges that come from a denial of radical amazement. We are so invested in our need for certainty and for power/control and this is bringing us to ruin the democratic experiment begun in 1776 and to ruin the Divine Promise that slavery will not last forever as evidenced by the Exodus from Egypt. The belief in the conventional notions from yesterday, last month, years ago is debilitating, enslaving and just plain wrong! It has in the past, is today and will in the future ensure the interruption of the divine plan to move our world forward, to find contentment within our core being and care for the stranger, the needy and the poor in our midst.

“How can I pray when the deaths of 1000’s of innocent Vietnamese is on my conscience” asks Rabbi Heschel in his interview with Carl Stern in December of 1972. This is a statement of radical amazement and deep spirituality as well as a religious and moral question.Our leaders then were not asking it nor are our leaders today asking it. How can any of us pray when the deaths of over 100,000 people from Opioids, over 100,000 people from Alcohol, the suicide rate grows each year amongst our young people? How can any of us look in the mirror as we “stand idly by the bloods” of our brothers/neighbors/fellow human beings? Yet, we are  and we do. We have watched more and more people become unhoused/homeless and done nothing to help these poor and needy human beings. We have allowed the people we sent to Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam flounder from their emotional and spiritual wounds from being in these wars/conflicts. We have supported people, even elected a president, who are anti-democratic and believe in authoritarianism and dictatorship. We have given power to the few, the minority through gerrymandering and the electoral college rather than practice and promote freedom and equality.

Radical amazement, as I understand Rabbi Heschel’s use of the term, is the antidote to power for power’s sake, for selfish reasons. It is the antidote to willful blindness and authoritarianism, it is the antidote to the spiritual malady that causes addiction to drugs, alcohol, gambling, sex, money, power, prestige, etc. It is the antidote to the mendacity and deception of white supremacy, anti-semitism, Islamaphobia, homophobia, racism, senseless hatred, etc. All of these old notions and cliches need to end if we are to continue to move the promise of the Exodus from Egypt, the covenant we made at Mt. Sinai, the teachings of Christ, Buddha, Mohammed, and everyone since forward and create more and more light for the path to wholeness. We are facing the inner demons of power today; Viktor Orban is speaking in Dallas Tx, at a CPAC conference along with Marjorie Taylor Greene and Donald Trump; 3 people who believe in white supremacy, who sell the lie of standing for “white christianity” and promote boogeymen/women and other lies to people who live in old notions and cliches. The organizers and the people attending are dangerous and seek to overthrow the democratic foundations of our nation, they seek to enslave those of us who do not want to live under so-called Christian Law where Jesus is a Lion, where Jesus cares for the rich and powerful, where the leaders of this movement bastardize everything that is in the Gospels and do it with help from their so-called Religious Leaders. Jews, people of color, Muslims, who go along with these charlatans will find themselves as Kapos, as the people who, in their desire to be near power, sell their souls and their minds for an extra piece of bread.

Radical amazement is a state of being aware of what is right now, a state of learning how to see what is in real time, rather than through ‘old eyes’. While the lessons of yesterday are crucial for learning how to deal with today’s opportunities, today is not the same as yesterday, the experiences are never exactly the same, the court cases are not the same, so we have to be maladjusted to our desire, impulse, need to ignore the nuances and the cries of the poor, the needy, the stranger, our neighbors, our enemies and live in this moment and live in truth, justice, kindness, mercy, and compassion. Radical amazement is the only way to stay away from the mendacity of the people described above, it is, in my opinion, the paradigm that will give us the power and the wisdom to defeat this constant wave of power-grabbing, mendacious people who want to destroy everyone who is not like them, everyone who doesn’t give them complete loyalty, everyone who questions them. Our maladjustment to the status quo, to the Constitution and it’s amendments doesn’t mean we don’t honor precedent, it means we keep it fresh and relevant. Just as there are 70 ways to understand the Bible, we can’t live in a one-way, one-size fits all democracy. Radical amazement keeps us fresh, keeps us democratic, keeps us open to learn and keeps us free.

In recovery, we recognize that each day is a gift, each day is new and we can only live today’s agenda-we can’t go back and replay yesterday’s nor go forward to advance play tomorrow’s. More on Sunday, 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 270

“Man may forfeit his sense of the ineffable. To be alive is commonplace; the sense of radical amazement is gone; the world is familiar and familiarity does not breed exaltation or even appreciation.” (Who is Man pg. 116)

Continuing to immerse our selves in the phrase above; “the sense of radical amazement is gone” is crucial for our continued existence, using the Latin meaning of “coming into being” and “take a stand for”. We are unable to grow into better, fuller and more purpose-driven selves as long as we stay stuck in commonplace and old ideas. It is not the way of spirit, it is not the way of Jesus, it is not the way of Moses, it is not the way of Mohammed, it is not the way of Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, Abraham Lincoln, FDR, Harry Truman, JFK, Ronald Reagan, and so many others who have led and worked to make America the land of the free and the home of the brave!

