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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 25

“Repentance is a decision made in truthfulness, remorse, and responsibility. If, to be sure—as is often the case among us—instead of deliberate decision we have a coerced conversion; instead of a conscious truthfulness, a self-conscious conformity; instead of remorse over the lost past, a longing for it; then this so-called return is but a retreat, a phase.”(Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity)

Today is Hoshanah Rabbah, the 7th day of Sukkot, the day when we beat the ground with myrtle as a gesture to have the negativity and errors of the past leave us. It is a day of looking forward with renewed strength, energy, determination, hope, and a plan. It is not a day of looking backward in longing for the past, it is not a day to return to the “good old days”, it is not a day of retreat, rather it is a day of advancing. Rabbi Heschel’s words above capture this so beautifully, so powerfully and so completely.

We look forward by, in Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch’s words, keeping the negative impulses far enough away from us so we are not caught in their web of desire and close enough that we are able to see when we are falling back into old patterns. We cannot do this when we are in a self-conscious conformity, when we are in a coerced conversion, when we are living a life of deception and mendacity, when we ‘look good’ while doing wrong. Yet, we persist in this manner even today. For all of our advancements in science, in technology, in space exploration, in philosophy, in psychology, etc we are still retarded in spirituality, still “falling off the wagon” of decency, “truthfulness, remorse, and responsibility”. We are still blaming another for our errors, we are still convicting someone else when our feelings are hurt, we are still exiling people when we feel guilty, we are still seeking ways to enslave someone else so we can feel like ‘sovereign of the mountain’.

This brilliance and wisdom from Rabbi Heschel in 1936 are still a bright light and the path to follow for all people. They remind us to search inside of our self, to search and engage in an inner dialogue in order to uncover the subtle self-deceptions we hold onto. We have to explore our minds, hearts and souls to find the mendacious beliefs we hold onto so dearly that we are not even aware of how they run and ruin our living. We have to engage in an inventory that exposes our ‘cleaning up bad behavior of another(s) and our self by blaming someone/something else. We get the gift of time and space to do this today and everyday. It isn’t only on Yom Kippur, it isn’t only on Hoshanah Rabbah, it is every day we are gifted with the opportunity to engage in T’Shuvah, to make a decision to live life in “truthfulness, remorse a responsibility.” Given the state of our world, given the need of some to capture and enslave another nation, another people, given the need of some to hold onto power through being “scoundrels within the law” as the Ramban says, all of us need to engage in this inventory, all of us need to be looking forward after and during our T’Shuvah and seeing where we missed the mark and where we hit the bullseye! All of us need to be taking responsibility for our actions, positive and negative, have remorse for our errors and a plan to repair the damage, and take responsibility for our errors without blaming another, without explaining them away, without disgrace and shame. All of us need to rejoice in our positive patterns, paths and deeds, we need to stop hiding from our goodness and use our goodness, our spiritual connection and our wisdom to move forward in making our corner of the world a little better for our being here.

We advance the goodness when we come to realize and admit our imperfections. We humans are imperfect, all of us. When we realize, acknowledge and grow from our imperfections, when we see how connected we are to one another through our imperfections, we are able to take pride in our humanity, we are able to embrace our humanity and the humanity of another(s), and we are able to find other points of agreement and not need to “kill the enemy” because we are no longer enemies or competitors, we are different people with different ways/ideas and when we can merge and compromise our ideas and find ways to see our similarities, we are advancing our humanity and the humanity of all. This all comes about when we are living our lives through deliberate decision making and living in conscious truthfulness.

In recovery, our search for truth is called peeling the layers of the onion skin. Each deception, each mendacious way and thought is as thin as the skin of an onion and as difficult to peel away. Yet we persist in this endeavor each and every day, we constantly take our own inventory and sometimes quickly and sometimes slowly we are able to see the self-deceptions and mendacity we have engaged in and with.

