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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 18

“The most unnoticed of all miracles is the miracle of repentance. It is not the same thing as rebirth; it is transformation, creation. In the dimension of time there is no going back. But the power of repentance causes time to be created backward and allows re-creation of the past to take place. Through the forgiving hand of God, harm and blemish which we have committed against the world and against ourselves will be extinguished, transformed into salvation.” (Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity)

As we ready ourselves for Sukkot, the holiday of Joy, seeing our own transformations and creations is appropriate and important, I believe. Too many of us have become stuck in certain ways of being that, while ‘normal’, have brought us to a place that I call “low-grade misery”. This is the place where we respond to the questions of “how are you”, “what’s happening”, etc with “okay”, “not much”. Our excitement comes from the next ‘killing’ we make, the achievements of our children, our hometown teams winning, and other outside ‘victories’. We even count the mitzvot we do like we are trying to keep our score high enough for god, for some entity that is non-existent, for how we look to the neighbors, etc.

Yet, even though Judaism itself is about our inner lives as well as our outer actions, we have become diligent and determined to ignore our inner life in favor of ego-driven emotions, in favor of mind-driven thoughts. We recreate ourselves through mind games and/or through mendacity and deception, not through T’Shuvah-return! It is time to either continue our journey of the month of Elul, the 10 days of T’Shuvah, and/or Yom Kippur itself of self-reflection, of inventory, of seeing the truth about ourselves, the beauty of our self, the ugliness of our actions, and the indifference our blames, shames, deflections and hiding.

We live in a world of smoke and mirrors much of the time, it is hard to be real, it is hard to be authentic. Yet, this is what all of Judaism, all of 12-Steps, all of Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, etc call for, authenticity, realness, truth and give us the path to achieving them. We have to begin to see how we have ignored these paths, be it Religious Science and/or Hinduism, God as Creator and/or Higher Consciousness as the power greater than ourselves, it doesn’t matter-because every true spiritual discipline leads to the same place, authentic living, truthful speech-inner and outer-, caring and loving actions towards self and another(s), and each one brings about the words of the Bible, “Proclaim Freedom throughout the land and to all its inhabitants thereof”! We can transform our self-made prisons into gardens of joy, love, kindness, justice and mercy if we are willing to see the truth of our self and the truth of our prior actions. While many of them have been great and life-saving/giving; they have been done with an eye to how they make me look, with an ego that is waiting to be stroked, with a non-spoken lien for collecting at a later date.

We learn that we are born with and always have two inclinations which Rabbi Harold Kushner taught me are: the earthly inclination and the Godly inclination. Both are necessary to our humanness and both need to be satisfied, fed and nurtured/grown. For too many of us we believe that our earthly inclination is all that is important either to satisfy it with more and more and more or to see it as the source of evil and try and starve it, kill it, ignore it, etc. Neither way is the correct way. The correct way is to transform our earthly inclination by feeding it in proper measure, and using the energy of this inclination to serve our Godly inclination, to serve our community, family, world and God. We have the compass to lead us here, we have the strength to endure the trek, do we have the will to make it happen, do we have the faith we can engage in our spiritual nature and transform our self-this is the great question each one of us has to respond to in our individual “dark nights of the soul”.

In recovery, we are aware of a daily and constant transformation and creation. We are in awe of our ability to make mistakes and learn from them rather than defend them or blame them on another(s). We are also aware of our daily growing, one or two steps at a time, until we are amazed at how far we have travelled. We are seeking transformation and creation each and every day, knowing we are not always going to see progress and having the faith to wait for the next challenge to appear.

I have been transforming myself for ever. I transformed me from a good kid with a good upbringing into a drunk, criminal, liar, cheat and thief. I created a persona that would get people to like me so I could take advantage of them. I then began the transformation from being a hustler for me to being a hustler for God. I have been working on this transformation and creation for the past 35+ years and it is really transforming the false self into my authentic self. It is a journey of trial and error, good and not good, ridicule, scorn, and love, devotion, truth seeking and self-deception, light and dark, moving forward and falling back. This journey is never done, the transformation is never complete, there is no line that says finish, no race to be won, only to live a life that is more or less compatible with being a partner of God, a life that is worthy of my daughter’s reverence, as Rabbi Heschel says. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 17

“The most unnoticed of all miracles is the miracle of repentance. It is not the same thing as rebirth; it is transformation, creation. In the dimension of time there is no going back. But the power of repentance causes time to be created backward and allows re-creation of the past to take place. Through the forgiving hand of God, harm and blemish which we have committed against the world and against ourselves will be extinguished, transformed into salvation.” (Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity)

The Gates of T’Shuvah are always open and we are taught to do T’Shuvah each and every day so, while Yom Kippur is past for this year, T’Shuvah is never over and done. I hope everyone had an experience of connection with their spirit, with community and with God yesterday. The word repentance conveys a meaning that could sound harsh and cold, punitive, and mean so I want to use the word T’Shuvah, or turn/return because T’Shuvah is the Hebrew equivalent of the word repentance.

The first sentence above could read: The most unnoticed of all miracles is the miracle of turning/returning! What a statement, what a thought! We do not notice the miraculous nature of T’Shuvah, the miraculous experience of turning back, returning to a way of being that is totally compatible with being a partner of God’s, totally congruent with our soul’s yearning and calling! How is this possible? How can this be true? Because we are stuck in our old ways, we are stuck in needing to be right/perfect, needing to be hurt/angry, needing to stay stuck in our patterns, fearing change, fearing facing our self in the mirror and the Ineffable One in our daily affairs.

We don’t notice the return of another person by not forgiving them their foibles, for exiling them because of their worst acts, by forgetting their best acts. We do this because truly forgiving another human being involves looking at our own actions in the relationship, seeing our errors and owning up to them so we can change, we can ask for forgiveness, so we can forgive ourselves. We are too afraid of this type of change, I believe because we still buy into the old adage; “a leopard doesn’t change its spots”, forgetting that we are humans, not leopards. While we have an animal part to us, we have a divine/human part that can control our ‘animal’ most of the time, and learning to control it more comes about from doing T’Shuvah. Another way this can be the “most unnoticed of all miracles” is because we are too hard on our self, expecting too much from our self. We judge our self by our worst, not our best actions. We have an expectation of perfection that blinds us to our incremental changes, to our progress, to our growing into our humanity a little more each and every day.

We engage in a practice of willful blindness so we don’t have to witness this miracle in another and we don’t have to do the work in ourselves. We have become so used to deny, deny, deny we have a hard time seeing truth, being honest with our self and with another human being. The thrust of T’Shuvah is to repair, return and have new responses, to change, to reconnect and to have hope/a new vision. We can’t do this if we are unwilling to notice the miraculous nature of T’Shuvah, if we are unwilling to dive into our own inventory, into the things we have missed the mark and the things we have done well. We can easily not notice the miracle of T’Shuvah when we are so focused on getting “it” right and not in what do we learn today about living one grain of sand better.

While it is understandable that we may miss the miracle of T’Shuvah in our self, missing it in another takes a concerted effort to stay angry, stay fearful, stay self-righteous, stay afraid to look at oneself. As it says in the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous, other people notice the change in us before we can notice it ourselves; so holding on to our need to be right, our need to make good people and bad people rather than seeing we are all both is the root of our soul sickness. Only through T’Shuvah, through returning to the words of the Prophets, “love mercy, do justly, walk in the ways of God” can we cure our spiritual malady. God wants and needs our return, we say three times a day in our daily prayers, and our family, friends, community does as well. In recovery, we learn this, we embrace this and we continue to do T’Shuvah in whatever form we choose, 10th step, rosary, confession, inventory, etc, in order to stay engaged in living well.

I have been engaged in this work for the past 35+ years and I am still surprised by things I did not notice: errors I have made that, at the time did not seem like errors; changes that have happened around me that I did not take note of; changes in my inner life that, upon realization, have helped me deal with life on life’s terms much better. I am constantly in awe of the miracle of T’Shuvah! For me, the miracle is that I live freer, better, and more in line with the Divine. I am more accepting, more resilient, more open, more connected to the Universe, to the call of God, the call of my soul, the call of another human being. Upon realizing all of these things, I see how they all begin with my action of T’Shuvah, my stepping into returning to the path, turning towards God by turning towards another person, learning, hearing and changing. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 - Day 16

“Before the judgment and memory of God we stand. How can we prove ourselves? How can we persist? How can we be steadfast? Through repentance.”(Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity)

I am not following yesterday’s quote with the next few paragraphs because tonight is Kol Nidre, the beginning of the Holiest Day of the year in the Jewish Calendar, a day when most Jews show up at Temple for expiation, for remembrance, and out of superstition, fear, memory, and hope. We want to believe we can be and are forgiven, even if we don’t believe in God, we want to remember our deceased relatives with others who understand loss. We go because we don’t want to tempt the fates, we go because we are afraid of judgement of another(s) if we are not seen. We go because we always have and we go in hopes of being moved, of having a spiritual experience. We fast for the day to ensure we don’t hide in food, we don’t hide in work, we don’t hide from our self!

Kol Nidre begins with asking for forgiveness for all of the things we did not get done in the past year and asking forgiveness for everything we will not finish in the year to come! Its an acknowledgment of our imperfect natures, of our exuberance to do more, better and the reality that it just might not happen. In the Mahzor, the Prayer Book for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, we recite the words of God in Numbers: “I have forgiven as you have spoken”.

This is the challenge, to speak the words of our errors, to go to people whom we have harmed and ask for their forgiveness, to forgive the people who ask for our forgiveness. An even greater challenge is to let go of our resentments towards people who have disappointed us, who have harmed us in ways we may not be able to articulate and we know the harm deep in our being. Tonight begins a 25 hour period of putting our hurts into words, crying out for healing and letting them go, asking for forgiveness from God and forgiving our selves for our imperfections. Rabbi Heschel reminds us in another teaching that when we harm another human being, we harm God, so after we ask for forgiveness from a person, we also have to ask for forgiveness from God, so the Kol Nidre Prayer encompass’ this ‘missing the mark’ as well.

“Through repentance” we prove ourselves worthy of our names, of our position, of our dignity, of our abundance. We are buoyed by our repentance and lifted up to new ways of living well through our previous failures when we learn from them. We are reminded of how much we matter when we are told how we have harmed another and how joyous this person/family/group is that we have returned. We are all ‘prodigal children’ to God and to one another, we all have been lost and Yom Kippur is the day we come out of hiding and allow ourselves to be found. This happens through T’Shuvah, “through repentance!”