The bravest act a human can take is to live in radical amazement, I believe. Constantly staying fresh in thinking, in actions, in understanding and in spirit is the only way to continue to grow and deepen our connection to self, another, universe. It is the only path to coming into the being we were created to be, to fulfilling the divine demand and call that rings in our soul, our inner life that we continue to run away from. Just as throughout history there have been people who wanted everyone around them to go along with their ideas, their old ways of doing things and seeing things, there have also been people who continually see the world through new eyes each and every day. Same shit, different day doesn’t exist in either their vocabulary nor their thoughts.

Radical amazement is not a one and done experience, nor is it an experience that is out of our reach and realm. It is a way of living that calls for us to let go of the lies we have been telling ourselves, it is a way of being that demands we stop comparing our self to another self, it is an existence that forces us to take a stand for decency, truth, love, kindness, justice and compassion, and it is an existence that reminds us of our imperfect path of coming into being the human we are intended to be. It is a constant nagging from our soul, our inner life to not get stuck anymore in our self-deception nor the deception of another. It is our path to letting go of our need to be liked at any and all costs, our need to ‘get ahead’, our belief that it is better to ‘go along to get along’ rather than stand for what we know is the next right thing to do. Radical amazement is an active, dynamic experience that gives us the gift of questioning every thing we think we know to learn new and different ways to apply the universal truths of faith, spirit, intuition and inner life.

Living this path is not easy nor readily acceptable to society at large. The people we venerate today were not always accepted nor venerated in their own time; the prophets were not loved in the times or places they lived and prophesied, the Rabbis were not followed immediately after the destruction of the Temple in 70ad, Jesus was not followed by the masses when he was alive nor right after his death, Moses could only lead 20% of the Israelites out of Egypt according to a commentary, and a large minority of people still believe the 2020 election “was stolen”! Rabbi Heschel was not celebrated nor understood in his own time and even today, people quote him and do not live his wisdom and teachings. We need to understand that only through radical amazement can we exist in the true meaning of the word, only through radical amazement can we find the strength, the beauty, the wonder and awe to be able to stay content while constantly changing. Radical amazement forces us to immerse ourselves in constant change so we can live within our self, so we can live the call of our soul, use the power and drive of our spirit to find new and different ways to serve God, to serve humanity and to serve our self, to feel the sense of the ineffable daily, to feed another human being with food and kindness and to respond to the call of our inner life!

In recovery we recognize that “old ideas” led us back down old paths and they just didn’t work anymore. We are adherents to Einstein’s definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results; because we have lived this way for years. In recovery, we experience everything anew, we let go of our old ideas, we let go of our “contempt prior to investigation” and we investigate with a desire to learn, not be right. One of the joys of recovery is rediscovering the wonder, awe and joy of living.

People get upset with me when I tell them I am great when asked “how are you”. They think its a discussion stopper, yet to me it is a descriptor of my readiness to learn, to see the world and my life anew, to be grateful for this day, for this encounter, for this experience. I am great everyday because I am alive, I am learning, I am excited, I am in love and am loved, I am a son, a father, a brother, a husband, a Rabbi, a friend, a leader, a follower, a learner and a teacher. How can I not be great? I have bad days, moments, periods where I am in distress about something that I haven’t found a response to that seems right, I get angry about mendacity and optics, cancel culture and “correctness” which is another word for phoniness, and this doesn’t mean that I am not great. Radical amazement brings me core contentment, I am no longer dependent on people, places, things to make me content, I am enough and I know it. 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 269

“Man may forfeit his sense of the ineffable. To be alive is commonplace; the sense of radical amazement is gone; the world is familiar and familiarity does not breed exaltation or even appreciation.” (Who is Man pg. 116)

The second phrase in this second sentence above is the root of our issues today, yesterday and will be tomorrow, I believe. “Radical amazement is gone” is the number 1 problem we face as human beings in my understanding and envisioning today, our history and our future. Without radical amazement, being alive has to be commonplace, ‘where’s mine’ has to be a constant refrain, fear of anyone not like  me has to overwhelm us, mendacity, believing the deceptions of another, using deceptions to manipulate another, and, our old favorite, self-deception is our modus operandi. Radical amazement, as Rabbi Heschel defines it is “maladjustment to conventional notions and mental cliches” and, unfortunately the people in charge are so interested in keeping the status quo, are so adept and successful at using the conventional notions and mental cliches to their advantage, we find ourselves in a world where being “alive is commonplace”, the “sense of radical amazement is gone” and we are more angry, less tolerant, more chained to a way of being that is not compatible with being a partner with God! Many people are wondering “how did we get to this state” which, in my opinion, is the wrong question. The correct question for all of us is “how do we regain our sense of radical amazement”? How can we recapture, experience for the first time, a sense of maladjustment to the notions and cliches that have run our lives for so long? How can we let go of our old ideas and see today and every day as fresh, new, pregnant with possibilities, etc? How can we relinquish our need to deceive, our desire to engage in self-deception and our belief in the falseness of another? These are the questions that this phrase, this wisdom of Rabbi Heschel are bringing up for me.