I am dedicated to the words of Rabbi Heschel above. I know I continue to engage in coerced conversions of my own negativity. My negative impulse derives me so much I feel compelled to act on it, I see this so clearly today and I now know how to resist it. I fell prey to this coerced conversion of my Yetzer HaRa so often because I was able to ‘clean up’ my actions with self-deceptions and coercing others to agree. I am so remorseful for this, I am changing this pattern because of the words above, the teaching of Rabbi Heschel and my desire to embrace my own goodness and advance the goodness of the world. God Bless and Stay Safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 24

“Repentance is a decision made in truthfulness, remorse, and responsibility. If, to be sure—as is often the case among us—instead of deliberate decision we have a coerced conversion; instead of a conscious truthfulness, a self-conscious conformity; instead of remorse over the lost past, a longing for it; then this so-called return is but a retreat, a phase.”(Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity)

As we head into the ‘home stretch’ of our celebration and our repentance holiday of Sukkot, the wisdom above is chilling, enlightening, and worthy of being heeded today as it was back in 1936. I am continuing to use his words from 1936 not only because we ‘have’ until Hoshana Rabbah to clean up our past, according to the Rabbis, also because T’Shuvah is a daily gift, a daily obligation, a daily reprieve from our continuous leaning towards “self-conscious conformity” that helps us attain a euphoric recall of the past and a desire to retreat back to the ‘old ways of doing things’. Rabbi Heschel is calling all of us to make a conscious decision to repair the damage we have caused, to long for a return to community and authentic self, and to be deliberate in our actions instead of conniving. OY!

After watching the Jan 6th Committee hearings yesterday, the dangers of a “self-conscious conformity” are clear as day and ring in our ears like a bell sounding the Tsunami alarm. Our elected officials and our civil servants must heed the warnings and the lessons from this stain on our history if it is to not be repeated again. Our desire for power, our need to be right, our looking back to the “good old days” with longing and determination will lead us to ruin, lead us to slavery, lead us to destruction. The hearings have made this clear, history has made this clear, yet people are still afraid and unwilling to make a deliberate decision to turn to a “conscious truthfulness”. We hear the excuses for Trump and his cabal, we hear the words of hatred and lies from the Marjorie Taylor Greene’s, we hear the promises of gridlock, intimidation, and bullying from Kevin McCarthy, we hear the warnings of Moscow Mitch and the finger pointing to Trump himself, while his RINO’s (all Republicans who still engage with him like Kevin McCarthy, et al) and his enablers (all the people who made excuses and helped him be the way he is because they were getting what they wanted like Moscow Mitch McConnell).

What we are not hearing, of course, is the truthfulness from all of everyone’s part in making it possible for a Jan. 6th to happen. What we are not hearing is the responsibility of each of us to reach out and find ways to talk to one another rather than engage in mudslinging and senseless hatred. What we are not hearing is how we allowed ourselves to be coerced into doing the next wrong thing, how we allowed ourselves to turn a skewed vision of the ‘glory days of America’s past’ into a longing to go back to racism, anti-semitism, white supremacy, absolute power. How we allowed ourselves to buy into conformity while proclaiming making everyone heel to the way of the powerful, everyone dance to the tune of the charlatan idolators is not being spoken.

This is God’s call to us all, no matter our religion, our spiritual discipline, our political affiliations, the call to meet our self in truthfulness is crucial to our survival as free people. This call to hold ourselves responsible rather than just point fingers is critical to our spiritual health. This call to stop conforming for gain and taking the next right action for our soul’s sake, for the sake of our neighbors, friends, strangers among us, for the sake of strengthening our connection to God/Higher Consciousness is the key to our growth and our partnership with the Ineffable One. We can only begin to answer these calls when we engage in T’Shuvah with truthfulness, remorse, and responsibility. More on this solution on Sunday!

In recovery, we are acutely aware of our desire to engage in euphoric recall and self-deception. We are so convincing in our lies because we actually believe them, especially in the ones that we believe hide the truth from someone else and, eventually, our selves. In our recovery we know that a ‘white lie’ can start the avalanche of a return to the ‘big lie’ of self-pity, entitlement, self-deception, anger, resentment, validation of these and so many more. Each day we ask ourselves what is the rest of the story, each day we wait for the second thought so we have choice rather than being driven by ‘only one way’.