I am so remorseful for the harm I have brought to people when I have missed the mark. It makes me ache when I confront myself with the relationships that have been lost because of my errors and another’s decision to not want to reconnect. It makes me sad to know that some people have decided to not forgive my errors and I accept their decision. I understand people’s decision to hold me responsible and not forgive. I understand people’s decision to forgive and not want to reconnect. I understand my own experiences of both of these decisions and it is usually out of a mistrust that the person making the amends is serious about changing. This makes me ache the most, that I cannot be trusted by some people to change, that I can’t trust another to change. The issue is my issue, not anyone else’s. It is an issue of spiritual immaturity that I am praying to grow in 5783.

I am powerless over the decisions another makes, I am powerless to change people’s minds and I am powerful over my choice to respond with acceptance or react with hurt. I choose the former! I also realize that resentments are very crafty, I just became aware of my inability to let go of certain experiences and how they are seen by another(s) as being a “victim”, which I do not feel like. I also have become aware that I have held onto a sense of not understanding peoples actions/reactions and allowing this not understanding to color my interactions with them. While I thought I had let go completely of any resentments, I have come to realize that I did not. For this I am very sorry and I pray people will forgive me.

I am in complete, or as complete as possible for this imperfect human being, forgiveness and compassion towards anyone who has harmed me. I don’t want any resentments standing in the middle of me and God, I don’t want any resentments standing in the way of me meeting my soul today and every day forward. I am truly sorrowful and ache for my errors and I am desperately in search of a resentment free 5783 and beyond. Have an easy fast, if you fast; have a good finish to Yom Kippur by being more connected to yourself than you were when you started; allow the experience to imbue you with the cleaning you need; God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 - Day 15

“Godliness is an absolute reality which exists through itself. It existed prior to the creation of the world and will survive the world in eternity. Sovereignty can exist only in a relationship. Without subordinates this honor is abstract. God desired kingship and from that will creation emerged. But now the kingly dignity of God depends on us.” (Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity)

The last sentence is almost too much to bear! “The kingly dignity of God depends on us” is a difficult concept to grasp for most people. If God is everything, if God is “King of the Universe” as the prayers on Yom Kippur say, why would God’s dignity depend on us? Isn’t it inherent? I believe the correct response is it is both inherent and dependent upon us.

We are responsible to follow the laws/ways of God, the sovereign of the universe, the creator of all. If we don’t believe in God, follow the laws of the universe, follow the moral call inside of us that so many people ignore, discard, trample. If we are not following these laws/ways of God, there is no respect for God, there is no respect for the power of the universe. There is only me, there is only humans are the king of the world and if I can beat you up, you have to give me dignity, you have to pay tribute to me, etc. And, as soon as we engage in this behavior, God’s “kingly dignity” goes away and we replace it with our own false dignity. As I write this, I am realizing, maybe for the first time and maybe once again, our inherent infinite human dignity cannot be seen nor activated until  we honor and acknowledge God’s “kingly dignity”.

As we can see in our politics, in the world’s affairs, there are people so bent on never giving God “kingly dignity” because they want all the fear, dignity, kingship for themselves. Putin in Russia is not giving God “kingly dignity”, he is trying to gain dignity and sovereignty through fear and semi-strength. He is a bully who has nuclear weapons and he has to be stopped by those of us who do give God “kingly dignity”. In our current political world, sovereignty is all that is important and many politicians believe they can have the power through mendacity, through fear-mongering, through scapegoating, etc. These ways fly in the face of “kingly dignity” because God doesn’t like false witnesses! Yet, we allow and listen to the lies of the politicians with an ‘ho hum’ attitude, we hold our noses when we vote, we engage in shouting at one another instead of finding our similarities and working out our differences with compromises and kindness. We allow ourselves to be so frightened by Putin’s nuclear threat that we watch Ukraine be decimated, we wring our hands and we worry about our own well-being.

One cannot give “kingly dignity” to God without standing up for the stranger, the widow, the orphan, the poor and the needy. One cannot give honor and respect to God while trying to “kill our competitors” in business with ruthlessness, with mendacity, with industrial espionage. One cannot give “kingly dignity” to God by giving lip service to God’s ways through religious behaviorism, through taking actions and never being moved in their inner life by these actions, by looking good rather than being moved to good in our higher consciousness. One cannot give “kingly dignity” when one is hellbent on being right, incapable of doing their own inventory, asking for forgiveness for their errors and forgiving another(s) for theirs.

There is a path to solving this dilemma, however. It is the path of repentance, the path of T’Shuvah, the path of moving forward. It is the path of the “Road less Travelled” as M.Scott Peck’s best selling book is titled. It is the path of wonder and radical amazement as Rabbi Heschel teaches. It is the path of God in Search of Man as Rabbi Heschel writes in his book of the same name. It is the path of trial and error, it is the path of truth overcoming our fears, it is the path of kindness trumping winning at all costs, it is the path of compassion for self and another rather than the expectation of perfection. All of these paths are the ones we commit to on Yom Kippur and then forget about until next Yom Kippur. Most Jews are not moved to admitting what they know that God’s “kingly dignity” is dependent upon them because they are not willing to be that in tune with their inner life, they have mistaken their inner life for their mental health, their inner life for their happiness. Our inner life is full of challenges and, as Rabbi Heschel teaches, the deeper the challenges, the richer the life!

In recovery, we are constantly seeking to align our will with God’s will, we are constantly seeking to give God dignity and respect. It is inherent throughout the first 3 steps of AA and in all forms of recovery, whether one uses the word God or some substitute.

In doing my inventory, I find the areas where and the missed opportunities to give “kingly dignity” to God and I am saddened and emboldened. Sad because it pains me, it makes me ache to realize my errors and emboldened because I am more committed to extend “kingly dignity” to God and to all of God’s creatures more and more. What I have found, however, is that arguing with God ala Abraham and Moses is also extending “kingly dignity” and arguing with one another does the same when it is for the benefit of principle and not personality, when it is for a moral value and not an ego boost. I have engaged in arguing for both principle and personality, moral value and ego boost. I am committed to increasing principle and moral value and lessen personality and ego boost, which are less this year than last. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 - Day 14

“Godliness is an absolute reality which exists through itself. It existed prior to the creation of the world and will survive the world in eternity. Sovereignty can exist only in a relationship. Without subordinates this honor is abstract. God desired kingship and from that will creation emerged. But now the kingly dignity of God depends on us.” (Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity)

One of the words in Hebrew which denote sovereignty is an offshoot of the word teacher. In Latin, sovereign comes from the word meaning “above”. One of the Hebrew words which denotes relationship is the same root as the word for Holy.  Hence, the 3rd sentence above could be understood as a Teacher who ‘stands’ above can only exist when we are connected and elevated. Without students, the Teacher’s honor is abstract. God desired an opportunity to be in connection and be a Teacher for humanity, for all creatures, and from this Will, this desire, creation occurred. Yet, it is only upon humans that the dignity of God depends. Dignity in the Hebrew is honor and in the Latin is worth.

Teacher, Sovereignty can only exist in a relationship, in a connection. With God this is always true, with humans, unfortunately, not always. We have, since the time of the Tower of Babel, tried to usurp God, be God, be the Ruler of the world, etc. We see this today with Putin and Ukraine, we saw this with Hitler and Nazi Germany, we see this with Orban and Hungary, with CPAC and the extremist right-wingers, with the prosperity Gospel believers, with any and every ‘only one-way’ philosophy/path. Rather than create a relationship based on respect, kindness, love, these deceivers create one based on fear, on power, on death-just as the Monarchs of olden times did. We say we are benevolent dictators and, while for a very few this may be true, we are not so benevolent when we are challenged, when our words are argued and debated and proven inaccurate. Then, most of us, become mean, scared and have to show how strong we are.

With God, our relationship is Kodosh, holy. It is a connection that we can take a time out from, and all of us do, and return to, hence this time of year being an intense period of returning. With God, we are respected, loved, cared for and missed. There are numerous stories in the Talmud about God’s pain when God’s children (us) are in exile and we humans are too stubborn, dull, blind to cling to the words of God, to the Will of God and to the connection to God. We want to ‘stand on our own two feet’ not realizing that with God as Teacher, as Sovereign, we are standing on our own two feet, living the life we are created for and, the greatness of God is that God’s always waiting for us to return, desiring to “heal our backsliding” and “take us back in love” as the Prophets teach us. This is what a relationship is meant to be, never without strife, never without hurt, never without errors, and always with a way back, always with a memory of the kindness and love that was freely given prior and always with healing and love.

Here again, we humans fall short. How many of us write someone off after one error. How often does one OH SHIT, wipe away 100 accolades? How often do we blame the one who makes the error without ever seeing our complicity, our part in the erroneous actions? How often can we, like God, say: “my children have defeated me” as God does in the Talmudic story of the Oven of Achnai? Yet, this time of year is replete with the spiritual forces of compassion and love, of forgiveness and return. We can, and I believe, must return to being compassionate with self, with loving our souls, with appreciating the dignity and worth of our being, with being teachable and in a connection with God that allows us to know we are forgiven, to forgive our self and to forgive all who ask for forgiveness. In these ways we return to our basic goodness of being, in these ways we return to our rightful place and in these ways we are never alone because we know God is with us always!

In recovery,  we remain teachable and open to the words of another(s) as we know God speaks through people. While we may not always agree with these words and/or opinions, we remain amenable to the possibility that someone has a better view of/perception of/understanding of a situation than we do. We desire to be “taken back in love” and for God to “heal our backsliding”. We are engaged in return and forgiveness each and every day.

As Yom Kippur nears, I want to again acknowledge my errors, my missing the marks in this past year and in years past. I am quite sorrowful for the harm known and unknown that I have caused. Knowing that everyone has a different perception of events, I cannot stand on ceremony or on my own “rightness," my own vision and deny someone else’s. To the people who feel harmed by my actions, I sincerely ask for forgiveness. For the people who have harmed me either knowingly or unknowingly, I forgive you. For people who don’t understand me, I am sad and for those who get me, I am grateful. This blog enriches my life, and while I have been told I sound like a ‘victim,' I am not nor do I feel like one. As all of us know, we harm and we are harmed and each of us has a different experience with this truth. I am moving forward, without regret for the past and with remorse for some of my actions. I pray you are too. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 - Day 13

“Godliness is an absolute reality which exists through itself. It existed prior to the creation of the world and will survive the world in eternity. Sovereignty can exist only in a relationship. Without subordinates this honor is abstract. God desired kingship and from that will creation emerged. But now the kingly dignity of God depends on us.” (Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity)

For many human beings the idea of Godliness seems too far away and is relegated to the few pious people like saints. Yet here, Rabbi Heschel is reminding us that Godliness is not just for the “pious”, it is within reach of all of us. It is a way of being, a state of being that preceded us and creation and will extend far beyond our mortality and even the ‘end of days’. And, we can say “so what” to this truth, we can do our usual slight of hand, lip service to Godliness, and wrap ourselves in ‘the Holy Book” to prove we are acting Godly while in actuality we are acting selfishly, we are living in mendacity and deception of another(s) and self, and we are saying one thing while believing in heart that we can do as we please, as Moses reminds us not to do in Deuteronomy.