We can recapture and/or experience for the first time a sense of maladjustment to the notions and cliches we have allowed to run our lives by remembering that society is not the force that rules us. Society has been, for most of history, the force that enslaves us. Pharaoh and the Egyptians were society in Biblical times, Assyria and Babylon, Greece and Rome all were the dominant societies of their times in antiquity. All of them had their own myths, their own notions and cliches and their own form of slavery and enslavement of another. In the Bible, Pharaoh is afraid of the Israelites because they are not like the Egyptians, he has to be suspicious of them because they are more mighty and numerous, he perceives them as a threat and has to control them. This has been the despots playbook forever and it is the playbook that so many people willingly follow. We see this in the way the Republican Senators are afraid to go against Mitch McConnell’s need for power and control, we see this in the way Mike Pence is trying to placate Donald Trump, we see this in the way Liz Cheney is being treated for being a defender of the constitution, a person who keeps faith with her oath of office. I am in opposition to almost all of Liz Cheney’s policies, and I respect and admire her stand for the principles of our constitution, the principles of service and faithfulness to our democracy.

When one is more concerned with being elected, with the power they can wield for their own sake and for the sake of their benefactors, we are all in trouble. Especially the one who is being used by benefactors, this elected official, this underboss in the crime family, this employee, pawn of the board, will always be betrayed by their own self-deception of being needed and important. Just as Putin took over Russia, the Idolators took over Christianity here in the US, the charlatans instigated the National Prayer Breakfast, Fox News took over the Republican Party, the far left took over the Democratic Party through deception, mendacity and lies. We, The People, have allowed ourselves to be lulled into false beliefs through deceptive means to believe in the righteousness of the leaders, to the utter denial of what we see in front of us because of our need to hold on to and live by the conventional notions and mental cliches of societal norms.

In recovery, this is what we are both recovering from and moving towards. Our buy-in of societal norms and mental cliches drove us to places and actions that are abhorrent to us now and made so much sense prior to our recovery. In recovery, we are constantly challenging our belief in these notions and cliches, we are constantly seeking to be maladjusted to them and to see life in the mode of “the glass is half-full” rather than half-empty. We are engaged in being alive by being excited about the day and what we will experience and learn.

I have been maladjusted my entire life and it drove me to drink, steal and act out for the first half of my life. In this second half, my acting out is in service of my maladjustment, not always appropriate and done for my own survival. When I feel the mendacity and deceptions begin to get too close, to be being bought by another(s) and/or myself, I react violently because I am afraid of being caught in the old web again. Self-deception and mendacity are the primary addictions for me and I have such respect for their power, I have to ward them off with power, disdain and loudly enough for my mind to hear what my soul is saying. It isn’t always pretty and it is truth, it is survival and it is the way I thrive. 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 268

“Man may forfeit his sense of the ineffable. To be alive is commonplace; the sense of radical amazement is gone; the world is familiar and familiarity does not breed exaltation or even appreciation.” (Who is Man pg. 116)

Hiding, mendacity, self-deception, conventional notions, disbelief of how much each individual matters, ‘a leopard doesn’t change its spots’, cancel culture, identity politics, and so much more have become so commonplace, most people are unaware of their participation in these soul crushing activities. In fact, many people wrap themselves in Tefillin, in the flag, in the Bible, in the Church, in their meditative practices to validate their commonplace living. Rabbi Heschel is calling us out on these lies we have been telling ourselves and these conventional notions and mental cliches we have been buying into.

Most people are so afraid of freedom, they have to stay stuck in the commonplace, they have to be engaging in the lies they tell themselves, etc because to be free they have to be responsible, they have to be engaging in their inner lives with the goal being to be free of prejudice, pride, envy and enmity, stop comparing and competing, complaining and feeling bad, and so on. To be free, to make being alive an event, as I believe Rabbi Heschel would say, is to hear the call of the Universe, the demand of the Ineffable and the cry of another human being. To be free is to have these experiences and respond. While it is in vogue to just listen and/or witness the pain of another, to hear the lies people spread and not challenge them because it is ‘their truth’, to believe there are ‘alternative facts’, there are “good people on both sides”, it is part of the path to making alive commonplace which gives more power to the people in charge, to the people with money, and leads to following the path to enslavement, self-deception, and spiritual death.

After the Shoah, many people condemned the Jews, the gays, the myriad of people who ‘willing’ went to the Camps ‘like sheep’ and find this so abhorrent and proof that if the Shoah did happen, then the people who ‘willingly went there’ deserved their fate. While this is the ugliest of arguments, it is also some of these same people who marched in Charlottesville and proclaimed: “Jews will not replace us”. While this is the epitome of anti-semitism, these are the same people who believe the 2020 election was stolen, Donald Trump is a truth-teller, Mike Pence deserved to be hung, the Jan. 6th hearings are a sham, “white is right”, etc. The same people who shake their heads when they hear about genocide, when they hear about following some dictator, are the very same people who make their lives commonplace by believing the lies of a deceiver, by engaging in mendacity themselves, by imbibing hatred at their parents knees, accepting that someone else is to blame for their misery and becoming full-fledged haters of everything and everyone that is not like them.