I still have remorse for my actions that have harmed people. I have remorse for my unwillingness to adopt fully my father’s (of blessed memory) teachings as a teen-ager and young adult. I have remorse for abandoning Heather by going to jail and prison. I have remorse for my actions that caused an earthquake at Beit T’Shuvah. I am truthful about them, I am responsible for my part in all of the experiences of my life, both the the not-so-positive and the positive. Each day, through writing, through reflection, through seeing the present, the past, and the future through different prisms, I am able to get clearer and clearer on what I am responsible for and what I am not. Each day, through these actions and more, I continue to confront truth, I continue to confront life, I continue to fight for and be an advocate for my soul, your soul, and Emet/Truth. God Bless and Stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 23

“Repentance is an absolute, spiritual decision made in truthfulness. Its motivations are remorse for the past and responsibility for the future. Only in this manner is it possible and valid.”(Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity)

This entire paragraph, is for most people, very difficult, especially the last sentence. Many people are unaware of and unsure of what “an absolute spiritual decision” is. It is not perfection, as I have noted previously. It is a decision that changes our vision and our actions. It wavers at times, there are times when it is difficult to engage in it because we are unable to discern truth from desire. Yet, it is a decision that needs to be a covenantal one, just as the decision to accept the Torah at Mount Sinai was, is and will always be a covenantal decision for the Jewish People. In Latin, the word valid comes from the word meaning “be strong”, and the word possible is to “be able” from the Latin. Rabbi Heschel’s brilliance once again shines in this sentence and in this paragraph.

When living a life of T’Shuvah, a life of remorse and responsibility, we find that much more is possible in our living than we thought. We find the strength to move beyond our past errors, we find the strength to learn from our past mistakes, we see a way forward that we never thought possible. I believe this could be the message of the last sentence above. At issue is our willingness to engage in living a life that we are able to live, living a life of T’Shuvah that is “an absolute spiritual decision” because we can. At issue is our belief that we are strong enough to withstand the pain and the ache of our errors in judgement and action. At issue is our commitment to move past our feelings of shame and blame, our experiences of being called out, embarrassed and, at times, falsely accused as well as ostracized. Yet, as the last sentence above comes to teach us, we are able to be strong and stand up to our errors, do our T’Shuvah, and move forward.

Since the time of Adam and Eve, humanity has been wary of acknowledging our errors in judgement and action publicly, we have been resistant to living in truthfulness, and we have been standing up to our errors with defensiveness, denial and deceit. The split we see in our politics in our country and worldwide is the outcome of the decision of our ancestors to hide from their missing the mark and has been passed down, exploited, gotten stronger causing the great chasms we see today. People are unable to have conversations anymore unless they agree on a matter, otherwise it is a war of deceptions, defenses and demoralizations. All of this flying in the face of what T’Shuvah/repentance stands for. This mendacious path of life denies the truth of T’Shuvah, it denies the possibility of repair and the fact that change is always possible. It also denies the truth that we are strong enough intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually to engage in T’Shuvah for the betterment of self, the betterment of another(s) and the betterment of our connection to God.

We are able to be strong and express our remorse for our past errors, we are able to be strong and be responsible for our poor decision making, we are able to be strong and be responsible to use these past experiences to change the way we live in the future. We have this strength and T’Shuvah connotes these possibilities. We are able to, in these intermediate days of Sukkot, put on the new pair of glasses we need to see the truthfulness of our spiritual decision to live in a covenantal relationship with God, with humanity and within our self. We do this through consistently looking in the mirror, always looking both backward and forward, always looking inside our souls, inside our inner beingness. We do this because we are able to see our self in another(s), see our self in our own mirror, see our self in deeds, see our self in our thoughts, see our self in our prayers and meditations. Upon recognizing both our missing the mark and hitting the mark we experience the possibility of change, the validity of change and of our humanity. Each day we recommit to our “absolute spiritual decision made in truthfulness”, we acknowledge our moving forward in being a partner with humans and God in making our corner of the world at least one grain of sand better, and we rejoice in the freedom our remorse, responsibility, and validity bring us.

In recovery, we “come to believe” in the possibility and validity of our change, we accept our errors as God’s lessons for us; knowing that some errors we keep making over and over again just like we did when we were in school. There are some areas where we have blind spots; our ability and willingness to confront these areas are proof of our openness to be in truth with our self and another self(s) in order to change. We find awe are strong and are able to overcome our inner ‘shame’ and let go of blame so we can move forward into the light that is before us.