As we are taught by Moses, Godliness is not on some high mountain, it is not across a large ocean, it is not hidden from us. Godliness is in our hearts, in our souls, in our mouths-the only entity stopping us from accessing and living in the Godliness community is us! We are all priests and holy souls, we are all precious gems having infinite dignity and worth, we are all deserving of honor through honoring another(s), we are all children/partners with God, we are all created Tzelem Elokim, in the Image of God, we all have a divine spark that radiates truth, goodness, kindness, justice, love and compassion. All of this is true and yet, we forget these truths, we ignore these truths, we get ‘drunk’ on our own ideas, on our own power, in our own ego, in an insatiable urge/desire to conquer and rule.

The truth that Godliness was here before and will be here after can make us humble enough, curious enough, and teachable enough to seek it. Yet, our hubris prevents us from accepting this truth. The story of the Tower of Babel is still being played out today, we are still trying to make it to the sky/heaven and be God instead of reaching for the stars to be one with God. We are still babbling with one another and more concerned with building our individual brand, proving we are the one, convincing you and me that my ways is the ONE WAY,  than we are with being one with one another and with God. We are, as always, at a crossroads where we have to decide as individuals and as communities and as a world whether life is more important than power, whether to “love thy neighbor” is more precious that loving one’s power, whether truth will trump our individual and collective mendacity. People will go to Temple on Tuesday Night and Wednesday and not be moved to this work, not be impacted by the day enough to ask for and grant forgiveness, a sadness and tragedy for God, for Godliness and for us all.

We can recover our Godliness and our humanity! It is not too far away as Moses taught. It is in our spirits, it is in our hearts, and it is in our minds. We have to surrender our reptile brain, we have to allow our reptile brain be confronted and defeated by our higher logic brain, we have to allow our minds to be confronted and defeated by our spirits/souls. We do this by letting go of our need for control, letting go of our need for power, letting go of our need to be right. In 4+ days we will celebrate the Day of At-One-Ment, also known as Yom Kippur. We celebrate a reconnection with Godliness, a re-covenanting with God, community, family and self. We celebrate our imperfections and acknowledge them out loud, and in a melody that points to our foolishness with believing we should be perfect. We get to celebrate this amazing day by doing the work, the joy of these days of T’Shuvah, these days of making amends and accepting the gratitude of another(s), these days of granting forgiveness to those who ask and having compassionate pity for those who can’t. We recover our Godliness through study, prayer and action. We recover our Godliness through surrendering our deceptions and lies replacing them with truth and kindness, justice and mercy, love and wholeness.

In recovery, we are able to recover our authentic selves by admitting and accepting that we are not the end all, be all. We no longer have to prove how smart we are, how rich we are, how capable we are, we just have to live smarter, live in the abundance we have, and live to the best of our ability in all of our affairs. Godliness is a gift that we have to unwrap each and every day and embrace it, use it wisely and enjoy the community and the ‘new/old’ home.

Knowing that I am but a speck in the grand scheme of world history helps me make more of a difference than less. It is this knowledge that motivates me to help another, to forgive those who have “trespassed against me”, as the Bedtime Shema commits us to. Godliness is the way to get unstuck from all that blocks the 3rd Chakra, the ego, the self-aggrandizement, the need to be right, the inability to be in truth and make amends, admit our errors. It has worked for me and it can work for all. I humbly ask for your forgiveness for anything I have done to harm you that I am unaware of. I have compassionate pity for those who are unable/unwilling to make amends to me for their actions. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 - Day 12

“Godliness is an absolute reality which exists through itself. It existed prior to the creation of the world and will survive the world in eternity. Sovereignty can exist only in a relationship. Without subordinates this honor is abstract. God desired kingship and from that will creation emerged. But now the kingly dignity of God depends on us.” (Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity)

Reading these words anytime can be a shock to our laziness and our egotism. At this time of year, when the forces of the spiritual world bend towards compassion, forgiveness and kindness, they, hopefully, hit us like a cold bucket of water when we are asleep, waking us up and sputtering about how much we did not realize what the time is. Godliness is not just the awareness of God, it is not just the awareness of a creative force, not just the awareness of a power greater than humankind, it is an awareness of the proper way of being in our everyday life, it is an awareness that fulfilling our egos, our desires, our inauthentic needs is not what life is really about.

Godliness is not a realm relegated to the clergy and the ‘pious’, it is a way of being that all humans are capable of and a path to wholeness and oneness of mind, body and spirit as well as oneness with community. Godliness doesn’t mean being okay with what is wrong, evil, broken in our personal, familial, communal, worldly lives. It means fighting for what is right, fighting to redeem our kin and we are all “kin under the skin” as my friend and teacher Pastor Mark Whitlock preaches. Godliness is a commitment to repair our corner of the world by adding our unique gifts and talents to raise up our standard of living and the standard of living of those around us. Godliness is not just an action, it is a state of being, it is a level of existence that is within our grasp, an address we can live in and at, a way of living that we will err in and return to; once we make Godliness our home.

Herein is the challenge of the first sentence above. Are we willing to move to the community of Godliness? It is a community that has always existed and will exist long after we and the world are gone and we have to choose to be a part of this community, we have to choose to move back to this development. It is a larger development than the world itself and there are a lot of vacant homes in it. These vacancies are caused by our leaving this community, they are caused by our hubris, our egotism, our need for recognition, our need to be scientifically based and sound, our need for power, prestige,  money and … Many of the people who proclaim their adherence to god’s will and god’s laws are idolators and charlatans. They have deceived themselves and the rest of us into believing they are the epitome of Godliness all the while denying the compassion, acceptance, T’Shuvah, love, truth, kindness and concern that God expresses in the Bible.

We, the people, have seats waiting for us in the world of Godliness, there are chairs and homes that have our names on them-waiting for us to claim our rightful place. We cannot do this when we are stuck in ego, hurt, identity, anger, self-importance. While all of these have their usefulness, in proper measure, when we get stuck in any of these and many more traits, we lose our way and home seems too far away to ever reach. Hence, comes Yom Kippur in 6 days to remind us that home is available, home is waiting and home is calling to us and we have to do the heavy lifting of clearing out the mendacity and deceptions that have been getting in the way of our finding our way back home. We have to stop listening to the conventional wisdom, the TikTok videos, the Facebook likes, the Instagram pics and listen to our inner voices, listen to and for the call of our souls and follow the road back home to Godliness, to union with our higher self, our higher consciousness, God, the Ineffable One, and, with all humans who also have a home in the Community of Godliness.

Recovery is a space to regain our Godliness. It is a roadmap back home to our inner goodness, our inner spirit, our inner joy, our inner connections to a Higher Power and one another. A lot of people believe that recovery is only for alcoholics and addicts and it isn’t. It is another spiritual discipline that helps people find their way back home, back to living humanely rather than transactionally, loving rather than selfishly, kindly rather than greedily. In recovery, we are recovering our integrity, our dignity and our truthfulness.

I returned to the community of Godliness many years ago, when I was in prison in 1987. I haven’t always acted in the ways of Godliness and I know this state of being is where I have the best life. I make mistakes, I do the best I can to repair them. I know I get bombastic when I perceive injustice towards myself, towards the people closest to me and in the world. I get a “fire in the belly” and speak loudly and forcefully. I really can’t help myself, I believe I inherited this from my father, z”l. And, I don’t want to lose this because when I did before, I lost my way home to Godliness for over 20 years, I harmed the people I loved the most and I was bereft. I do make my amends for the errors I make, the ways I forget to live in a way that is compatible with Godliness and I never apologize for my “fire in the belly” that God has placed in me. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark.

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 - Day 10

“The world has fallen away from God. The decision of each individual person and of the many stands in opposition to God. Through our dullness and obstinacy we, too, are antagonists. But still, sometimes we ache when we see God betrayed and abandoned.” (Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity)

This wisdom is so important for us to incorporate into our ways of living, it is crucial for us, at this time of year and in all of our days of living, to ask ourselves the questions and meditate on the thoughts of the previous days I have been writing on these words of Rabbi Heschel. As he said in his interview with Carl Stern, anyone who  doesn’t think they have any problems, anyone who believes they can solve everything, is an idiot, so too with anyone who believes they always stand with God, so to with anyone who continues to blame another(s) for the tragedies that befall a nation, a community, an individual, they are idiots!

When 9/11 is blamed on infidels, when AIDS is blamed on LGBTQ+ people, when the pandemic is called a sign of God’s anger with us, when all of these blaming and shaming are used to get people to ‘come to Jesus’, we know it is mendacity and deception in play. When we blame our troubles on another so as to not take responsibility for our part, we self-deception is in play. When we blame the innocent victims, like women who are raped, children who are molested, because of their ‘enticement’, we experience these supposedly people of faith lying and bastardizing God’s words and desires. When politicians wave the flag and proclaim loyalty to God and Country while taking freedoms away from people, treating the stranger with disgust and indulging in senseless hatred of anyone who doesn’t ‘toe the line’ of their ideology, we are watching history repeat itself as it has since the destruction of the 1st Temple.

Yet, the last sentence above gives us all hope! As long as we can ache, as long as we can, at sometime, recognize the betrayal and abandonment of God, we are not lost forever. Each one of us matters is what comes to my soul as I read and meditate on the last sentence above. While it is said in the plural, we, it takes at least 2 ‘I’s’ to make a ‘We’! Our ability to ache is something we have to also write down and contemplate as we do our inventory and work of T’Shuvah in these next 7 days. Our aches and pains are signs of our return, are guides to our way back to the life we want to live, the life we need to live, the life we were born to live and the life with passion, purpose and connection that is our birthright. Aching allows us to leave the unnecessary suffering of ‘woe is me’, ‘I am so bad’, the indulgence in self-pity that keeps us enslaved to betraying and abandoning God, our authentic self. Aching is a spiritual awakening that, Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom is teaching us that aching is the realization of how far we have strayed and how much we need to and want to return to our core, to our authentic self, to our community, to God.

