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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 38

“The ancient Rabbis knew that excessive piety may endanger the fulfillment of the essence of the law. “There is nothing more important, according to the Torah, than to preserve human life … . Even when there is the slightest possibility that a life may be at stake one may disregard every prohibition of the law.” One must sacrifice mitsvot for the sake of man, rather than sacrifice man for the sake of mitsvot”. (God in Search of Man)

To live a spiritual life devoid of the politics surrounding us, as I am understanding Rabbi Heschel’s words above, is to live a life of selfishness and, actually, not be spiritual at all. While many confuse religion with the way some people interpret and practice it as fundamentalists, religion enhances our spirituality and our spirituality enhances our religion as I learned from Rabbi Jonathan Omer-man over 32 years ago. As soon as we separate one from the other, we are beginning a descent into self-deception and mendacity. Many people wave their religious behaviorism as a flag/banner showing how pious they are while being devoid of spirituality, while not adhering to Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom above. Others proclaim their superiority by ‘being spiritual not religious’, again a specious argument. Spiritual disciplines, religious rituals, all lead us to the same place, a sense of and a commitment to a “Power Greater than ourselves”, “Higher Consciousness”, etc. We are being challenged today, just as we were in 1955 when this book was published, just as we were in the 30’s and 40’s, just as we have been throughout our history, to be human, to care about human life as much as God cares, as much as the Universe cares, as much as the Spiritual forces of the Cosmos care.

What does the phrase “to preserve human life” mean to us today? We are witnessing the destruction of human life in so many ways. We have put the dollar ahead of human life, we have put our power ahead of human life, we have put satisfying our needs ahead of the life of another human being. We have forgotten that “to preserve human life” we have to first get in touch with our own humanity. We have to, as our religious leaders and spiritual leaders teach, see the dignity in our self, see the Image of the divine in our being, experience the theta waves of oneness with the universe in order to be in concert with the humanity of another.

We fail to realize that our selfishness is not preserving our own life, it is killing our souls and then, naturally, we murder the souls of any and all people. The excessive piety of the Maga crowd, like Stephen Miller, Marjorie Taylor Greene, et al leads to their inability to see the humanity in anyone else, especially anyone who is not 100% in agreement with them. The excessive piety of the far-left with their Anti-Semitism and vitriol against anyone who is not 100% in agreement with them has caused many to ignore the humanity of those who may be allies at times, as well as the people they are arguing against. In both cases, excessive piety, as I am understanding Rabbi Heschel’s brilliance above, leads to the ignoring of human suffering, the ignoring of human dignity, the ignoring of human needs.

Our excessive piety towards any philosophy, religion, spiritual discipline, idea will always lead us to ignoring the human condition of our self and of everyone else. We will fake it for a while, however in excessive piety we are unable to truly care for our self, we are so intent on fulfilling the rules and rituals, following the philosophy and being ‘perfect’, we are unable to allow our self our imperfections, let alone the imperfections of another(s). We get so caught up in ‘doing it the right way’ we become blind to the myriad of ways to fulfill any mitzvah, we become blind to the commandment to care for the poor, the needy, the hungry, the stranger! We are so caught up in our need to be right, our need to be perfect, our need to disassociate from what is in order to achieve some type of nirvana, that we fail to see how we are killing our own humanity, how we are stomping on the divinity in another(s) human being, and how we are heading for disaster, heading for slavery, heading for destruction.

In recovery, we “continue to take personal inventory and promptly admit when we are wrong”. We have to keep a daily, hourly, record of what we are doing well and not so well. We have to “promptly admit when we are wrong” so we don’t fall into the trap of rationalizing our mistakes, blaming things on another, shirking our responsibility. Our daily inventory keeps our humanity front and center for us, it keeps the humanity of another(s) in the forefront of our living and we are able to be kinder and gentler with our self and with everyone else.

I have to vote for people who care about human beings in need. I pray that most people will let go of their excessive piety towards a personality and vote to keep the soul of democracy alive. I  have devoted the past 35 years to this goal and I have fallen short at times and I know I have hit the mark more often than not. I work hard to not blame my self, another, the universe for what has happened in my life and I take responsibility for my part. I am also responsible for what I do today, how do I help another human being out of their suffering? I am blessed to be able to reach out, lend a helping hand, need nor expect anything in return and know that this makes today a good day. Helping a human being who suffers takes precedence over anything else in life. Doing this helps me be more human, kinder to myself as well as to you and keeps me in line with the divine demand to me. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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Living Rabbi Heschel‘S Wisdom - A Daily path to living well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 37

“The ancient Rabbis knew that excessive piety may endanger the fulfillment of the essence of the law. “There is nothing more important, according to the Torah, than to preserve human life … . Even when there is the slightest possibility that a life may be at stake one may disregard every prohibition of the law.” One must sacrifice mitsvot for the sake of man, rather than sacrifice man for the sake of mitsvot”. (God in Search of Man)

We are facing the danger “the ancient Rabbis” knew about and were worried about. Many people are becoming/have become so obsessed with the fulfillment of the laws they have come to make up, rather than the laws of the Faith and Spirituality, we are watching the loss of life happen and not even noticing it. We are watching people be beaten and hosed, gassed and bombed for their desire to be free, to be treated with dignity and respect, to be seen as equally worthy and valuable. Rather than live the thoughts and the warnings of “the ancient Rabbis” we are watching demagogues, authoritarians, deceivers, liars, cheats, dullards and even our Justice system treat the life and dignity of anyone not like them, anyone not genuflecting to them, anyone not bowing down to them, anyone not proclaiming their fidelity to them as not human, not important, not mattering, needing to be destroyed, locked up, put in cages.

We have seen this for years in this country and many of us believed it would be different with the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and it was for a minute. Then the South rose again and got statues of insurrectionists, of treasonous people put up across the land. When Black people were starting to come up, the Klan got more violent, more murderous and, nothing happened to them. We watched the Klan march in New York City in the 1920’s with Fred Trump proudly among them and, unlike the Kennedy boys, his son carries on in Fred’s tradition of racial animosity, religious hatred. In 1964, with the passing of the Civil Rights Act many of us, again, believed it would be different, only to have Nixon/Agnew work with Thurmond, et al to begin to tear it apart, something that would be accomplished by Trump’s court and the Tea Party/Maga combination.

We have watched every immigrant group be scapegoated since the mid-1800’s. Whether it is the Chinese brought here for slave labor to build railroads, etc, the Italians, the Irish, the Vietnamese, the Cubans, and of course, the Jews and the Hispanics forever and always; the country who has Lady Liberty in it’s New York Harbor to welcome people, to give new immigrants hope and light has berated, been prejudicial and continually used their immigrant status against them. Believe it or not, there have been many whites who have raped, robbed, pillaged, murdered and done other sundry actions, yet we only hear about the Hispanics and Blacks. There are many whites who have laundered money, done insider trading, who run the banking system, the media, financial markets, yet we only hear about ‘the Jews’. There are many white people who are organized crime and have been throughout our history, making some of their crimes legal now, yet we only hear about the Irish, Italian, Hispanic, Jewish, Black gangsters-amazing isn’t it?