“Now is the time for all good people to come to the aid of their country”, this phrase used in teaching typing is so important to follow through on by all of us. We have to come to the aid of our country by coming to aid of our self. We have to do more than listen and witness the pain of another, we have to find solutions to the pain, we all have to be “first responders” to the stranger, the poor, the needy among us. We have to do more than accept our own inner pain and frustrations, we need to seek help to heal our inner lives,  to grow our inner lives, to mature our spiritual living. We are being called to let go of the conventional notions, mental cliches, mendacities and self-deceptions that have led us down the primrose path to hell! We are being called to be ALIVE, to experience this day as unique, exciting, eye-opening, a learning opportunity, a change to repair old errors and relationships, a moment to respond to the call of the Universe and the demand of the ineffable. This day is the gift given to us to engage in truth seeking, truth telling and more freedom than yesterday.

In recovery, we call this “letting go of old ideas” and no longer practicing “contempt prior to investigation”. We begin each day with a prayer for honesty, openmindness, and willingness to live in the moment, to face what is and to respond with humility and service as a way of living in the grace of life, as a way of responding to the call of the universe and as a show of gratitude.

I think about the moments when being alive is commonplace for me and I am so excited to report that these moments are few and far between. While I am not in action as I was a few years ago, I am in action with thoughts, with plans, etc. I am not seeing life through commonplace eyes, I am engaged in thoughts, in the world, in my writing, in my living one grain of sand better today than yesterday. I am engaged in love of life, wife, daughter, grandson, family, friends, and more of humanity each day. I am aware that this is the best way to honor the grace God has granted me and the fire God has placed in my belly for truth, for service, for love, for gratitude and for life! 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 267

“Man may forfeit his sense of the ineffable. To be alive is commonplace; the sense of radical amazement is gone; the world is familiar and familiarity does not breed exaltation or even appreciation.” (Who is Man pg. 116)

Reading the second sentence evokes in some people and, hopefully, more people a sense of divine pathos, a deep experience of pity and sympathy for people who are willfully blind to the truth about being alive. Treating being alive as commonplace is the greatest expression of entitlement that one can think of. Yet, we all do this and many are  oblivious to this way of being that is all too commonplace in our world today, yesterday and, hopefully not, tomorrow.

Of course people get excited about things, I do not experience Rabbi Heschel denying this, and even in our excitement we react in commonplace ways, we have come to expect so much, we are so jaded by our pasts and imprisoned by the traumas we have experienced, we are unable to see the nuances, the beauty and “radical amazement” of being alive! How many people wake up to a new day with gratitude and joy, excitement to learn and have their eyes wide open to the many miracles, love, acts of service they can engage in, etc? We see on the news each day, this is not so welcomed, this is not newsworthy, yet, “to be alive is commonplace” is most of what we hear about.

Shootings, mass and individual, thefts, rape of public trust, enslaving people who are different than ‘the people in power’, power being wielded for personal agenda, mendacity and deception, these are commonplace occurrences that we take for granted and decide we can do nothing about, we are, after all, only one person. Rabbi Heschel is calling to us to stop this type of thinking, stop acting as if being alive is commonplace, is an entitlement, something we take for granted and are indifferent to.

I write about the political situation not as a ‘liberal’, a ‘democrat’, rather as an observer of what is happening and how unspiritual it is, how unGodly it is, and how Rabbi Heschel is calling us to raise our standard of living, raise the discourse going on, and raise the foundational principles of spirit to be the foundational principles we live by. Our elected officials swear an oath to our country, to the constitution, to God and they give it more lip service than actual service. They swear a greater oath, to them, to their party, to their need for power, to their prejudices, their self-deceptions, their false self. The Jan. 6th Committee is showing this in vivid detail. Yet, it is not the politicians who are totally at fault here, We, the People, are responsible for accepting being alive as so commonplace that we do not hold these elected officials responsible, we are supporting their desire and their ability to crush us, crush our spirits, and enslave us to do their bidding. We, the People, are so lost in the accepting the lies and deceptions of another because it speaks to our own fears, prejudices, desires we don’t realize that these NON-OATH KEEPERS, are killing our freedoms, our choices, our spirits, and our faith.

The disease of the commonplace permeates all we do, if we allow it. Rabbi Heschel’s solution was to be surprised, to take nothing for granted. To be aware and engaged in the daily actions of the world and of our self to keep cleaning out the schmutz that can easily accumulate in our thinking, our hearts, our spiritual arteries. Much like blocked arteries to our heart, we are in desperate need of spiritual angioplasties at least once a week, and our tradition says daily! Doing T’Shuvah everyday keeps us up to date on our subtle ways of making being alive commonplace rather than making being alive an event of magnificent proportions. We have a choice each morning and each evening to grow our sense of awe and wonder at being alive, doing something important, truthful, connecting and kind with our living not as a ‘one-off’’ rather as our true north star of living, being excited and aware of the opportunities each day gives us to live well, live free and live with our eyes wide open in wonder and awe.

In recovery, we strive to keep it real, keep it fresh through our “continued to take personal inventory” each and every day. We see what we have done well and where we have missed the mark, we are able to repair damage and enhance our goodness. We seek to grow each day in our being alive as a gift mentality not to be taken for granted as we did before.