There is not “one true faith” so we have to take our aching and find the spiritual discipline, the path that works for us, that sings to our soul and allows our soul’s voice to join in the choir and the cacophony of voices of this or that particular faith/discipline/philosophy. All true paths are welcoming of the true paths of another discipline. We are told there are 70 ways to understand the Torah, so who can be so arrogant as to say: “Only my interpretation is correct”, a liar, a charlatan, an abandoner of God, a betrayer of God. We have to be careful of these deceivers and we have to be careful to not engage in self-deception. Remember the words of the prophet: “do justly, love mercy and walk humbly with God.” This is the motto for those of us who use our aches as the opening to return to God of our understanding, who use our aches to welcome and engage with people from every walk of life, who use our aches to reconnect with our inner life and live our soul’s knowledge rather than our mind’s wisdom and rationalizations.

In recovery, our aching is our sign that we are on the right path, the path of returning to a decent way of living, a path of returning to caring for our self and for another(s) dignity and well-being. We use our aching as a signal to be aware of what is going on, don’t phone it in, stop taking things for granted and check in with our soul, with our friends, to make sure we haven’t drifted off this new path even slightly. We are using our aching to constantly self-correct before we get too far off the path and find ourselves lost again.

My aching has led to amazing breakthroughs in my living. This aching and Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom and the wisdom of his daughter, Dr. Susannah Heschel, have led me to not have resentments, to accept the negative actions of another(s) towards me with sadness, pain at times, and then to ache for their healing and returning to God. My aching reminds me that, while I personally suffer some effects, these negative actions are much more about the person perpetrating them than about me. Just as my negativity prior to recovery was not personal towards the individual, it was about me needing an outlet for my anger, resentments, etc, so too, I realize, are the negative actions people take towards me their outlet for their own inner anger, resentment of themselves. My aching propels me to pray for these people, to wish for their return to truth and authenticity rather than blame, “poor me”, optics, perfection. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 - Day 10

“The world has fallen away from God. The decision of each individual person and of the many stands in opposition to God. Through our dullness and obstinacy we, too, are antagonists. But still, sometimes we ache when we see God betrayed and abandoned.” (Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity)

I am amazed at how we still cannot find the strength to ache, when we need to defend ourselves and rationalize our betrayals and abandonments of God, of Godliness, of decency, of truth, of owing. Owing is one of the major causes of abandonment and betrayal, I am coming to believe. Our debt to God for the gift of life, for the many gifts we have been graced with is too much for many of us. The weight of this debt and the repayment is seen as onerous by many. “What do you mean, I have to care for the stranger, the poor, the needy-let them figure it out themselves, I did” is a common refrain/response to the demand for Tzedakah as ‘charity’. “They had a lawyer and due process was followed” is a refrain I heard from Antonia Scalia when asked about his decision to let an innocent man be put to death in Texas-not exactly following the demand of God to “run after righteousness! Rather than ache, we blame, defend and get angry/offended that our integrity is being questioned. Never once thinking about the integrity of God, the integrity of our Covenant with God is being abandoned and betrayed. We owe one another dignity and truth, kindness and compassion, justice and love, according to the Hebrew Bible. These seem to be in short supply today as much as they have been in the past. Yet, we still have 9 days to rectify this situation, 9 days to replenish our supply of these basic traits and actions that signify our reconnection with God, our surrender to Godliness, our awareness of truth, our persistence of a path of decency as shown in the Torah, and our using the gift of T’Shuvah to correct our missing the marks, to return to a way of being that is compatible with being a partner of God!

We have become so risk averse, so afraid of the next lawsuit, we have stopped following God’s demand, we have stopped hearing the call of the universe, of our neighbor, of our own souls. Our fears of being left out, our fears of not having a seat at the table, our fears of being exploited rather than the exploiter, lead us to abandon and betray God and the ache we need to experience becomes smoothed over by optics, by rationalizations, by self-deceptions. In the next 9 days, we do, however, have the opportunity to leave these self-deceptions, these rationalizations, the need for optics to cover truth and return to the God, Godliness. It will take a concerted effort and “the courage to change the things we can” as Reinhold Niebuhr teaches us in the Serenity Prayer. It will take a daily practice of being grateful one owes, a daily practice of being joyous that we can repay the confidence God has in us to do the next right thing, a daily practice of letting go of our need to be right, a daily practice of self-examination, a daily practice of turning our will over to God and accepting God’s will for us, as a community and as an individual. None of these practices will engender the change we need to make for our self, for God, for another human being, for community until we let go of our need to rationalize, our need to let fear rule us, our need to look good through optics and not see how we don’t walk our talk.

Aching is such a painful experience and one that is necessary for us. When we ache, we connect with the sadness, the pain of the downtrodden, some of whom we have stepped on. When we ache we connect with our own experiences of betrayals and abandonments so we are very aware of God’s experiences of our betrayals and abandonments. I use God to include nature, force of the cosmos, the collective human community, not an actual material being. When we ache, we give ourselves the opportunity to go through the pain we have caused our self and another self rather than hide, blame and rationalize. When we ache, we see how to correct the source of our sorrow and pain, we see how to let go of our old ideas and ways, how to be maladjusted to what the ‘societal norms’ dictate and be our true, authentic self that is of service through acts of lovingkindness.

One of the sayings we learn in recovery, early on, is “you can’t save your face and your ass at the same time”. How true this is, saving our ass means going through the aches our behaviors and ways of being have brought about. Saving our ass means taking these 9 days to get real and clean and then every day after continue to do maintenance to keep “our side of the street clean”. This is the path recovery suggests to/for our self.

I ache because in this writing I realize how I have let pride, ego, fear get me to abandon and betray God. I have been worried about how I will be viewed and not what is the next right thing to do. I have been stifled by ‘the lawyers’ and the need to protect assets. I ache because in today’s world, this is normal and truth has no place in a courtroom, God has no place in some Jewish Institutions, decency and what is right has no place with some Clergy, and courage to stand up is somewhat lacking when faced with loss of everything I/we have worked for. I ache because the place we created has told Harriet to clear out her office, told us we are not welcome there. I ache because years ago I was told and, to some extent, saw what the future could be and I ignored it. I ache for the lost souls who need to prove their ‘rightness’ at the expense of their souls and the souls/lives of another(s). God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 - Day 9

“The world has fallen away from God. The decision of each individual person and of the many stands in opposition to God. Through our dullness and obstinacy we, too, are antagonists. But still, sometimes we ache when we see God betrayed and abandoned.” (Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity).

On this first day of 5783 do we ache? Do we see the myriad of ways we have abandoned and betrayed God? Do we see the paths we have taken that betray our soul’s calling? Do we ache for these choices? Do we take the time to pay attention to the harm we bring to our self, to another(s) self, to God from our inability to ache, our inability to take personal inventory? Do we bother to ask ourselves these questions during the year, at this time of year? These are the questions haunting most of us, now and always, whether we are consciously aware of them nagging at our inner life, bothering our conscience, niggling at our souls or not. This theme of aching, this wisdom as to our dullness and obstinacy, the truth of our standing in opposition to God always are in our minds, hearts, souls and our failure to recognize them is the root of our problems personally, communally, globally.

These next 10 days are for us to seek out and search out our betrayals of God, our betrayals of our authentic self, and our betrayals of all human beings around us. As one of the Confessionals teach us: I am guilty, I have betrayed, I have misappropriated, I have engaged in negative speech; and our work today, for the next 10 days and for every day after is to seek out the subtle and not-so-subtle ways we continue to betray. An example of being in opposition to God is ignoring the poor and the needy in our midst-the homeless/unhoused people around us whom we have helped to be in this situation through exorbitant rents/housing prices, through no safety network, ridiculous health care costs and so many other morally correct fixes. Yet, many of the ‘supposedly people of faith’ don’t care for them because they either don’t vote, don’t vote their way, and/or see them as unimportant; while espousing how much god rules their living. This god of theirs is an idol they have carved out of stone because their god doesn’t care for the poor, the needy, the stranger, the powerless, etc while God in the Bible, while Jesus in the Christian Bible care for these entities deeply and profoundly. Maybe these ‘people of no-real-faith’ can serve the rest of us as examples of betraying God and trying to stay oblivious to this truth, as an example of the subtle ways we have “fallen away from God”. How can they not ache, one would wonder!

While it is easy to point the finger outwards, we have to look inwards and see how our actions are as idolatrous as those above. What are the ways we have fallen away from God and stayed in denial of this truth? How have we rationalized our dullness and obstinacy? How have we ignored the nagging, the niggling, the bothering that is constantly happening in our subconscious, unconscious, conscience, soul? How do we ignore the person on the street walking past us? Do we say hello to everyone we encounter so we let them know they matter, they are seen? In these 10 days we acknowledge being seen by God, by self (hopefully), and we continue to ignore people we encounter every day. Taking a lesson from our father, my late brother Stuart who was in the old home because of his MS, would sit outside in his motorized wheel chair, smoke his cigarettes and say hello to everyone. Most people completely ignored him, and of the rest who at least looked up, less than 50% would respond. While he would never admit it, I saw the hurt in his soul that people could not acknowledge his presence, his kindness, his attempt to connect. I saw the ache in his soul and I knew the ache of God at that moment. Even with 2 brothers as Rabbis, Stuart wasn’t so religious and he was deeply connected to people and longed for connection like we long for air to breathe. Do you experience the ache inside of you when you ignore people? Do you experience the ache inside of you because of being dull and obstinate?

Most of us begin our recovery because we finally experience an ache and an insight as to how we have betrayed and abandoned God, higher self, our covenant with another(s), etc. We run out of rationalizations, we run into a wall of mirrors that cause us to face our self, our demons within and our heroes within. We engage in a searching and fearless moral inventory and find our moral compass again, restore our connection to our soul, to our inner life, to our Higher Consciousness, our subconsciousness, to our personal relationship with a power greater than ourselves.

I have ached each day of my life and prior to studying with Rabbi Heschel through his writings, I ached for what I did not have, for what I wanted, for my self-centered needs and my unnecessary suffering over what I believed were the injuries people inflicted on me. While I still experience injuries, I no longer ache over them, I don’t long for my self-centered needs and I want what I have rather than having what I want. I ache today for my betrayal of God, my abandonment of Godliness in all my affairs, my dullness and obstinacy to accept what is and to see the handwriting on the wall. I ache today for the ways I have not been an advocate for my soul, for the souls of another(s), not been an advocate of and for Godliness. I ache when I hear mendacity and deceptions, I ache when I realize my own and anothers’ self-deceptions. I pray our aches turn us into spiritual warriors a little more in 5783! God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 - Day 8

“The world has fallen away from God. The decision of each individual person and of the many stands in opposition to God. Through our dullness and obstinacy we, too, are antagonists. But still, sometimes we ache when we see God betrayed and abandoned.” (Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity).

