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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 58

“Even more frustrating than the fact that evil is real, mighty and tempting is the fact that it thrives so well in the disguise of the good, that it can draw its nutriment from the life of the holy. In this world, it seems, the holy and the unholy do not exist apart, but are mixed, interrelated and confounded. It is a world where idols may be rich in beauty, and where the worship of God may be tinged with wickedness.”(God in Search of Man pg. 369)

The last sentence of this piece of Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom may be the most chilling of the entire paragraph. Rabbi Heschel is reminding us of the biggest challenge to our humanity, to our living a life that is compatible with being a partner of God. How do we live in “a world where idols may be rich in beauty” and still stay faithful to God, to truth, to love, to kindness, to justice, to compassion?

We are being confronted, as we have always been confronted, with idols that disguise themselves as being holy, that confound us by looking so beautiful, so rich in meaning, and so appealing in their seductiveness. We are constantly being bombarded by the messages our minds want to hear, that our conform to our hearts’ desires and they lure us into actions that are antithetical to God’s will, to decency, to equality, to freedom.

We have put people and ideas on pedestals and come to worship them rather than find ways to fulfill the ideas/paths of ethical living that comes from our Holy Books, be it Torah, New Testament, Koran, Eastern Philosophy, etc. We live the words of the philosopher Tevya in Fiddler on the Roof: “when you’re rich they think you really know”. We are no longer following God, spirit, higher consciousness, we are following the idols of wealth, power, prestige and beauty. Look at how many ‘stars’, celebrities have been born because of instagram, Facebook, tiktok, and other social media sites. We no longer are interested in following the great minds of our time, the wisdom of our ancestors, we are too engaged in following the idols of wealth and beauty, the idols of power and prestige. We are so interested in following and becoming these idols that we sell our souls to get our “five minutes of fame”.

We are so obsessed with beauty, with riches, with power, with idolatry that we seek to deny and defy truth when it is spoken. We are willing, as we see each and every day, to follow what is shiny and fun rather than focus on what is good and needs to be enhanced. Our media follows the flashy news of negativity rather than the dull news of decency. Our schools teach us how to get ahead and be successful through money and fame, not how to be successful at being human. We have let go of the seeking to separate the holy and the unholy, we have let go of discerning the evil from the good. We are more interested in what is ‘cool’ than in what is right. This is not a new problem, as I stated before, it has, however, reached a level where our freedoms are in grave danger. 

We are so blinded by the beauty and the riches of today’s idols that we see good where there is horror, we defend evil in the face of kindness, we care for the rich and the mighty rather than the poor and the stranger. We are so deaf as to be unable to hear the call of the needy and instead hear the call of mendacity and deception. We are so engaged with the idolatry of worshiping beauty, riches, power and prestige we step on the people who we need to do the work we are unwilling to, we trample on the freedoms of anyone who gets in our way and defend our actions by saying we believe in a god that rewards beauty, riches, power and prestige otherwise ‘those people’ wouldn’t be in such straits. We continue to worship at the altars of the idols who believe anti-semitism is good, racism is just, white christian nationalism is the only way!

The major way of being that we recover in our recovery is truth, justice, kindness, love, compassion. We are acutely aware of our need to believe in a power greater than ourselves in order to live in recovery. We know our best thinking got us to a depth of despair and deception where we were engaged in life-taking rather than life-giving. We were living as animals thinking of our self only and what we wanted/thought was good for us. We worshiped at the altar of self and followed the idols we made and called this faith and godliness. Our recovery is based on the principles above and God is whom we worship. We keep removing blinders and ear wax that block us from hearing and seeing what truly is and what we can/need to do to serve a power greater than our self.

I sit here writing this and am guilty of being part of the “world idols may be rich in beauty”! There have been times, in my recovery, where I participated in worshiping the idols of beauty and riches, power and prestige. I even see the lies and self-deceptions I used to do this, I do T’Shuvah for this every day. I know most of my recovery is rejecting these idols, most of my recovery/daily living and teaching is about stripping away the lies and self-deceptions, uncovering the deceptions of another(s) so we all can see truth and I have not whitewash my idol worship by saying they were for the greater good. One can never sell out to idolatry for the greater good, in fact this is exactly the type of message we give our selves so we can practice this idolatry. I am stopping and I pray everyone else does also. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 57

“Even more frustrating than the fact that evil is real, mighty and tempting is the fact that it thrives so well in the disguise of the good, that it can draw its nutriment from the life of the holy. In this world, it seems, the holy and the unholy do not exist apart, but are mixed, interrelated and confounded. It is a world where idols may be rich in beauty, and where the worship of God may be tinged with wickedness.”(God in Search of Man pg. 369)

While we will never get “pure” in either our thoughts or our actions, this is left to the realm of the Angels I believe, we can and, I believe, must begin to improve our awareness of what is holy and what is unholy. We can and need to be aware of how we mix these two modes of being together and how we easily and subtly move from one to the other. As with everything in life, we have to become aware before we can change, we have to acknowledge the true challenge before us prior to being in the solution.

The beginning of our awareness begins with our letting go of our self-deceptions, the lies we tell ourselves to make our self feel good/better about our self and believing the deceptions of another(s). As Rabbi Heschel teaches, “self deception is a major disease”. When it is in the political sphere; Hitler comes about, Putin becomes a hero to White Christians, elections here become stolen and people put partisanship above caring for the stranger, the needy, the poor, etc. In this sphere, we can bring down individuals and countries through our need to lie to our self and to believe the mendacity of another(s). We are witnessing politics as war and have since the mid-1990’s, we are witnessing our court system, from the Highest to the lowest, become pawns of political and religious rhetoric rather than stand for the rule of law and the holiness of our Bill of Rights and Constitution. We have to be aware of our actions and the motives behind our actions in this realm in order to separate the holy and the unholy. We have to end the interrelationship between holy and unholy in our politics so we don’t lose this shaky, beautiful, frustrating and bright star called Democracy, that our ‘forefathers brought forth on this continent”.

This confounding of holy and the unholy never happens in the political sphere if not for it happening in the personal sphere of life. In the family we watch how parents will say “do as I say not as I do” which causes consternation and sets up ones deception receptors as ‘just the way life is’ and ‘everyone lies’, etc. We teach our children to lie and hide, to deceive and to believe/go along with our deceptions and wonder why they lie, hide, steal, from us. We teach them it is okay to deceive to protect the “family honor”; it is okay to be unholy to protect the “family honor”; it is okay to cheat in business/work to “get ahead of the competition”, etc. All of these ‘normal’, accepted deceptions we teach and practice and wonder why the holy and unholy are confounded? How far have we grown as human beings since the days of the Roman Coliseum? How do we continue to deceive our self about our spiritual growth when we continue to use religion to separate us from one another? How do we continue to believe the lies of those who tell us that our unholiness is for the the greater good? How do we follow the leader who is so flawed and so anti what our spiritual and religious texts teach us about being human tells us to? How do we continue to defend practices that marginalize people when “all men are created equal” and we “are engaged in a great civil war” for the soul of community and family?

In the personal sphere it is not okay to blame parents, teachers, religious and political leaders for our own self-deceptions, our own mendacity, our own desire to be deceived. It is time for each of us to take responsibility for our giving in to our unholiness, for our mendacity, for our glee at taking over for someone else, for causing the downfall of another so we can ‘get ahead’. We have to do a daily inventory of the lies we are telling ourselves at night and see how the lies are leading us to confuse “the holy and unholy”, more each day. We have to find the kernel of truth in these lies that make them so believable and so powerful for us and begin to let them go so we can see clearer each and every day. It is a process that is never finished and the more we engage, the more we can live into the holiness we are and the holiness we bring.

In recovery, we “continue to take personal inventory and promptly admit when we were wrong”. We have lived in the mixed-up space of unholy/holy and it drove us to drink! We found ourselves so far out of the realm of being human that we had to come back to the holy/unholy way of living and this is what our recovery is truly all about: separating the holy from the unholy and living more holiness in our everyday actions. We know that “deception of others is rooted in deception of self”.

I have been writing the lies I tell myself and counsel everyone to do the same. When I get away from doing this for too long, I find myself waist deep in mendacity, self-deception and this has led to despair, errors and being too blind, arrogant to see what was and what is. I am jolted back to seeing the lies, the deceptions of another that I believed and the self-deceptions and lies I have told myself. It is exhilarating to see truth and devastating to see the subtler ways I deceive myself. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 56

“Even more frustrating than the fact that evil is real, mighty and tempting is the fact that it thrives so well in the disguise of the good, that it can draw its nutriment from the life of the holy. In this world, it seems, the holy and the unholy do not exist apart, but are mixed, interrelated and confounded. It is a world where idols may be rich in beauty, and where the worship of God may be tinged with wickedness.”(God in Search of Man pg. 369)

Rabbi Heschel is reminding us to be careful and to never be so sure of ourselves, of our rightness, of our righteousness because “the holy and the unholy do not exist apart”. Yet, we find ourselves, so often, believing in our rightness and unable to hear any argument that is in opposition to what we think, what we believe. So many of us are so sure of our ability to separate the holy and the unholy and this surety, as I am immersing myself in Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom, is exactly what makes the holy and the unholy be “mixed, interrelated, and confounded.”

Confound comes from the Latin meaning “to pour together, to mix up” and one of the Hebrew words is babel, as in the tower of Babel story in the Bible. Because we have the two inclinations, as I have described earlier, the ‘good/divine’ inclination and the ‘evil/earthly’ inclination, the pouring together and mixing up of the holy and the unholy seems natural, instinctive. By this I mean, without a rich inner life, without a deep dive into our soul’s natural way of being, our minds and our desires will confuse and confound us into believing in the rightness of our actions, of our beliefs, of our surety. This mixing  up, this pouring together of the holy and the unholy is at the root of our problems/challenges to make the prophet’s words: “Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore”(Isaiah 2:4) a reality.

Abraham Lincoln in his Gettysburg address said: “a new nation dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war…”. While that was true then, it is still true today. In fact, it has been true for the entire history of humanity! Because we confound, mix up, interrelate the holy and the unholy, we are constantly at war with this basic principle of faith: every soul is precious to God, every soul is a Divine Image, every soul is a Divine reminder. The civil war that Lincoln spoke about so eloquently, is not only between people, it is within each one of us.