These god-fearing people of NO FAITH, are extolling scriptures and bastardizing the words of spirit and of God. They have made it their business to, as Trump did, turn the Bible upside down and inside out to suit their purpose. Rather than fulfilling Scripture, rather than fulfilling spiritual truths, rather than fulfilling what our higher consciousness tells us, they are dead set on fulfilling their needs for power, control and wealth. They are dedicated to the proposition that only they are equal and every one else is inferior. I know this because, while they offered consolation and ‘comfort’ to Speaker Pelosi, none of the Republicans stopped talking or condemned the rhetoric that makes the attack on her husband possible. Just as Yitzchak Rabin was killed because of violent rhetoric, led by Benjamin Netanyahu, so too has violence been perpetrated by many, including Jan. 6, 2021, because of the violent, evil rhetoric of Trump, Jordan, Meadows, McCarthy, McConnell, and the rest of the people who have “stood idly by the blood” of their brothers and sisters. It is time to speak up and vote them out of power, it is time for them to experience the logical consequences of their actions, it is time to say NO to this insidious hatred! VOTE, VOTE, VOTE for truth, kindness, justice, mercy and compassion-vote in ways that are in concert with God’s path, not the path of Oligarchs, Pharaohs, Putins, Trumps, Koch’s, etc.

In recovery, we are acutely aware of how we murdered people’s souls by our deceptions, our mendacity, our rape of their trust and the shattering of their hopes that this time we meant what we were saying. We are so overcome with regret for our past actions we made a vow to remember them in order to stay away from them today and tomorrow. We have made/are making our amends and changing our ways because of these past actions. We have a new way of living that makes us want to and need to live a moral and ethical life, no longer engaging in the deceptions of the past and preventing new deceptions from taking root.

I am enraged at how these people of NO-FAITH continue to bastardize God’s desires through their ‘strict adherence’ to the laws as they want to understand them. More tomorrow! God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 36

“Rules are generalizations. In actual living, we come upon countless problems for which no general solutions are available. There are many ways of applying a general rule to a concrete situation. There are evil applications of noble rules. Thus the choice of the right way of applying a general rule to a particular situation is “left to the heart,” to the individual, to one’s conscience.” (God in Search of Man pg. 327)

We are in a moment of great peril today. We see the dismantling of the rights and freedoms accorded people by our Constitution, our Declaration of Independence and by every Spiritual Tradition/Discipline. Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, is only the latest in a long line of haters, disseminators of anti-Semitic lies. We have Marjorie Taylor Greene who is being hailed by the Republican Party for accusing the Rothschilds’ of starting the Wildfires, calling Jamie Raskin a communist and a pedophile, etc, etc. We had Pizzagate in 2016 and ad nauseum through the ages. We have the Stanford report on their exclusion of Jews and non-welcoming of Jews in the 50’s and 60’s. We have the assault on a woman’s right to choose, an assault on vaccines to keep us safe, an assault on the rule of law, an assault on our freedom to vote, an assault on our democracy by Ye, Greene, McCarthy, Trump, De Santis, Abbott, et al. Yet, people cheer and clap when Greene says she wants to ‘kill the bitch’ Pelosi, impeach Joe Biden, arrest the FBI, etc. There used to be a “bring your child to work” day - now the people fawning over Greene, Herschel Walker, Dr. Oz, J.D. Vance, Blake Masters, Kari Lake, and the like believe we should “bring your AK47 to work”. Why not blast away the competition, the people who speak truth, the people who don’t agree with you- my heart is telling me this is okay must be their inner dialogue.

I understand the Rabbis’ desire to set hard and fast rules which they realized could never hold so they adopted another way to understand the rules, follow the law and allow individuality and personality to be part of living within the confines of the Torah/Teaching from God/Higher Consciousness. They put the minority opinions into the discussion that was written down and we now have parameters within which everyone is able to live-if we choose to live with Godliness and Holiness in all of our affairs. They even went so far as to say, if at all possible-never make a law that would make people feel far away from God and/or the law. This is the caveat within which we have to live-while there are some absolutes-don’t murder, don’t commit adultery, don’t bear false witness, don’t covet, no idolatry- most of life comes down to choices of how to follow a way of living that is compatible with being a partner of God, choices of how best to honor the infinite worth and dignity of every human being including our self. The Jewish Tradition teaches: “To destroy one soul is to destroy an entire world and to save one soul is to save an entire world”. It doesn’t differentiate between race, color, creed, ethnicity, in fact Biblical living calls for us to have “One law for the citizen and stranger alike”. There is no difference between us that allows one person to enslave another, to allow one person to believe they are above the rules, laws, desires of God and humanity, to allow one person to believe they can spread mendacity for their own power and greed with impunity and call themselves Godly.

Here is the great challenge for all of us, how to stop these unholy imposters, these unGodly messengers pretending to be people of faith, these money-changers, power-brokers in our Churches, Mosques and Temples who curry favor with the Kevin McCathys, the Marjorie Taylor Greenes, the Donald Trumps, the Ron Di Santis’, the Greg Abbots, Jim Jordans, et al. People who are supposed to be messengers of Christ’s teachings, of Mohammed’s prophecy, of Moses’ insight and warnings. We have to uncover their falseness and their deceptions, we have to stop allowing these haters, these demagogues to drive us into being an authoritarian nation, a nation that denies it’s heritage, it’s mission and it’s raison d’etre. We have to do everything in our power to repel this assault on our freedom, our choices, our souls. These liars call themselves ‘god-fearing people’ ‘christian nationalists’ yet there is nothing Godly in what they are doing-God demands truth from us, not lies, and there is nothing Christian in what they are doing and saying-Christ cared for the powerless, the voiceless, the stranger, etc. Greene, et al and their ministers of greed and power are the very things they accuse everyone else of-they are using Goebbel’s playbook like masters. We have the power to stop them, we have our votes today, this election. We have social media, we have the power of pen and tongue - let us use it for God’s Sake, for Democracy’s sake, for our freedom’s sake!

In recovery, we recite the Serenity Prayer at most meetings. Reinholt Niebuhr’s prayer asks us, demands of us to be proactive and concentrate on what things we can change, our self, our responses and our actions. It is an activist prayer which is telling us to stop concerning our selves with things out of our control and engage in what we can control and change.

I believe we can control and change the trajectory of our democracy. I believe, as Rev Niebuhr demands, we must engage in this struggle. We may or may not be at the brink of a Civil War, I do know we are engaged in a struggle to determine if this nation, under God, will survive this latest assault on it. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark.