I have experienced freedom each and every time I engage in T’Shuvah, each and every time I live into the “absolute spiritual decision made in truthfulness” some 36 years ago. I know I fall back, I know I make the same errors over and over again, and I know that I keep moving forward, I keep appreciating the strong human being I am and I know I am able to change, I am able to follow through on my spiritual decision and enlarge my being and my actions through T’Shuvah, through maintenance and through the love of God, the covenant with the people whom I love and love me. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 22

“Repentance is an absolute, spiritual decision made in truthfulness. Its motivations are remorse for the past and responsibility for the future. Only in this manner is it possible and valid.”(Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity)

In a recovery meeting I attended yesterday, we were talking about the topic of accountability and I thought of the quote above. Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom is reminding us that we can return, we can repair old damages, we can have new responses to the old ‘triggers’ as long as we are accountable and in truth with our self and with another(s) self! This is the Good News of our day, of all days and too many of us don’t believe this good news, too many of us are skeptical of this good news, too many of us still believe the lie of the Ancient Greeks who thought perfection was attainable.

Just as with the barnacles on a boat, just as with objects that have lost their shine, just as with cosmetic surgery, we can do a ‘facelift’ on our beingness. We can, through T’Shuvah, through “remorse through the past and responsibility for the future” remake our lives, remake our relationships and remake our world. Armed with this truth, with this knowledge, we are able to change the course of our future and change the history of our past. We can become ‘new’ people as the famous teacher/physician Rambam teaches. We can be a world saver as Reb Meir teaches in the Talmud in Tractate Yoma 86b. All of this is within our reach once we turn our attention to accountability, to repenting, to remorse and to responsibility.

As we are in the intermediate days of Sukkot, the tradition in many Jewish circles is that we are able to repent until the end of the 7th day of Sukkot. So, while we are celebrating joy and greet one another with words of joy, we are still given the opportunity to clean up whatever ‘messes’ are still lingering on our souls, on our minds, on our ‘shoes’ as it were. We are still called to be accountable, we are still given the joy of being responsible for and to tomorrow and all our tomorrows. I use the word gift to indicate the immense grace we are all given to return to our families and friends, return to our communities and world, return to our authentic core self and to God even when we haven’t been aware that we were separate. I hear, in his words above, Rabbi Heschel call us to account, calling on us to stop being willfully blind, to stop engaging in self-deception, to stop deceiving another(s), to stop buying the deception of another(s). He is demanding we take seriously our lives, our obligations and our talents and opportunities. He is demanding we experience the grief and remorse for the myriad of errors we have committed by not being true to our self, by not being authentic with another(s), by hiding from God.

And, he gives us the remedy, an ancient remedy as we learn in the Cain and Abel story. God tells Cain “if you do right, there is an uplift”(of your soul) and “negativity couches at your door, it desires you a lot, and you can master it”. The problem of our negativity being so strong, our urge to do whatever we want without regard to the impact on another is in our DNA! And there is a remedy, we can master the negativity so it no longer controls us, it no longer defeats us. That remedy is in the brilliance of Rabbi Heschel’s words above. Being in truth with oneself about what we need to change, being accountable to another for the damages/harms/errors we have made, repairing and changing as well as expressing gratitude for the love and connection are paths to achieving our return, having remorse for our past errors and taking responsibility to lessen the errors of our future. We will still make some of the same errors, they just won’t be from indulging in our negativity, they won’t be as severe and they won’t be as long-this is what T’Shuvah is about, as I understand it. We are not going to be perfect, we are going to be aware and our eyes will be opened wider and have less film on them, our hearts will be circumcised and be more open to the love and cry of people. We will be more accountable, more truthful and more able to respond to this moment, to the present without the baggage of the past weighing us down. I realize, in this moment, the spiritual truth and reasoning of continuing to clean up the past during this holiday of Joy-leaving the old baggage and being unencumbered with guilt, with shame, with blame is the only path to true Joy!