Whenever I take being alive for granted, I find myself agitated and upset for no legitimate reason, nothing has happened, yet, I am irritable and discontent. I have learned these are the signals of not being engaged in the present with awe and wonder, with joy and gratitude, with service and connection to God, to another person. These moments, which sometime last a day or… allow me to reflect on what I am taking for granted, what I am treating as commonplace and what needs to be corrected inside of me, in my inner life so I can stop the lies of my false ego and the mendacity of my emotions from ruling me. I say mendacity of my emotions because emotions and soul experiences are different, one is false ego based and the other is authentic ego based. One is powerfully deceptive and the other is powerfully enhancing, unfortunately when the deceptive one is louder, it seems more convincing. This is where my gratitude of this day and my learning, writing, and connecting save me. 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 266

“Man may forfeit his sense of the ineffable. To be alive is a commonplace; the sense of radical amazement is gone; the world is familiar, and familiarity does not breed exaltation or even appreciation.” (Who is Man pg.116)

The first sentence above is the root of all of our problems today, yesterday and will be tomorrow, I believe. We have forfeited our sense of the ineffable in our search for facts, in our search for power, in our search for certainty, in our search for protection against bad things happening. Yes, people pray to God for help, for health, their own and another’s, yet having a sense of the ineffable is a different experience. Sense, according to the Latin is to “have a feeling, meaning”. I believe Rabbi Heschel is teaching us that to have a sense of the ineffable is to feel the meaningfulness of our living, the importance of following a way of living that is “compatible with being a partner of God” as he says elsewhere and often. I also understand his angst and worry over this phenomenon, over this travesty and trauma to the human spirit, to our humanity and to the ineffable.

Our need for answers is part of the human inclination, it is probably the main catalyst for the Garden of Eden story, if Adam and Eve were not searching for answers as to their own existence, they probably would not have eaten of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Yet, they did and since then we have been creatures who continue to seek answers to more and more questions, stemming from the main questions: “Who Am I” and “What Am I?” As I write this, I realize, once again, we are asking the wrong questions so the answers we get, while correct for these questions, are not going to feed our sense of the ineffable, they are going to help us forfeit the sense of the ineffable which, as I said above, leads to more and more problems: more angst; more hatred; more prejudice; more blame; less responsibility; more killing and more mendacity and many more.

We are witnessing the destruction of freedoms in our country by people who are claiming that they ‘know what god wants’, I don’t capitalize god here because the god they believe in and the altar they worship at is of their own making, not the ineffable spirit of the universe Rabbi Heschel is teaching us about, not the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, not the higher consciousness of Buddha. No, the god they believe in and the altar they worship at is one of narcissism, one of power, one of control, one of mendacity and one of deception. The charlatans of today all spew out the gospels of extremes in search of power for themselves, not the constituents they were elected to represent, not the constitution they swore to uphold, not the welcoming of the stranger they were taught by Emma Lazarus on the Statue of Liberty. They are intent on securing their power to tell the rest of us what we should be thinking and feeling, what to hate and what to love, etc. Rather than help us grow into the meaningfulness of our living, they want us to go along with their agenda so they can feel powerful and in control.

To sense the ineffable takes a lot of work on one’s part. We have to let go of our need for certainty, we have to let go of our desire to control, we have to let go of our need to be right. Instead, we have to embrace the wonder of the universe, we have to engage in and with the ineffable beauty, awe, and embrace this  experience every morning upon waking, as well as throughout our day. We have to clear away the schmutz we have accumulated over the years that blocks our hearing the call of the ineffable through the wind, the trees, turning the dial of our inner radios to the correct megahertz to hear the demand and the call of the ineffable to each and every one of us. To sense the ineffable is to know that the call to each of us is different, the demand to each of us is different and each of us is needed for the world to make sense, for the world to work, for each of us to live out our sense of the ineffable as only we can without comparing, competing, denying and self-seeking.

In recovery, we know that without a sense of the ineffable we will be back where we were before, suffering from paralyzing demoralization, acute psychic pain, prejudice, jealousy and so much more. We continue to grow our sense of the ineffable so we can continue to grow our self into being human more and more each and every day.

I have used this writing to keep my sense of the ineffable. I have forfeited this sense whenever I go along with the lies I tell myself, when I go along with the lies you tell me so I can get along, when I have thought I was the smartest one in the room, etc. I regain my sense of the ineffable by seeing/experiencing my daughter, my grandson, my siblings, my friends, my family and, of course, Harriet. I regain my sense of the ineffable by immersing myself in Rabbi Heschel’s brilliance and the awe of life. I regain and grow my sense of the ineffable by connecting with people authentically and soulfully. 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 265

“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)

Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom above haunts me and should haunt all of us. Maimonides, the famous Jewish Scholar of the Middle Ages, said: “What is in the heart should be on the lips”. Moses taught us not to say one thing, seemingly agree with truth while in our hearts think I can do what I want. What we say and what we do have to be interrelated, interdependent otherwise, we are engaging in living a false life, a hiding life, a fearful life, a lonely life. While we may achieve accolades, riches, etc, we know that we are engaging in a sham life and nothing except returning to an “authentic existence” will give us rest, give us inner harmony, give us our self-respect back.