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 35

“Rules are generalizations. In actual living, we come upon countless problems for which no general solutions are available. There are many ways of applying a general rule to a concrete situation. There are evil applications of noble rules. Thus the choice of the right way of applying a general rule to a particular situation is “left to the heart,” to the individual, to one’s conscience.” (God in Search of Man pg. 327)

The great conundrum for us all in taking in these words of wisdom is to be so present in the moment we are in that we cannot use yesterday’s way “of applying a general rule” to today’s situation. We are forced, pushed, called to see the nuances of this situation and not compare, not compete, maybe not even be consistent with yesterday’s actions. This is how we continue to evolve, continue to change, continue to grow. Staying the same, never changing no matter what new information comes in, acting the same in every situation is a lazy person’s way of life. It is not the life of a dynamic human being, it is the life of a static person. It is not the path to be human, it is the path denial, the path of fear, and it is followed by people who are not willing to grow their heart, grow their conscience and/or be in touch with and listen to either of these nor the cry of their soul.

Our houses of worship are failing us and have failed us, which may be why affiliation is at a low point right now. They have failed because they are more interested in dogma than in spirit. They have failed because they speak the words of imperfection and their actions are the actions of disdain for our human weaknesses and punish the sinner rather than lift up the fallen. Religious leaders have been co-opted by political issues in order to ‘serve Christ’ while the Bible reminds us to serve God and not politicians. The Bible reminds us that each of us has planted within us the Spirit of God, the spirit of the Universe which, when we allow it, when we grow it, gives us all the insight to know how to handle every situation. It does it through the stories and the ways different Biblical Archetypes apply the general rules to specific situations. The Bible, The Talmud, the commentaries all teach us through stories of ancestors how to apply and how not to apply the general rules to specific situations, not to do the same thing rather how to think and see this situation for what it is, not what we want it to be.

Our religious institutions need to stop worrying about a woman’s right to choose and speak about our responsibility to see every human being as having infinite worth. Our religious institutions and communal organizations have to be less concerned with what clothes we are wearing, what music we are listening to, how things look, and more interested in what is happening in our souls, relieving the spiritual distress that so many of us are in. Our religious leaders need to be reaching out to the downtrodden and the needy, the widow and the poor, the mothers who are in need, the children who do not know how to discern what their conscience is telling them, the fathers who have blocked spiritual arteries to their heart’s knowledge and to all of us who are just seeking spiritual growth rather than being told what to do and lied to about what attributes God wants us to use. Our religious institutions and communal organizations along with our religious leaders must seek God not Greed, Spirit not Power, Progress not Perfection and help the rest of us do the same.

The path to growing one’s intuition, our hearts’ knowledge, our conscience and our consciousness is study, prayer, meditation, being present in this moment. It is a hard path and we will falter on it, we will trip and fall back into old ideas and patterns. This is part of being human! No matter what your religion is, no matter what your spiritual discipline is, living it in the street, living it in your home, knowing and accepting our imperfections along with our infinite worth, dignity and talents is the only way to grow. To paraphrase Rabbi Heschel from his interview with Carl Stern, a life without learning is not worth living.

In recovery, we know that one foot in the past and one foot in the future is not a good place to be. We have to have both feet in the present, in the now. Many times we ask our self the question: “What would God have me do in this moment?” Our answer depends on our spiritual condition and we know when our response to this question is selfish and self-serving, mean-spirited and enslaving, we must seek help from someone else we trust, because we cannot trust our self in any moment that is self-seeking, self-serving.

I find my growth happens every morning as I write this blog. Rabbi Heschel has been my guide, my disturber, my teacher, my friend, my yardstick for the past 35+ years. I am grateful to Rabbi Mel Silverman, z”l, who turned me on to the wisdom and brilliance of Rabbi Heschel while I was in prison, I am grateful to God and the State of California for intervening in my life when I was about to fall off the cliff and put me in prison so I could learn how to learn, how to listen, how to apply “general rules to a particular situation” through growing my heart’s knowledge, being able to hear my conscience and my soul once again. I work hard to stay in the moment, I work harder to not fall back into old ideas and patterns of behaviors, I work hardest to live the principles of faith/spirit/God in all of my affairs today and accept my imperfections and ‘fail forward’. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 34

“Rules are generalizations. In actual living, we come upon countless problems for which no general solutions are available. There are many ways of applying a general rule to a concrete situation. There are evil applications of noble rules. Thus the choice of the right way of applying a general rule to a particular situation is “left to the heart,” to the individual, to one’s conscience.” (God in Search of Man pg. 327)

I find myself in awe of the wisdom above and in sadness over how we have ignored training our heart, raising one’s conscience and one’s consciousness to be able to fulfill the last sentence of this brilliance from Rabbi Heschel. We are in a situation where our religious institutions have failed us, where our clergy have failed us, where our parenting has failed us, where our psychology has failed us, and where we have failed ourselves.

We no longer teach our children the words and ways of our faith traditions as they were originally conceived through Divine Revelation or Divine Intuition, we teach them the words and ways of faith as a weapon, as a tool to ward off ‘those people’, to put fear into our children and give them the erroneous ideas of being saved by a deity, being rewarded for martyrdom, following the ONE way. Our religious institutions have failed us by not training our hearts, not growing our souls, only appealing to our minds and our emotions. Our religious institutions have failed us because they are willing to sacrifice what is right for what is expedient, what is holy for what will keep the doors open, ‘on advice of counsel/optics’ for what is true. Within each of us is a soul yearning to be heard, a spirit pushing to be utilized and a heart waiting to be circumcised, hoping to be broken so the power of knowledge, the beat of a different drummer can be free and the light from outside can come in to strengthen our hearts.

Our secular schools are not supposed to be teaching morality, they are not supposed to be training our souls, our hearts. Yet, we leave it to them because our religious institutions have failed us so greatly. We are in need of a revolution, a spiritual revolution as Rabbi Heschel describes elsewhere in his writings. We are in desperate need of a rebellion to love, to wholeness, to raising our consciences, and our consciousness!

This rebellion has to begin at home, however, not just in our religious institutions. At our dinner tables there is more to talk about than grades and sports, more to engage in than social occasions. There is the ‘arguing’ over what is truthful and what is moral, what is correct in this situation and how to keep our moral compass in the midst of lies, deceptions and mendacity. There is the conversations around our own self-deceptions, our own imperfections and our spiritual development. How are we raising the souls of those around us and our own souls at our dinner tables, in our backyards, in our get-togethers  with friends and family? How are we holding our selves and one another accountable for maturing our souls a little more each day? How are we raising our consciousness towards our Divine Intuition one grain of sand more each day? How are we lifting up our conscience to meet the needs of any and all situations we find our self in daily?

These questions are imperative to ponder and consider if we are going to grow our free will. The solutions to these questions and more will determine our progress on our journey to the Promised Land, on our journey towards true freedom and our journey towards wholeness. We are in desperate need of asking the right questions for the situation at hand. The world is in dire need of us “enobling the common” and being human as Rabbi Heschel teaches and as he lived.