As we enter the new year in the Jewish Calendar of 5783 tonight, the last sentence above seems especially poignant. We are, as I believe Rabbi Heschel was experiencing, an ache because of the betrayal and abandonment of God by all of us, and especially by Jewish people and tonight, tomorrow, during the 10 days of T’Shuvah, the 10 days of Awe, we are called to account for these betrayals and abandonments and make a commitment to return, to do T’Shuvah, to turn back to the principles and values that we accepted at Mount Sinai, that we have learned to use as the foundations of our actions, to stay rooted and grounded in God instead of mendacity, instead of deception, instead of inauthentic needs.

Looking at the world in this moment should cause all of us to ache, all of us to see the betrayal and abandonment of God in the actions of Trump’s good friend, Vladimir Putin. We have not done all we can as a country, as individuals to stop the atrocities of Putin and his minions in Ukraine because of a realistic fear of nuclear war. Yet, our country was created and stands because men and women went beyond their realistic fears to fight for the freedom that we take for granted. God wants all people to be free, God wants all people to find ways to serve one another, serve God and, as the Prophets teach: “nation shall not lift up sword anymore, neither shall they learn war anymore”(Isaiah 2:4). We learn war, it is not as natural as people think, it is not ‘second nature’, it is a learned action that we can choose to unlearn when we choose to be close to and honor the gifts of life God gives us.

How can we not ache when we see the Republican Party embrace a demagogue like Viktor Orban? How can we not ache when we see so-called religious Jews embrace Orban who uses anti-semitic tropes in his speeches, who uses Jew as the bogeyman like Hitler before him? How can we not ache when these same ‘the only real Jews’ go directly against the commandments of God by bearing false witness, killing the souls of their own children, running with the majority to do evil, hating their neighbor in their hearts, using the kindness of democracy to serve themselves at the expense of everyone/anyone else? How can we not ache?

How can we not ache when we see how LGBTQ+ are treated as pariahs, as not worthy human beings, when we abandon and betray God by berating this group/individual rather than, as the Talmud teaches, go to their maker and complain? How can we not ache when Jews are willing to abandon the values and principles of Torah in favor of optics? How can we not ache when we treat women as 2nd class citizens even though Rashi taught his daughters Torah and Talmud, even though the stories of women saving the Jewish people are throughout the Hebrew Bible? How can we not ache when Israel treats the minority Arabs as their ancestors were treated throughout history-as less than rather than giving them their proper seats at the table? How can we not ache when Jews treat the stranger poorly even though 36 times in the Torah we are told to treat the stranger well because we were strangers in Egypt? How can we not ache?

How can we not ache when we bow down to MBS for oil and for geo-political reasons even though he is a murderer, a despot? How can we not ache when Jarod Kushner, Donald Trump, his children and his cronies raped the Federal Government for their own wealth and now are in bed with MBS and the rest of the oligarchs, plutocrats, who abandon and betray God with almost every breath? How can we not ache when the MAGA Republicans are trying to overtake this country by making sure there are not free and fair elections? How can we not ache when we stand by and watch Mealy Mouth McCarthy and Moscow Mitch bow down to Trump, DeSantis, Abbott, et al knowing they want to end democracy? How can we not ache when the Democrats can’t use their majority to end the blight and stain on our country by not passing voting rights, by not passing protections for women, for minorities, by not ensuring we are a nation of Religious Freedom not a Christian Nation as some of these charlatans want! How can we not ache when Jews are supporting the very people who want to turn the US into a Christian Nation? How can we not ache?

In recovery, our realization of how much we abandoned and betrayed God, family, self is what motivated our change. The ache became too great to ignore, there was no amount of self-deception that could stop the ache anymore and we made a decision to turn back to God, to principles, to values, to moral behaviors, to love, kindness, justice, compassion and truth. The ache is still present with every imperfect action we take and we know how to lessen it, how to heal it now-return to decency, return to authenticity, return to loving God and being loved by God.

I ache for all the reasons above and more. A sweet 5783, a good 5783 and God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2- Day 7

“The world has fallen away from God. The decision of each individual person and of the many stands in opposition to God. Through our dullness and obstinacy we, too, are antagonists. But still, sometimes we ache when we see God betrayed and abandoned.” (Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity).

Antagonist comes from the Greek meaning “struggle against” and it is an apt word to use regarding the way humans consistently “stand in opposition to God”. Through our crazy and persistent struggle against decency, spirit, Godliness we are witnessing the unmaking again of hope, truth, love, kindness, compassion, justice. This is happening, I believe, as an outgrowth of our identifying with our hurt and pain so we engage in unnecessary suffering/neurotic suffering. We hold on to resentments a lot longer than we hold onto gratitude in most cases. We nurse our wounds physically, mentally, emotionally a lot longer than the pain of these wounds last. We fail to realize that unnecessary suffering keeps us in opposition to God, keeps us struggling against what we know is the next right action to take and we persist in this craziness.


We do this because we keep believing the lies and deceptions of another(s), we believe that some human can fix us, some human will beat up our ‘opponents’ and we will get even and vindicated. We are looking for mommy and daddy to make our wounds feel all better! We have been taught by example that it is easier to feel bad than do good, it is easier to blame than be responsible for our part only, it is safer to keep the status quo rather than be maladjusted to these ‘normal’ ways of living. We have made unnecessary suffering a badge of honor, a way of thinking and acting that allows us to abuse another person because our wounds are worse than theirs, our mistreatment was/is worse than yours, it has been going on longer than yours, etc. The self-help book shelves are full of the answer, the mindfulness has become an industry, life-coaching is a big business, all because people are in search of relief to their wounds, relief from their sufferings without ever realizing their contribution to this unnecessary suffering.

When we allow the pain of our wounds to pass, when we examine our part in our suffering, when we can accept that people enjoy hurting another for their own gain; emotional, mental, financial and accept what is rather than complaining, rather than immersing our selves in our  hurts, rather than languishing in our suffering, we are on the road back to our own Godliness, our own healthy road of living, and our own shedding of the skin of negativity. We do this by doing the work of this time of year: making an inventory of the ways we are not being who we are and the ways we are being authentic. Writing down what blocks us from being partners with God, true to our souls nature, belonging to a community that heals instead of hurts, that uplifts instead of putting down, that believes in the power of the human spirit instead of believing in their own power. In this writing we find our ability to hear our soul’s call, the call of Godliness that has been blocked for a while and/or gets blocked in certain situations. We find the persistent and crazy ways we struggle against our own best interests, our own Godliness in order to ‘keep up with the Jones’ in order to feel like we are part of something, in order to be vindicated in our suffering.

Pain is an essential part of being human. The first pain is the separation from the energy of the universe when we are born. We are all spirit prior to this moment and now we are matter and spirit. How to incorporate these two seemingly opposites is a life-long adventure and no one gets it perfectly nor constantly correct! We experience pain often and many of us are so engaged in our suffering we can no longer discern when the pain is gone and where the suffering has begun. We are able, however, to let go of our struggle against Godliness, we are able to surrender to the Higher Truth of Godliness and we are able to surrender our suffering so we can find our authentic self. This is the challenge and the work of all spiritual disciplines. This is the essence of religious traditions, eastern philosophies, and spiritual paths-letting go of suffering and embracing  momentary pain while growing and learning from the pain as well.

In recovery, we are recovering our Godliness, we are recovering our basic goodness of being and we are letting go of the suffering we held onto for so long. We realize the suffering did us no good, it harmed us and we, in turn, harmed those around us. We realize we are not doomed to living a life not of our making and we become aware of our need to be partners with God, with another(s) to improve our corner of the world and lean into our authentic self.

Unnecessary suffering has always been a bad friend to me. I know it has made me resentful in the past, it is a path that leads to my inner turmoil and to my misery. I still go there at times, I just leave this way of being much quicker. This doesn’t mean that I take on the burden of every situation, it doesn’t mean that I accept all blame and responsibility for any given incident, it means that I accept and acknowledge my part and feel sadness and pathos for someone who can’t accept theirs. I am freer this year than last because I continue to realize the subtlety of unnecessary suffering, experience the pain, ask God and people close to me for help and move forward. I forgive the people who are unable to take responsibility for their part as God has forgiven me in the past. This is one way I practice Godliness. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2- Day 6

“The world has fallen away from God. The decision of each individual person and of the many stands in opposition to God. Through our dullness and obstinacy we, too, are antagonists. But still, sometimes we ache when we see God betrayed and abandoned.” (Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity).

The word dull comes from the German meaning “crazy” and the word obstinate comes from the Latin meaning “persist”and antagonist comes from the Greek meaning “struggle against”. The third sentence above could be read as “through our insanity/craziness and our persistence (of this crazy/insane way of being) we, too are struggling against (God). Understanding Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom using the roots of the words gives us different ways to immerse ourselves in his teachings and immerse ourselves in being human a little more each day. I know I am more human from his words and brilliance and I pray that everyone would immerse themselves in his brilliance so we all can be human a little more each day.

What makes us continue to persist in our crazy thinking and acting in opposition to God? I have thought and pondered this question in many forms for a very long time and I realize one response is that we mistakenly think we are God! We continue to see ourselves as the supreme being of and in this world. We believe Napoleon Hill who said: “what the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve.” While many great things have been created by humans, it is not the mind that conceives the need for such things, it is the spirit, I believe. It is not the mind that came up with the need for penicillin, it was the deep pain and need that Alexander Fleming’s soul experienced that led to his mind understanding and discovering penicillin, I believe. Most scientists are driven by deep spiritual needs to find cures such as antiseptics, sterile conditions in surgery, etc. Yet, when we follow the words of Napoleon Hill too literally, we begin to believe the lies we tell ourselves, we begin to solidify the mendacious thought that there is nothing greater in the Universe than humankind, we begin to believe we are greater than God, greater than the creative force of the Universe!

We see this craziness and persistence in the words of politicians, rulers, despots, authoritarians, and our selves if we are willing to engage in the work of T’Shuvah, the work of personal inventory, the work of seeing the whole picture of our life and what is going on in our world. We are part of the persistent craziness that has haunted our world since forever! We buy into the Greek and Roman belief that we can be perfect or at least should be, we buy into the American belief of greatness and superiority, we buy into the America First idea of Henry Ford, Father Coughlin, Lindberg who were deeply anti-semitic and supported Hitler only today it is Putin, Orban, MBS who are being courted and loved for their ‘defense of white people’ and their stranglehold on the people they are supposed to be caring for. We see the persistent craziness of our personal lives in continuing to believe we should be “HAPPY” all the time, that we are only as happy as our unhappiest child, we compare and compete with ghosts of the past, people in the present and vie for some prize in the future. We continue to point fingers at another(s) and blame everyone for our ills rather than search out our inner persistent crazy beliefs and ideas.