Today, we are living a compartmentalized life, a life where we believe our actions have no relationship to each other, we can be a ruthless businessman and a kind, loving parent/spouse, ‘don’t bring your home life to work nor your work life home’ is a favorite saying of many. If I am sad, I should just put on a stiff upper lip and grin through it, etc. All of these phrases point to the separation that most people today believe they should achieve. We are a society badly in need of interdependence and interrelatedness. We are all suffering the consequences of our compartmentalized lives; isolation, boredom, addiction, misery, senseless hatred of another who is “different” than us, going against our self-interest for one issue/reason. We go along with people we know are bad because they will ‘protect’ Israel, they will ‘protect’ what we say the Bible says, even though it really doesn’t. We see the alliances of strange bedfellows because they can agree on one issue, in 2016 it was defeat Hillary Clinton so the Republican Party coalesced behind a known democrat, a known misogynist, a known liar and a known bigot! Now, the Republican Party is denying the truth of their own eyes by still saying it wasn’t their people who rioted, it was the mythical THEM. How can they believe this dribble, these lies? They can because they live inauthentically, they live bifurcated lives, they live lives where there is nothing important except winning, power and wealth. They live lives that have been bought and paid for by their ‘benefactors’ and they are unwilling to stand for truth, for love, for kindness, for justice, for democracy!

We are in a time of great distress caused by our refusal to live an “authentic existence”, by our refusal to live interdependent, interrelated, integrated lives. We are unwilling to acknowledge our need for one another, we are unwilling to acknowledge our relatedness to one another as human beings, we are unwilling to integrate our seemingly opposing forces within and outside of us to become a whole human being. Instead, we go through life with a hole in our soul which only grows larger and larger because we refuse to live an “authentic existence”. We continue to reject the simple yet complex solution that our faiths give us, “return to God, return to your truth”.

We do this by engaging in the process of T’Shuvah, of a fearless and moral inventory. We have to see our actions in a larger context, of seeing them through the eyes of the people around us, seeing our actions through the ‘eye’ of our soul, through the ‘eyes’ of God. We get to look at and repair the damages we have done, we get to let go of our irrational need for recognition, power, control, we get to embrace the both/and of existence and reach out for the assistance we need at any given moment. We join with people for a better life for everyone, we don’t overlook the bad and give a wink and a nod to people doing bad things because we can “use” them to meet our own ends. Living a life of interdependence and interrelatedness shouts out that the ends never justify the means! After our inventory/T’Shuvah and after we make our amends, we make a plan on how to not get trapped by our self-deceptions, our mendacious thoughts, the deceptions of another and join with other people of faith and spirit to live together to raise one another up and hold one another to the higher standards we know to be true.

In recovery, we say “practice these principles in all our affairs”. We walk our talk and no longer hide from truth, no longer disregard the love of God, of our family, of our friends, of the strangers we meet. We embrace our need for one another and we give what we have to embolden and uplift the lives of everyone we meet.

I have always known of the interdependence and interrelatedness of life, I just thought for about 30 years that this was a sign of weakness, now, in recovery I know it is a sign of strength. I am interdependent on you, on strangers, on loved ones because I am not an island, I am not always right, I am not capable in all areas of living, I am not able to do everything. I practice my interdependence and my interrelatedness with my wife Harriet Rossetto to whom I have been married for 32 years today. Our interdependence created and sustained Beit T’Shuvah for over 30 years! I am aware of my need for you and I pray to never lose this awareness.  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 264

“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)

The interrelationship of work and worship are, as I said earlier, epitomized in Hebrew with the word for both being Avodah. In “Ethics of the Fathers”, we are taught “the world stands on 3 things, Torah, Avodah and G’milut Hasadim; a path of spiritual and moral behavior, working this path and fill our lives/spaces with kindness. Avodah is the lynchpin of this trio because without working the path, we will never fill our spaces with random acts of kindness and love. We have to work towards our “authentic existence” otherwise we will fall into mendacity, deception and a ‘false self’ that we adopt and adapt to whatever moment we are in. Working the commandments goes back to the acceptance of the Torah at Mount Sinai, “Na-Aseh V’Nishmah”, we will do and then we will understand is the response of the Israelites to the question of will they accept the covenant with God that the Torah comes with. If we think we can worship while acting in direct opposite of the tenets of our faith, we are sadly mistaken. Herein lies one of the roots of our problems today.

We believe that we can do anything we want and then say we are faithful to God, to our ‘religious’ tenets because when we are in Church, Temple, Mosque, etc we behave in the manner of our faith. We sing the praises of God and cheat a person in business. We listen to the testimony of the Prayer Leader, Minister, Priest, Rabbi, Imam, etc and we clap, sing the praises of the person and treat the stranger with disdain and suspicion. We show up loyally at our houses of worship, go through the service and have none of the service go through us. We claim to be good “Christian’s, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, etc and bastardize the teachings, we work the religious beliefs to serve us instead of serving them. This is where work and worship are interdependent and interrelated in negativity and evil. Our spiritual leaders who remind us to be judgmental, prejudiced, remind us to be benevolent ‘white people’, are working the way they worship, just not the way God intended us to make work and worship interdependent and interrelated. They are spouting the words of Christ, Mohamed, Buddha, Moses while twisting their meanings and the spirit in which they were delivered. This is the height of mendacity, deception, idolatry!