This is the good news of recovery, this is the freedom of recovery, this is the burden and accountability of recovery. Repentance, living our spirituality out loud, remorse and truthfulness are the paths to freedom for us in recovery and for everyone else as well, even though many people are unaware of this truth. We engage in being truthful with our self as to how our day went with a 10th step(taking of our own inventory) each evening; noting the errors and the good we have accomplished. We engage in a spiritual decision each and every morning and throughout each day to live the best we can rather than the worst we could and herein is the way we show both our remorse and our new found responsibility.

I make an “absolute spiritual decision” each day to be one grain of sand better today than I was yesterday. To those people who feel I have wronged them, I apologize publicly as I have privately. I pray for your forgiveness and I commit to changing, growing and being more responsible. God Bless and Stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 21

“Repentance is an absolute, spiritual decision made in truthfulness. Its motivations are remorse for the past and responsibility for the future. Only in this manner is it possible and valid.”(Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity)

As I am understanding Rabbi Heschel’s brilliance today, our ability to return to our authentic self is dependent upon our willingness and thoroughness to engage in T’Shuvah. It is dependent upon our openness to maturing and living from our spiritual nature instead of our lower mind nature. It is dependent upon our search for truth about our self, about the ways in which we are living, and about our deep desire to connect with something greater than our self, with people, with people who love us and whom we feel love for.

The first sentence above reminds us that any “I’m sorry” to get the heat off, to not be bothered, to be perfunctory, doesn’t make us repentant, it doesn’t help us return, it is another self-deceptive and mendacious action on our part. Too often we say we are sorry and mean it emotionally and/or intellectually maybe and not in our depth of our beingness. Too often we say we are sorry because it is what is expected of us, we learn to as children when our parents make us say: “I’m sorry” to someone for something we are not really sorry about. Some times we are in the right and we are still told to say we are sorry which only lessens the veracity of those words in our minds. We say “sorry” without any meaning or heartfelt expression because we are just going through the motions.

Rabbi Heschel is reminding us that T’Shuvah, true repentance comes with a desire to return to a connection as well as to return the dignity we robbed another human being of. It is to return the “kingly dignity” to God and to regain some of our own dignity as well. To err, while human, is to denigrate our self, to soil our spiritual nature, to put plaque in our spiritual arteries and T’Shuvah is the angioplasty of our spiritual arteries, it is the return of dignity to our self, to another(s), to God. Without this being “an absolute spiritual decision” it is subject to being another deception we use to ‘get over’ on another person, to look pious and then claim to be injured when someone detects our insincerity and doesn’t accept our false repentance. We are so used to the insincere “I’m sorry” that many of us do not even know that we are not being sincere as we have convinced our self that it is all meaningless, life is hard and then you die attitude, do whatever it takes to get ahead attitude.

Earlier in this essay, Rabbi Heschel asks: “What is the state of our repentance?” This question needs to reverberate within us. Is our T’Shuvah a once a year mechanical beat our chests to look good, to fulfill our superstitions event? Is our T’Shuvah a continuation of our false “I’m sorry’s”? Is our T’Shuvah a decision that we make with our minds, emotions and spirits? We know the difference even when we say we don’t. We know the difference between our desires and what is the next right thing to do. We know the difference between ‘getting the heat off’ and being sincere in our remorse. We know the difference between effectuating a return for connection and a return for our gain. We know the difference between authenticity and falseness. Yet, we have played the false route so long and so often we have trouble distinguishing one from the other. We have made our desires so important that we have trouble distinguishing them from what is truly the next indicated action. We have be insincere for so long, we have trouble distinguishing what sincerity truly looks like. We have been living false scripts for so long, we are almost unaware of what is authentic and what isn’t. Unfortunately, this seems to be the state of our repentance, this seems to be the reason we buy the mendacity and the deception of another(s) so readily, it seems to be the state of our personal affairs, self-deception, mendacity and inauthenticity.

The Good News, however, is we can change this state of being! The gates of repentance, the gates of T’Shuvah are always open to us, God is always waiting for our return. In the Talmud we learn that between the 2nd and 3rd watches at night, God cries: “My children are in exile” and weeps for the disconnection. The people we have harmed are also open to our return, many of them don’t act this way because they are afraid of being hurt again, being taken advantage of again, yet they need and want us to own our errors, restore their dignity and whatever else we stole from them and maybe reconnect again or not. We have to do the work of T’Shuvah, we have to see our self in a state of absolute truthfulness, we have to look at our self through our soul’s knowledge and memory, not the false excuses of our minds that we have come to believe.