We have to engage with God in Search of Man not by searching for God, rather by searching for our true self. We have to engage each and every day in the search for our inner truth, for our connection to our authentic beingness. We have to stop confusing our rationalizations, our desires, our earthly desires for power, prestige, property, etc with our divine need for connection, with our divine calling to make peace with one another, to find our similarities and respect our differences. We have to engage in a spiritual discipline that allows our earthly power to be subject to our goodness. We have to cease and desist from our need to be right and engage in our need to be in connection and in covenantal relationships with one another.

We cannot do this when we are confusing the “holy and the unholy”. We cannot do this when we pour together our FOMO (fear of missing out) with our fear of being powerless. We have become subjects to and of the liars, the charlatans, the powerful by believing they like us, they are like us and they understand us. How can anyone else understand me unless we understand ourselves? How can we subject my self to another’s power until we know and understand our own power? How can we be connected to another until we are connected to our self? This is the root cause, I believe, of the holy and unholy being “mixed, interrelated, and confounded”! Nothing will change until we go to the root of the challenge, our inner life. This is the challenge I hear Rabbi Heschel calling us to, this is the demand of God that Rabbi Heschel is articulating for us in these words in this reading, on this day, in this year.

In recovery, we realize we have “undergone a profound alteration in our reaction to life;” and we are aware that we would not be in recovery without the aid of “inner resource which they presently identify with their own conception of a power greater than themselves”(Herbert Spencer-Appendix II Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous). Each and every day we are engaging with our inner life, we are engaging in the struggle between our soul’s knowing and the rationalizations of our intellect and the desires of our emotions. In recovery, we never get it perfect, we are aware of how easy it is to mix up the “holy and unholy”. We no longer hide from the challenge and we are quicker to heed the call and the demand to distinguish one from the other.

OY! How often do I confuse holy and unholy is like asking how often do I think, how often do I speak, act, etc. Yet, over the years I have seen the difference more and more, I have come to know when I am confounding myself and another, as well as God by mixing them up. I am able to distinguish one from the other in subtler ways and, while not always understood by another(s), I am unafraid to take action on the holy and respond to the challenge and demand Rabbi Heschel is articulating above. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 55

“Even more frustrating than the fact that evil is real, mighty and tempting is the fact that it thrives so well in the disguise of the good, that it can draw its nutriment from the life of the holy. In this world, it seems, the holy and the unholy do not exist apart, but are mixed, interrelated and confounded. It is a world where idols may be rich in beauty, and where the worship of God may be tinged with wickedness.”(God in Search of Man pg. 369)

The more I immerse myself in Rabbi Heschel’s words and the more I see the horror of human beings sink to our lowest selves, the more I experience the trembling, sadness, grief, fear Rabbi Heschel is conveying through his words and teaching. 10 years after learning of the death of most of his family, 10 years after first seeing and hearing of the almost complete mass murder of a people because of their faith, skin color, etc, 10 years after the almost complete annihilation of a city and its citizens from the Atomic Bomb, he is witnessing the same evil come alive and flourish through the same people who supported Fascism and Hitler 20+ years earlier! We are witness’ to this same animalistic, Apeman stronger than you, hate you for the color of your skin, hate you because you are a Jew (Jews will not replace us chant is alive and well), hate you because you have more than me, hate you because I deem you less than me behaviors and attitudes and so many people who can help stop this are not because hatred serves their purpose, they believe.

When we hear people invoke their faith in the service of anti-semitism, dropping bombs on innocent children, discriminating against someone because of the color of their skin, believing women are inferior to men, spewing out their evil speech in service of their prejudices, we are witnessing how evil “can draw its nutriment from the life of the holy.” I watch the news, read the blogs, see the tweets and am appalled and I am beginning to understand the way it all happens. Because of the human desire to be deceived, which is what Eve portrays in the Garden of Eden story and Adam is a willing participant in the deception, we want to believe this evil that draws power and ‘rightness’ from the ‘holy scripture’. We want to believe the deception of another(s) so we can be ‘on the right side’ of things when judgement day comes. We want to deceive ourselves into believing that God doesn’t love the widow, the poor, the orphan, the stranger and the needy. We want to believe the lies of the people who say “the rich are loved by God more and therefore everyone should follow them and when God loves you poor people because of your service to the rich, you too shall be redeemed and enriched” and other such bullshit from the ‘prosperity gospel’ of the charlatans purporting to be god’s True Messengers. To many people, it seems good that we separate the wheat from the chaff, the good from the bad; recognizing the bad are everyone who doesn’t fall into lockstep with the ‘party line’-sort of what Stalin, Hitler, Putin, Xi, Orban, Jim Jordan, etc have said and are saying.

Hmm, maybe it is time for leaders and followers to seek truth rather than popularity. Maybe it is time for us all to stand up and march to our capitals and demand we live the moral, ethical, legal and spiritual principles that are implanted within us, that we learn from the Declaration of Independence, the Magna Carta, the Constitution, the Torah, the Talmud, even Hammurabi’s Code. Maybe it is time for us to wrestle with the best ways in our day, in our time, in our situation to put these principles into practice. Taking a page from the Talmud, knowing that there is more than one way to live our principles and using them for evil, using them to deceive, using them to tempt another into doing evil is not one of them. Hmm, maybe it is time for all of us to rise up and say NO to the lies of Fuentes, NO to the silence of the GOP leadership, NO to the lies of big business, big Pharma, small people who lie to get by. Maybe it is time for all of us to look in the mirror and see how we are bastardizing the holy in favor of our own gains, in favor of expediency, in favor of getting along.

In recovery, we are so sensitive to our ability to disguise evil, to use the holy to feed the evil ways we used to practice. We know evil so well because we were to a greater and/or lessor degree practitioners of exactly what Rabbi Heschel is warning us about in the first sentence above. We search out each and every day our subtle ways of evil and take contrary action to what we think we can/should do in these situations because we are aware of how cunning and baffling evil is, we are aware of how real, strong and tempting evil is, and we know how easy it is to deceive ourselves into believing it is actually for the greater good. In recovery, we work to stay hyperaware of anything that even smells like evil and run away from these actions.

I am hyperaware of my ability to disguise evil, I am hyperaware of the ability of another(s) to disguise evil and I realize that many people are not aware of the wisdom and teaching of Rabbi Heschel above. I have been quick and loud in pointing it out about someone else, something else and I work to be as quick and loud with myself and about myself. While nothing will ever be done with 100% good, as I/we are not perfect, I strive to always make sure the evil doesn’t get too much nourishment and stays as small as I can make it and I let people know what my agenda is and work hard to serve the agenda of the WE instead of just the agenda of me. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 54

“Even more frustrating than the fact that evil is real, mighty and tempting is the fact that it thrives so well in the disguise of the good, that it can draw its nutriment from the life of the holy. In this world, it seems, the holy and the unholy do not exist apart, but are mixed, interrelated and confounded. It is a world where idols may be rich in beauty, and where the worship of God may be tinged with wickedness.”(God in Search of Man pg. 369)

Dr. M. Scott Peck, a psychiatrist and author, defines evil as “using the vulnerabilities of another person against them”. Using this definition, it could be clearer and more pointed as to the “the fact that evil is real, mighty, and tempting” for each and every one of us. We live in a culture of ‘one up-man/women-ship’, where anything goes as long as you win, Goebbels’ belief that we should accuse another of that which we are guilty of is rampant, Roy Cohn’s belief to never admit anything, never be wrong is prominent in our political, business and personal lives. These ways of being are tearing the fabric of democracy, of humanity and of goodness apart. I believe one of Rabbi Heschel’s concern in writing this passage, as well as the rest of his teachings, is that we have, can, do, and will bastardize so many good things and turn them evil without even realizing it. We will fall prey to those who bastardize good for their own assent to power and their desire to hold onto it at any and all costs to another(s).

We see this daily in the political rhetoric and the pundits who cover them and give the bastardization of good, the real, mighty and tempting evil that people are putting out so much air time, the rest of us don’t know what is true and what isn’t true. Our vulnerabilities in wanting to believe another person, our need to be connected to people, our faith  being true and real, also set us up for becoming part of the evil that is real, mighty and tempting. We have all ‘gone along to get along’, the people working for the Sackler Family, the administrators at the FDA, the doctors who accepted the lies of Big Pharma, all were/are part of the evil that is the Opioid Crisis! These good, outstanding citizens caved into the pressure, the money, the “offers they couldn’t refuse” and perpetrated a grave evil that has resulted in millions of people dead over the past 40+ years. Now, we are supposed to believe the same people who caused the problems, Big Pharma and Doctors, that with more pills, they can ‘cure’ a person. Lets use LSD, Ketamine, Suboxone, etc to cure the problems of addiction-and we are buying into it, we are jettisoning spiritual recovery for a quick-fix medical answer from the same people who caused the problem. I support harm reduction, I just don’t believe the panacea that the quick fixes in any area of living promise.

We see this using the vulnerabilities of a person against them when we listen to J.D. Vance, Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, etc rail about those Elitists from the East, forgetting to mention they went to Yale, Harvard, etc. When the crowds are shouting LOCK THEM UP, not realizing the liars and cheats are the elitists, the rich, the powerful who are leading the chants. Donald Trump does not know what it is to watch one’s mother try and figure out how to put food on the table and pay the rent while taking home $55-60.00/week in 1966! The advertising business is built on finding a persons’ weakness/vulnerability and exploiting it in order to get us to buy ___. It works! While it doesn’t seem harmful, it is exactly this type of evil that is so “real, mighty and tempting” that “thrives so well in the disguise of the good”.

We all are guilty of participating, initiating, enhancing, engaging in evil. We are all part of the problem and until we admit this, there is no long-lasting solution. In viewing history, I believe our inability to come to terms with our participation and engagement in evil is how we keep finding new ways to hide from it, we are making new disguises and masks for evil in order to fool ourselves! This is, I believe, the reason we have never really had a solution to the evil of war, to the evil of ‘needing to be #1, of the evil to take advantage of another’s vulnerabilities, of the evil to wield power for our own sake rather than for the sake of another(s)/for the sake of God. We can and must change this is we are to evolve into the beings we are created to be, if we are going to stop learning “evil from our youth”.

Recovery is based in “acting our way into right thinking and feeling”. Recovery is a behavioral modification way of living. It is not perfect, it is a progressive path to living one day at a time a little better than the day before. It is a path of two steps forward and one step back, it is a path of plateaus and leaps, it is a path of constantly moving forward in our quest to live one grain of sand better each and every day. It is a way of being that helps us uncover our lies and self-deceptions, our going along with the crowd to do evil.