What Rabbi Heschel is pointing out, I believe, is that without dedicating ourselves to a path of holiness, we will never become whole human beings. Without working diligently and consistently on our incongruent parts we will never truly enjoy the compliments we get other than to think “if they only knew”. Without ensuring that each day we work a little more and our worship infuse our actions/work at least one grain of sand more each day, we cannot enjoy the “authentic existence”, the genuineness of coming into being and taking a stand for God, for what is right and for our true self. We have this opportunity each and every day. We wake up in the morning and can greet the day with hope, promise, joy and commitment. We can make our plan to live the joy, hope, promise, love, kindness, justice, mercy, and truth that each day holds in store for us. Doing this makes our work and our worship come together. When we don’t do this, we are going through the motions of prayer, of worship and we are committing “religious behaviorism” which to Rabbi Heschel is a big sin, a big way to miss the mark.

Realizing that we don’t truly accept Torah or any faith without making sure that our actions are in line with the religious, moral, ethical, spiritual principles of our faith is the subtlest form of idolatry. We think we are spouting the right words, we believe we are ‘being spiritual’, we believe we are following the tenets of faith, yet our actions are actions of false ego, prejudice, spiritual plagiarism, racism, unable to see women and anyone ‘not like me’ as equal to me, homophobic, treating the stranger as a criminal rather than welcoming them. To experience the truth of Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom we have to begin with using our faith as a plan of action (which is what a commanded life is) and then our daily actions are to fulfill this plan of action (which is what the work is) and then we get to have a genuine coming into being our true self and this leads to the random acts of kindness our Sages of old taught about. When our daily ‘work’ is imbued with our faith/worship we walk around with a smile for people, a howdy and a hello and are not concerned with any return, just with putting the Grace of God that we receive in the morning out into the world we work in and the people we worship with.

In recovery, we speak of “faith without works is dead” because we have been giving lip service and using worship and faith as pawns in our scheming way of living. We have not actually put these tenets into action and/or in the ways they were meant to be used, we have bastardized them in the past for our own needs/good and now we use them in the ways they were intended.

I find this idea so important to my recovery, to my teachings, to my ability to live. I can say that I have seen, lived and do live the interrelationship between work and worship. Not perfectly and more 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 263

“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)

The more we immerse and encounter the phrase “both work and worship”, the more we are able to experience the importance of both in our daily lives. The question that faith, spirituality come to respond to/answer is how do we keep working and worshiping our “authentic existence” rather than mendacity, self-deception and the deception of another(s)? This is the great question for our time, for all time. Going all the way back to the Garden of Eden when Adam and Eve engaged in the deception of hiding, when Cain engaged in the mendacity of not knowing where Able was. Abraham deceiving Pharaoh and Abimelech with the “she is my sister” lie. We have seen over and over again how easily even our greatest heroes can fall into working and worshiping at the altar of the idol of mendacity, inauthenticity, taking a stand for deception, and stunting their own coming into being. If these giants of faith fell into this trap, how can we expect ourselves to avoid it?

I am hearing Rabbi Heschel call to us to be aware of this trap, to stop putting on the cloaks of ‘holier than thou’, stop engaging in the mendacity and self-deception of ‘doing it for the greater good’ when one is only engaging in working in deception modalities and worshiping at the altar of the idol of power. It is time for all of us to stop and look at what we are working for and towards, how we are working to achieve our goals, whom we are working for as well as what altar we are worshiping at, what entity we are worshiping and how are we integrating our work and worship. deceivers like the Trump family, their racist, white supremacist friends and allies, work for themselves, first last and always. They are working towards dominance, invincibility, total protection for self, being able to do whatever they want with impunity. They are working for and worshiping their false self, trying to say that racism and faith go together. They do an excellent job of integrating their faith in themselves, their belief that they can use faith to do anything they want because faith leaders put their hands of DJT and anointed him the savior of Christianity. Talk about deception and mendacity! They have truly integrated work and worship for their own good, not for the sake of heaven. I use them as an example and they have many, many ancestors, followers, co-idolators and deceivers as well as raising up a whole lot of disciples. One of the hallmarks of great deceivers is their use of truth to create lies, use teachings to promote their deceptions and tap into the self-deception of a large group of people so they follow their lies. They have adopted a false self, a false way of being and are afraid of engaging in “authentic existence”.

Using the principles of faith and spirituality however lead us down another path. They lead us to find our own unique and individual “authentic existence”. When justice and mercy are part of our foundation of life, we can no longer turn a blind eye to the injustices we witness on a daily basis, homelessness, killing innocent/guilty of a small crime black men, price gouging, shunning the stranger, etc and we demand justice and mercy from everyone, beginning with our self.  When kindness and compassion are part of our foundation of life, we can no longer ignore the sores that are festering on an individual, on our society, we can no longer make it ‘someone else’s problems because I pay my taxes’, we can no longer ignore the appeal to see the humanity in the addict, the criminal, the people we meet in a store, on the street, we can no longer ignore our own hard-heartedness and we open up our hearts to let the pain penetrate so we engage in the call to action of our souls. When truth and love are part of our foundation of life, we can no longer stay in our own self-deceptions. We can no longer just point the finger of blame towards another, towards the amorphous ‘them’, we can no longer wrap ourselves in the cloak of “I’m good and you’re bad”, we can no longer shirk our responsibility in every experience as Rabbi Heschel teaches, “in a free society, some are guilty, all are responsible”, we can no longer engage in senseless hatred and mendacity. We open our souls up to love our neighbor and everyone is a neighbor, we open our souls up to speak truth to power and to everyone else, including our self, we embrace, love and care for the stranger in our midst, we become the voice for he powerless and voiceless and we shatter the mold of racism, anti-semitism, all forms of hatred and the “cancer of the soul” called prejudice.