Judaism in particular and religion in general call for us to do this inner inventory daily. We are called to account for our self once a year in a grand way, Yom Kippur, and are given the instruction to prepare for this day by engaging in a Soul Accounting for the 40 days prior, to see where we have done well/better than the year before and where we have missed the mark/made some of the same errors as the year before along with new ones. We are forced to see the ways our persistent craziness has harmed human beings around us and far away from us, harmed nature, harmed God and harmed our self. It is the time to continue/begin this work as Yom Kippur is 12 days from beginning. It is not just the awareness of our persistent craziness that matters, it is how we change our ‘stinking thinking’, how we make a plan to hear the call of our soul, how our spiritual growth becomes more important than our financial growth, our mind’s growth because our spiritual growth will lead all areas of our living to a new and mind-blowing growth.

Rabbi Heschel’s words have a profound impact on me each day, week, month, and year. This writing from 1936 is bone-chilling to me because I see the demagogues spouting their lies, I see the persistent craziness of their ‘followers’ and I experience an inner persistent craziness to what they are saying and doing. As a Jew, as a human being, I have to speak out, I have to do something, so I vote, I write, I say hello to everyone I meet, I continue to uncover and discover more hiding places and I am dedicated to let the persistent craziness of my negative thoughts, my less than/more than thinking, my need to prove my truth, my desire to ‘win’ leave me quickly when it comes up so I can stand with God, so I can surrender to God, so I can nullify my will before God’s will in order for God’s Will to become mine as Pirke Avot teaches. My dedication is paying dividends, I no longer resent the people who are unkind, who lie, who engage in their persistent craziness and I stand with God in opposition to them! God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark.

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2- Day 5

“The world has fallen away from God. The decision of each individual person and of the many stands in opposition to God. Through our dullness and obstinacy we, too, are antagonists. But still, sometimes we ache when we see God betrayed and abandoned.” (Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity).

Many of us are unable to hear Rabbi Heschel’s words, too willfully deaf to understand he is talking to all of us, too enamored with our false self, all of the mental make-up that Rabbi Heschel speaks about in later writings to ever believe he is speaking to us. Yet he is. Historically, he is writing the Jews in Germany and surrounding Europe as Hitler’s rise to power and hold on power is more and more concerning, while many Jews see this as another progrom they will weather. So many people since 1936 have been unable/unwilling/too willful to hear, take in, immerse themselves in these words of warning and wisdom.

So, what of us here and now? What is it about our nature that keeps us wittingly and unwittingly “in opposition to God”? Knowing what we know from our history as human beings, knowing what we know about the dangers of the angry rants and ramblings of demagogues, we still make a decision to “stand in opposition to God”, stand in opposition to our best interests? It is, on the surface, ridiculous and, yet, it isn’t. Our need to go along to get along, our need to be part of ‘the group’, the ‘cool ones’, the ‘power circle’, the ‘right side of things’ is so strong it moves us to applaud sending migrants to Kamala Harris’ residence in DC, to support dark money, to chant ‘lock her up’ while praising the real criminals. This need to be part of is an authentic need, just one that is being used against us by the grifters and charlatans and we are mistaken in what group we need to be part of.

Human beings, throughout the ages, have been drawn to authoritarians and demagogues all the while forgetting that what someone will do to someone else, they will do to you unless they do T’Shuvah. Humanity has suffered at the hands of these authoritarians, these demagogues to the point of revolutions, beginning with the Pharaoh in Egypt and continuing to this day. Yet, we forget these painful lessons of being enslaved by another because we are too enslaved by our own fears of being left out, by our FOMO fears. We then allow ourselves to stand with the liars and practitioners of mendacity and “in opposition to God”! We are so good at self-deception we believe our own lies in order to be in the “in group”. Jews are not going to be part of the “In Crowd” of white supremacists, demagogues, authoritarians no matter what Netanyahu and others may believe. When Jews try and out demagogue the authoritarians to show their bona fides, they definitely are being willfully deaf, dumb and blind to Rabbi Heschel’s warning above. They are definitely standing “in opposition to God”!

We do, however, are gifted with the antidote to our usual behaviors. We are shown the path back to God, back to a way of living that honors our authentic needs, serves the authentic needs of another(s) and allows our soul’s knowledge to lead us forward through T’Shuvah. In these next 13-14 days, we have the spiritual sustenance in the universe  to unblock our hearing, to wipe away the mucus from our eyes that blocks our ability to see our foibles, to let go of optics, to stop blaming everyone else and be responsible for our part. Through T’Shuvah we can stop our fall from God, stop our fall from grace, stop our fall from our status as God’s Partners, stop our fall into slavery. We do this be being in truth with our self, being more afraid of hiding from God anymore than we are in seeing our errors and missteps. We do this by being scrupulous about our Soul Inventory, listing the assets AND the liabilities, we do this by taking seriously the inner meaning of the words of the confessionals on Yom Kippur, asking our self how we have been guilty and of what, how we have betrayed and whom, including God and self, what have we stolen from God, self, another(s) and how have we defamed our self, God and another(s) with our negative speech. Doing the same for how we have been decent, stayed loyal, used gifts wisely and uplifted  with positive speech is crucial for us to get the whole picture of our year, our life.

In recovery we call this being rigorously honest with our selves. We then tell another human being who is a guide, a spiritual counselor, a sponsor, as well as God and our own self the ways we have erred and the ways we have improved from one year to the next, one day to the next. We know the dangers of believing our own press, we know the dangers of standing “in opposition to God” because we did for a while and it brought pain, suffering, degradation and defeat to us and the people around us!

I hear Rabbi Heschel’s words loud and clear. I hear the call to examine the ways I have stood “in opposition to God” as well as the ways I have stood with God, stood for and with the next right action, stood against the charlatans and the liars. I am embarrassed at the times I haven’t out of fear, out of ‘is it worth it’ attitudes. It is always worth standing for truth, standing for God. Rabbi Heschel’s words are calling to me to stop hiding, look deep within to see what I am hiding and whom I am hiding from. More tomorrow on this. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2- Day 4

“The world has fallen away from God. The decision of each individual person and of the many stands in opposition to God. Through our dullness and obstinacy we, too, are antagonists. But still, sometimes we ache when we see God betrayed and abandoned.” (Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity).

Rabbi Heschel’s words above should give us all pause as we are entering these Holy Days of self-searching and seeking the truth about one’s self and the people around them. “The decision of each individual person and of the many stands in opposition to God”, written in 1936 describes our history and, as it turns out, our destiny. Rather than learn from the destruction of the Temples for, as the Rabbis point out, not caring for the stranger and the widow, the poor and the needy, and for senseless hatred, we continue to promote these affronts to God all the while praising God with our words. This is happening on an individual level and on a communal level-there is no place that is safe for a person of faith, for a person who is not, does not want to stand in opposition to God.

Just as in Nazi Germany, religious leaders today are promoting these paths that are in opposition to God and extolling their paths as “the one true path to God” while practicing UnGodliness! We have to stop going along to get along. We have to say NO to these charlatans who promote Donald Trump as being “sent here by Jesus” to redeem us. We have to start to oppose the people who want to make this country and this world a plutocracy like Peter Thiel and his minions Blake Masters, J.D. Vance, et al. We have to stand in opposition to the lies about immigrants, after all we are all immigrants or descendants of immigrants-except Native Americans who we have regulated to “the reservation”. We have to stand in opposition to the lies of prejudice, the lies of racism, the lies of anti-semitism, the lies of Islamaphobia, the lies about the rich and the poor alike. We have to call on the 1% to pay their fair share of taxes, not more nor less, we have to have a safety net for those who become impoverished as The Torah teaches us to redeem our kinsman and loan money to our people without interest so they can get ‘back on their feet’. We have to stand in opposition to the mendacity of the extremes of either end of the spectrum remembering Maimonidies’ admonition to seek the middle path. We have to stand in opposition to the treatment of our veterans who put their lives on the line to serve our country and our response is homelessness, red tape at the VA, etc. We have to stand in opposition to the UnGodly ways LGBTQ are treated, the UnGodly ways women are treated as Chattel, the UnGodly ways of blaming the victim as these religious leaders are apt to do in their zest for power, for currying favor with Trump, Thiel, McCarthy, McConnell, et al. We have to stand in opposition to these deceptions for our own souls, for our own well-being and, most importantly for the sake of God. We have to do this so we can be in communication with God through prayer and community and not have to hide, we can say we did our best to stand with God this past year and we commit to stand with God a little more this coming year.

There are 15 days to Yom Kippur, 15 days to get our houses in order before a new year begins, 15 days to make a different decision than we have in the past, possibly, 15 days to stop fighting our innate urge to merge with the Godliness inside of us, 15 days to surrender to our ‘better angels’, 15 days to turn and return to a state of being that is, as Rabbi Heschel says, “compatible with being a partner with God”. We have to stand up against the religious leaders of all faiths that are standing “in opposition to God”. We have to take back our religious traditions so they serve God by serving people. The commandments were/are to serve us, to help us grow as human beings, to enable us to overcome our baser instincts and serve something higher than our own physical, mental and emotional needs, to assist us in letting go of the self-deceptions and the mendacity that we have been living and to engage us in a passion and purpose that serves our souls, the souls of people and God.

In recovery, we engage in this self-reflection daily. We have learned through our actions, through being ostracized for our UnGodly ways of living, as we needed to be so we could become aware of them, to not take anything for granted. We know we are not able to live on autopilot and everything will be okay because “we have seen the light”. Rather, because we have seen the light, we need to keep it on, keep it bright and keep walking towards it in a deliberate manner. Else, we will go astray again and lose our way.

In these next 15 days, I am reflecting on when I stood in opposition to God in this past year and I know these experiences have been less this year than in past years. I am not free of this way of being and it doesn’t dominate me as it once did. I also am reflecting on my use of Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom and brilliance to point out where we are today, how we can use his teachings to enhance our daily living and our world. I know I have been more aware of these pathways this past year and commit to continue to grow in his wisdom and paths to make life better for another and for me. I am using these 15 days to become more grounded in God’s Path. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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Living rabbi heschel’s wisdom - a daily path to living well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2- Day 3

“The world has fallen away from God. The decision of each individual person and of the many stands in opposition to God. Through our dullness and obstinacy we, too, are antagonists. But still, sometimes we ache when we see God betrayed and abandoned.” (Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity).