T’Shuvah is the basis of my path of recovery, along with the 12-steps. Each day is a challenge to uncover the evil that “thrives so well in the disguise of the good” in my thinking, acting and living. It is very challenging which is why a daily inventory is crucial for me and sometimes it takes me a while to realize the evil I did believing it was for the greater good! God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 53

“Even more frustrating than the fact that evil is real, mighty and tempting is the fact that it thrives so well in the disguise of the good, that it can draw its nutriment from the life of the holy. In this world, it seems, the holy and the unholy do not exist apart, but are mixed, interrelated and confounded. It is a world where idols may be rich in beauty, and where the worship of God may be tinged with wickedness.”(God in Search of Man pg. 369)

This paragraph is so full of wisdom, caution, learning and thoughtfulness that I am going to spend a while on it. Beginning with the first part of the first sentence, “evil is real, mighty, and tempting” is something that we have to first acknowledge to be true. I am defining evil as ‘acting in opposition to God, acting in opposition to what is good, kind, just, merciful, truthful, loving, etc. Many people want to accuse another human being of being evil, many people want to denounce an action as evil, and they are not in the awareness of how real evil is, they use it as an adjective rather than a noun, they use is as an adverb rather than a verb! Rabbi Heschel is teaching us, once again, that evil is both a noun and a verb as well as an adjective and adverb. Without this recognition, we will find ourselves pointing our fingers elsewhere and not noticing the evil that is real, mighty and tempting in each of us.

Jewish Tradition speaks of two natures/inclinations that every human being has, the “good/divine” inclination and the “evil/earthly” inclination. I learned about divine and earthly inclinations from Rabbi Harold Kushner and I believe they are better descriptors. Jewish Tradition also says, “the good/divine inclination is good and the evil/earthly inclination is very good!” What a paradox for all of us, how can “evil/earthly” inclination be very good? Because the evil/earthly inclination is, as Rabbi Nachman bar Samuel bar Nachman says the name of Rabbi Samuel bar Nachman: “were it not for the Yetzer Hara (evil/earthly inclination), a man would not build a home, or marry a woman, or have children, or engage in business(Genesis Rabbah 9:7). When we believe that someone else is evil and someone else is wrong, when we go to paint another as the source of all evil, the source of everything bad, we are deflecting from looking at our own misuse of our evil/earthly inclination! We are projecting our own evil actions onto someone else so we can feel good about our self. Every spiritual discipline, every religion acknowledges “that evil is real” and we all possess the capability of being evil, as Christ says: “let he who is without sin/evil, cast the first stone”.

We also deny the strength of evil and the temptation for evil because evil also gives us power, we believe. We have seen throughout history how evil has tempted good people to do very bad things. After watching the “U.S and the Holocaust” documentary by Ken Burns, one is able to see how anti-semitism led America to halt the immigration of Jews seeking asylum from Nazi Germany and Eastern Europe leading to their death in a myriad of ways in Concentration Camps, being shot in the streets, burned in pits, dying in the forest, etc. While most people would not call Breckinridge Long evil, he was. He allowed people to die needlessly and had a cabal of willing people to go along with and carry out his prejudice. We are guilty of falling into the temptation and might of evil with our treatment of people who are not like us, ie, our prejudicial attitudes towards African-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, Jews, Muslims, Irish, Italians, etc. We have made the stranger feel unwelcome here in America for a very long time, in direct opposition to the words on the Statue of Liberty. While many of us have not actively engaged in this evil, we have been either indifferent to it, passive about it, and/or went along with it so we could get along.

The evil Rabbi Heschel is speaking about, in my opinion, is so insidious it goes unnoticed. It is the evil that we perpetrate each and every day in the ways we talk about another person, another group, the ways we are going to “kill the competition”, the path to “getting higher ratings than anyone else”, the demonizing of someone else, some other group in order to feel good about our self, our group. Our need for power and fear of losing it leads us to evil actions and becoming evil. We are easily tempted to evil as God says in Genesis 8:21, “the inclinations of the human are evil from their youth”, yet knowing this we blame our own evil on another, we wrap ourselves in the false flag of nationalism, of liberty, of conservatism, of liberalism, etc so we can deny the truth of God’s statements in Genesis and our own real-life experience of our selves!

In recovery, we are on a mission to turn our evil inclinations away from satisfying them and gratifying them with joy and glee. Our mission is to use the energy of our evil/earthly inclinations to create new ways to be of service rather than use old ways of demanding, stealing, intimidating another(s) to be of service to us. We engage with our inclinations to resist the temptation and the seemingly magnetic pull of evil to serve it and, in contrast, use our evil/earthly inclination to serve the good.

I have turned from serving my own evil/earthly inclination over these past almost 34 years while not losing the energy, sight, creativity and power of my yetzer hara. I am not perfect and I have indulged my evil/earthly inclination too much at times and these times have been fewer and farther in-between! God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 52

“Modern man may be characterized as a being who is callous to catastrophes. A victim of enforced brutalization, his sensibility is being increasingly reduced; his sense of horror is on the wane. The distinction between right and wrong is becoming blurred. All that is left to us is our being horrified at the loss of our sense of horror.”(God in Search of Man pg. 369)

The last sentence above is the as terrifying as the previous three if not more terrifying. Are we “being horrified at the loss of our sense of horror”? I think this is a very serious and open question for each and every individual and we have to ask our self how we and where we have lost our sense of horror. When I would pass the homeless Vets encampment by the VA Cemetery in Los Angeles, I was horrified at the ways we treated the people who fought for our freedoms, the people we sent off to war as innocent young people and brought them back with physical injuries, moral injuries and spiritual injuries and then left them to live on the streets? How can one not be horrified? Yet, so many people have blamed the Vets themselves as they do with all of the homeless, ‘it is their fault’, ‘get a job’, ‘stop using drugs and alcohol’, ‘take your medication’, etc. is our response ignoring our responsibility for and in making this problem. As Rabbi Heschel teaches: “in a free society, some are guilty, all are responsible.” We have shirked our responsibility by blaming someone else for whatever is ‘wrong’ in our world. We have stopped “being horrified at the loss of horror” because we blame someone else and thereby take no responsibility for the problem nor the cure! How horrifying is this?

I heard a Congressperson say the other day, “I am elected by my district to do what is in their best interest AND in the best interest of the country.” These are the words of one who realizes how callous we have become to catastrophes, how our “sense of horror is on the wane”. When I listen to people blaming the victims, as some are doing in the latest tragedies-‘what were they doing there anyway’ ‘those drag queens are groomers so if people were there they were groomers or being groomed’, and other such poppycock from people. While it is true that people shoot people, no one is horrified that we have had over 600 mass shootings in the United States this year? No one is horrified enough to take action about any real gun control. In 2018 there were more registered guns in the US than people in the Census! When we add in the illegal guns, OY! Yet, we hear from legislators, from the NRA, from Clergy that owning a gun is a good thing, shooting innocent animals on a ranch is fun, it is a right in our Bill of Rights, etc. While the founding fathers did not want the states to feel totally at the will of the federal government so we did not set up another scenario like with King George in England, they certainly did not mean for people to carry a gun in order to shoot anyone they felt like! Nor, since we have meat processing plants now, do we need to use a gun to kill animals for food. Yet, we make excuses for not stopping the proliferation of handguns because we have ceased to be horrified by what is going on in our country, we have become inured to horror, blind to the brutalization, and so callous we are not even aware of the catastrophes that happen all around us.

We no longer have to be dull and boorish, we no longer have to be callous and insensitive, we no longer need to stop being horrified by what is happening all around us. We need to wake up, we need to heed these words of Rabbi Heschel and we need to end our descent into evil. We do this by no longer using the vulnerabilities of another person against them, we no longer blame the victim, we no longer blame ourselves for caring, we no longer take advantage of another person just because we can. We stop exploiting people for our own gain, we stop deceiving them and climb out of our self-deception. We engage in living life with wholeness, kindness, goodness, and spread these principles throughout our daily activities.

As we say in recovery, living by spiritual principles, one day at a time we continue to grow and move closer to a truer way of being. We practice the principles of decency, kindness, holiness, truthfulness, honesty, open-mindedness, justice, acts of loving-kindness in all of our affairs. We follow the words of the Prophet: “Love Mercy, do Justly and walk in the ways of God”. This is our response to the negativity and evil we perpetrated on people before we came into recovery, before we discovered that we are responsible and we are capable.

I have been ill for the past couple of days so I have been inside watching TV and I am horrified by what has happened and the responses by some. I am heartened by the response of the heroes who came to the rescue, including law enforcement. I have been horrified at what is happening for a long time, I have been watching callousness, brutality and reduced sensibility be validated by godless imposters who wear the cloth of clergy, I have watched in horror the lies from leadership about why doing something about the proliferation of guns will not help, I have been totally struck silent by the lies of the dull and the boors that almost 50% of Americans believe. I keep writing, I keep speaking, I keep praying, I keep sending money and other support to places that are attacking our societal ills with loving kindness. I know everyone reading this attacks our societal ills in your own unique manner and I am grateful for this as well. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 51

“Modern man may be characterized as a being who is callous to catastrophes. A victim of enforced brutalization, his sensibility is being increasingly reduced; his sense of horror is on the wane. The distinction between right and wrong is becoming blurred. All that is left to us is our being horrified at the loss of our sense of horror.”(God in Search of Man pg. 369)

As we celebrate Thanksgiving today in light of the latest shooting in Va., it is time for us to stop lying to ourselves and one another about what is right and what is wrong. We have been blurring the distinction between right and wrong for the millennia and we have to stop engaging in this mendacity, in this idolatry. We can no longer call ourselves free people, decent people, people of faith while blaring these lines for our own benefit. The Gun Lobby, the people spewing hatred and lies about the elections, about another person’s sexual orientation, religion, etc are attempting to blur this distinction between right and wrong so they can stay in power, they can have control, they can be #1 in the land. How sad, how sick, how horrible. Yet, we continue to buy into the lies of these charlatans, we continue to give them the ‘cover’ of free speech. Riling people up to commit gun violence is not free speech-it is inappropriate speech. Re-writing history so the Native Americans look like the villains when we were taking their land, re-writing history to make it look like the slaves traders from Africa were doing the African’s a favor by enslaving them, is so beyond the pale and, yet, Ron De Santis and Greg Abbott are selling this horse manure and millions are shoveling it into their psyche!