In recovery we do this by making a searching and fearless moral inventory. We do this by continuing to review our days and realize what we have done not so well and what we have done well.

I am grateful that so many people welcomed me back, I am grateful for those who accepted my T’Shuvah and didn’t want any more connection. I am grateful that I have learned how to make “absolute spiritual” decisions based in truthfulness after so many years of deception. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 20

“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)

Today is the first day of Sukkot and as we enter the Sukkah we are supposed to bring in guests who are no longer alive, like our ancestors, Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Rebekah, Jacob, Rachel and Leah, etc. We also can invite our own deceased relatives and friends. This is called Ushpizin. I would like to suggest another ‘friend’ to invite this year, based on the text above and my understanding of it today, this friend is called acceptance. Without acceptance, we cannot change anything, we cannot be present and we cannot be joyous. And the hardest experience for most people to accept, I believe, is forgiveness by another person.

Most of us do not believe it when someone says they forgive us. We see ourselves as so bad, so despicable, we can’t believe the other person could seriously forgive us and we are wary and non-trusting of them from then on. The reason being, of course, that we would not forgive someone who did this harm to us, in fact, we probably haven’t. We are unable to accept the forgiveness of another, we are unable to accept the forgiveness of God and we are unable to accept we are worthy of self-forgiveness as well. This is another form of self-deception, a very subtle form of self-deception through which we are able to stay in misery and disbelief of a basic spiritual principle: The Gates of T’Shuvah (repent, return, new response) are always open!

The prophets proclaim God’s call for us to return, three times a day in our daily prayers we call God “the One who desires our return”. Yet, we continue to hold on to our disbelief that we can and/or should be forgiven, we continue to hold onto our belief that another person can and/pr should be forgiven.These two ways of being block us from the true joys of living; a covenantal connection with God and a covenantal connection with human beings around us. Our disbelief and our belief as stated before prevent us from accepting our imperfections as part of our nature, from accepting we will continue to make mistakes and we can learn from them, we can grow from them and we never have to hide from them or hide them from another person.

We must engage in what is called, suspending my disbelief. This is a process whereby we put our disbelief on hold, we are not letting it go, we are just putting it on a shelf for right now and we believe that you/another person whom we can trust, believe we can be forgiven. We hold on to your belief until it is proven true and valid or false and invalid. Once we do this, the world opens us up to new possibilities, we are able to see and experience a freedom from this self-deceptive principle we were holding onto. We are able to experience the forgiveness of another person, we are able to accept the forgiveness of another person and we are able to shed the skin/label of “bad person” that we have carried for so long. Suspending our disbelief in this area will lead to us suspending a lot of old beliefs we have held onto that cause us to suffer the “low-grade misery” of living in mendacity and self-deception.

Doing this allows us to invite those we have harmed into our Sukkah, we can welcome them with open arms and a belief in their words of forgiveness, we can be open and honest with them and ourselves, we can willingly accept them for who they are and know we are being accepted for who we are-truthfully and completely. Suspending our disbelief and believing in forgiveness allows us to invite the people we have held resentments against into our Sukkah. People we have said we will never forgive we can invite into the Sukkah, whether in person or spirit, and embrace them for and with their imperfections. I have come to realize that Sukkot comes when it does not just as a harvest festival, it comes as a joyous reunion after we have recovered from the awe of being forgiven, forgiving another person(and for some forgiving God), and forgiving our self. It takes a few days to recover from such an enlightening experience as Yom Kippur and then Sukkot is the celebration of the new person who has emerged from the Day of At-One-Ment with a new skin, a new outlook, a revived spirit and a new vision of what is possible.

In recovery, we know we “acceptance is the answer to all of our problems today” as Dr. Paul teaches us. We know we have to accept life on life’s terms and we have to accept our imperfections. We have to accept that we are worthy of forgiveness and we accept that resentments are the number one cause of falling out of recovery. We rejoice in and find a new freedom when making our amends.