Having immersed myself in the paragraph above for the past few days and many times over the years, I have such respect, admiration, love and joy for the way my father, z”l, taught us all to think for our self, to grow our souls and mature our spirits as well as teaching us how to act morally no matter what our emotions and/or mind told us. Of course, I went off the rails for 20+ years from this path and, because of his teachings, I had a path to return to. I know that I have to apply my spiritual nature to my daily living, that separating them, compartmentalizing my life always leads to negativity, to incompleteness, to feeling like a fraud. I was always faulted for saying that I was great when asked how I was, I came to believe that what people did not/do not understand that being alive, being teachable, being grateful, being excited for what lies ahead infuses me with the desire and the strength to have my heart broken, because more light will come in and I will see errors in my thinking, areas where my intuition needs to mature and the places/times my neediness overtakes what is true, real and right in front of me. It helps me realize the willful blindness I have/do practice. I am great every day because God has returned my soul to me for this day. In recovery, we say we live one day at a time and this is a joyous experience for me. I plan for tomorrow and I live in today-how can this be bad? I keep recalibrating my moral compass and making sure I am heading true north each day, I continue to ‘argue’ for the sake of heaven and my soul as well as for yours. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 33

“Rules are generalizations. In actual living, we come upon countless problems for which no general solutions are available. There are many ways of applying a general rule to a concrete situation. There are evil applications of noble rules. Thus the choice of the right way of applying a general rule to a particular situation is “left to the heart,” to the individual, to one’s conscience.” (God in Search of Man pg. 327)

I have been immersed in these words for the past 24 hours and I have thoughts bouncing around in my head and my heart, in my conscience and in my consciousness. I am thinking of the phrases: ‘this is the way we have always done it’ and ‘it was good enough for me so it is good enough for you’ and other such idioms. Rabbi Heschel’s words above remind me to stay in radical amazement at all times, to constantly be maladjusted to these generalizations  and these rules that we feel compelled to follow exactly as written. Rabbi Heschel is demanding that we actually be present in our actions, in our living situations and stop hiding from what is in favor of some mirage we see or want to see.

I am thinking of the ways the “noble rules” are being bastardized by our Court system from the Supreme Court all the way down to local courts. The Supreme Court has ruled that a corporation is to be treated like a person, they have ruled the legitimacy of secret and dark money for political contributions. They have opened the door to abuses of power by Senators like Lindsey Graham and shut the door on the civil rights and voting rights of minorities. They have applied the power of the Court to tell a woman what she can do with her body and the government that can’t tell men to be vaccinated! Our Court system has become so politicized by K street money and the Federalist Society, the prove the verse in the Bible that says: bribes blind the eyes of the wise. Rather than seeing the Constitution for what it is, an amazing document that is purposely left to interpretation and being amended, they want to put it in stone and make it a fossil. We, the People, have to say no to this hijacking of our courts. We, the People, have to say no to not holding people in power accountable. We, the People, have to take Abraham Lincoln’s words and put them into action: “that government of the people, for the people and by the people shall not perish from this earth.”

We, the People, are able to say no, we are able to vote our heart, our spirit, our true self if and when we stop making it okay for us to use “evil applications of noble truths.” When the rules become weapons to denigrate, enslave, isolate and force people into hard labor in order to put food on the table, we have become like the Pharaoh in Egypt. When we go along with the bastardization of “noble truths” we are going against Moses’ many exhortations in Deuteronomy. When we become drunk with power and believe the rules don’t apply, we are acting like the people prior to the flood. When we spread lies about someone else in order to feel good about our self, in order to build our self up, we are engaging in the behaviors that caused the destruction of the Second Temple. When we are treating the stranger, the poor and the needy as criminals, we are acting the same way the people in power did prior to the destruction of the First Temple.

What we are failing to realize is that this is what leads us to exile. What we are failing to realize is that we are already in exile! We have separated our self from God, from one another with these “evil applications of noble truths”. We have used rules to keep people “in their place” like the Caste system of India. We have taken the revolutionary spirit and the reasons their is America and turned them against the very people America was created for; “give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”. Instead of “lifting my lamp” we are allowing a minority to turn out the lights on our democracy. Rather than “the golden door” we are allowing a minority of prejudiced people, scared people open the iron bars of prison literally and figuratively. We, the People, are the only ones who can turn the tide back. We, the People, are the only ones who can re-light the lamp of Lady Liberty. We, the People, are the only ones who can open the iron bars and help people through “the golden door”. We, the People, have to act our ways back into right thinking, We, the People, have to respond to the demand of Rabbi Heschel’s words and the call of God to BE HUMAN!

In recovery, we leave the prison of old behaviors, we leave the iron bars blocking us from seeing how to apply a general rule to a specific situation. We do this by using the spirit of the rule to point us in a direction. There is a general rule to acknowledge our powerlessness over a substance and/or behavior and we, in recovery, have to use this rule to realize we are powerless over people, places and things. We also realize that what works in one situation will not work in another in the same way. We are acutely aware that each moment is different and if we don’t adapt the rules to the situation, we will fall back in our recovery.

I am still swirling with thoughts and experiences of this wisdom of Rabbi Heschel. I am still seeing how I fall into the trap of finding the wrong way to apply the general to the specific and that I do this less and less with each day. More tomorrow, God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark.

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 32

“Rules are generalizations. In actual living, we come upon countless problems for which no general solutions are available. There are many ways of applying a general rule to a concrete situation. There are evil applications of noble rules. Thus the choice of the right way of applying a general rule to a particular situation is “left to the heart,”27 to the individual, to one’s conscience.” (God in Search of Man pg. 327)

To go beyond the rules, to go beyond the requirements is what Rabbi Heschel describes above. The “countless problems” we encounter each day of our life are not always concrete situations. Even though, many of us want a ‘one-size fits all’ solution, this is just not the case if we are to live authentically, spiritually, and intellectually honestly. Yet, we continue to do this, we continue to make complex situations concrete, we continue to take simplicity and turn it into mendacity, we continue to engage in deceit, subterfuge and power struggles because ‘we know better’. Rather than seeing the “many ways of apply a general rule to a concrete situation”, we crave the certainty of a solution that worked then, works now and will work in the future without any creativity, any changes to the solution and, as Rabbi Heschel points out, this is just not possible.

The more certainty we crave in our rules, the more opportunity there is for “evil applications of noble rules”. One of the most glaring is the “noble rule” of free speech. This was put into our Bill of Rights as a protection against being silenced by government as the Colonists were by the King of England. It is not to be used for hatred, for violence, for insurrection. It is not to be condoned by leaders like Kevin McCarthy does with Marjorie Taylor Greene, Jim Jordan, et al. It is not to be bastardized with racists tropes, anti-Semitic tropes, with political ads that are lies like the ones from ‘sanity in government’s Stephen Miller who, like Greene, Jordan and their cronies enjoy bullying, lying, wielding their powerful megaphones to deceive ‘their base’ and prevent them from hearing truth.