What are we grateful for? Are we grateful that our “sensibility is being increasingly reduced:”, that we are becoming more and more callous to these mass shootings, some put the number this year at over 600 so far this year! Are we grateful that we can escape from the horror of our actions and the actions of people around us by sitting with family and friends today and have an oasis in the midst of the chaotic goings on in our world today? Are we grateful for blaming the Jews for killing Christ and sending space lasers to cause the landslides in Malibu as Marjorie Taylor Greene says. Are we grateful for blaming Muslims for all the problems we are facing today? Are we grateful we can blame LGBTQ+ for a myriad of catastrophes? Are we grateful that can blow off our sense of horror by blaming our actions, the actions of blurring right and wrong on someone else!

What are we grateful for? Are we grateful for our ancestors who, since Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue, risked their lives so we can live free? Are we aware of the horror of American First and their defeat during the WWII? Are we aware of myriad of people who believed the words on the Statue of Liberty and, because they had courage and hope, we are living in America? It ain’t perfect and, we are better than most other countries. I am an American and my father fought in WWII, he never really spoke about it, and on Thanksgiving, he was always grateful to be an American. Are we grateful enough to be an American that we take on the responsibility of caring for those “yearning to breathe free”? Are we grateful enough to be an American that we open our doors to another human being like the doors were opened for our ancestors? This is where the distinction between right and wrong is getting the most blurry. We have forgotten to return the favor, repay the debt that was taken on by our ancestors when they arrived on these shores, we are all immigrants, we are all strangers, we are all needy and we are all poor, this is our heritage, this is the roots of our being able to be an American so who are we to deny this same opportunity to another person in need, another person “yearning to breathe free” as our ancestors were?

What can we be grateful for? We need to be grateful for our ability to discern right from wrong, we need to be grateful for the many gifts we have been given, the most precious of all being freedom, living in a country that believes “All men are created equal” and extending this to women as well. We need to be grateful for our ability to let go of and take off our hard-skinned shell that we have kept on out of fear of being hurt, we need to be grateful for connection and love that we share with one another. We need to be grateful for our ability to sing praises to God, to people, to sing the song of our own soul in a country that gives us the sound stage which to do this. We need to be grateful for our desire to make our corner of the world a little better than when we found it, we need to be grateful to be able to live without brutalizing another human being anymore.

In recovery and in my life in recovery, I am grateful beyond words for the gifts I have received. Some of these gifts are the gifts of returning to family and friends after being callous and brutalizing, the gifts of love and connection with people I have been able to help and touch, the gifts of being the brother I always could be, the uncle I was wanting to be, the son my mother needed me to be, and the father Heather wanted and needed. Also, I learned how to be a husband and how to love unconditionally from Harriet Rossetto. I am grateful to Rabbi Heschel for impacting my life in ways I can’t even express and I am grateful for and to all of you for reading and being on this journey with me. God Bless and Stay Safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 50

“Modern man may be characterized as a being who is callous to catastrophes. A victim of enforced brutalization, his sensibility is being increasingly reduced; his sense of horror is on the wane. The distinction between right and wrong is becoming blurred. All that is left to us is our being horrified at the loss of our sense of horror.”(God in Search of Man pg. 369)

Rereading the first two sentences above, thinking about the massacre at Club Q in Colorado Springs and the aftermath of blame and shame on the LGBTQ+ community as well as the outpouring of support, love, condolences for the people who lost their lives and the sheer horror of what happened, hopefully reminds all of us of God’s demand to be welcoming and caring for people who we think are different than we think we are. I listened and hear the callousness of people who believe drag queens are ‘grooming’ our children to be ____ fill in the blank, I hear Mike Pompeo say that the leader of the Teachers Union, a Jewish Woman, is the most dangerous person in the world. I watch in horror as Jewish Republicans cheer and applaud men who are calling for Joe Biden’s Impeachment, calling Democrats pedophiles and other such nonsense, extolling the virtues of Christian Nationalism and wonder if we are ever going to be anything but “a being who is callous to catastrophes”!

The heroes of the Club Q massacre are, of course, the people who beat down the gunman and the police who responded so quickly. The heroes of Club Q are the co-owners who have provided this space for all people to gather, straight, LGBTQ+, and everyone else. The heroes are the ‘drag queens’ who perform for the sheer delight of the audience and themselves. The heroes are the people who live and let live. The heroes are everyone of us who knows that we are all kin under the skin as my friend and teacher Rev. Mark Whitlock preaches. The heroes are the people who have shed the hard-skin of callousness in favor of the welcoming skin of Godliness. The heroes are the people who say ‘enough is enough’ and we have to change the speech from hate to loving disagreement, from vilifying to finding common ground where we can, from gridlock and stubbornness to forgiveness and welcoming. This is the path for people of faith, not the hatred and vitriol of these charlatans who claim to be acting in God’s name because the god they claim to be for is not the God found in any Spiritual denomination. Their “higher consciousness” is not the higher consciousness of any Spiritual discipline known to humanity.

We are witnessing Rabbi Heschel’s words above in real time. Instead of heeding these words for the past 67 years, we have lived the truth of them more and more. We are so stuck in our callousness that we are unable to see how we have become slaves to our dull, insipid and evil ways of treating one another. We are blind to the poison and bile we ingest believing it is good for us to be on a diet of hatred and callousness. We are deaf to the cry of horror from people we are brutalizing, we are deaf to the cry of our souls and inner life for the ways we are trying to kill the spark of holiness, the spirit of God that lives inside of us. We are immune to the reduced sensibility of what is the true north of living well, we are becoming more and more incapable of trembling and shuddering at the actions of the haters, at the mendacity of the liars, at the offensiveness of the bullies and the brutality of ourselves and our ‘tribe’.

We are circling the wagons to defend the indefensible, we are hearing people use the rule of law to break our norms and the law itself, we are witnessing the breakdown of our government “of the people, by the people and for the people” because of hatred and fear, because some people are desperate to hold onto power, are desperate for the ‘good old days’ and believe the lies of how wonderful they were. I am reminded of the Israelites in the Desert who longed to return to Egypt because they were able to ‘sit around the flesh pots and eat their fill of wonderful foods’, these people were experiencing Euphoric Recall because it never happened, they were slaves. The people going along with, cheering on, and enjoying the callousness and brutalization of anyone not like them are just like the Israelites in the Desert, the ‘good old days’ were not so good for them, they were poor and they were treated as second class citizens by the same people they are cheering for now! The lunatics are running the asylum because anyone who doesn’t want to see what is real and true, ‘all people are created equal’  is crazy. Anyone who thinks any one class/tribe/religion/group of people is all bad, is the cause of all the problems in the world is dangerous and crazy, hard-skinned, dull, vain and blind.

I understand the people who are stuck in their callousness as does everyone who is in recovery. We were there and I am not proud of my reduced sensibility, my brutalization of those around me nor that I was unable to see the horror of my actions because of my own vanity! Recovery and Judaism has unblocked my soul and allowed me to see life as beautiful, hear the calling/demand of Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom, and experience life as loving. This happens because my spirituality is not relegated to rituals, it is what guides me each and every day-serving God and being Godly is part of each and every action I take daily and when it isn’t I do my T’Shuvah and repair the damage, change my ways, and ‘fail forward’. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 49

“Modern man may be characterized as a being who is callous to catastrophes. A victim of enforced brutalization, his sensibility is being increasingly reduced; his sense of horror is on the wane. The distinction between right and wrong is becoming blurred. All that is left to us is our being horrified at the loss of our sense of horror.”(God in Search of Man pg. 369)

Sensibility comes from the Latin meaning “that can be perceived by the senses”, horror comes from the Latin meaning “tremble/shudder” and wane comes from the Latin meaning “vain”. Using these definitions, the last two phrases of the second sentence make me shudder!

Rabbi Heschel is calling us to account, I hear him demanding we take notice and stock of where we are and who we are as human beings, as partners with God in making our corner of the world a little better than how we found it. He is calling us to reawaken our senses, to stop using them as validations for our unspiritual, our immoral behaviors. He is, to me, reminding us of the Divine command to care for the world and all of God’s creations that are in it! Rather than being sensitive to the slights and the put-downs, rather than allowing ourselves to be victims, duped or tricked, into believing we have to be callous/hard-skinned, Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom informs us that we can use our senses to perceive what is and how we can make it better! Paraphrasing President John F. Kennedy: ask not what life can do for you, ask what you can do for life. We cannot enhance our life nor the lives of anyone else when our sensibility is reduced, lessened, when our sensibility is used to perceive slights and how to ‘win’, how to control, how to be brutes, how to enforce our will rather than promote God’s will. Yet, we continue to engage in actions that reduce our sensibility to what is good, what is holy and what is needed.

Indeed, we shudder less and less with each passing day. We are becoming more and more indifferent to the evil, to the negative, to the harms we inflict, to the moral injuries we suffer and we inflict on another(s), to our reduced sensibility and to the horror of our vanities. This is not a Jewish problem, a Christian problem, a Muslim problem, a Buddhist problem, an American problem, an Asian problem, etc, it is a human problem and we are either willfully blind to what is happening to and within each of us or we are wearing blinders and surrendering to callousness, to being a victim, to going along with the brutalizations of another(s), to being dictated to. We are losing our ability to be horrified a little more each day. Remembering these words were published in 1955 and this was 10 years after the fall of Nazi Germany, we were in the Cold War with the Soviet Union, Civil Rights movement had begun, anti-semitism was alive and well with College Quotas on Jews, etc, we can see how progressive, how cunning and baffling a situation we find ourselves in today.

It is time for all of us, human beings, to take off our hard skin, to stop duping ourselves and allowing our self-deception to rule us. It is time for us to stop being ruled by dull and stupid people and be dull and stupid our self. It is time for us to awake our senses to what is and how to make it better, rather than sense how we can exploit the vulnerabilities of another(s) person. It is time for us to shudder more, to tremble more because we are accountable for what is going on and one day our actions will be shown to us and we will have to face our self. We do this by not buying into the lies we tell ourselves and the lies another tells us. We do this by seeing the divinity in each and every person. We do this by remembering that when we stand before another human being, we stand before an Image of God. We do this by letting go of our vanity and care more about what we do rather than how we look. We do this by being grateful for all the wisdom and kindness we have been shown throughout our life, we do this by honoring the wisdom of our different spiritual paths and living their principles in all of our affairs.

In recovery, we regain our ability to shudder and tremble, we regain our ability to perceive what is right and good. We regain our ability to be human again, to love, to be kind, to be just, to practice mercy, to be in truth. We take our own inventory and we answer to God, to another person and to the myriad of people we have brutalized. We are able to take off our hard skin and be callous no more. In recovery, we let go of our need to make another(s) bend to our will, to make another(s) serve our desires and we bend to the will of decency, goodness, love, kindness, ie to the will of God.

I took off the hard skin a long time ago and everything that happens in life impacts me deeply and greatly-be it dull and stupid, kind and loving, be it callousness, be it truth and mercy. I don’t always show it and I am vulnerable to the actions of those around me, to the actions that go on in the world at large and I get frustrated and impatient with people who want to continue to harm someone else just because they can. I did this in my pre-recovery days and every time I see someone doing this to someone else, I want to (and often do) scream WTF! I resonate to Rabbi Heschel’s words above (and just about all of them) because he is speaking the words of my soul and, I believe, the words that are in everyone’s soul. I still get dull and stupid at times, I still am inappropriate when my sensibilities are offended and I am getting one grain of sand better each day. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 48

“Modern man may be characterized as a being who is callous to catastrophes. A victim of enforced brutalization, his sensibility is being increasingly reduced; his sense of horror is on the wane. The distinction between right and wrong is becoming blurred. All that is left to us is our being horrified at the loss of our sense of horror.”(God in Search of Man pg. 369)

Rabbi Heschel is calling to us, I would say, demanding of us to recognize what has happened to us, what is happening to us and what will happen to us as long as we remain “a victim of enforced brutalization”. Victim comes from the Latin word ‘victima’ can be defined as “a person who is tricked or duped” as well as “a person harmed, injured…”. To enforce comes from the Latin meaning “in strong” and has come to mean compelling observance. Brutalization comes from the Latin “Brutus” and means ‘dull or stupid’ as well as “an absence of reasoning or intelligence”. Immersing oneself in this phrase can help us understand what is going on in our world a little better, I believe.

We have been duped and tricked into believing the mendacity of a few, we have been harmed and injured intellectually, morally and spiritually by this trickery and we have not woken up enough to realize it. This is why, I believe some of us are willing to go along with “alternative facts”, why some of us are willing to compel another(s) to follow paths that serve our self-interests rather than the interests of the whole. We have become dull and stupid intellectually, morally and spiritually because we have turned reasoning and intelligence over to ‘the leaders’ of our “enforced brutalization”.

We see this happening in all levels of life, in our homes, in our workplaces, in our government, in the war being fought in Ukraine, in the authoritarian take-over of many countries that believed in democracy. We watched/watch it happening in our own country where people who spew hatred and who’s only agenda is to cut taxes for the wealthy and cut benefits for the poor are voted into office by the very people who will suffer from this brutal agenda. Our Congress is no longer a representative of the lamp of Lady Liberty, it is, with the new Supreme Court, tricking and duping people into believing they care about them, all the while caring only for themselves and the agenda of a few(in comparison) wealthy donors. They are compelling our observance of their twisted agenda, calling it ‘christian’ while promoting the exact opposite of what Christ speaks about in the Gospels. Calling themselves ‘god’s warriors’ while trying to enslave the stranger, the poor and the needy exactly the opposite of what God calls for 36 times in the first 5 Books of the Bible!

We are being governed by dull and stupid people and we don’t even realize it! Rabbi Heschel, in his words above is warning us of what was happening 67 years ago (and before) and we still haven’t heeded his wisdom! We have been morally injured and we have morally injured so many, like our soldiers who we sent to Vietnam, Afghanistan, even World War II. While we may have had to go to war, this doesn’t diminish the moral effects on our soldiers, while we have to fight for what is right, what is holy, what is good, when we use the tactics of hatred, violence (physical and/or speech) we morally injure ourselves and everyone else in our path. We have become inured to this fact, we have harmed our moral compass and we no longer are able to discern what ‘true north’ is. This has happened in secular society as well as religious society, this has happened in Communist Countries, Authoritarian Countries, Democratic Countries. We are losing the battle for the morality of our countries, the morality  of our neighborhoods, the morality of our selves!

In recovery, we are recovering our moral compass! We learn/relearn what is truly moral and decent. We uncover the lies we have been telling ourselves for so long that we came to believe they were truths! We peel away a layer of mendacity and self-deception each day/week/month/year. We have become hyper-aware of our tendency to buy into the mendacity of another, our tendency to excuse our own bad behaviors and our alliances/relationships are more covenantal than transactional. We search each day, in all of our affairs to do what is right, just, moral and decent. We live an “attitude of gratitude” and remember that we get to live life with joy and being of service is our path to wholeness and connection. In recovery, we let go of our need to be brutes and return to being loving, kind people that engage in being human one grain of sand more each day.

Looking at my life through this lens of Rabbi Heschel’s brilliance allows me to see when and where I have been the brute and when I have been brutalized by my moral injuries and by the moral injuries of another. I see where I have duped myself, duped another person and been duped, by the same sense of desperation for connection. I realize the ways I compelled myself to observe someone else’s (societal) norms/needs in order to get connection and how this transactional connection harmed me and everyone else. I also realize how, at times, I compelled others to go along with my inauthentic needs based on my own moral injuries,  and this harmed them and me. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 47

“Modern man may be characterized as a being who is callous to catastrophes. A victim of enforced brutalization, his sensibility is being increasingly reduced; his sense of horror is on the wane. The distinction between right and wrong is becoming blurred. All that is left to us is our being horrified at the loss of our sense of horror.”(God in Search of Man pg. 369)

I understand a Prophet to be a person who can hold humans and God in one moment at all moments. A Prophet is also a person who can see what is happening right now and warn the rest of us as to the dangers that lie ahead if we don’t change our ways. For me and many people, Rabbi Heschel was more than a descendant of the Prophets, he was a prophet himself. The words above, as so much of what he teaches and reminds us of, are the reason I am confident he was given to humankind at a time when we most needed to hear truth and not get too full of ourselves. Like Dr. King, Rabbi Heschel not only spoke truth to power, he spoke truth to the powerless, he spoke warnings to Presidents and to Popes as well as to all of us. Yet, his words still have not landed with enough force to change our ways. These words were published in 1955, written before, I am sure and they are as true today if not truer as they were then.

Ten years after the end of WWII, ten years after the discovery of the depth of the depravity of Nazi Germany, ten years after hearing excuses from Nazi Soldiers and Officers of how they loved their children and music and were kind-hearted men and women who perpetrated horrible and despicable acts upon human beings who were ‘not like them’; Rabbi Heschel is speaking to us about callousness and catastrophes! Unfortunately, not even the Jewish world took his words and warnings seriously enough to stop the callousness and see the catastrophes.

The root of the word callous in the Latin means ‘hard-skinned’ and the Hebrew is the same word as describes Pharaoh in the Book of Exodus. Rabbi Heschel is calling each of us out to face our inner Pharaoh, to see how, where, and when we are ‘hard-skinned’, stubborn, so full of our self we are blind to what truly is. In 1955, we thought everything was wonderful, yet the Fellowship Foundation, a Christian organization that promotes false images of Christ, pushes a Christian Nationalist agenda within Congress, began in 1953. While we celebrated Ike as our President, a good man, we were beginning to get involved in Vietnam, we were continuing to be in Korea, we had killed the Rosenbergs even though the Government knew Ethel was completely innocent! McCarthyism had run unabated for 4-5 years and, finally, Joe McCarthy was censured in 1954; not before he and his ‘guy’, Roy Cohn, had ruined the lives of so many and killed the Rosenbergs. Yet, even then, people were becoming callous to these catastrophes because they were being told this is what was necessary to deal with the catastrophes ‘those’ people were causing. Sound familiar?

Today, we are dealing with callousness, we are dealing with the effects of people in Government, in business, in the Church, Mosque, Temples, in the Eastern Spiritual traditions who are being callous and using God, spirit, the American Flag, Apple Pie, Motherhood, etc to validate their actions. President George W. Bush promoted a “compassionate conservatism” and, having met him a few times, I know he believed this was possible. His program to help faith-based and community initiatives was bold, spiritual and compassionate and, of course, it was fought against by people who did not want the ‘church’ to be involved with Government-these same people who attended the National Prayer Breakfast and took money from Lobbyists and from the Fellowship Foundation were against Pres. Bush’s initiative because he wanted to give aid and comfort to the downtrodden, the people in and who needed recovery, and knew faith-based and community programs were better suited to deliver what was needed than the government! We are dealing with the callousness of Tea Party from 2010, from the America First’s since the 1930’s, with the liars and cheats who want to investigate anyone and everyone but themselves. We are suffering the catastrophes of their behaviors and many people are so ‘hard-skinned’ themselves they don’t realize what is happening and they even applaud these actions!

In recovery, we are dedicated to piercing the ‘hard-skinned’ we put on so many years ago. We are engaged each and every day in opening up our minds, hearts and souls to welcome and engage in spiritual, moral ways of dealing with life as opposed to the callousness of ‘dog eat dog’, ‘where’s mine” we used to live. We do this by living according to Spiritual Principles and we no longer worship idols, we serve God by serving humanity.

I think of the callousness and the Pharaoh-like ways I lived prior to recovery and, truth be told, even at times in my recovery and I am sad. I see the catastrophes before, during and after they are happening and, I have committed myself to looking deeper when I am ‘sure’ I am not engaging in any callousness. My loud and abrasiveness has never stopped me from seeing the soul of another in my recovery and I am grateful to those who point out to me when I am being callous and causing catastrophes. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 46

“The terror and anguish that came upon the Psalmist were not caused by the calamities of nature but by the wickedness of man, by the evil in history.” (God in Search of Man pg 368)

We all have a choice and most people are unaware of this choice. Evil and wickedness is not natural, they are learned, as I wrote yesterday. Yet, so many people shrug their shoulders when they see it, are afraid to call it out and are unwilling to look inside themselves to root out the different ways all of us give into wickedness and evil. As Rabbi Heschel wrote to President Kennedy: “The hour calls for High Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity”. Grandeur, comes from grand which, in the Latin, means “full-grown”; audacity from the Latin means “bold”. The Hebrew for grandeur is “great/splendor/beauty” and for audacity is “nerve/extra spirit”.  This hour and every hour of our lives calls for “high moral grandeur and spiritual audacity” and most of us are either afraid of being this way, unaware of the need to engage in this mode of living, or, even worse, believe we already are acting this way!

Humankind has always been in need of “high moral grandeur and spiritual audacity” and we have been blessed with people who have answered the call Rabbi Heschel asked President Kennedy to make. Beginning with Abraham and continuing to this day we have people who continue to call upon us to respond to “our better angels” rather than our lowest common denominator. Here again, the challenge is to be aware of what is happening inside of us, around us and engage in the holy work of “high moral grandeur and spiritual audacity.” We cannot do this as long as we stay unaware of our own tendencies towards evil and wickedness. We cannot do this as long as we stay indifferent to the evil and wickedness around us. We cannot do this as long as we believe the lies of our minds and the lies of those who purport to be ‘spiritual leaders’ while spewing hatred, intolerance, racism, control, etc all in the name of some false god they have set up for their own use, for their own power.

One of the most insidious ‘evils’ we practice is the ignoring of another human being by not saying hello, not acknowledging them as we walk down a street, as we enter a business, as we go about our ‘business’ thinking that someone else is not ‘worth our time’. Everyone is made in the Image of God and ignoring anyone is ignoring God because, as Rabbi Heschel teaches us, we are all reminders of God, we are all Divine needs. Yet, so many of us believe what we are doing is more important than what another is doing, so many of us believe we have the right to ignore the poor, the needy, the stranger because they don’t belong to our tribe, they are less worthy than we and our cronies are. We have bought into the lie of nationalism, the lie of tribalism, the lie of a pecking order that has us (usually white christian males) at the top and everyone else is supposed to serve us, our desires, believe our lies and be willing to go to war, civil and otherwise, for us. How evil is this? How wicked is this? Yet, so many people just nod their heads when these idolators speak and are ready to storm the Capital based on the lies and the spell under which their own inner evil, inner wickedness has them.

While it is easy to blame the leading idolators and I do, it is much more important to begin to take our responsibility for our own learned evil and learned wickedness. Once we heal these spiritual maladies, we are no longer subject to going along with the idolators, we are no longer willing to believe the Jerry Falwell Jr.’s, Jim Jordan’s, Ayatollah’s of Iran, the MBS’ of Saudi Arabia, the Putin’s of Russia, the Orban’s of Hungary and political differences boil down to how to implement strategies that improve the lot of the poor, the needy, the stranger; finding ways to embrace them and open our borders, our shores so we can honor and live the words of Emma Lazarus written on the Statue of Liberty:  “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore…I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” We can do this, we must do this if we are to be the country we purport to be, the people we are called to be and the servants we need to be.

In recovery, rooting out the inner evil and wickedness is a daily mission. We know we are in recovery one day at a time based on our spiritual condition. Each and every day we live the spiritual discipline we have chosen to follow so we can engage in letting go of our inner wickedness and our inner evil. We work hard each day to unlearn the lessons of our youth, the lessons of society that give cover to the subtle evils so many of us practice in our daily living without even noticing. To be in recovery, we have to be aware and alert to these subtle evils because we are living proof of the truth that these inner evils are cunning and baffling and no amount of willpower will save us from them.

I work diligently to stay aware of the ways my own inner evil and wickedness creeps up. It is hard, it is subtle and the more I grow spiritually, the more cunning and baffling they become. I am not a quiet person, I am not a polished person, I am me and I am loud, abrasive and passionate. While these are not bad qualities, I know that my inner wickedness and inner evil has caused me to use these qualities in not good ways and for those whom have been harmed by my inner evil and inner wickedness, I apologize and I keep working each day to be one grain of sand better. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 45

“The terror and anguish that came upon the Psalmist were not caused by the calamities of nature but by the wickedness of man, by the evil in history.” (God in Search of Man pg 368)

The more I immerse myself in these words of Rabbi Heschel, the more I understand the verse in the Torah that says “people are evil from their youth”. The issue that has faced humankind since the beginning of our creation/evolution is our learning to be wicked/evil. As I have written before, M.Scott Peck, the author of A Road Less Travelled, defines evil as “using the vulnerabilities of another against them”. In the Jewish Tradition, rather than Caveat Emptor-let the buyer beware, we are taught that the seller has to disclose any and all flaws, information about what someone is about to buy. We are taught to use knowledge to help another human being, not take advantage of another person.

“The wickedness of man” is speaking to our inner desires, our negative impulses that drive us to either be victims or perpetrators of evil, of harm, of striving to be number 1 at any and all costs. We are taught that this is good from our youth because we share and we love and we embrace when we are infants, we know we need help when we are infants, we laugh and we cry from the inside when we are infants. Yet, as we grow older, we learn how to get our way through manipulation. We learn how to be ‘the best’ or not try at all. We learn how to escape and we learn it is good to ignore our more spiritual, divine inclinations. We are taught ‘stranger danger’, ‘they are out to get us’, money, power and prestige is our only protection against ‘them’. These ways of being are the root of our wickedness and the cause of the evil we perpetrate.

Many of us are uncomfortable hearing this, we want to defend our actions, we point to all the reasons we have to protect ourselves and, as we all know, the best defense is a good offense. Some people use the phrase: “I am going to get them before they get me”. No one can deny the validity of this way of being given the world as we know it, given the history of evil for millennia, yet, if each of us continues to act in these ways, we will continue to go down the slide of evil and wickedness until we forget the words of the Psalmist, the lessons of the Prophets, and the promise of freedom from anguish and terror that we were given at Mount Sinai.

We can turn our learning around if we are willing to change and face God instead of hiding from God. We can turn our wickedness into goodness if we are willing to listen to our own better angels, our own higher consciousness. We are capable of bringing goodness into the world instead of wickedness when we are not focused on being number 1 and we are focused on being the best human being we are capable of in each and every moment.

The leader of the Cuban Revolution from Spain in 1892, Jose Marti says “It is a sin not to do what one is capable of doing”. He goes on to say “a selfish man is a thief”. These two quotes remind us of who we truly are, who we can grow into rather than taking the path of least resistance and going along with the crowd, learning evil from our youth and using the vulnerabilities of another against them. We have within us the power to stop our ‘normal’ behavior, we have the power to stop the people who want to cause anguish, narrowness, tightness upon another person, group, religion, class of human beings. We have this power and we seem to be refusing to use it. The power of Putin, Hitler, Trump, Hawley, Cruz, McConnell, McCarthy, Jordan, Biggs, et al,  is the power to convince people that it is in their best interest to hate someone else. It is in their best interest to give more power to despots, to authoritarians, to haters because ‘we are in this together’; all the while using these very same people to gain power and enslave them. Orban, MBS, and the rest of their cronies care very little if at all for anyone else, they only want to use us to enhance their own power, enhance their own stature and enhance their own egos. We experienced throughout the ages, especially in Nazi Germany, in Rwanda, in Bosnia, the devastation this way of being brings. It is truly up to us to root out the evil and wickedness we have learned in our youth and return to love, caring, kindness, justice, compassion and truth that our higher selves know to be right.

In recovery, we have perpetrated the “evil of our youth” upon so many others, we were the terrorists causing anguish, creating a tightness in the being of those who loved us, and enslaving them through this anguish and terror. People had to reject us even though they loved us and saw the good in us because of our actions and this made them be people they just did not want to be. In recovery, we live each day letting go of the evil and wickedness we did, seeing the subtle ways our thoughts go back to our prior learning, and practicing love, tolerance, service and kindness as our antidote to our ‘old ways’.

As a person who was “evil from his youth”, my recovery is based on “how can I help”. I have learned that there are still subtle ways evil creeps in, old habits die hard, and I am continuing to let go of these negative ways as soon as I realize them. I am committed to not causing anguish, terror anymore. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 44

“The terror and anguish that came upon the Psalmist were not caused by the calamities of nature but by the wickedness of man, by the evil in history.” (God in Search of Man pg 368)

This wisdom from Rabbi Heschel is as true today as it was in the time of the Psalmist, as true as it was when Rabbi Heschel wrote these words. Yet, we forget this truth, we paper over it by blaming it on another human, any group that is not us, even on it being God’s will! We have to recover our terror and anguish, we have to look inside of our own beings and see when and where we create terror and we create anguish in the hearts of another for the wrong reasons.

Calling someone else a terrorist is normal in our society today. We throw the word around to describe anyone who doesn’t agree with us, who is trying to change things, who is working to upend the status quo. This is not to say there are not terrorists who use fear, bombs, violence, hateful rhetoric as a method of putting anguish in our hearts, who are trying to take over control of everything we do. Rather, as I am reading this brilliance from Rabbi Heschel, I realize we relegate another to being a terrorist, we live in anguish and fear of ‘the other’ which doesn’t allow us to see the terror and anguish we cause.

Anguish comes from the Latin meaning “narrow, tightness” and the Hebrew word is “tzar”, the root of Mitzrayim/Egypt. When we are in anguish we are in a narrow space feeling the tightness of being enslaved. Isn’t this what the terrorists want? They want us to feel the tightness of slavery, they want us to feel as if we are helpless and powerless over our fears and them. They are trying hard to sell us a lie that terror wins, that we deserve to be enslaved, that we no longer are able to discern between truth and mendacity, that our best choice is to go along to get along. These are the tactics of every terrorist, be they in politics, running a nation, a business, a family, being a member of a group that wants power, an employee who feels wronged, a family member who wants all the attention to be on them, in other words: we are all capable of bringing terror and tightness, fear and narrowness of vision to each and every group, endeavor, nation we belong to and/or are trying to conquer.

We are watching this play out in our politics, in our businesses, in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine: so many people are in fear of what will happen if they buck Putin, if they say no to Trump, if they stop Musk, etc that we have all become enslaved to the whims of people who perpetrate evil just because they can! They are all ‘evil geniuses’. Yet, we “stand idly by the blood of our neighbor” because we are afraid of the consequences of standing up to these evil bullies. No matter how many times we have seen good triumph over evil, we still are afraid to stop it when it begins. Kevin McCarthy is afraid he won’t be Speaker of the House, so he is going to go along with Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz, Andy Biggs, et al and impeach Joe Biden? He is going to investigate Nancy Pelosi? He is going to go along with wielding his gavel to punish anyone who disagrees with Trump, with Jim Jordan, with Gaetz and Greene etc? This is an example of the evil and wickedness the Psalmist is speaking of. Richard Nixon used the FBI, IRS, and any branch of government he could to spy on and punish his enemies-he covered up a break-in at the Democratic Headquarters when there was no way he was going to lost the election anyway! Yet, here we are some 50 years later witnessing the same types of behaviors in our elected officials. We still haven’t learned much from our recent nor distant past have we?

There is hope, however. Being in Cuba where things are desperate because of the embargo alone and then we have to, for some reason, keep tightening it-I couldn’t bring a box of cigars back because just before we went, that and Rum were put on the things we couldn’t bring back anymore. The desperation is also because of the Cuban government and, like here in the US, in Russia, in China, in the entire world-those in Government live better than the average Cuban. While seeing the poverty and the disrepair of Habana, we also witnessed the amazing resilience and spirit of the Cuban people. Their music is fantastic, they have government schools that teach music, dance, art, etc and the young people are so engaged in the arts that they use them as an outlet for their despair. Adults flock to concerts by Chamber Orchestras, bands, Symphonies, etc and are respectful, engaged and wowed by the talent. We say a concert by a group whose leader plays all over the world and he had his two daughters play with the band-it was a family affair as the whole group play and live like family.

We recovering people are aware of terror and anguish. We practiced it, caused it and felt it. Terror and anguish is one of the roots of our addictive behaviors, I believe. We were afraid of everything and most people, we felt the tightness of our fear and we became enslaved to the erroneous belief that life was so narrow we had to go along to get along, we had to follow the leader and, in turn, made our lives narrower and we became terrorists to those around us. More tomorrow.

God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 43

“The world is in flames, consumed by evil. Is it possible that there is no one who cares? (God in Search of Man pg.367)

These words are haunting me greatly as I prepare for a Cultural Trip to Cuba including praying at the Synagogue in Havana and doing a little teaching there as well with my dear friend Rabbi Laura Owens. They are haunting me as we prepare for Tuesday’s mid-term elections. They are haunting me as we prepare for the onslaught of election deniers, the onslaught of armed people scaring voters away from the polling stations, the new ‘poll tax’ in Florida where, even though the people said it was okay to vote with a felony conviction, Ron DeSantis is arresting people for exercising a basic right of democracy.

They haunt me as I listed to Blake Masters and Kari Lake speak so despairingly about people seeking refuge at our borders, forgetting that even the “FOUNDING FATHERS” ,who they say they are defending, were either immigrants themselves or descendants of immigrants seeking refuge from the King of England and other Autocrats in other nations. We have forgotten our roots, we have forgotten our beginnings and we have forgotten the words on the Liberty Bell that come from Leviticus 25:10! We have forgotten how our ancestors, some as far back as 1607 and some as recently as last year, braved treacherous journeys so we can “breathe free” when we denigrate refugees. We are consumed by evil it seems in this country and people are covering their evil up with politics, instead of calling it what it is: HATRED.

The greatest evil is the evil we have become indifferent to. In his chapter on Wonder in God in Search of Man, Rabbi Heschel  says: “Indifference to the sublime wonder of living is the root of sin.” The people calling themselves patriots are, in fact, plutocrats. They are people who believe they are the smartest people in the room and no one should ever question their brilliance and decisions. They believe that everyone else should serve them, except for their fellow plutocrats. Peter Thiel is backing many of these people like Masters and J.D.Vance-people who hate the people they are asking to vote for them, people who have disdain for the poor, the needy, the stranger-forgetting the ways Vance’s ancestors were treated for being poor hillbillies and drug addicts as he depicts them in Hillbilly Elegy.

This is one reason “the world is in flames, consumed by evil.” We have forgotten our own roots. One day, I ran into a person whom had been helped at the Recovery Center I am retired from. I asked him why he didn’t come around and tell his story now that he was successful and he said: “I am disgusted that I had to sink so low as to need the charity of this place”. I was flabbergasted and it brought these words home to me in a powerful way. “The world is in flames, consumed by evil” because we have become embarrassed by our roots, we have become embarrassed by our neediness, we have become embarrassed by being the strangers, we have become embarrassed by being poor. Because we have become so embarrassed, we begin to hate the people who hold mirrors up to our faces. We hate and despise the parts of us that another human being represents that we are trying to disown, to forget, to rewrite. This is what is happening right now in our country, to our democracy.

Liz Cheney who is not in agreement with most of my opinions/beliefs on key issues, is campaigning against these Plutocrats, these freedom deniers, because saving democracy is more important to her than being in power. What a concept, she is more concerned with stripping the facade off of these so-called Republicans, these so-called believers in democracy than she has been about her own political future. She doesn’t agree with many of the policies of the candidates she is campaigning for and she sees kindred spirits in their fight to preserve our democracy and to make this a “more perfect union”. We are “consumed by evil” because our own “indifference to the sublime wonder of living.” We are “consumed by evil” because of our “indifference to evil” as Rabbi Heschel says elsewhere. We have the power and the strength to stop this assault on goodness, on truth, on holiness, on spirit, on Godliness, on love, on justice, etc-the question we all have to answer is: do we have the willpower to push back against these deceivers or are we the Israelites in Egypt when Pharaoh dealt with them slyly and they succumbed?

I have been writing this blog for almost 2 years beginning in January of 2021 with the prophets and Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom for the past year and 43 days. I am taking a spiritual rest beginning tomorrow until I return from Cuba on the 15th of November. I pray for the health, well-being and safety of everyone. I pray for the health and well-being of our democracy and for the world. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 42

“The world is in flames, consumed by evil. Is it possible that there is no one who cares? (God in Search of Man pg.367)

These two sentences of Rabbi Heschel, published in 1955, when everything was ‘so good,’ reflect the unspoken fears of many of us. We are watching, today, the world in flames in the Ukraine, the price gouging of the Saudis’, the authoritarianism of Orban and, here at home, the violent rhetoric of one political party that has been hijacked by the MAGA message. We are witnesses to the worst evil possible, as M. Scott Peck describes: the using of the vulnerabilities of a person against them. We are witnesses to the lies and deceptions of people who say one thing to get a vote all the while using the slight of hand of a 3-card monte player.

We are a world that has always had fires going in different parts of the world. Remember, Judaism is the only civilization to transition from antiquity to present day. Rome burned, Greece was destroyed, the Assyrians are no more, Egypt was drowned, Spain, England, France, all have had their heyday and fell from grace because, I believe, the fires they lit and fanned through the ways they treated the stranger, the poor, the needy caused them to rot from within. Evil will consume the perpetrators as well as the victims and we forget this truth believing we can master the evil we bring to the world. We erroneously believe we can be saved from ourselves, from any consequences because we are ‘in charge’! History teaches us the fallacy of this thinking and, yet, we ignore the lessons of history in favor of our superior ways.

The United States was/is supposed to be a beacon of light for the stranger, the needy, the poor as evidenced by the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor. Yet, the prejudice displayed at Ellis Island reminds us of a promise unkept. Quotas to keep our Jews, Muslims, Irish, Italians, and others from entering is another example of not fulfilling the promise of Lady Liberty, not fulfilling the intent of the Founding Fathers (and Mothers). Yet, people went along with these policies because of the evil that flourishes within each of us when left unchecked, when left unresolved, when not overwhelmed with awareness, commitment, spirituality, and direction from God/Higher Consciousness. We are still facing this problem/issue today in America, we are still electing people to our Congress who want to perpetrate evil on citizens and strangers alike when they don’t agree with them, when we stand up and say no to their evil ideas, to their eye diseases of prejudices and to the cancer of the soul they try to spread to everyone with their racism, xenophobia, anti-semitism, etc. It is time for us to wake up, it is time for us to stand up, it is time for us to do the inner work so we don’t buy into moral equivalence like Trump used at the Charlottesville “Jews will not replace us” rally, the naming of the people who attacked our Capital as patriots exercising their right of dissent, their right to bear arms, all poppycock to foment an armed rebellion and Republican leaders like Mitch McConnell, Mitt Romney, stay silent and watch Adam Kissinger and Liz Cheney be threatened, ostracized for speaking truth. Rather than being like Nathan Hale, for whom no military bases are named, they are like the Confederacy that began and lost the Civil War. Maybe the lesson is that the evil of slavery, the evil of prejudice, the evil of hatred, the evil of fear-mongering never left us, it went underground and found ways to worm itself into the fabric of our society.

“The world is in flames, consumed by evil” is a descriptor that needs to shake all of us to our core. We have to stand up to this evil, we have to denounce it, we have to do a deep dive inside oof our self to see the insidious ways we have succumbed to it, how we go along with evil without being totally aware of it and how we go along with it in the name of getting along, in the name of not wanting conflict, of not wanting to lose, of wanting to be on the winning side. The BIG LIE is that evil wins! The BIG LIE is that we cannot fight it, we cannot rid the world of it. The BIG LIE is we are powerless over the evil that lurks in our hearts, minds and gets perpetrated in the world!

Recovery is the denouncement of these BIG LIES! Each day we gather together, people in recovery, to help one another raise our self up from these BIG LIES, each day as the Buddhists teach we engage in “noble speech” and “noble listening”. We have a motto in recovery: “Say what you mean, mean what you say and don’t say it meanly”! We also are deeply aware of how much we owe back to the world because of our prior evil ways, for the evil we put into the world prior to our recovery.

I find my self inquiring how am I helping to fan the flames of evil and how am I extinguishing these flames. Of course I do both, as does everyone. My main paths of extinguishing these flames is this blog; to say hello to everyone I see in stores, on the street; to watch my words more and to keep advocating for the souls of the people who seek me out. I am extinguishing these flames of evil through studying with people, through keeping in touch with people, through connecting with people transparently and authentically. I am more focused on extinguishing these flames of evil because I have dealt with the ways I fan these flames by working very hard to keep myself in proper measure, to breathe before I respond, to respond rather than react and to feel divine pathos for people who are still stuck in fanning these flames while doing everything I can to stop them. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 41

“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)

The more time I spend with these words, the more determined we all should be to stop the “excessive piety” of the charlatans who are preaching they know that God wants them to ignore the pleas of the downtrodden, stop listening to the demand to care for the stranger, the poor, the needy, buy into the lies and meanness that is so rampant as justifiable and necessary. We are living in momentous times, as each era has been, and we are blessed to have the teachings of Torah, of the Bible, the Koran, Buddha, and the wisdom of people like Eckhart Tolle, Dalai Lama, Rabbi Heschel, Martin Luther King Jr. and all of their true disciples on how to fulfill the teachings for the benefit of all people.

Yet, we still fall into the trap of believing that some lives are more important than others! We still buy into the mendacity of another(s) and we are willing to, as they did at the Tower of Babel, sacrifice humans for the sake of the goal, for the sake of themselves, for the sake of ‘the cause’. Immersing ourselves in the words and wisdom above cause us to look at our own actions and ask ourselves how important is optics, how important are these behaviors and ‘rules’ we have come to adopt so we can be ‘part of the pack of leaders’? It is amazing to me that lies and innuendos spread by Elon Musk, Donald Trump Jr, Marjorie Taylor Greene, etc are given any breath when we immerse ourselves in the words above, yet they are being screamed out in some social media circles and taking a tragedy and making the victim at fault. This is a terrible denial of our own humanity as well as a denial of facts. We are falling into the abyss of deception which will bring down our freedom to choose, our freedom to speak, our freedom to practice faith or not. All of these are in danger when the goal, the deed becomes more important than  a human being.

We have a cure for this situation, however. It is called taking off our blinders, calling B.S on the liars and seeing each and every person as an equal member of the human race. How much money one has, how smart one is, how much one gives to charity, how much work one does to better humanity does not mean they are a more worthy human being than anyone else. We are all endowed with “certain unalienable rights”; to be children of the Creator, to be given the dignity worthy of our heritage-children of the Sovereign-, to be treated with care and kindness, to “love our neighbor as we love our self” so we have to practice self-love and spread truth, justice, kindness and compassion to everyone.

Living the words above means letting go of our need to ‘have it our way’ and do it God’s way, live in accordance with morals and ethics, and, most importantly, put human life ahead of tribal rituals. We are being called to take sides in every moment, either stand for the principles of Torah, decency, kindness, truth, Justice, compassion, mercy and love or we stand against these principles. There are no alternative facts, alternative principles in the Spiritual world, in the world we were given to grow and nurture. “Nation shall not life up sword against nation, neither shall people learn war anymore” seems to have been forgotten as a prophecy, as a teaching, as an exhortation of the Prophets to the people to not give in to our lower desires, not give in to our immature feelings and understandings of what it means to Be Human! We have forgotten that God is calling to us to return, each day we are to do T’Shuvah, return and repent, repair and have new responses to life’s daily challenges. We do this when we take in the words above and make them alive in our souls, alive in our brains, alive in our actions!

In recovery, we are constantly laying down our weapons of mass destruction, our actions of selfishness, harshness, meanness, and picking up the tools to create goodness and service to further the goal of maintaining and saving human life. Doing this helps us regain our humanity and save our souls from the hell we were putting them in.

I have, at times, confused what is life saving and what is self-serving. The majority of my life has been involved in life-saving and not self-serving so I can stand in front of the mirror and not hide from “the man in the glass”. I also am unafraid to be responsible for my errors and my goodness. We are traveling with the Documentary: “the Jewish Jail Lady and the Holy Thief” and meeting new people whom we can serve, bringing hope and solutions to communities that have been decimated by the loss of one person to overdoses, incarcerations, etc. and then have the loss multiplied by the vast number of people who have succumbed to the disease of addiction. I have been able to speak truth to power and, at times, have them listen and heed and staying out of the result, being in the solution, has allowed me to continue to move forward in my way and not need to be right, not need to win. Rather, the ‘win’ is connection, friendship, love. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 40

“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)

Immersing ourselves deeper into Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom allows us the opportunity to examine our daily actions, our beliefs, our authentic needs, our self. Since there is “nothing more important, according to the Torah, than to preserve human life…” how are we preserving our own? How are we preserving the life of our neighbor? How are we engaging in life-affirming activities that are life-enhancing for each of us as individuals and for all of humanity as a whole?

The central prayer in Judaism, the Shema, is a prayer that ends with the Oneness of God and, as Rabbi Harold Shulweis taught me, we are all part of this Oneness. At our core, in our being, in our humanity, we are all part of the Ineffable One, part of the Oneness that holds our world together. We are created in the Image of the Divine, ergo, we are part of the Divine, we are “God’s reminders” as Rabbi Heschel teaches, so we have to stop our erroneous belief that we have to murder the soul of another in order to ‘win’.

There is no ‘win’ in the ways people are trying to ‘win’ today and forever,  there is only Pekuach Nefesh, saving a soul/life. While there is, of course, the physical aspect to saving a life, helping someone who is sick, caring for the wounded in battle, stopping to help when we see someone stuck/sick on the road, etc, of more concern for me as I dive deeply into Rabbi Heschel’s brilliance, is the spiritual aspect, the psychological aspect of saving a life, of preserving our spiritual health and the spiritual health of people around us, people we can(and I would add must)touch and reach out to. This is a much ignored authentic need, this is a much maligned and forgotten action, this is a belief we have shunted to the side in favor of puffing our selves up to think well of our self, we have shunted to the side in favor of feeling downtrodden and enslaved, etc.

Many people think little of their spiritual health, little of the spiritual health of another, even people who go to Churches, the Mosques, the Temples do not put a lot of stock in their spiritual health. Rather they are, like the pious people, endangering the essence of the law, of prayer by paying lip service rather than attention to preserving their spiritual life and nurturing the spiritual life of people around them. Given the state of the world today I believe it is imperative we start paying more attention to our spiritual health and well-being. We are in desperate need of connection for the sake of learning and growing, not for the sake of ego and ‘winning’. We don’t need to determine our worth by how many likes we have on TikTok, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc. We don’t need to determine our well-being based on what designer clothing we just bought, what ‘star’ we just met, what deal we just closed, what promotion we just got, how much our home is worth, what our spouse looks like, etc. All of these externals have been pushed on us by societal ‘norms’ and they are controlling our inner life, our spiritual health and they are killing us, making us susceptible to the lies and deceptions of another person, making us kiss the ‘tush’ of people we know could care less about us as humans and our actually using us for their benefit, etc. We do not need to continue to kill our inner life, to feed poison to our soul anymore. In fact, Rabbi Heschel is telling us we have an overriding obligation, a sacred duty to preserve our inner life and feed and nurture our souls to grow and flourish.

We do this reaching out to the people closest to us and letting them know what we need to do to preserve and grow our spiritual health and well-being. We engage our higher self/higher consciousness and look into the depths of our being and listen to what our soul, our higher consciousness, God, intuition, higher knowledge is telling us. We stop connecting on a self-serving basis with our traits and brains and/or with another and connect with our traits and brains to serve our spiritual insights, our spiritual needs and the spiritual insights and needs of another(s). Remembering Einstein’s wisdom-we need to remember the gift of our intuitive mind and have our rational mind serve it, rather than continuing to forget the gift and worship the servant. Each day we are given a myriad of opportunities to preserve and grow our spiritual well-being, lets take advantage of them more that we seek to take advantage of another human being.

In recovery, we have had to face the wreckage of our self-serving behaviors and have the atrophy of our spirits reflected back to us through the faces of those around us and the people, who for some unknown reason, still love and care for us. We know, as is said often, our recovery is based on our daily spiritual condition and if we are not right inside, we will soon return to the scenes of our worst behaviors and situations. Each day we seek to grow one grain of sand more together, healthier and wiser in our inner life.

I have, at times, engaged in preserving the souls of another(s) at the expense of my own. This has caused me angst, problems and sadness. More tomorrow. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark.

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 39

“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)

As we are one week away from the MidTerms and we are witness’ to the language of violence, hatred and the savage beating of the husband of the Speaker of The House of Representatives, Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom from 67 years ago is, hopefully, ringing in our ears and disturbing our daily living. We are facing a scenario much like Germany in the 1930’s, Italy of the same time period, the Holy Roman Empire of 1492 and before, 1948 Israel, the times of Noah and the flood, and other times throughout history where people believed that violence against their fellow person was the right thing to do to show how powerful they are, how fervent they are in their loyalty to falsehood and mendacity, how they can command their ‘foolish followers’ to do anything for them.

How can these so-called ‘good christ followers’ condone the lies they have been telling about the 2020 election, the democrats, the Jews, people of color? How can they adore Kyle Rittenhouse who crossed State Lines to kill human beings in cold blood and then get a free pass because, he who brought the gun and was brandishing it, felt like his life was in danger! The jury bought this lie and the Republicans have extolled him. How can these people who swore an oath to defend the Constitution have solidarity with people who are trying to destroy the tenets found in it? How can Mitch McConnell say that Jan.6th did not happen as an insurrection and defend Donald Trump’s use of violent rhetoric even against him! How can Mike Pence claim to be deeply religious and use hate speech, condone violent rhetoric, and put into place policies that deny the very dignity that Christ preaches about in the Gospels to the very people Christ was ministering to? How can these ‘god-fearing’ people extol Mother Theresa and seek to blame, shame and deny services to the very people she ministered to her entire career?

How can Jews of any denomination continue to vote for these fear mongers, these hate spewers? How can they claim to love God and hate God’s creations-human beings unlike them? How can they claim to serve God and go along with people who decry the stranger, the poor and the orphan? How can they recite the prayer, Shema Yisrael, and deny that we are all part of the Oneness that is God? How can they study the Torah and believe that only some of us are created in “the Image of God”, only some of us have the “spirit of God” breathed into us? How can they believe it is okay to cheat, abuse, another as long as they are not Jewish? How can they use ‘Shabbos Goys’ knowing everyone is supposed to rest on the Sabbath?

How is all of this possible? Because we pay lip service to the tenets we proclaim, we are not willing to, as Rabbi Heschel did, live these tenets no matter what someone else may say. We are not willing to “pray with our feet” as Rabbi Heschel described marching in Selma with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. We are not willing to go against the popular grain for fear of missing out. We are not willing to stand for our principles if the powers that be won’t like it. We are not willing to cancel a class to join a march for freedom as Rabbi Heschel did, we are not willing to be unpopular for standing up for God, for the stranger, the poor, the needy as Rabbi Heschel did, we are not willing to risk the wrath of people to stand for the stranger, the poor, the needy, for what is right and good about humanity, to stand for being human, as Rabbi Heschel demands us to be.

In recovery, being of service is paramount to having a good life. It doesn’t matter if it means cleaning coffee cups after a meeting, writing postcards for voting rights, marching for women to have the right to choose, calling for everyone to be vaccinated so no one risks the life of another on some insane theory, realizing that God has endowed each of us with a talent that can help another human being/humanity at large and we are all called to be of service to the stranger, the poor and the needy which, in turn, enhances our humanity and is a living amends for the myriad of times we ignored the needs of humanity and individual human beings for our selfish desires.

Today is my birthday, today is 34 years to the day since I walked out of prison to go to a re-entry facility and begin life anew. I made a vow 36 years ago to change my ways, to hear what God is trying to tell me and to follow God’s demands not the demands of my desires. I also committed to giving truth, love, kindness and spirit back into the world and rather than taking advantage of another human being, I would be of service to who ever I could help. I have followed through on this commitment and I continue to honor it. I am acutely aware of the times I haven’t. I am acutely aware of the pious people who have stood idly by the bloods of their brother and, overwhelmingly, I have not. I am still responding to God’s Demand, God’s Call and through Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom and tutelage, I continue to find new ways to serve, new ways to save a soul and new strength to overcome the disdain, the muck and mud that are slung at me and stand with God and with like-minded human beings to protect and serve the voiceless, the powerless, the needy and the stranger. God Bless and Stay safe, Rabbi Mark.