Continuing with Rabbi Heschel’s essay on The Meaning of Repentance that was published on the 16th of September in 1936, we experience the timelessness of his message and wisdom. Rabbi Heschel is speaking to the Jewish Community of Berlin and to the Jewish Community of the world at that time, at this time, at all times. His words echo the words of the prophets, echo the words of the Torah, echo the words and ways of the Talmud, echo the words of our hearts and souls. Yet, we are still acting with dullness and obstinacy, we are still standing in opposition to God, we are still denying this truth and so many more.

We have fallen away from God while preaching God’s word and using God’s words, God’s ways in false manners, practicing idolatry, taking the Name of The Lord in Vain, Creating False Images of God and wrapping ourselves in the texts of our Bibles, holy books. I believe this is one of Rabbi Heschel’s meanings with his brilliance above. We saw this in Nazi Germany where the Catholics, Protestants, supported Hitler, made excuses for hatred, for killing Jews, Gays, political enemies, etc. We saw this in the response of the Jewish Community, making lists, going along to get along. This is a prima facia case of falling away from God. We are taught never to trade one life even for the community because we all have infinite dignity and worth. Yet, the Jewish councils went along with the Nazi’s requests, they went along with making their lists, they fell away from God, they fell away from their roots, they did not engage in fulfilling God’s requests, they engaged in saving their lives and killing their souls and being responsible for the deaths of many. While this may seem harsh, it is a fact born out by the Eichmann Trial, by Hannah Arendt, by historians today.

We are seeing this today as well. When religious leaders go along with inhumane treatment of criminals, homeless people, our returning veterans, the stranger that is seeking refuge, the poor who is seeking help, the women who are seeking agency over their own bodies and lives, people who are exercising their freedoms and rights, they are falling away from God. When “good Christian men and women” believe that Jesus was the Lion, not the Lamb; when they believe that Jesus did not care for the poor and downtrodden; when they believe that Jesus did not embrace the prostitute, the criminal, the infinite dignity and worth of every human being; they are falling away from God. When “the good Jews who keep Judaism alive” believe the prophets were not talking to them when they railed about empty rituals; when they believe all is okay to save my life and I can cheat people who are not like me; when they forget the myriad of stories in Talmud and elsewhere about Elijah the Prophet being found in the gates of the cities, dirty, poor, begging and waiting for some human kindness; they are falling away from God. This is true for every Spiritual Discipline, the later practitioners forget God and serve themselves and/or their masters.

This time of year is for us to take an inventory of our selves, our actions, our behaviors, our prejudices and our strengths, our kindness’, our character traits we have used in proper measure, etc. It is a benevolent time in the Cosmos for us to look at our self with truth and compassion, with kindness and reality, with love and sorrow and it is imperative we take advantage of this time, it is imperative we see how we fall away from God and how we embrace God. It is imperative for us to drop our mental gymnastic routine to make it okay to fall away from God, it is imperative for us to stop using the rational mind to rationalize putting people in concentration camps okay, to make lists sending our friends and neighbors to certain death in order to save our own necks okay. It is imperative for us to make expiation for our ‘missing the marks’ and for the ‘missing the marks’ of our ancestors and relatives.

In recovery, we have to make a searching and fearless inventory because we know what will keep us dull, keep us falling away from God, from decency, from connection is dishonesty, is hiding and keeping secrets from another(s) and from our self! We search our inner life for the trauma’s we have experienced, the ones we cause, the lies we have told ourselves and the ways we act in truth, the ways we heal our own traumas and help another(s) heal theirs. We write all of this down and we go over it with another person so we can get perspective on our inventory and then we go about the business of making amends where possible and doing more good. This is how we prevent our self from falling away from God for an extended period again.

I wrestle every day to not fall away from God. I know life when I have fallen from God and it is not good-it may have been ‘fun’, it was not good. I am doing my inventory now and have been through this daily writing, I am I afraid to meet God this year as I have been unafraid to meet God for these past 35 years because I am unafraid to meet ‘the man in the glass’, I am not nor have been in need of lame excuses and blaming another since my recovery. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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Living rabbi Heschel’s wisdom - A daily path to living well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2- Day 2

“The mystery of prayer on the days of Rosh HaShanah presents itself with characteristic familiarity: it reveals itself to those who want to fulfill it, and eludes those who only want to know it.” (Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity)

Continuing with this sentence, we need to be amazed at our inability to think our way into right action and our incessant need to do the same things over and over again expecting different results, as Einstein defines insanity. Yet we are not! One reason, I believe is that we have become accustomed to our limited knowledge and believe it is all the knowledge we need. Another reason, may be that what we are doing has worked for us in the past and we see no need to change it. Both of these rational decisions lead us to becoming stagnant, familiar and enslaved to our old ideas.

Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom above is a call to action, a call to our souls, a call to our divinity, our humanity and our desire to learn and grow. Yet, we see over and over again our resistance to immersing ourselves in the fulfillment of God’s needs, in the fulfillment of the needs of people who can not do anything for us, in the fulfillment of the desires of our souls over the inauthentic needs of our minds and emotions. When we are interested in the fulfillment of our power needs, of our need to be right, of our desire to conquer and control, we will never be able to have the mystery of prayer on Rosh HaShanah, the mystery of prayer in general, the mystery of service, the mystery of love, the mystery of the Ineffable One revealed to us, as I am understanding Rabbi Heschel today.

This is the great challenge for all human beings, seek to fulfill the authentic needs of God, the authentic needs of our souls, the authentic needs of another human being, the authentic needs of nature, etc. We have become so enamored with our selves, with our stature and status, we forget that we are here to fulfill a Divine Need, as Rabbi Heschel teaches elsewhere. We are reminders of God, he explains to us, and we need to sharpen the ‘eyesight’ of our souls, wipe away the film from our spirits and “circumcise the foreskin of our hearts”. Yet, we are so focused on our selves, on our filling our ‘needs’, these mysteries of living well elude us. We are witnesses to this type of behavior in ‘identity politics’ one-issue politics, excluding one group or another from ‘our kind’ right now. We are engaging in behaviorisms, religious, progressive, conservative, and missing the spirit, missing the call of the Universe to fulfill the authentic needs of self, another(s), the world and God. This is the great conundrum of our time, as it has been of past eras. How do we let go of our self-deceptions, how do we reach for what is beyond us, when we will do the work of Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur?

The work of these Holy Days is the introspection of this past year, the introspection into the lies we have been telling ourselves and everyone else. The work of these Holy Days are to use the spiritual forces of compassion, kindness, truth and love that overwhelm all other forces in the Universe to be aware of our inauthentic needs, to commit to fulfilling the authentic needs of self, another(s) and God. It is the work of uncovering our souls, recovering the path of our Intuitive Mind and using our rational mind to serve spirit and intuition. It is the work of reconnecting with and re-covenanting with God, with our families, our friends, our missions. It is the work of taking off the masks we have worn that hide our true nature from self and everyone else. It is the work of accepting our shortcomings and improving them each and every day. It is the work of being congruent, what is in our heart is on our lips as Maimonides teaches. It is the work of wrestling and struggling with our baser desires, transforming them into the energy that fulfills the prayers we say on Rosh HaShanah, Yom Kippur and every other day. It is the work of being grateful for what we have, being present in our daily activities and engaging with everyone we meet with a hello and a smile.

In recovery, we are constantly seeking to improve our self, use our traits in proper measure and be aware of what is revealed to us each day. We are hyper-aware of the minute drifting we have towards selfishness, harshness, pettiness and pride. We do the work of this time of the year each and every day.

I have been blessed with many revelations. I work hard each day to be present, to check in with my soul and with my inner life so I can be clear when I am with another human being. I listen for and seek to fulfill the call of God, the call of another(s). I am also on guard for how I lie to myself, how I worship my rational mind at times and how I forget my intuitive mind. I am on guard against complacency and laziness which prevents me from learning and growing. I am on guard to discern the true calling, the true voice of the Ineffable One from the voices of lower self, the voices of the charlatans and liars trying to convince me that up is down and good is bad. I am blessed to be able to learn each day from and with Rabbi Heschel and so many more people. I am blessed to know the experience and address of living with joy and gratitude. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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Living Rabbi HEschel’s Wisdom- A daily path to living well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2- Day 1

“The mystery of prayer on the days of Rosh HaShanah presents itself with characteristic familiarity: it reveals itself to those who want to fulfill it, and eludes those who only want to know it.” (Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity).

As we approach Rosh HaShanah in 9 days, Rabbi Heschel’s essay on “The Meaning of Repentance”, written in 1936 has much to enlighten us with. The opening sentence of this essay above is, I believe, crucial for us to understand and know the difference between fulfilling and knowing.

Mystery is defined as something that is difficult or impossible to explain or understand, which is the essence of prayer. Communal prayer, personal prayer, on most days is a mystery as to our explaining the impact on us and on Rosh HaShanah, as Rabbi Heschel is reminding us, it is even more difficult to understand and explain the power of prayer, the need for prayer, even for many the meaning of the prayers themselves. Yet, we continue to go to services, we continue to show up late and leave early AND we go. Whether we understand the prayers, whether we believe in God, we show up for Rosh HaShanah services because we are afraid not to, because we are in the habit of doing so, and/or because we know we get something and, even though we cannot explain or understand what we get, we want to participate in this mystery, participate in the prayer experience and hope we learn a little bit more of what is happening for and to us. This is, I believe, the “characteristic familiarity” that the ‘three day a year Jews’ as they call themselves, experience.

Mysteries are here to be solved, according to our rational minds and we need to just ‘put our thinking cap on’ and find the solution to the mystery so we can be assured that everything has a reason and there is no mystery that we cannot solve. This attitude could be a result of being partners with God and our charge to care for our corner of this world, it could be as a result of our arrogance and hubris, it could be as a result of our fear of the unknowable and the unexplainable. For many people, the only peace they have is when they know and can understand what is happening, very few people actually ‘go with the flow’ and, in the words of Reinhold Niebuhr, “accept the things we cannot change”. Most people believe in their own power to think themselves into and out of any and all situations that life presents. Rabbi Heschel’s words above are teaching us that there are mysteries we will never solve through trying to know something.