This year, I have let go of resentments and invite all the spirits of people I have harmed to forgive me, I invite the spirits of the people who have harmed me to know I forgive them and I will sit in a Sukkat Shalom, a canopy of inner peace this year. God Bless and  stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 19

“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 enter Sukkot, the Holiday of Joy, these words of Rabbi Heschel are ringing in my ears, my mind, my soul. How can I/we be joyous without the power, the gift, of forgiveness? How can I/we be joyous without acknowledging my errors and my victories? How can I/we be joyous without transforming yesterday’s errors into today’s learning? How can I/we be joyous without self-forgiveness, without self-compassion, without inner joy?

One of the lies we tell ourselves is that if we ignore something, ‘forget’ about it, we will be free of it. This self-deception has ruined so many lives in so many ways because our inner life, our subconscious doesn’t ‘forget’ doesn’t ignore. We store these hurts and these errors a lot longer than we store our victories and our goodness, unfortunately. It is crucial for us to engage in T’Shuvah so we can move through our fog from “low-grade misery” and into the light of joy, into the openness of love.

Denying our errors seems to be hardwired in us, a child will deny they did something from fear of being punished. This behavior continues and grows until one day we are unable to be responsible for anything we and/or another(s) perceive as an error and either deny, blame, ignore, etc. We see this in our Governmental leadership, we see this in corporations that will pay fines and deny responsibility, we see this in relationships that are torn asunder, we see this in divorces, we see this in family relationships that fall apart. Yet, we continue to act in the same ways over and over again out of an erroneous belief that we will not be able to withstand the blows to our ‘fragile’ egos that awareness, acceptance of responsibility may bring. Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom above is the rebuttal of this conventional wisdom. Rabbi Heschel is calling to us to be maladjusted to these ideas and notions about T’Shuvah, about forgiveness.

To be truly joyous, we have to stop forgetting about the past and begin to transform it. We have to stop blaming and excusing ourselves and engage in the work of T’Shuvah so we can experience God’s forgiveness, the forgiveness of another(s) and forgive our selves. We do this be going through our past and seeing how we can use our errors and our victories as learnings, growing from both and repairing/maturing our souls and our minds to be one grain of sand better today than yesterday. We have to stop ignoring our past and be present in today by going through rather than leaving our past.

We have to realize that every one has a part in errors, every one of us has a part in redemption, every one of us is needed to bring about forgiveness. Each and every one of us is in need of forgiveness, redemption and connection with God, with one another and with nature. We all are imperfect beings and, in God’s ‘eyes’, we are all redeemable, we are all worthy of forgiveness, we are all loveable. It is up to us to, as Rabbi Heschel says earlier in this particular piece of wisdom, to restore the “kingly dignity” to God, to one another. Only by engaging in this way of being can true joy envelop us, can joy become our new address and can we leave the “low-grade misery” of our past. Only by engaging in redemption, in forgiveness can we move forward and use our past errors as learnings and stepping stones to taking our rightful place in life, to waking up each day with gratitude, excitement and going to sleep with contentment and joy.

In recovery, our 6th and 7th steps, to me, reflect Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom above. By being ready for and asking God to remove our shortcomings and character traits that are out of proper measure(my interpretation), we are also asking for God’s forgiveness and acknowledging God’s desire, ability and action of extinguishing our blemishes and transforming them into salvation, as Rabbi Heschel teaches us. We, in recovery, are living examples of Rabbi Heschel’s brilliance above.

I find myself in a liminal state, I am in the middle of another metamorphosis, not knowing where it will lead and where I will land. I am, however, once again a recipient of God’s forgiveness and love. I am cleansed of the negativity of the past through T’Shuvah and God’s acceptance of it, even if another(s) doesn’t. Rabbi Heschel’s words have permeated me this year in a different way than in past years; rather than needing everyone to forgive me, like me, I have come to a new realization. I have made T’Shuvah for past errors, I have learned much about me from them and, to the best of my ability, repaired my inner life so they occur less often and with less intensity and this is the best I can do in this moment. Knowing this, accepting this moves me to a place of allowing God’s forgiveness to be enough when another(s) can’t. I hope and pray that one day everyone will be able to ask for and receive forgiveness from one another as God does for us each and every day. This is the path to embracing the Joy of Sukkot for me. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.