In our work place and in our homes we have come to believe that a rule has to be applied the same to each person in the work place and/or home. We have come to legislate ourselves into the sameness and the lunacy that Rabbi Heschel is pointing out above. We cannot treat each person the same at work because each person in a work place has different talents, different ways of doing the same work and, in opposition to Henry Ford, human beings are not robots, they are not automatons, they have to have freedom to their work in the way they know best. This is the path to creation of new and interesting ideas, products, ways of doing things and it is impossible if we are all treated the same. When we are unable to discern that there are different jobs in our work place and the people filling these jobs deserve the freedom to do their job in the best ways they see fit, get the job done of course, we limit the productivity of our work place and we limit the creativity of our workers, and we limit the company’s ability to grow and sustain itself.

We, the People, need to stand up to the bullying of our Elected Officials and the people running for office. We need to stand up to their fear-mongering and deceptions. We need to discern the situation we are in and stop trying to solve it/resolve it with past solutions, that probably were only band-aids anyway. It is time for us to go inside and see what our intuition and our spirits are telling us, it is time for us to stop using “noble rules” for our benefit and in pursuit of evil. It is time for us to stop bastardizing our sacred texts, our sacred relationships, our sacred self through stunting our self with foolishness and mendacity. We are able to rise above the negative calling to apply “one size fits all” and the “if you do it for one, you have to do it for all” mantra that political correctness on both ends of the spectrum seem to call for.

In recovery, we are constantly seeking solutions to the issues we face each day. Some people erroneously believe if they do today, what they did yesterday, they will stay in recovery. This self-deception has been proven false over and over again, yet some people still seek an “easier and softer way”, hoping they will not have to do the deep dive into seeing everything new, every situation with a “new pair of glasses”. In recovery, we know our life is constantly changing and staying in the present, in the now and seeing what truly is are necessary in order to go beyond the rules and immerse ourselves in the situation, finding a solution that is appropriate for this moment, knowing it may not be for another moment.

I have been guilty of what Rabbi Heschel writes above, I have tried to use the same solutions that did not work before and try to make them work in another situation prior to my recovery. I am guilty in my years of recovery, just a lot less so. I work hard to see each situation on it’s own merits, I use my insights, my wisdom, the advice I seek from another, and I glean a solution that is unique to this moment. I do this in my work as an Advocate for the Soul of another person, an organization, the world around me. I continue to use the general rules and apply them with purpose and passion and nuances to seek solutions for everyday life situations. This is the purpose of this blog, finding new ways and situations to apply Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom and brilliance to our everyday living. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark.

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Living Rabbi Heschel’s Wisdom - A Daily path to LIving Well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 31

“The ultimate requirement is to act beyond the requirements of the law. Torah is not the same as law, as din. To fulfill one’s duties is not enough. One may be a scoundrel within the limits of the law. Why was Jerusalem destroyed? Because her people acted according to the law, and did not act beyond the requirements of the law.”(God in Search of Man pg.327)

The more I immerse myself in these ideas/thoughts of Rabbi Heschel, the more I find the nuances which were fairly well hidden in my subconscious mind come to light. The word Jerusalem in the Hebrew comes to mean ‘city of wholeness’ and when we only act “according to the law”, we are destroying the wholeness we seek as humans. While we are satisfying a need, a compulsion, a necessity so we can feel accomplished, fulfill someone else’s rules, fulfill God’s rules, do what we need to do to get ahead, we are not satisfying the deep craving in the soul of every human being to be whole, to be complete. In fact, as I am experiencing Rabbi Heschel’s words above, we are destroying the very pathway to the wholeness we seek.

While we will never get ‘there’, just as we never get to the Promised Land by the end of the Torah, we can continue to make this journey if and when we decide to “act beyond the requirements of the law”. We saw this with the Founding Fathers, the Declaration of Independence says “all men are created equal”, not just white men, and it is an incomplete document because they did not include women. However, the fact that they went beyond these requirements at the time, by a Southerner Thomas Jefferson, shows the reason our nation survived two wars with England and a Civil War as well.

The Jewish People have survived with our roots intact and our Torah as it is for over 2500 years, some say over 3300 years, because people have been willing to go beyond the letter of the law and serve the spirit of the law as well. The Prophets tell us the story of the destruction of both the Northern Kingdom (Israel) and the Southern Kingdom (Judea) and the reasons for both, giving lip service to the law, bring sacrifices that did not change the inner life, the heart, the spirit of the people, rather being punctilious about the letter of the law, the requirements, while not being engaged in the spirit of the law, in not “going beyond the requirements of the law.” And we learned from this that we have to remember and act, to paraphrase Pirke Avot, the world endures because of 3 things, Torah (a teaching of how to live) Service (fulfilling the words and will of God) and Acts of Lovingkindness (going beyond fulfilling the words and will of God to acting Godly in all our affairs). While this is a tall order, it is the only way to experience more wholeness in our inner life, it is the only way to experience a serenity and calm in our inner life, it is the only way to engage our subconscious and bring more clarity, more wisdom, more wrestling to light in our lives.

Going “beyond the requirements of the law” has to become a daily routine that we never do routinely. If we are to move towards wholeness and freedom for all, we must stop our narrow viewing of Torah, the Bible, the Koran, the Constitution, and begin to turn them around and around, upside down and sideways to glean all of the different paths to wholeness that they give us, to immerse our selves in all the different paths to freedom that they uncover for us. Doing this means creating the Bigger Table that John Pavlovitz speaks about. Doing this means changing from a “me” society to a “we” society. It entails as moving from seeking to be ‘somebody’ to knowing and embracing being an ‘everybody’ as Joe Dispenza teaches and as Rabbi Harold Shulweis teaches being Ehad, part of the Oneness of God/Universe. We do this by giving voice to our true inner desires, to our soul’s call, to our unique talents and gifts. We do this by allowing our deeds to change our inner life, by being immersed in our actions such that we become transformed, recreated by them. Each and every day is an opportunity to move towards wholeness and/or destruction. We have to choose life, we have to choose wholeness, we have to choose freedom, otherwise destruction/negativity “couches at our door and it desires us much”.

In recovery, this is the path we seek to follow. When we make “a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God” we are seeking wholeness, we are seeking freedom from the “bondage of self”. We are seeking to go beyond the self to join with the Higher Self, both ours and the One of the universe. We do this on a daily basis and we seek to grow one grain of sand more whole each day.

I hav experienced this journey towards wholeness for the past 35 years. It has been one step forward and two steps backwards at times and 3 steps forward and ½ step backwards at other times. Today, I know I am more whole than I have ever been thanks to Rabbi Heschel, my path of recovery, Torah, my wife and family, my friends and my non-friends. I am taking the lessons of the experiences over these 35+ years and incorporating them into my daily living and each day is calmer, more whole and freer than the days before. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 30

“The ultimate requirement is to act beyond the requirements of the law. Torah is not the same as law, as din. To fulfill one’s duties is not enough. One may be a scoundrel within the limits of the law. Why was Jerusalem destroyed? Because her people acted according to the law, and did not act beyond the requirements of the law.”(God in Search of Man pg.327)

One of the errors that many of us make when we read Rabbi Heschel, Eckhart Tolle, Dalai Lama, John Pavlovitz, the Bible, the Big Book of AA, and all other spiritual texts is just that, we read them, we analyze them, we become mindful from them, yet we don’t experience them. To read any of the people above, to read the St. Francis Prayer, the Serenity Prayer is only a half measure. We must experience the words, we must immerse our self, our spirits, our inner life, our higher consciousness in the words and go beyond the words. If all one does is rationally read the sentences above and ponder them, one will never be able to glean the brilliance and the wisdom of these sentences, one will never be able to have a light shine on them from Rabbi Heschel’s teachings, one will stay in a mode of pondering and thinking, arguing and agreeing, rather than “act beyond the requirements” of intellectual stimulation.

This is, I believe, how we become “a scoundrel within the limits of the law”. This is a quote from Ramban, the famous Jewish leader in Spain who participated in the Disputation and wrote these words as a commentary on the sentence: “You shall be holy because I, the Lord, am holy” from Chapter 19 of Leviticus. It was in response the question of why is this verse in here when we have accepted Torah? He went on to use sex as an example; a man has sex with his wife whenever he wants with no regard to her needs, her desires, her physical, emotional and spiritual state. This is permissible, and not holy! We can, if we look see these behaviors in our own lives as well. Whether it is sex, our race for success, our taxes, our interpersonal relationships, our business ethics, we can, if we search find the paths we take to “be a scoundrel within the limits of the law”.

Many of us are so aware and, at the same time, immune to this truth that we will change the rules to fit our needs, our particular situation and then deny this to another. We do and will lobby to change the rules of zoning, of welcoming new people into a neighborhood who are ‘different’ than us, etc. I have watched municipalities add extra police presence to shopping areas because ‘those people’ (usually black, brown) have come shopping here. While this is legal, the business owners requesting the extra police are doing it from fear and prejudice-scoundrels within the limits of the law. How often have you and/or I set a different standard for our self, sometimes higher, sometimes lower, than we do for another and berated another for not living up to our expectations? How often have we used our power of status, wealth, pen and tongue to win an argument, a lawsuit, a labor dispute by using isolated incidents and taking them out of context? How often have we used the vulnerabilities of another against them in order to ‘win’? How often have we rebuked someone else for the very things we do and then either excuse our same behaviors?

Most of us have, at one time or another, or will “be a scoundrel within the limits of the law”. Most of us have and will deny this, ignore this, and defend ourselves for doing it! Just a fact that is hard and necessary to face. Going “beyond the requirements of the law” means to accept our propensity to want to be right and immerse our self in the whole story. We have to continually experience the actions we are taking, we have to continually experience the wisdom and path of living well that our holy texts, our amazing interpreters of spiritual living give to us. We have to let go of our need to be right and see the nuances of our actions, our thinking and the ways we block off the voice of our higher consciousness/the voice of our soul. We move from wealth being power over to wealth being power to help, we move from berating another for our disowned parts to recognizing our self in another human being, we move from prejudice to seeing people of color, non-christian people as human beings as dignified and worthy as we are. It takes a constant awareness and commitment to change for this to happen, it takes a deep dive into our inner life and marriage with our soul’s knowledge to make this happen and we can do it. As we say in recovery, we have to “let go and let God”, we have to stop having “contempt prior to investigation”.

Immersing and experiencing these words cause me pause, I am well aware of when I did this in my distant past and examine the ways I still am “a scoundrel within the limits of the law”. I have found myself less a scoundrel and more engaged in going beyond the letter of the law. I know I go the extra mile for another, for a cause and for God. I also know that I am capable of fooling myself. Many times I claimed I was doing something for the ‘sake of heaven’ and it was for my sake. I have not, in these past 34 years, however, used the vulnerabilities of another against them so I could ‘win/succeed’. Of this I am proud. I am constantly immersing my self in the moment and staying present more and more each day. I experience what I read by writing about it, growing from this blog and rejoicing in my progress. I pray you rejoice in yours as well. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 29

“The ultimate requirement is to act beyond the requirements of the law. Torah is not the same as law, as din. To fulfill one’s duties is not enough. One may be a scoundrel within the limits of the law. Why was Jerusalem destroyed? Because her people acted according to the law, and did not act beyond the requirements of the law.”(God in Search of Man pg.327)

Rabbi Heschel is really disturbing for many of us in this teaching. What does he mean “to fulfill one’s duties is not enough”? I have pondered this sentence for years and I have come to understand Rabbi Heschel calling to us to go beyond the boundaries and limitations of our duties to immerse ourselves in our duties so we change our inner dialogues, our inner emotions and our inner experience. It is easy to follow the rules, it is easy to fulfill a duty, it is much more difficult to have the rules and our duties change us. Hence, the following sentence “One may be a scoundrel within the limits of the law”.

We live in a society that allows people to skirt the law in a myriad of ways. Gil Cedillo, Keven de Leon have not resigned from the LA City Council after being unmasked as participating in racist, mean-spirited conversations about groups of people and individuals. They are within the law to do this, they can even say they are fulfilling their duty as elected officials to stay in office, yet, they are scoundrels because their motives are purely selfish and self-serving. They are not unusual, unfortunately. Many of our elected officials have been ‘outed’ as supporters of racism, anti-semitism, etc and the establishment wants to reward them-just look at Kevin McCarthy and Marjorie Taylor Greene. While our congress people are elected from a particular district and/or state and they are to serve the interests of their constituents, they also take an oath to serve the entire country. Yet, instead of serving the whole country, they serve special interests that keep them in office, that keep them in power and “fulfill their duties” while being “scoundrels within the limits of the law”. We see this also with corporations and individuals who will pay fines and not admit guilt, who will sue the people they have harmed, who seek to win at any and all costs while keeping on ‘the right side’ of an issue and/or a law.

As individuals, we can “fulfill one’s duties” and still be scoundrels as well. This occurs when we take advantage of another person’s ignorance, take advantage of another person’s vulnerabilities, manipulate people to go along to get along, etc. We seem to be unable to live into our duties in a manner that changes our inner life. We seem to be controlled by FOMO, fear of missing out. We seem to believe that if we can put someone else down, we build our self up. We act in ways that “fulfill our duties” and harm another(s) without any remorse or repentance. It is an accepted mode of living in society, we call it survival of the fittest. Let the buyer beware is one way we justify being “a scoundrel within the limits of the law”. Another way is blaming our victims, another way is trying to control the actions of another person through money, legislation, and bastardization of holy texts. This way of living has led to our society being addicted to pleasure, wealth, power, greed, war and hatred of “the other”. It has led to blame and shame of anyone who is ‘different’ from us in ethnicity, race, creed, religion, etc. It has led to a deterioration of our morals, ethics and decency and has put freedom on a collision course with authoritarianism.

Rabbi Heschel’s demand above, however, gives the antidote to these seemingly benign activities. When we go beyond the letter of our duties, when we go beyond the letter of the law, when we stop doing things for our own gain only, we are in recovery from this terrible dis-ease of more, of power, of greed, of selfishness. We are able to do this when we remember whom we are serving, God, people, something greater than our self. Going beyond the mere “fulfilling our duties” becomes a path of inner wholeness and clarity, a path towards self-satisfaction and connection with the universe, with humanity and a sense of accomplishment of service and living our particular mission. The path to this is to be fully engaged in doing the next right thing with intention, with passion, and with purpose. We no longer do things by rote, we no longer ‘mail it in’, we engage in the action with our whole self, not being distracted by what is next, not being distracted by our devices, not being distracted by worries from our past nor fears of the future. We are present in this moment, we are immersed and listening for the wisdom of our inner life, our souls’ knowledge and we begin to transform our FOMO’s, our need to be right, our greed and thirst for power into knowing we are in the place we are supposed to be, knowing when we are right without needing to prove it, realizing we have enough for the moment, and we are enough always!

This is the path for all of us who are in recovery. We let go of our old ideas, realizing they have not served us in positive ways. We seek to improve our inner life and mature our intuition while recognizing and rejoicing in our newfound truth that we are imperfect and will never be perfect nor are we expected to be perfect. We engage in life with a spirit of curiosity, passion, gratitude, excitement and acceptance. We learn a little more each day about living well, about joy, about authenticity and connection. All this happens because we go beyond the “requirements of the law”. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 28

“The ultimate requirement is to act beyond the requirements of the law. Torah is not the same as law, as din. To fulfill one’s duties is not enough. One may be a scoundrel within the limits of the law. Why was Jerusalem destroyed? Because her people acted according to the law, and did not act beyond the requirements of the law.”(God in Search of Man pg.327)

Now what are we to do? We have celebrated new beginnings, we have cleansed our selves of our past errors (we hope), we have brought in the harvest of our actions and rejoiced over the ending and beginning of a new year of reading, studying Torah, so what do we do today? Rabbi Heschel’s teaching above is one of the best responses I have ever heard. Today, the day after the celebration, the day after the Holidays, is the day to commit to living in the spirit of the law, to go beyond the “requirements of the law” not to be more precise to the letter of the law, rather to immerse our self in the teachings of the Torah, in the spirit of the Torah, to understand the laws are here as an entry point to our souls, the key to unlock our connection with God, our connection with community, our connections with family and with our own soul. We can’t do this if we are so focused on the requirements, if we are living our life to check the boxes, if we are holding our self and everyone else to a standard of perfect adherence. We cannot go beyond the letter of the law if we fail to see that the law is the beginning and not the end.

Herein lies the issue for every human being-what end am I trying to achieve, as opposed to what end is the Divine calling me to? Our ends are too often trying to either be the best at fulfilling the law, skirting the law, and/or bastardizing it. We see this in the recent scandal in the Los Angeles City Council. While all of the participants in the racist comments and despicable name-calling were entirely within the law of Freedom of Speech, they showed themselves to be everything they complained about had happened to them, to their people, showed themselves to be racist and anti-semitic all the while staying within the requirements of the law. To go beyond the requirements would entail these people who got caught and everyone one of us, to examine our bias’ and our prejudices, to cut out these cancers of our soul and correct the eye diseases that cause us to be so intolerant. To go beyond the requirements of the law means we have to have a spiritual awakening from all of our celebrations, all of our Holy Days. We have to immerse our self in the life affirming and life changing experiences of each and every day.

We have to see that the law is not the end all/be all. Passing laws to restrict people’s rights and freedoms, keeping people ‘in their place’ are not paths to fulfilling the spirit of any of the laws of Torah. Torah is the big book of recovery from our human condition, as Harriet Rossetto teaches, and it tells us the story of our condition and how being connected to God; loving mercy, doing justly, walking in God’s ways; brings us to living a life full of joy and heartache, error and forgiveness, love and loss, mendacity and truth, and how to lean into joy, love, forgiveness, compassion, justice, mercy, and truth! It only happens when we use this day to lift up our actions because of yesterday’s learning, it only happens when we are more concerned with connection and spirit than with power and prestige. It only happens when we let go of our need for control and we are controlled by a power greater than ourselves, by God. Not the false gods that some people are quoting as prosperity gospels, as the one who wants the infidels killed, the false god of vengeance, the idolatry of blaming misfortune on the ones experiencing it rather than accepting that “nature does not go against itself” as the Talmud teaches.

Rather, we have to see how to use the law to fulfill the commandment: “You shall be holy because I, God, am holy.” We cannot be holy when we are living in mendacity, we cannot be holy when we are living in self-righteousness, we cannot be holy when we think we are the power, the smartest, etc.  We cannot be holy when we are stuck in the minutiae of the letter of the law, we cannot be holy when we are engaged in religious behaviorism. We cannot be holy if we do not grow spiritually each day.

In recovery, we recognize that the steps are here as suggestions, and they are very good ones! We also work with sponsors who help us apply them to our life, to our understandings and help us grow in the spirit of our program of recovery. We are recovering from living in a black and white world to once again see the colors, the grays, the blues, pinks, oranges, etc so we can live immersed in what truly is rather than what our eye disease has been showing us.

Each day is the day after for me. I have always believed this, I have immersed myself in more than the requirements forever, for over 23 years in order to skirt the law and I got arrested for my efforts more than once-a real slow learner am I. In these last 35+ years I have worked hard to learn and grow each day. I am reflecting on the many times I went beyond the letter of the law, I am reflecting on the times when I thought I was and, in retrospect, I wasn’t. I know each day has helped me cut the cancers on my soul away and that going beyond the “requirements of the law”, growing spiritually each day is the Chemotherapy I need and use to guard against the cancer of rigidity from returning. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 27

“This is one of the rewards of being human: quiet exaltation, capacity for celebration. It is expressed in a phrase which Rabbi Akiba offered to his disciples: A song every day, A song every day.” (Who is Man pg. 118)

Today is Simchat Torah, we dance with the Torah and rejoice in and with it. While it is a loud celebration, it is also a time of quiet exaltation. Exaltation comes from the Latin meaning raise aloft, raise upward. Today, Jews all over the globe raise the Torah up and pledge allegiance to God, to the principles of Torah and to help the stranger, the poor, the needy. We do this in quiet exaltation because it is only a pledge between us and God, it is a commitment that we make with our spirit, our mind and our heart. We actualize our capacity to celebrate and be part of a celebration of truth, justice, mercy, kindness, compassion, and love.

The last sentence above is one that speaks to all of us. Frank Sinatra sang “Without a Song” and in it, like Rabbi Akiba’s wisdom, he reminds us that: “without a song the day would never end …when things go wrong a man ain’t got a friend without a song.” Where is the song: in our hearts, in our minds, in our souls. We get to sing it every day, we get to raise our self up by singing the song that is uniquely ours, singing it in concert with everyone else’s song making a cacophony of sound and music that opens the hearts of everyone a little more, makes us a little less judgmental every day, raises our standards of living one grain of sand each day. In the quiet exaltation of singing our unique song, we realize our focus on comparisons, competitions, past hurts, future fears are all for naught. We get a glimpse of what freedom truly is, where we are going towards and how to move forward.

We sing the words of Torah when we read it, we sing hymns in Church, we sing songs in the Mosque, we sing our prayers, we sing songs of love. In the Jewish tradition one of the central prayers is the V’Ahavta, “and you shall love”. We sing of our love of God with all our heart, all our soul, all our everything. When we are able to love life, to love God, to love our self, to love another(s), to love everyone with our heart, our soul, our everything, we have reached a level of freedom that is unknown to most people. While most of us don’t stay there for long, as Michael Corleone said in Godfather III, “every time I think I am out, they pull me back in”, those of us who have experienced this level long to return. We return on a day like today, not just because we are dancing with God’s wisdom and teachings, rather because today we are singing our song, with joy, fervor and love. This is the key, of course, to sing our song and not the song of someone else. To sing our song without trying to drown out the song of any one else. To sing our song, letting go of our need to deceive another, to act mendaciously, to engage in self-deception. I would posit that singing one’s own song is the antithesis of deception, mendacity, isolation, and self-deception/self denigration.

We can use today as an example of what this looks like. When I led a congregation, I would unwind the entire Torah Scroll and wrap it around the people gathered for our celebration. Each person would point to a word in the Torah and that would be their word for the year, to live with, to embrace and to celebrate in quiet exaltation, raising upward from where they were prior. Each year some people would return for this one service only so they could get their word of Torah. We have the same opportunity today, whether Jewish or not, whether in Temple or not, open the Spiritual book you count on, your ‘go to’ spiritual text, flip through the pages quickly, stopping on a page; close your eyes and point to a word, look at it,  and find the meaning of the word for you today and for the next year. If you don’t want to do this, here are some words I have had in years prior: truth, kindness, life, exaltation, love, choice, liar, rebel, wonder, awe, return, response, speak.

This year, I was studying with someone yesterday and my word of this year jumped out at me, mist. In reading Ecclesiastes, the word mist jumped out to me. Every thing that I believe is permanent just isn’t. I get to remember to seek God and live Godly each day, as much as I possibly can. I get to be accountable for me and to me, I get to stay in this moment, this day and not be imprisoned by the past nor the future. I get to remember the vanity of my youth and the stinking thinking of my own puffed-up importance. I get to turn my heart and my soul to the best life has to offer, using each experience as a teaching moment and learning the lesson of this moment in order to make the next moment better. Mist also means watering my soul with the elements God/Universe has provided, no longer asking ‘where’s mine’ rather taking in the nourishment of this day, staying present with the people, the surroundings, the learning, the joy of this day without needing to moan about what was and isn’t, without needing to fear what is to come, just remembering the wisdom of Rabbi Akiba and these words from “Without a Song”, “I got my troubles and woes but, sure as the Jordan will roll, and I’ll get along as long as a song, strong in my soul.” We all have songs in our souls, we all need a word to trigger a stanza, a lyric, a melody for each year so we can build the symphony that our life truly is. This is the “quiet exaltation”, the celebration I understand Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom gives us. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 26

“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 Shemini Atzeret and tonight is Simchat Torah. We remember our deceased loved ones today and tonight and tomorrow we rejoice ending Deuteronomy and beginning Genesis again. Yet, how can we remember the lessons and love of our deceased and rejoice in the presence of Torah when we have a longing for the past, when we are retreating from this moment? To paraphrase Rabbi Heschel, what is the state of our remembering, what is the state of our rejoicing?

Here is the great challenge of being human, as I immerse myself in Rabbi Heschel’s teaching above. Yizkor, to remember, is to honor and cry for the loves who are no longer with us and in the prayer we say for our dead, we commit to do acts of Tzedakah, righteousness, in their name. We cannot be righteous when we are longing for the past, when we are stuck in our grief, when we are retreating rather than moving forward. At the Red Sea, God told us to go forward instead of looking backward with fear and longing. Throughout our journeying through the wilderness, we longed for a return to the past, to Egypt, to slavery with euphoric recall moments that never happened and we did not turn back. Can we say the same for us today? Can we remember our dead with determination to carry on the goodness they began? Can we remember our dead with a renewed commitment to being one grain of sand more righteous today than yesterday? Can we remember our loved ones by being truthful and responsible?

We are in a world that still wants “the good old days”, where the ones in power now are afraid of the “riffraff” who are seeking a seat at the table. We, the free descendants of former slaves, the free descendants of the oppressed minority throughout the millennia, must do all we can to make room for everyone to have a seat at the table if we are to honor our dead with righteous actions, if we are to be responsible to their memory and to do the T’Shuvah they were unable to accomplish. We have to make a “deliberate decision” to remember our departed with righteous behaviors and to open our hearts, our minds, our self to being on the path of righteousness.

What is the state of our rejoicing if we want this return to the “good old days”? It is stale and mendacious. It is impossible to rejoice in the words, the teachings, the excitement of learning anew, of staying fresh and forward thinking and seeing when we are stuck on the past, when we are retreating to an idea that was never as good as our euphoric recall tells us it was. We never ‘finish’ the reading of Torah because there is always something to learn, something to discover, something to uplift us and to strengthen us in our battles against the “coerced conversion” of our negativity, the “coerced conversion” of those in power, the “coerced conversion” of our fears, etc. It is impossible to rejoice when we retreat back into defensiveness, when we retreat back into shame, when we retreat back into self-deprecation, when we retreat back into conformity.

We can, however, overcome all of the roadblocks to rejoicing, all of the turbulence that prevents us from being present and looking forward. The solution is T’Shuvah, a return of remorse for our errors and for the errors of our ancestors. The solution is T’Shuvah a return to truthfulness in all our affairs; seeing every person with hearts of love, respect and dignity as brothers, sisters, cousins, because we are “all kin under the skin” as my friend and teacher Rev. Mark Whitlock teaches and preaches. The solution is T’Shuvah, a return to being responsible for our actions, responsible to make our corner of the world more welcoming, more just, more compassionate, more caring, kinder, more loving than when we found it. The solution is a return to “deliberate decision” making, to mining the spiritual texts we engage with each day for new and different ways to serve. The solution is a return to our words at Mt. Sinai: “we will do and then we will understand”. The solution is a return to our words as we crossed the Red Sea: “This is my God and I will honor God”. The solution is a return gratitude for this day and the actions that shows our gratitude.

I am so grateful for all the people who have crossed my path. I remember my relatives with love and joy, I am remorseful for the years and days when I did not honor their memory, their love, their commitment to me with righteous behavior and I have and continue to make a “deliberate decision” to grow the righteousness and love they instilled in me. I also am returning to a state of rejoicing in this moment and every moment that I can through leaving “the good old days” and ‘the bad old days’ where they belong, in the past! I also am returning to truthfulness, responsibility and acts of gratitude, righteousness, kindness, compassion, justice and truth today as I do every day. My remorse for my past acts stays with me enough so when I get close to repeating them, I remember this is not who I am today, this is not what I need to do today. God Bless and Stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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