While he is speaking about prayer, I believe his wisdom applies to all of life’s mysteries. Our constant need to know is what gets in the way of our ability to experience, to be immersed in what is, to live with and in “radical amazement”. We are so dependent upon conventional notions and mental cliches in order to function well, we have lost the ability to have the clarity/serenity to know what we don’t know and accept what we are powerless over. We are so dependent upon conventional notions that scientific breakthroughs are either overblown or go unnoticed. Our colleges are teaching how to get a job, how to be on the “right” side of issues, not how to explore and discover the mysteries of living, the mysteries of life itself. Our society is based on power and who has it in the moment, not on how to live with the mysterious nature of life, of community, of covenantal love. We have become more and more obsessed with knowing everything rather than immersing ourselves in whatever is happening in the moment. We are so obsessed that any departure from the conventional notions and mental cliches society has adopted and adapted is seen as heresy, it is seen as stupidity, it is seen as a crime.

Yet, only through our maladjustment to these notions and cliches, as Rabbi Heschel teaches, can we have an authentic awareness of what is. On Rosh HaShanah, this is what Judaism is providing for us, truthfully it provides us with this opportunity every day, and we have to be open to what this authentic awareness is for us, for everyone. There is a universal authentic awareness and a unique authentic awareness that comes to all people on these days. It is necessary, however, for us to let go of our conventional notions, our historic ho-hum about Rosh HaShanah and have a new experience. For most people, this has not happened because they are waiting for the Rabbi, the Cantor, the Choir, the prayers, to awaken them, to show them this awareness in a rational manner. It can’t happen and people are bewildered as to why they go and when will it happen-maybe next year. This is, I believe, one of the reasons so many people have chosen to become unaffiliated and disconnected from Judaism in particular and religion as a whole.

In recovery, we are painfully aware of what our so-called rational thinking did to our souls, our families, our friends, our communities. We are aware of the depths of depravity that our rational thinking took us to. We mourn the loss of our innocence and our joy that our pre-recovery days brought about. We are sorry for the loss of trust, belief, joy, kindness, innocence, etc, that those days brought upon so many others. We are, today, in rapt awe of the mystery of recovery, the mystery of prayer every day, and the mystery of repentance and forgiveness.

God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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Living rabbi heschel’s wisdom - A daily path to living well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 312

“To the sense of indebtedness, the meaning of existence lies in reciprocity. In receiving a pleasure, we must return a prayer; in attaining a success, we radiate compassion.” (Who is Man pg. 118)

The last phrase of the teaching above of Rabbi Heschel’s is what we all need to live more! We have taken success as an entitlement to radiate ego, power, hatred, ‘getting even’, deception and mendacity rather than compassion. Taking a deep dive into these two sentences forces us to submerge our self in a shocking awakening of who we are at our core and who we are acting like. We are awakened to the discrepancies in our beliefs and our behaviors, we are made aware of the deceptions and lies we tell ourselves and another(s), we are given the opportunity to make amends for the harms we have caused to another(s) and to make amends to our self for abandoning our truth, our authenticity, our purpose, our Higher Power/God.

This is what the Hebrew month of Elul, Rosh HaShanah, and Yom Kippur do for us when we participate in more than the religious behaviorism of this time. I have heard many people say the formula prior to Yom Kippur “if I have done anything to hurt you please forgive me” and I ask them if they think they have done anything to hurt me. When they are not sure, etc I thank them, I make whatever T’Shuvot I am aware of and end the call, meeting. These people have not dived into the ocean of awareness and looked at the reflection of themselves that God sees, that their mirror has been showing them. Rather, they are believing the lies and deceptions of their minds and their minions. We spend so much time in the beauty parlor making ourselves look pretty all the while not realizing the atrophy of our spirits and our souls, the atrophy of our society and our families. The number of people who are shocked at the addictions of their family members, the lies of their politicians, the anger of the poor, the wretched who came here “yearning to breathe free” and are enslaved as much if not more than where they left, is amazing to me.

These are the people who believe their largess will protect them from the logical consequences of their deceptions and mendacity, their willful blindness and self-serving actions. These are the people who believe they are owed rather than owe, the people who are entitled to their pleasures, guilty or otherwise, and believe that gratitude is owed them rather than a daily action they are obligated to engage in. These are the people who think if the optics are good/right no one will look behind the curtain. These are the people who, like the Wizard of Oz, keep denying truth even when they are uncovered and their mendacity and deception is exposed.

These are the people like all of us! We are these people every time we deny compassion to another, every time we forget to say a prayer for all the joys in our lives-no matter how down we feel. We are the entitled ones who build ourselves up on social media for our sake, not for the sake of sharing our gifts and talents. We are the people deceiving our selfs into believing we are doing a real deep dive into the Torah, the Bible, the Koran, etc and we know what God wants and act tyrannically and hatefully towards anyone and everyone who doesn’t agree. We are the people who have forgotten we owe and only through our debt can we connect with God, with another human being, with the world, with our authentic and true self. We are the people who need to take these next 10 days and the 10 days between Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur to face our self, see our success’ and have compassion for our missing the marks, review our pleasures and say a prayer of gratitude. See what the universe has blessed us with and reciprocate by putting goodness and joy back into the world somehow, somewhere. We are the people who can and must take an accounting of our indebtedness and find the meaning of our being, our purpose and passion and live them out loud in this next year a little more.

In recovery, we humbly ask God to remove our shortcomings, not as a ‘poof they are gone’ action, rather we are asking for help to overcome the barriers to living Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom a little more each day. We are not asking to be ‘cleansed’, rather we are acknowledging the power of the lie, the hold of the deception and the magnet pull of mendacity. We are reminding our self to be on the lookout for the paths that take us deeper into the forest of mendacity, that take us farther and farther away from compassion and gratitude and closer and closer to entitlement and self-serving.

Today marks 52 weeks of writing on Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom. I am humbled by your readership, I am grateful for Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom and I have changed greatly during this year. My indebtedness is more palpable and more welcoming, my reciprocity grows daily and I am aware of the reciprocity of generosity that Rabbi Jonathan Omer-man taught me about some 33 years ago. I offer prayers throughout the day and take pleasure in all of life’s gifts-ones I like and those that are not so much to like. My success as a human being is my compassion and, as Dr. Susannah Heschel taught me years ago-to show those who have harmed me (whether in act or in my interpretation) diving pathos, God’s compassion. In this way, I am able to truly “love my neighbor as I love my self.” See you tomorrow! God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Day 311

“To the sense of indebtedness, the meaning of existence lies in reciprocity. In receiving a pleasure, we must return a prayer; in attaining a success, we radiate compassion.” (Who is Man pg. 118)

Rabbi Heschel is always reminding us of our need to live a life of reciprocity, a life of giving and taking, a life of doing and being, a life of action and reflection, etc. Rabbi Heschel’s message is very clear to me, experience our life as a work of art, reminding ourselves that we are the artist creating it. Creating it well means living in the both/and; not the either/or. Looking for our uniqueness, cultivating our inner life into a rich landscape of connection to God, to another(s), to the world. Yet, we continue to “miss the mark” in this area, we continue to blame and shame, to lie and deceive, to place optics over substance, to create gargoyles instead of The David or The Moses as Michelangelo did. He was an amazing sculpture and one of the stories we have about him is that he just chipped away the marble that was hiding our view of these amazing sculptures. For him, I believe, sculpting was a pleasure and his response to the question of how he did it, was his prayer of gratitude to God for his talent.

Humanity has always, to a greater or lesser extent, taken pleasure as an entitlement not a gift. Reciprocity has always been seen as a one-way street by the majority of people, especially people who are in power or think they should be in power. They do not have a sense of indebtedness, rather they have a sense of entitlement. We are witnessing the logical continuance of such entitlement with the lies and deceptions of Lindsey Graham, Kevin McCarthy, Donald Trump and his boys, these MAGA people who are running in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Michigan, etc. They may or may not believe their rhetoric, they only want to win, in winning they receive pleasure and they return harming the stranger, taking advantage of the needy and criminalizing the poor. Not exactly the prayer Rabbi Heschel has in mind in his wisdom above.

Yet, why shouldn’t people do this, why not have men make more than women for the same job, why not have white people earn more than people of color, why not hate the Jews for not acknowledging Christ as the Messiah and Redeemer, why not lie, cheat, steal to get ahead, we are entitled to it if we can make it happen goes this type of thinking. Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom above rejects the entitlement of humanity, it rejects and refutes the deceptions and bastardizations of the “religious right”, the religious left, either extreme-politically, emotionally, spiritually. Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom is that God gives us the gift of pleasure, as I am understanding him today. God gives us the ability to “receive pleasure” and the honor to “return a prayer”. Notice that he uses the word “must” in this phrase, giving us the sense of imperative, the experience of a commandment, the joy of an obligation.

Immersing oneself in the words above, over and over again has allowed me to realize the multi-faceted view of living Rabbi Heschel is giving us; to see life as indebtedness, to realize that reciprocity is the pathway to making meaning in our being, and pleasure and prayer are so closely linked point us to the uniqueness, love, care, kindness, and truth of God and the imperative to act Godly. Just as God receives and accepts our prayer, so too do we get to and must receive and accept the prayer of someone else. Just as God is our lender, so too do we have to lend to the poor, the needy, the stranger according to their need, not our wants. Just as God cares for the downtrodden and the voiceless, we too have to care for them and give them a lift up and be their voice until they can speak. Just as God condemns mendacity and deception, so too do we have to stop supporting the way of being that says looking good, having the ‘right’ words, the ‘right’ optics, the ‘right’ politics makes you a ‘right’ person. Religious, social behaviorism and the plagiarism of the spirit, of the words of God are antithetical to everything that Rabbi Heschel is saying above. Lets change the ‘game’ and instead lets get serious about living, about life. More on this tomorrow!

In recovery, we are always offering a prayer of gratitude and a prayer of thanksgiving. We wake up grateful for this day, we are thankful for our opportunity to serve, to overcome whatever obstacles we may face today by not engaging in old ways and behaviors that brought us down. We are eager to reciprocate and to act Godly, we seek out ways to serve rather than be entitled as we were before. In recovery, we are well aware of our need to live in the tension of indebtedness and reciprocity in order to experience the true meaning of our being, our existence-what we are here for and how to carry it out.

I have found reciprocity of generosity to be one of God’s great gifts to me and to thee. While the people I have helped may not reciprocate, I get a gift from an unknown, unlikely source and I realize that the Universe is truly benign and good. Mercy is abundant and I have to remember to pay down my indebtedness, reciprocate with joy and whatever another human being needs (rather than what I want to give) and serve with pleasure, receive al that life gives me with pleasure and then offer a prayer to God of thanks, of help, of awareness or needing to be made aware. Since I have staying power, I am always blessed to receive the message God is sending even if I act hastily. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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