In recovery, we call this “turning our will and lives over to the care of God…” We are constantly seeking to root out our self-deceptions and catch our mendacious ways earlier and earlier, knowing we will probably never be free of these deeply human traits. We seek to live life based on the principles above and not with mendacity nor deception.

I smell the mendacity of another very quickly and this helps me seek out my own. I have, of course, engaged in self-deception and mendacity in my recovery, and I am able to recognize it faster because of my daily inventory and inner search. I use prayer to help me keep myself always working for the sake of heaven as well as for my sake. 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 262

“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)

Immersing ourselves in the last phrase of the second sentence above, allows us the opportunity to experience the relationship between work and worship. In Hebrew, they are the same word, Avodah. There is another word for work in Hebrew that is used in conjunction with the keeping of Shabbat, that word is Malacha, which is usually defined as more creative work, more ‘holy’ work such as building the Temple.  Online it says the root for work is closely aligned with the word torture. The word for work is the same word as the yoke Roman masters put on their slaves and beat them with.

Since genuinely taking a stand and coming into being includes both work and worship, what can we learn from this wisdom. Both words are pointing us to see the interplay between these activities which many see as opposites. Yet, here again as with the other pairs in this sentence, they are complement each other more than oppose each other. There is a Yiddish phrase upon seeing someone, a sort of greeting that is: “Vus Machts Du?” What are you working at? The normal response is “Macht a Leiben” Working at life, making a living. To make a life is the connotation of the word work in this Yiddish phrase to me and the double entendre is to point out the need to have basic financial needs met, as the Torah teaches us, and to know our worth as human beings, our ability to be genuinely evolving and standing for and with God, people of spirit, is made up of our inner work, our worship of our soul, of our adoration of something greater than ourselves! One cannot encounter this sentence, this last coupling and ever worship a person again, I believe. It is counterintuitive to worship any human being who puts a yoke on you, who demands total loyalty, who beats you, blames you and takes no responsibility when they make an error. It defies rational and spiritual thinking to work for, to be yoked to and then worship someone who doesn’t work for, with you, someone who is so self-centered they cannot even see you as a human being.

I am struck with this coupling because, as I said above, in Hebrew they are the same word and I find this brilliant! Our ancestors knew that worship would take work, doing the next right thing was not necessarily an automatic response from our youth on. As the Bible teaches, “man is evil from his youth”. So the Jewish tradition has Mitzvot to help us stay “yoked” to the path of justice and mercy, truth and love, kindness and compassion. And we need to be yoked because our tendency is to stray, our tendency is to believe lies and deceptions, our tendency is to lie and deceive. We have to work to make a life that is compatible with being a divine need, that is compatible with being a ‘child’ of God, that is compatible with being a partner with God in completing creation.

Which brings us to questions that religion and spirituality come to respond to: “Who/what do I worship? For whom do I work?” While the answer seems like a “duh”, it is more nuanced that just God because we have seen how people bastardize the teachings of God and twist them into their own power trip, they become the arbiters of what God wants, what God is saying rather than encouraging each person to have their own revelation, their own experience and encounter with God. At the Red Sea and at Mount Sinai, everyone there had their own experience unlike anyone else’s because one cannot encounter God, one cannot work at building a life, one cannot copy what someone else does in the same way and expect to learn, gain, enjoy and or achieve their own unique purpose. Every day, we are asked the question: “Where are you?”, Rabbi Heschel, in this last phrase, is asking us to answer this question with “Here I am”.

In recovery, we learn early on that we have to release ourselves from the yoke of indecency, mendacity, power-seeking, false pride, false ego, self-deception. It is not an easy thing to do and it takes a lot of work, a lifetime job. Yet, we also learn that we have to choose to yoke ourselves to what is right and good, we have to put spiritual blinders on so we don’t stray from our new path as the old one beckons us back with all sorts of enticements. In recovery, our commitment is to change what we are yoked to and to whom we are yoked.

For many years, I was yoked to negativity, I was yoked to evil, I was yoked to deception and the need to be accepted, loved, recognized. My recovery began in a jail cell when I, unbeknownst to me at the time, heard and spoke the words God put in my mouth, not the words of the negativity and mendacity I had been yoked to for so long. This is how I threw off the yoke I had been wearing, almost. What I have come to learn, the remnants of the yoke, the scars of the beatings and impressions of both stay with me, they rear their ugly head from time to time and my worship of God, my work at recognizing the scars and impressions quicker keep me on this path. I have to work at my worship, I have to take action on my imperfections, I have to not apologize for who I am, only the wrongs/harms I commit. I have to stop being yoked to the old needs and be freer each day by strengthening the Yoke of Heaven that I wear. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark