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

Daily Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 85

“The confusion goes back to the very process of creation. “When God came to create the world and reveal what was hidden in the depths and disclose the light out of the darkness, they were all wrapped in one another, and therefore light emerged from darkness, and from the impenetrable came forth the profound. So, too, from good issues evil and from mercy issues judgement, and all are intertwined, the good impulse and the evil impulse..”(Zohar Vol. III pg.80b)”(God in Search of Man pg.371)

Immersing ourselves in this teaching is daunting. It is a journey into our inner life and one that is very uncomfortable for most of us. We are seeking certainty and surety, we want to have ‘the answer’ and ‘be right’, we want to ‘be in control’ of our lives, our surroundings, our world, etc and the wisdom Rabbi Heschel  is imparting to us, as I understand it today, tells us that our search is for naught, there is no ‘ the right answer’, certainty is a myth we have created to deal with our need to hide from and not engage with our inner life. We keep trying to ‘figure stuff out’ with our intellect, we seek therapy to help us deal with and control our emotions, in order to ignore the truth of everything being intertwined and the only way to discern/separate/distinguish the different strands that are wrapped around each other is through our spirit, our soul.

This is the least attended to in most people, the reason being is that even many of the people who pray, who do yoga, who meditate, are trying to go through their practices, are trying to perfect their practices, not understanding/realizing that it is more important, healthier, and more solution oriented to have prayer, yoga, meditation, etc go through us. We need to have our inner life changed by engaging in a practice of distinguishing what is and the ways to unwrap the good from the evil, the mercy from the judgement, the truth from the lies, etc; in other words, our practices have to engage and change our inner life, they have to strengthen our souls, our spirits, enough for our souls to become the arbiters of our much needed action of distinguishing and separating the strands that are “wrapped in one another”.

We, the people, need to let go of our certainty, our need for surety, our ‘succeed at any cost’, our ‘safety in wealth’, etc attitudes and ways of being. I know that these are societal norms and ways of being, I know these are the deceptions we are brought up on, I know we believe we can be anything, anyone we want to be and the teaching above tells me these deceptions that society has perpetrated on us for millennia, is what is killing our spirits, causing mental health problems and providing the spiritual crisis that is fueling our rampant Addiction Epidemic. We have been in this epidemic for a lot longer than the Government, the Doctors, the FDA, the NHI, etc decided it was an epidemic. Yet, we are willing to find pills to cure our addiction crisis up to and including psychedelics , take homeless people off the streets without giving them the one-on-one individual care they need-just give cookie cutter global answers, etc. Rather that acknowledge how mixed up we are because we are not separating what was intertwined at creation, we are all beating our chests like the Cavemen and Cavewomen to prove how smart, powerful, rich and right we are. How ridiculous after so many 1000’s of years of failure!

I hear a call from Rabbi Heschel for all of us to realize our mission is to unwrap what is intertwined, discern and distinguish what is good and what is evil, what is light and what is dark, what is true and what is mendacious. We were given the tool to do this, our inner life, our souls, and to realize that darkness is necessary, mendacity moves us to seek truth inside of us and to call out when “the Emperor has no clothes on” with a knowing that goes beyond our intellectual certainty. When we unwrap, discern, distinguish what truly is from our intellect, we can always be persuaded we are wrong by a stronger opposing argument. When we unwrap, discern and distinguish from our souls, we have a sense of knowing that is unshakeable, we can allow someone else to ‘win’ and know that we are seeing what is. All of this takes a maturing of our souls, allowing our spiritual practices to truly go through us and change us.

In recovery, we are on a constant journey of spiritual maturity. We are engaging in a path of one step at a time, one grain of sand more of maturity in our souls, our inner life. Upon entering recovery, we become aware of how stunted our inner life, our souls have become. We become aware of how imprisoned we have kept our inner knowledge because of our fear of change. Once we immerse our self in recovery, we are excited for what this day will bring and how we will grow, mature and embrace our life more and more.

I have been the Caveman, I have been the mendacious one, I have shirked by duty and the demand of God to unwrap a piece of what is intertwined and confused. Rather, I have, at times, added to the confusion. I am so sorry and, my entire recovery has been to make amends for these ‘crimes’. I also know that my recovery is not perfect and I have made some of the same mistakes to a much lessor degree and I am grateful for the love, the guidance and the infusion of spirit that God and God’s Angels that surround me keep pumping into me! Stay safe and God Bless, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 84

“The confusion goes back to the very process of creation. “When God came to create the world and reveal what was hidden in the depths and disclose the light out of the darkness, they were all wrapped in one another, and therefore light emerged from darkness, and from the impenetrable came forth the profound. So, too, from good issues evil and from mercy issues judgement, and all are intertwined, the good impulse and the evil impulse..”(Zohar Vol. III pg.80b)”(God in Search of Man pg.371)

Rereading Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom and teachings above are overwhelming in light of today’s happenings, today’s wars, today’s promotion of the confusion Rabbi Heschel is warning us about. Rather than engage in uncovering what is “hidden in the depths”, rather than disclosing “the light out of the darkness”, humanity has been deeply engaged in wrapping up mercy with judgement, good with evil, truth with lies, etc so humans are able to gain power, wealth, live in a transactional world rather than in a covenantal one. It is hard for me, at least, to realize this light that Rabbi Heschel is shining upon us has been and still is dimmed by people who are afraid to have revelation and disclosure, uncovering and separation.

We are willing to separate the Sabbath from the rest of the week, be the Sabbath on Friday, Saturday, or Sunday. Jews have a ceremony called Havdalah, which means to distinguish, to separate, at the end of our Sabbath. Yet, we are not willing, nor have we throughout the millennia, to separate the evil from good, the judgement from mercy, the lies from truth. Rather we work hard to keep them intertwined so we are able to do terrible things in the name of God, Christ, Allah, etc. We see this in Iran, we see this in Saudi Arabia, we see this in Israel and we are bombarded with this in America.

I believe there is a very good reason for our resistance to Rabbi Heschel’s brilliance, Rabbi Heschel is not speaking just to everyone, he is demanding action from each of us. He is calling us out individually to stop hiding what is deep in our spirits, what is embedded in our minds, to reveal our fears, our hopes, our dreams to our self, to another(s) and to begin to separate what is self-centered egotistical and what is Godly and holy, what is ‘just because I want it’ from ‘how does this help another(s) human being, for the sake of service rather than ego/money/fame’. I am hearing Rabbi Heschel demand that we engage in the work of personal revelation; the work of disclosing the light within us rather than hiding from it and hiding it from the world. Being good is not a weakness though there are many who exploit the goodness of another(s) for their own power and gains. This, as I am reading Rabbi Heschel today, is not our concern, just as God had faith in humanity (maybe more than is deserved) that we would use God’s revelations and disclosures for our good, for our health, for our service, for our unique gifts to shine, for the sake of everyone not just hoard and abuse what is revealed and disclosed and we haven’t yet! Yet, Rabbi Herschel is optimistic about the human capabilities, he keeps calling us to the task of personally looking inside of our being, to search our soul so we can reveal our authentic purpose and disclose our unique talents and brilliance in service of God, in service of another(s)!

We have learned to hide our self, our authentic self from the world because it is a cold, cruel place. This is the teachings we receive from our youth, we learn of ‘stranger danger’ which makes it hard to reveal our self to anyone for fear of being hurt. We are berated for “missing the mark” and sold on the idea of perfection which we work hard to accomplish on the outside and for everyone else to see. This way of being has also caused us to hide our true self from us as well. One time someone asked:”If you live a false self long enough doesn’t this become your true self?” I was almost speechless as I realized how great is our intertwining of true and false, light and dark, good and evil and how this intertwining has led to obliviousness and willful blindness, led us to cover up what is disclosed in our depths.

In recovery, we dedicate ourselves to pulling apart what is evil from the good we do, knowing we will never be “good for goodness sakes” alone, there will always be some self-interest involved. The major self-interest involved in our pulling apart the lies we have used as our north star from the truth is we learn how to live with our self, we learn how to stop depending on substances, process, ways of being, ‘normal things’ to validate what we know, in our depths is not right, is not okay and we are aware of the myriad of ways we confuse our self and confuse everyone around us.

Looking back, I realize that I have been seeking to unwrap the confusion Rabbi Heschel is speaking about forever. I would talk about, cry and whine about “it’s not fair” when I saw evil triumphing, when I watched deception win, when I witnessed and experienced people using goodness, kindness as weakness and the ridicule, the taking advantage of that ensued. I remember being outraged when a couple of young people held up my grandfather in his small tailoring shop and threatened him for a couple of dollars and his desire to deliver all of the dry cleaning he had in his store to the people who had left it for years, in some cases. His ability to reveal his light, his goodness, his morality was overwhelming to me, yet, I succumbed to the dark side of society and have made amends to him at his grave. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 83

“The confusion goes back to the very process of creation. “When God came to create the world and reveal what was hidden in the depths and disclose the light out of the darkness, they were all wrapped in one another, and therefore light emerged from darkness, and from the impenetrable came forth the profound. So, too, from good issues evil and from mercy issues judgement, and all are intertwined, the good impulse and the evil impulse..”(Zohar Vol. III pg.80b)”(God in Search of Man pg.371)

Rabbi Heschel’s teaching in the first sentence is validated by his quotation from the Zohar and all of this quotation is crucial, I believe, to “the central problem history and the ultimate issue of redemption.”(ibid). The confusion of good and evil, of light and dark, of profound and profane are with us from the beginning of creation. We see this in the ‘story’ of creation in the Bible. At first there was “tohu v’vohu”, emptiness and chaos, whether one believes God created the world or in the big bang theory. This emptiness and chaos has plagued us since time immemorial and, while we try to explain it, we try to find the roots of it, it is important for us to realize, accept and surrender to this truth. Creation is messy, it is chaotic, it is painful and it is wonderful, just ask any mother who goes through excruciating pain in labor and child birth and is amazed and euphoric upon holding her child immediately after birth. While she might scream and yell during the process, she is ecstatic over the result of her pain, her chaos, and feels an emptiness, aka postpartum, afterwards as well.

In the first sentence above, Rabbi Heschel is reminding us that our “dreadful confusion” described earlier, is not something that is situational, it is built into the world, it is built into our nature. All of our denial, all of our willful blindness to this fact is, in my opinion, what causes the evil to be more embedded in the good we do, what causes our false ego to reign over our spiritual nature, our recognition of truth. Our great challenge, as I hear Rabbi Heschel speak to me, is to realize this confusion is part of creation and, rather than running from this realization, rather than trying to change this truth, we are being called to use this knowledge to be more aware, to be more on guard, to be more engaged in separating, distinguishing the evil that is hidden in the good, the light that is shining from the darkness, etc.

Since “the confusion goes back to the very process of creation”, we can stop blaming ourselves, stop blaming another(s) for our confusion and begin to discern when the confusion comes to overwhelm us and surrender by asking for help to unwrap these opposing inclinations from guides, mentors, mentees, loved ones. Science has a way of explaining this confusion: neural pathways are created by our thinking, by our confusion if you will, and we keep traveling these neural pathways so we continue to engage in this confusion without being aware of it. This is an explanation as to why someone can lie to someone else and/or themselves and never realize they are lying, they are, instead oblivious, unaware because they keep traveling the same neural pathways in their minds. The scientific solution is to create new neural pathways, ones that help us separate the confusion into smaller pieces and have the awareness to ascertain the evil that is hidden in the good, our agenda that we have hidden from ourselves and another(s) in our actions and become less oblivious and willfully blind to what truly is.

Spiritually, we do this through listening to the call of our souls, our intuition, our gut instincts. The issue here, of course, is to make spiritual progress each and every day, to be aware of the spiritual awakenings that we are blessed with each day. We do this in a myriad of ways: yoga, meditation, prayer, ‘good deeds’, mitzvot, etc. Yet, as Rabbi Heschel teaches earlier in God in Search of Man, we have to not only engage in the performance of these practices, we have to allow them to enter and change our inner life, to help us mature our spiritual nature. Just as with the new neural pathways, this takes a lot of work, a lot of realizing when we are falling into old patterns of allowing our minds and emotions to override what our souls, our inner life is telling us, and surrendering to truth rather than tainting it with our agendas, our lies, our willful blindness and our obliviousness. It is fascinating that many people who are great practitioners of the various spiritual disciplines, religious tenets, are oblivious to how little their actions change their insides, how little their beliefs move them to mature their spirits and allow their spirits, their inner life, the “still small voice of God” to be the commanding voice rather than their intellect or emotions. Every spiritual discipline’s practices are to grow new ‘spiritual’ pathways, to grow new neural pathways so we can begin to lessen the confusion that exists inside of every human being.

In recovery, our “fearless and searching moral inventory” begins this process. We are able to recount, observe, acknowledge the confusion we have been living with, spreading to another(s), and the spiritual maladies we are recovering from and the ones we need to make amends for. Our inventory makes clear, for at least a moment, how we have surrendered to the confusion rather than surrendered to the solution, it makes clear the lies we have told ourselves as well as the obliviousness we have walked through life with. We know we will continue to be susceptible to the confusion, we are just more aware of this fact, have less need to deny it, and are able to be in the solution quicker. God Bless and stay safe, Happy 2023, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 81

“The dreadful confusion, the fact that there is nothing in this world that is not a mixture of good and evil, of holy and unholy, of silver and dross, is, according to Jewish mysticism, the central problem of history and the ultimate issue of redemption.”(God in Search of Man pg. 371)

Once we have taken the ‘mirror test’ and begun our own road of redemption, we realize we can’t always redeem ourselves alone. We need help, we need guidance, we need to surrender to our own powerlessness. While the ‘rugged individual’ is a wonderful idea and the ‘self-made’ person sounds so courageous and wonderful, both of these conventional notions are falsehoods. We are taught in the 2nd Chapter of Genesis: “it is not good for human to be alone”. Yet, we keep getting more and more isolated, lonely, resisting of help and connection. We use “likes” and “friends” and clicks on social media to our connections and to determine our worth, ie faux connection, rather than having real connections. In order to be redeemed, as we learn throughout the Bible, we need help from another. Asking another person to redeem us is a strength not a weakness. The Bible also teaches us to “redeem our kinsman”, the Rabbis call this “ransoming the captive”. We are told to sell the Sefer Torah, our holiest object, if we have to in order to ransom back a person who is being held in captivity. We are taught to help one another, to “love your neighbor as you love yourself” so helping another human being(s) achieve freedom, achieve redemption, buying back their soul, acting like a kinsman is a learned way of being. Unfortunately we seem to be missing this lesson in our daily living.

The story of “Lady Bountiful” has played out over and over again in history as well as in today’s world. This is antithetical to truly engaging in “the ultimate issue of redemption” as I understand Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom above. We have to stop ‘doing things for those poor people’ and begin to engage in our own redemption and help another(s) find theirs. It is not just about the money we donate, while it is important to donate to the causes that are near and dear to our hearts, it is about how we stop seeing “those people” and relate to another human being as ‘my people’. We are in desperate need, as we have always been, of seeing the similarities, the humanity of everyone, the needs of each one of us to be redeemed and experience the reflection of our own soul in everyone we encounter.

We are, as we have always been, at a crossroads right now. We have to decide how long we are going to travel the road of senseless hatred, of scapegoating another race, religion, ethnicity, gender, etc for our own self-satisfaction, our own gain (political and otherwise), our own need to look outward rather than inward. I believe it is time for us to stop this bastardization of spiritual values, of moral living and take our proper place with everyone else in this road towards redemption: in acting like a kinsman rather than a taskmaster, a freedom rider rather than a slave owner, a scared kid like everyone else rather than a bully, a seeker rather than a master. We can do this when we actively engage in redemption of another, knowing it is a way of moving forward our own redemption. We have so many examples of this way of being: Father Greg Boyle and Homeboy Industries, Rabbi Iggy Gurin-Malous and the T’Shuvah Center, Pastor Ed Treat and the Center of Addiction and Faith, Pastor Mark Whitlock and Reid Temple, Rev. Andy Bales and Union Rescue Mission, to name a few of the myriad of people and causes that are actively redeeming our people. Rabbi Heschel is inspiring me, and hopefully, you to see everyone as ‘our people’ and reach out in any and every way we can to redeem our kinsmen/kinswomen. It is not just for clergy or government, it is the responsibility, the gift we all get to participate in. I pray we all will.

In recovery, we know we have to continue to work with and help ‘the newcomer’ so we can give away what we have, so we can help them achieve their own redemption-never deciding what redemption looks like for another, only helping another human being see their unique road map to redemption. We help them personalize the steps to recovery and “act like a kinsman/kinswoman” towards all we meet-in and out of recovery as we “practice these principles in all our affairs”. While, like Jews, we in recovery don’t actively seek converts, we do intervene when called upon, we visit the ‘addict’ who is still suffering from their behaviors, their actions, their substances, their depressions and anxieties, and give our fellow human beings our hands to hold on to for the rest of our lives, if they want. In recovery, we know we are responsible to and for one another, we know we are connected to all of humanity and we seek to help in the redemption of everyone as another step on our road to redemption. We are acutely aware that we can’t keep what we don’t give away.

As we are reaching the end of 2022 and there is a huge push to donate to different charities to redeem our kinsmen/kinswomen, I am asking people to consider the charities above, I am asking everyone to donate to their Churches, their Synagogues, their Mosques to support the different ways these Homes for All support and engage in redemption. I ask you to help the organizations above who are saving souls as well as the bodies of people young and old. I do, I am also grateful beyond words for the myriad of ways people have helped me along my own road of redemption. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 81

“The dreadful confusion, the fact that there is nothing in this world that is not a mixture of good and evil, of holy and unholy, of silver and dross, is, according to Jewish mysticism, the central problem of history and the ultimate issue of redemption.”(God in Search of Man pg. 371)

Immersing our selves in Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom and teachings causes us to change our ways, engage in self-reflection, hold our selves responsible individually and communally. We have to stop living on the surface of life, no longer be content with our ‘good deeds’ and cease and desist from our rationalizations and looking outside of our selves for causes and answers. Rather, we have to be engaged in our inner lives, in our clearing out the shmutz, the junk we have allowed to overcome our soul’s knowledge. We are in desperate need, individually and communally, of ‘open heart’ surgery. The type of surgery that opens our hearts to what being human truly is, the type of surgery that opens up our spiritual arteries so the flow of inner wisdom, higher consciousness, God’s teachings and ways, is more readily available to us, becomes our new normal, our new way of being.

To do this means we have to first look ourselves in the mirror, as Cassidy Hutchinson so aptly put it in the Jan. 6th committee hearings. Rather than see if our make-up is on correctly, rather than worrying about the hairs that may be out of place, rather than noticing the crows feet and lines on our faces, when we look in the mirror it is imperative that we see if we are being the person we were meant to be. The “mirror test” becomes not about our looks, it becomes about who we are as humans. It is the first step in our process of changing our way of being human. We have to look into the mirror and remember the poem “The man in the glass” which reminds us that we can fool everyone else, we can get all the money, power, prestige, etc. and at the end of the day: “But your final reward will be heartache and tears If you’ve cheated the man in the glass.”

Individually and communally, we need to begin with the “mirror test”, we have to stop cheating our selves and cheating everyone else with our deceptions of self and another(s). Letting go of the societal norms and pretenses, the conventional notions and mental cliches is a strong beginning. Holding ourselves to a higher standard, the standard of being human, allows us to see where we have ‘hit the mark’ and where we have ‘missed the mark’. It is the beginning of a true awareness of where, when, and how we mix “good and evil, holy and unholy, silver and dross”. We can do this work by first realizing and admitting the lies we tell ourselves each and every day; like ‘not good enough’ ‘everybody does this’ ‘I’m entitled to’ and so many more. Taking the ‘mirror test’ opens us up to seeing our assets and liabilities, the problems we face and the solutions we have to our dilemmas. We stop hiding from our selves, from the truths about us, from the shame and blame we engage in and get into action to grow spiritually and morally. We are, in fact, “buying back” our existence from the falseness we have become accustomed to and from a society that rewards mendacity! It is time for us to act as kinsmen/kinswomen to our self so we can truly participate in this “buying back” of our souls. This is, I believe, part of our ultimate redemption.

I hear Rabbi Heschel teaching me/us that we will never get totally good in this life, we will never get totally holy in any single action we take, there will always be a little dross of the shine we put into the world. Yet, as I listen to Rabbi Heschel speak to me, I realize that he is reminding us that perfection is not the goal, there is no Mitzvah we will do perfectly because we are not able to separate out all the evil, unholy, dross in our daily living. The best we can do is to improve one day at a time, one grain of sand each day. This is what we do IN RECOVERY, this is what we do when we choose to live life along spiritual principles. Doing this doesn’t mean that we are not successful, doing this is not a monastic endeavor, doing this does not mean we are doomed to boredom and/or no fun/no pleasure. Rather engaging in this dive into our inner life shows us what action and pleasure truly is, what being part of community truly can be, and success is not about status and money (although we can attain both), it becomes about passing the ‘mirror test’!

I have been looking at life through the lens of Rabbi Heschel’s teaching above for a long time and I still engage in “the dreadful confusion” and I still have a mixture “of good and evil, of holy and unholy, of silver and dross” in my daily actions. I also know how far I have come in since my last arrest in 1986. I am aware of how my “dreadful confusion” prevented me from redeeming, “acting like a kinsman”, “buying back” some lives while knowing that my way, my struggle, my love, my actions have caused me to help many people to redeem their own lives. I know my way of being is not for everyone, it is not ‘politically correct’, it is too intense for many as my friend, teacher and Rabbi, Rabbi Ed Feinstein says. Yet, I know without being me, I could never pass the mirror test and that is the most important test of all to me. In Jewish prayer, when we say the name of God, we are always upright and standing straight and tall, and from engaging  in this inner life work, I can be “face to face” with God and have a close personal relationship because of the myriad of ways I “act like a kinsman”. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 80

“The dreadful confusion, the fact that there is nothing in this world that is not a mixture of good and evil, of holy and unholy, of silver and dross, is, according to Jewish mysticism, the central problem of history and the ultimate issue of redemption.”(God in Search of Man pg. 371)

It is time for We, the people, to discuss, plan, and activate our redemption from “the dreadful confusion, the fact that there is nothing in this world that is not a mixture of good and evil, of holy and unholy, of silver and dross”! The Latin root for redemption is “to buy back” and the Hebrew word for redemption is “Ga’al” and this is defined as “redeem and act as a kinsman”. As I understand Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom this morning, he is calling on us to engage in, plan and activate our “buying back” the souls of our loved ones and of ourselves. He is reminding us that We, the people, are responsible for one another. He is demanding we treat each other as kinsman, as kinfolk, as relatives because, I believe, we are all entrusted with our own, unique Image of the Divine. The Namaste greeting is a recognition of this truth, when we recognize someone as human, this is an act of redemption. People, of course, in our “dreadful confusion” have relegated this recognition only towards “our own people, our own kind”.

This is how, after being slaves in Egypt and telling the story of the Exodus from Slavery and our redemption by God, Moses, Aaron, etc, we can still exclude people who aren’t ‘our kind’. We Jews exclude one another from our country clubs, our boards, our homes, we have pity for ‘those people’ rather than “act as a kinsman” towards them. We are so adept at ignoring our “dreadful confusion”, believing that evil is actually good because it is to ‘help them be responsible’ and ‘suffer the consequences of their actions’. While both of these sayings are true and valid, when taken out of context, they become mean, enslaving, unholy, and evil. When we deal with addiction, the addict has, to a great extent, lost her/his ability to choose and other way, just as the Jews in Egypt who were mightier and more numerous than the Egyptians went along with the Pharaoh and, when it was too late, realized their enslavement. Yet, the Jews who exclude, blame, and give money to get the solicitors ‘off their back’ never seem to want to be held responsible for their actions, never want to experience the logical consequences of their actions, never do a real T’Shuvah because they are so buried in their own “dreadful confusion, they are unable to grasp, agree with nor do the inventory necessary to change, to redeem themselves, to ask for help to be redeemed, to act as a kinsman!

This way of being is not relegated to Jews in boardrooms and country clubs, it is true for all Jews regardless on socio-economic status because we have forgotten the wrestling that Jacob did with ___, and afterward he declared he saw God face to face. We can and must open up our eyes and see God in every person we see, we have to see God in nature, in the buildings and business’ we work at, create, otherwise we will never be able to ask for the help we all need to be redeemed, we will always be suspicious of one another rather than “act as a kinsman” toward one another.

For people who aren’t Jewish, this is way of being is also true. The Puritans came here looking for Religious Freedom for themselves which Roger Williams expanded to mean Religious Freedom for all. It is impossible to find salvation and redemption when we are told there is only one way to worship and serve God. Christian Nationalism, Anti-semitism, racism, are not actions of redemption, they are not ways to “buy back” our souls from this “dreadful confusion” we are in. While many people are able to say the words of Christ, it is much more difficult for these same people to live the words of Christ, who was all about redemption, all about seeing the ‘dregs of society as these ‘good christians’ would label us, as his kinfolk, as his friends, as his flock. We are watching these ‘good christians’ bastardize Christ’s teaching and reputation by calling their prejudices, their need for power, their unrelenting opposition to “buying back” the souls who are seeking asylum, etc, and still voting for them, still listening to them, just as people listened to Father Coughlin, just as people voted for Hamilton Fish even though he promoted Nazism and Jew-hatred. Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Jews, all spiritual disciplines are guilty of doing evil and calling it good, acting unholy and calling it holy, of selling/speaking dross and calling it silver. We, the people, have to stop deceiving ourselves into believing these liars, we have to reject the deceptions and mendacities they bombard us with.

The recovery movement is a Redemption movement. We have no interest in doing anything other than helping another lost soul find their way, we work hard to speak to each person in ways they can hear because we see them as kinsmen/kinswomen. We are acutely aware of how people redeemed us and we have to pay their kindness forward, we have to ‘buy back’ the souls of people who seek redemption and we have “love them until they can love themselves” and beyond.

Rabbi Heschel continues to redeem me/us, continues to “act as a kinsman” towards every human being, regardless of economic status, race, color, creed, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, etc. Rabbi Heschel continues to teach us how to lift the veil from our eyes so we can see truth and live with clarity rather than in the “dreadful confusion” we live in now. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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Living Rabbi Heschel's Wisdom

Daily Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 79

“The dreadful confusion, the fact that there is nothing in this world that is not a mixture of good and evil, of holy and unholy, of silver and dross, is, according to Jewish mysticism, the central problem of history and the ultimate issue of redemption.”(God in Search of Man pg. 371)

Immersing ourselves in this sentence should make us all shudder with trembling awe. It is apparent from our history as humankind and as individuals that we are wither willfully blind and/or oblivious to “the dreadful confusion” that we engage in daily. We especially engage in and add to “the mixture of good and evil, of holy and unholy, of silver and dross” in our politics, in our business, in our communal life, in our family life, and in our personal lives. Yet, because of our need to be right, because of our distortion of religion, of God’s teachings, of our fragile egos, etc we are unwilling to experience the trembling awe of our confusion and the ways we mix up good and evil in everyday life. Rather, we become more and more oblivious and blind by accusing another(s) of doing this, of being the “evil ones”, while we are doing the same actions. It is a problem that we continue to repeat from history, truthfully we use history to validate our blindness, our obliviousness and our continuing to engage in these ways of being.

It is evident in the political mismanagement of our country and nations throughout the world. Our leaders are more interested in serving their own ego needs for power and/or the needs of a certain group, be it the wealthy, the identity politics, etc rather than serving the needs of all people, rather than helping us come together to wrestle with this “dreadful confusion”, we engage in our need to be right and grow our confusion. Politics, supported by the media has, maybe always was, the petri dish for mixing up holy and unholy, silver and dross rather than be the laboratory where we separate the good from the evil. While it is easy to blame the politicians, the responsibility resides with us, the people who elect them, the people who believe and/or don’t care about their lies, their deceptions and mendacities.

We, the people, have learned how to deceive ourselves into believing in the ‘rightness’ of our confusion by believing we are doing “God’s Work” by enslaving another people based on race, color, religion, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, etc. We, the people, are unwilling to follow the teachings of Jewish Wisdom that reminds us to do T’Shuvah every day. We, the people, are unwilling to look at the ways we have harmed our own souls, the souls of another(s), daily because we are too interested in defending ourselves so we don’t have to deal with our own imperfections, so we can blame another(s) for our foibles. We, the people, are turning a blind eye to the truth of our imperfections and how they harm and how they can help us grow. We, the people, have made a decision to be oblivious to the myriad of ways our unwillingness to do T’Shuvah each day, our unwillingness to look within ourselves and out towards another(s) to see how we have engaged in “the dreadful confusion” Rabbi Heschel is teaching and reminding us of. We, the people, do this so we don’t have to change, we don’t have to be responsible for the emotional, physical, spiritual harms that we cause through “a mixture of good and evil, of holy and unholy, of silver and dross”. It is amazing how we use our history to validate this way of being, we use history and position to wrap ourselves in self-deception and call it true and valid. It is sad, it is scary, it is destructive it stops us from experiencing the trembling awe Rabbi Heschel’s brilliance needs to cause within each of us, and it has to end or we will stop being human.

In recovery, we are constantly putting on a “new pair of glasses” as Chuck C writes about in his book of the same name. We go back over our history in our daily inventories, in our 4th step “searching and fearless moral inventory” so we engage in the separation “of good and evil, of holy and unholy, of silver and dross” from our past so we can change our present. Seeing the myriad of was we engaged in the “dreadful confusion” Rabbi Heschel is writing about, causes us deep remorse and a trembling that reverberates throughout our bodies and minds, that makes us want to hide and defend/explain, and, through our recovery, with the help of guides, family, friends, we, instead, face the confusion. This allows us to separate and distinguish what is good and what is evil, what is holy and what is unholy, what is silver and what is dross. This process of inventory/T’Shuvah propels us to make our amends, realize when we are in our “dreadful confusion”, carve a new path of living so we can stay away from our historical actions, and reach out to serve instead of taking what we want and living to be served.

I tremble each and every day since my spiritual awakening some 36 years ago this month, when I was arrested for the last time. I tremble at the wreckage of my past, I tremble at the times prior to and since December of 1986 when I tried to “save my face rather than my ass” as we say in AA and the wreckage I wrought. I tremble at the myriad of times I engaged in “dreadful confusion” for my self and the impact on so many people. I tremble each day from awe as well. It is with awe and humility that I can sit here and write each day, it is with awe and humility that I get to be with the woman I love each day, it is with awe and humility that I get to be the father of an amazing woman, a grandfather to a beautiful boy, a brother and an uncle, a Rabbi for so many even though I am ‘retired’. I wake up with trembling awe each morning and am extending it longer and longer each day. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 78

“The dreadful confusion, the fact that there is nothing in this world that is not a mixture of good and evil, of holy and unholy, of silver and dross, is, according to Jewish mysticism, the central problem of history and the ultimate issue of redemption.”(God in Search of Man pg. 371)

It is imperative that we face this “central problem of history” rather than point fingers, make excuses, engage in self-deception and mendacity concerning it. The ‘winners’ blame the ‘losers’ in each round of culture wars, the people in power blame the “riffraff’” as we see as far back as the Rabbi’s blaming the slaves who were not descendants of Jacob for the Golden Calf. We minorities blame the people in power for their status, etc. While some of this blaming may be valid and true, it doesn’t help us face, meet, and find a solution to the “central problem of history” that Rabbi Heschel is reminding and/or teaching us about.

Whether it is ‘the devil’, ‘the riffraff’, ‘those people’, ‘them’, when we look outside of our self, we are deflecting ourselves from this “central problem”. The “central problem of history” begins inside of each one of us. We are not bad from our birth, we are not incapable of goodness, kindness, love, justice, truth, we just have an issue of learned evil, learned confusion, learned how to mix up what is good, holy, silver with their opposites from our youth, as we are taught in the Bible. We learn this at home, we learn this in school, we learn this in business, we learn this in our Houses of Worship. We learn this when we learn to compare and compete with someone else in order to ‘win’. We learn this when we are called “bad boy/girl”, when we are asked “why can’t you be like ___”. We learn this when we begin to believe that our worth is determined by outside measures, when our validation has to come from another human being(s) instead of from within ourself, when we are either good or bad depending on the clothes we wear, the weight we are at, the car we drive, the home we live in, the spouse/significant other we are with, etc. We learn this when our Houses of Worship teach us that we have ‘the only right way’. We learn this when we believe that our might makes us right. The subliminal messages and teachings we receive are powerful and we learn how to mix everything up, at times, unconsciously.

It is sad that in our Houses of Worship we learn how to mix things up when they are supposed to be helping us develop our spiritual life, mature our souls, imbue us with morality and strengthen our inner desire to follow the words of the prophet Micah: “Act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with God” and instead are teaching us how to be xenophobic, how to be martyrs, how to see danger in anyone and everyone who doesn’t believe what we do, how to berate our self when we don’t follow the ‘rules’ for the sake of the ‘rules’ and the dictates of earlier men. When the ‘laws’ are worshiped instead of God, when there is only one way to understand and interpret the Words of God in the Bible, etc, our Houses of Worship, our spiritual disciplines have become a source of the “dreadful confusion” Rabbi Heschel is calling out to us. They become a source of mixing up the “good and evil, holy and unholy, of silver and dross” instead of a place to separate these ways of being, recognize when we are the cause, the participant, the victim of this “dreadful confusion” and learn how to recognize, change and repair our souls from this dreadful and soul crushing path. It is time for us to demand of all spiritual leaders to get involved with their self/their soul and deepen their inner life experience so they can better relate to the rest of us, so they can examine the subtle and not-so-subtle ways they engage in this “dreadful confusion” all the while proclaiming their righteousness and the righteousness of the people who first taught how to deceive all of us including themselves. It is time for our spiritual leaders, the elders, the boards, the hierarchy of our Spiritual Disciplines, our Houses of Worship to be accountable to themselves and to all of us, it is time for them to lead by example of doing T’Shuvah, taking their inventory, admitting the myriad of ways they have engaged in, promoted, and turned off the light of many souls with their participation in the “central problem of history”, this “dreadful confusion” that has perpetuated racism, anti-semitism, hatred, war, prejudice, etc. It is time for our religious leadership to make their amends for the state we find ourselves in because of their need to make everyone a “christian” according to how they bastardize the words of Christ, of Mohammed, of Moses, of God!

I am calling out my fellow clergy, I am calling out the people who would fire Pastor John Pavlovitz because he stood with and for marginalized people as did Christ. I am calling out the leadership of our Spiritual Centers who claim love and kindness while being ruthless and uncaring about their paths of “dreadful confusion” and their adding the “central problem of history” while wrapping themselves in their ‘rightness’, in their support of “the right causes”. I am calling out the people who compartmentalize their living rather than engaging in un-mixing what is good, holy, silver from their antonyms. I call myself out regarding this every day. I am constantly seeking to separate evil from good, false ego from authentic self, my holy actions from the unholy ones, my excuses and reasons which hide the truth from me to doing T’Shuvah and making the changes and repairs necessary to be in the solution of this “central problem of history” rather than adding to it more. I am a work in progress and always will be. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 77

“The dreadful confusion, the fact that there is nothing in this world that is not a mixture of good and evil, of holy and unholy, of silver and dross, is, according to Jewish mysticism, the central problem of history and the ultimate issue of redemption.”(God in Search of Man pg. 371)

Harriet Rossetto disagrees with Churchill’s statement: “Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” She believes we do learn from history and learn to repeat it. Putting Harriet’s wisdom together with Rabbi Heschel’s words above regarding “the central problem of history” seem appropriate. When we add in God’s statement in Genesis that “the inclinations of the hearts humankind are evil from their youth” denoting that evil is learned, we see how this problem, though very old, studied and debated from time immemorial, continues to confound humankind. We are witnesses to the evil that has been perpetrated on one another for the millennia and, yet, we seem to be unable to stop ourselves from mixing good and evil, holy and unholy, silver and dross. When we buy silver we see it is .975% silver and 18 karat gold is 75% gold, yet we speak of them in absolutes. When we speak of holy in our churches, temples, mosques, we speak of it in terms of exclusive to “our kind”. When we celebrate our victories and call us the greatest of all time; when we idolize a sports figure, a politician, a musician, a celebrity, anyone as the best; we forget their foibles. In Baseball we are in awe of someone who hits .400, while forgetting they missed getting a hit 60% of the time. In business we speak in hushed tones of the ‘great ones’ ignoring the help they received to be successful, ignoring the flaws and the injustices they committed to achieve their successes.

Anti-semitism has been with us forever and many people, including Jews seem to accept this as normal and a phase that comes and goes. Racism has been with us forever as well and we accept this as ‘normal’. Prejudice and biases are a part of every human being and our inability to recognize, admit, and change these ways of being is what perpetuates our “dreadful confusion”. The real issue, I believe, is how many of us are either willfully blind to our “dreadful confusion” or purposely engage in making a “mixture of good and evil, of holy and unholy” so we can get the power, the money, the prestige we believe will make us feel good about ourselves and continue our historical precedents.

We are witness’ and perpetrators of in our daily living and, so many people have no idea of the evil their “dreadful confusion” brings. The House of Representatives is being taken over by many of the same Republicans who did not vote to uphold the free and fair election of 2020 and did not want to uphold the will of the American people. Supreme Court Justices are voting their politics rather than the law, we had our first insurrection since the Civil War and, those same Republicans were blaming Antifa, Jews, Blacks, etc rather than their own supporters who truly stormed the Capital. We are seeing the erosion of freedom, of democracy and too many people are going along with these authoritarian, minority rule ways of being.

We have to teach our children differently, we have to give them a spiritual and moral foundation that helps them separate the silver from the dross, the gold from the metal and the only way to do this is by teaching them truth and truthfully. Rather than banning books on the Holocaust, books on racism, books on anything the authoritarians do not want our children to question us about, we should be teaching history from the viewpoint of the winners and losers, we should teach them how the Hebrew Bible, which is the foundation of the 3 major Western Religions and is the basis from our morality, was written by the losers in history. The Prophets who we have records of were not truly listened to as they ranted, begged, cajoled the powers that be in Ancient Israel and Judea to stop the evil inclinations of their hearts that led to their destruction. Each generation has the opportunity, the gift and the power to hearken to these lessons from our history, each of us alive today have the power to say NO to the “evil inclinations of our hearts” that we have learned since our youth. Rabbi Heschel’s teaching above is calling us to “face our own music” and change our ways.

In recovery, we are so aware of how we continue to engage in this “dreadful confusion”. It is the reason we are constantly making “ a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood him”. We follow a regimen of seeking the next right action to take, admitting when we have been wrong, ie followed the evil inclinations of our hearts, and learn anew how to stop mixing up what is good from what is evil, what is holy from what is unholy. We are masters at concocting this mixture and we no longer seek to do this, which is why we are in recovery-to learn/re-learn how to live in the good, the holy, the light more each day.

I am still learning how I mix things up, the evil inclinations that my heart learned as a youth, how to leave the “dreadful confusion” Rabbi Heschel is speaking of. It is, I know, a lifelong journey that I will never get totally right and moving away from the confusion and the mixing up a little each day is the best I can do and that is good enough, not matter what anyone else says/thinks. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 76

“The dreadful confusion, the fact that there is nothing in this world that is not a mixture of good and evil, of holy and unholy, of silver and dross, is, according to Jewish mysticism, the central problem of history and the ultimate issue of redemption.”(God in Search of Man pg. 371)

Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom above is reminding us to not be so sure of our rightness and our righteousness. While there is much talk of being “on the right side” of an issue, the teaching above calls to us to not be too satisfied with our opinions, our actions, and our tribe’s use of power. Throughout history people have waged wars; in actual battles, in politics, in religious beliefs, in families, etc, believing they were standing up for THE TRUTH, and they had the corner on what God wanted/wants, what is/was moral, etc. Rather than living with an open mind, a curious mind, humans have and continue to have a desperate need to be right, to make arguments for how and why their actions, their thoughts, their beliefs are the only ones that are good, holy, silver while everyone else’s are evil, unholy, and dross.

We are in the ending days of Hanukkah and soon will be celebrating Christmas and Kwanzaa. All of these holy days coincide with the winter solstice reminding us that at the darkest times in the physical world, we can find the light of our souls, the light that all people can shine, our equality as humans, our celebration of the miracles of life and be grateful to our Higher Power, Higher Consciousness, God, the Ineffable One for our ability to gather together in prayer, song, celebration of lifting our souls and the souls of all people up rather than sink into the despair of the darkness of our physical world. Yet, we have bastardized these spiritual events and commercialized them. We celebrate victory over the Greeks and Syrians and yet, the people who were victorious took on many of the ways of the Greeks. We celebrate this victory over an outside enemy while trying to hide the inner war between Jews who were fundamentalists and Jews who weren’t. Christmas has become so commercialized that many people forget the celebration is the birth of Christ, who is thought to be the Messiah by Christian people. It is the celebration of hope, of faith, of who, what and how we can actually be holy, good, and silver in our everyday living. Many people put Kwanzaa down instead of realizing it is a holiday celebrating and committing to community, to spirit, to love, to self-determination.

Yet, we are still arguing with one another over who’s way is best while the words of Rabbi Heschel remind us to stop deflecting ourselves from the real issue: how do we separate the good from the evil, the holy from the unholy, the silver from the dross. This is our great challenge and we are too focused on proving the rightness of our ‘position’ to engage in the real war, the true struggle. I believe this deflection happens because we know we will never be able to completely separated these pairs that go together and we can’t face our inability to ‘win’. Instead, we find lawyers that suborn perjury from a 26 year-old young woman so ‘the boss’ will not look bad nor be charged, we find Congressperson-Elect winning by lying about their history, we watch in horror as the Ukrainians fight for their democratic way of life and government while a strong minority fight for authoritarianism to take over our country with Kevin McCarthy, Jim Jordan, Marjorie Taylor Greene being in charge. We are watching racism and anti-semitism and other prejudices become commonplace, mass shootings get headlines one day and gone the next without any serious action on how to keep our fellow Americans alive, etc and call these ways good, holy and silver! How ridiculous and, sadly, through their mendacity, their deception and our drive to live in self-deception, how scary and how powerful these liars have become, how dedicated to their deceptions and the lies they tell themselves they have become to the point where they actually believe they are pure and have solved the problem Rabbi Heschel gives us above.

Engaging in this struggle is what everyone in recovery does rather than believe they have the way, the only way, the pure path, the power and “God on My Side” as Dylan put it in his song. We are acutely and chronically aware of how deceiving this mixture can be, how easy it is to make evil into good, unholy into holy and pass dross off as silver. We did it for so many years.

I was a PhD in contributing to the “the dreadful confusion” Rabbi Heschel is speaking about. I have spent the last 36 years (2 of them in prison) trying to, and succeeding much of the time, separate the dross from the silver, the unholy from the holy, the evil from the good. While I can attest to my inability to fully achieve this separation, I am content to say I am in the struggle, I’m aware of and know that I have to stop allowing my mind and emotions to rule me and, instead, give my soul, my intuition a louder voice. I also know that my soul and my intuition are not fully mature so I also need to seek out people who can help me mature more in these areas and whom can advise me as to when I am mixing up good and evil, etc. Having a daily spiritual practice of prayer, meditation, immersing myself in Rabbi Heschel gives me a start to the day and I know my goal is to be one grain of sand better today than yesterday. God Bless and stay safe this holiday weekend, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 75

“The dreadful confusion, the fact that there is nothing in this world that is not a mixture of good and evil, of holy and unholy, of silver and dross, is, according to Jewish mysticism, the central problem of history and the ultimate issue of redemption.”(God in Search of Man pg. 371)

Rabbi Heschel’s use of the word “dreadful” conjures up many thoughts and meanings for each of us. Extreme fear, unhappiness, suffering are in the first definition of this word. In the third definition, however, the dictionary defines “dreadful” as “used to emphasize the degree to which something is the case, especially something regarded with sadness or disapproval”(the underlining comes from the dictionary). I want to use this definition today as Rabbi Heschel is speaking to us so we get the degree to which the confusion of good and evil, the hiding of evil in the good is true and how aware we have to be to this confusion in our own self as well as in another(s). This is not to point fingers as people do, rather it is to look inside of our self, to take our own inventory each time we pray, with each action we take, at least by the end of the day and see how we confused good with evil and evil with good, how we participated in confusing another(s) regarding what is “holy and unholy”, how we have passed off dross as silver and thrown away silver in lieu of choosing dross.

How sad and how fearful is Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom? Yet we continue to avoid it, disregard it and continue the confusion that began with Adam and Eve, with gaining too much too quickly and being unprepared to understand and respond to the challenges that eating from the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil brings. We are in such a hurry to get ‘somewhere’, we are so intent on serving our inauthentic needs, our heart’s desires, we run to confuse our self more and to confuse another(s) more as well. In the last prayer of the Shema, we remind our self to: not scout out/run after our hearts and eyes because we will become a whore for them. We know “that there is noting in this world that is not a mixture…” and yet we continue to believe, to deceive our self that we know the difference and we are the ‘messengers of God and we are the anointed of God, we absolutely know what is right and good’. Rabbi Heschel’s teaching above is to give us humility and humanity, yet it seems like a lot of people ignore Rabbi Heschel’s call to action and mirror of truth that he holds up to our faces and our souls.

We are witnessing, as we have witnessed throughout history, this confusion and the way people use deception and mendacity to their benefit, to make sense of their actions and to convince people of the ‘holiness’ of their ways. We see this in the Ukrainian War that was forced upon the people of Ukraine by Putin because of his ego, his convincing the Russian people of his lies and confusing them that this is a ‘holy war’ for Mother Russia when it is only for the benefit of him and his cronies, for the benefit of power and prestige. We are witnessing the mixture Rabbi Heschel is reminding us of in our own country where Jim Jordan, who was in on the planning of Jan.6, 2021 in some fashion, who was a bully and liar in the Benghazi hearings, is going to be head of the Judiciary Committee in the House of Representatives, is going to investigate his ‘enemies’ and hopes to get at least half of the people of the United States to go along with him! This is not about politics for me, for us, it is about truth, it is about leaving our individual self-deception to truly see how the deceptions others are perpetrating on us can only stop when we recognize this dreadful confusion that has caused wars, power struggles rather than using power for the greater good. We see that Congresspeople refused Subpoenas from one of the committees of the House, we watch in horror as 30+ people “took the 5th” as to their ages, names, etc in the Jan.6th hearings. Yet, these same people wrap themselves in “God, Country, Flag” to garner support for their mendacity. While they are not confused about the evil of their actions, they do work overtime to confuse ‘their people’ to believe that up is down, right is left, they care for the spirit of America, and other such hogwash! This is how dreadful, how much we have to emphasize this issue to our self and to another(s).

In recovery, we have PhD’s in sowing this confusion, knowingly and unknowingly. When we knew we were doing it, we were acting in a way that was evil incarnate. When it was unknowingly, we were blind to what was true, what was good, and we suffered from a disease/dis-ease that is “cunning and baffling”. We work hard every day to achieve “spiritual progress” and we do not deceive our self, nor anyone else, that we are prefect nor that perfection is even possible.

Immersing myself in Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom above disturbs me greatly. I am not arguing with it, I know that I have purposely engaged in the confusion above. Prior to recovery, I helped to mix them up knowingly and for self-satisfaction and gain. This wisdom is causing a forward looking view and plan to ensure that I am not unwittingly adding to the confusion and the mixture that contributes to the ills of the world. I am searching backwards and seeing when I used confusion to help someone recover and when I used it for my own personal gain. While there is, of course, some of the later, I know the former, the helping of another by speaking in a way they could hear, was overwhelmingly the case. I also know that I bought into the deception/purposeful confusion of another to the detriment of self and everyone around me. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 74

“Thus there is a holy spark of God even in the dark recesses of evil. If not for that spark, evil would lose its power and reality, and would turn to nothingness.”(God in Search of Man pg. 370)

Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom above cautions us to be aware of and on guard for our inclination to be self-righteous and, I believe, to think that we can be pure in our thoughts and actions. While it is imperative to strive to do good, we are called to do and be good, we have to be aware that we are not all good. We have to be aware that even our best intentions and actions have a tinge of evil in them, in us. We are born with both the good inclination and the evil inclination. Jewish wisdom tells us that the evil inclination is very good, which I understand to mean that it is the engine that drives us and, when subject to our good inclination, pushes us to be better human beings, just not totally pure human beings.

Rabbi Heschel’s teaching above is very disturbing, as are all of his brilliance for me. It disturbs our sense of righteousness, it disturbs our sense of superiority over ‘those people’, it disturbs our prejudices and extremes. It disturbs our view of our clarity of vision and our ‘knowing’. He is teaching us to be careful of our stands, to be careful of people who are so certain in their ‘rightness’. He is demanding we see the “holy spark of God’ in the evil we are calling out so we can transform what we are calling ‘evil’ into something that can be used for good.

It is hard to tease out the “holy spark of God even in the dark recesses of evil” because it entails us to immerse our self in the truth of what is going on rather than just hate evil and hate the person doing evil. It is even more difficult because we have to distinguish the evil we are doing when we wrap ourselves in self-righteousness. While we celebrate the victory, the bravery, the miracles of Hanukkah, we also need to be aware of the ruin that the Hasmoneans brought to Judea, how they became corrupt, how they made a deal with the Romans which eventually destroyed the 2nd Temple. And they fought for freedom for the Jews and, unfortunately, their version of how Jews should act. They were zealots for God and for their beliefs, for living Jewishly in their fashion rather than remembering there are 70 faces to Torah, there are many paths and ways to live well in the Bible, not just one way.

We see how the “holy spark of God even in the dark recesses of evil” fool us into believing we are ‘the ones’ who know God’s will, we are the ‘true believers’ and how good people can do bad things. We are experiencing what happens when people become so sure of their ‘acting for the sake of heaven’ and how they try to impose their beliefs onto everyone and set themselves up as the only interpreters of God’s will and the only ones who truly know God’s will. They anoint themselves as the arbiters of what is right and what isn’t right. They engage in hateful, violent speech and actions, they refuse to be accountable for their actions using their self-proclaimed status as ‘the anointed of God’ to defend, validate and promote themselves and their unholy ways. Misogyny, Racism, Anti-Semitism, Either/Or, the unawareness of the truth of Rabbi Herschel’s teachings, are hallmarks of the charlatans. Yet, they seem to be running the world now and have been for so long.

I hear Rabbi Heschel calling us to account, for us to find the evil that is within us and to gravitate to the “holy spark of God even in the dark recesses of evil” so we can transform our negativity, our need to be right, our need for power, our need to deceive ourselves into goodness, learning, leading where we can and following another when it is their expertise, taking the blinders of deception off and seeing truth. It is a hard task, one that we will never do completely or fully. Yet, as Jewish wisdom teaches, “it is not our task to finish the work and neither can we desist from doing the work”. We are in desperate need, both as a people and as an individual, as Americans and as citizens of the world to distinguish between what is profane and what is good and mundane. I hear Rabbi Heschel ringing in my ears to stop our duplicitous nature and ways, stop hiding from the truth of our souls, stop using the “holy spark of God” to make evil good and goodness evil. Cure our own “eye disease” of prejudice that is “a cancer of our soul” as he teaches elsewhere. This is an important path to be able to truly serve God and another(s) which also serves our self.

I continue to engage in attempting to distinguish the “holy spark of God” that is in me and in everyone from the evil/negative leanings of my desires and my mind. It is hard and I engage in T’Shuvah each day, continuing to take personal inventory, so I can distinguish what is good and not good in my actions. I am acutely aware of the times I have used “for the sake of heaven” as an excuse to validate my own negative behaviors. I am also aware of how often I have been blinded by the “holy spark of God” that I see in another(s) to the evil/negative intent and actions they are engaging in towards themselves and towards me. Remembering the wisdom above helps me see the whole picture, rather than just the part I want to, it stops me from living in ‘all good/all bad’ in the either/or and I can engage in the both/and of my living and yours. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 73

“Thus there is a holy spark of God even in the dark recesses of evil. If not for that spark, evil would lose its power and reality, and would turn to nothingness.”(God in Search of Man pg. 370)

Rabbi Heschel’s teaching above illuminates our challenge, our problem and is very disturbing. He is reminding us to stop living in the either/or of devil and angel, of all good/all bad. If, as people of faith believe, everything comes from God, God is everything, then there has to be “a holy spark of God even in the dark recesses of evil.” This is troubling for most people, even people of faith because we want to separate God and evil, we want to hate evil and love God. Elie Weisel once told me that he can’t even hate evil because hate leads to unspeakable horrors and destruction, as he experienced at the hands of the Nazis. In the Bible, God tells Moses “Come to Pharaoh”(Exodus 10:1) teaching us that God resides in people that do evil and unspeakable things. Without God being in Pharaoh, Pharaoh would cease to exist because once the spirit of God leaves us, we die.

God’s call to Moses teaches us that we should always seek to find, relate and call to the spark of God that resides in people we would consider evil. It further, as I understand this teaching today, calls to us to remember that no person is totally evil, just as no person is totally good. We have to stop even separating ‘good people’ from ‘evil people’ and, as we learn from so many spiritual disciplines, to “hate the sin and love the sinner”. It is imperative, if we are to harness the power of evil and use it for the sake of good for us to see the “holy spark of God” within it, to stop labeling people, to stop blaming people, to stop committing a great evil ourselves: denying the evil that resides within each of us.

Hanukkah is the celebration of the victory of the Maccabees over the Greeks ostensibly. It is also a story of the same senseless hatred of Jews by other Jews. It is a story of a civil war as well as a war for the sake of heaven. While the miracle of this victory is a testament to the power of spirit, it is also a cautionary tale to all of us, I believe. It cautions us to not kill one another because we differ in how to serve God, it is a story that, hopefully, causes us pause before we label ourselves good and ‘those people’ bad. Given the wisdom above from Rabbi Heschel, it reminds us to see the spark of holiness in each and every person, to remember that God resides in whomever we want to designate as the Pharaohs in our lives. It also reminds us that we have to harness our own evil so it doesn’t turn to serving our selfish and self-serving desires, our inauthentic needs, the nuanced path of going against the very forces of good and God that we say we are seeking/following. This is the challenge that we face each and every day because we have both the good inclination and the evil inclination within us.

As we rededicate our selves to serving God, to seeing and creating the miracles of returning to our basic goodness of being and to decency; we have to remember to stand up for justice, to practice being merciful, to live in and always seek truth, to engage in loving actions no matter how we feel, being compassionate with our self and another for our sorrows and foibles. We are in dangerous times right now, we are finding out whether the lessons of our earlier errors that caused the Civil War, that gave birth to the Klu Klux Klan, that promoted Anti-Semitism and love of fascism in the 1930’s and continues to this day will be learned and we will return to our own basic goodness of being, we will stop needing a ‘bad guy’ to hate, we will accept one another as equals, we will remember we are all created in the image of God, we all have a spark of God within us or continue to practice the evil ways of our history and believe that we are “doing God’s work” by hating and killing another(s), figuratively and literally, because we perceive they are evil and the cause of everything that is wrong and bad? This is, to me, one of the questions Rabbi Heschel’s teaching is asking us.

In recovery, we begin hearing the phrase “let us love you until you can love yourself” and it feels uncomfortable and phony to many. Yet, it also feels welcoming and belonging at the same time. “How can anyone love me with all the terrible things I have done, how can they love me when I am so evil”, many of us say to ourselves. This phrase, I believe, has its roots in the wisdom of Rabbi Heschel above, it speaks to the ability of people in recovery to see the “holy spark of God even in the dark recesses” of another person because they see this “holy spark” within themselves since we immersed ourselves in our recovery.

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 72

“Indeed the most horrible manifestation of evil is when it acts in the guise of good. “Such monstrous evil deeds could religion urge man to commit” (Lucretius)”. (God in Search of Man pg.370)

These words have to be brought inside of each one of us as well as pointing our fingers, speaking our experiences of religion and leadership. We also have to take our own inventory and see how, when and where we disguise evil in the good/as good. How, when and where our false faith, our negative inclination move us to commit the “monstrous evil deeds” that Lucretius is speaking of. We have to stop wrapping ourselves in white robes while acting with black heartedness. It is crucial for us to do this so we can “be the change we want to see in the world” as Ghandi taught.

Too many of us excuse away the evil we commit “in the guise of the good” through ignoring it, denying it, explaining it, rationalizing it, etc. We find our self unable to admit our actions because we do not want to change. We are committed to the subterfuge and the deceptions, we are so deep in our own self-deceptions that we deny, deny, deny to our dying breath unless there is an intervention! It is time for us to engage in these interventions for our self, for another, for our fellow human being. It is crucial for our continued spiritual, moral, and physical growth and that of our descendants for this intervention to take place soon, maybe even today.

This intervention begins with a deep study and discussion of Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom above and an identification with the pain, sorrow, concern his brilliance and wisdom has for all of us. It can be any text that helps us see beneath the surface of our deceptions, it can be any therapy that helps us see beneath the lies we are telling our self and another(s). It can be any catalyst, any friend, family member that is so invested in truth, in our well-being that they risk our denial and anger to break through the shell of barnacles we have created so we can keep lying to our self and another about the exact nature of our ‘rights’. This intervention is to help us out of our denial, out of our obliviousness to what truly is happening, to what we are actually doing, to the harm we are bringing to the world.

It begins with each of us letting down our guard, letting go of our need to be right, seeing the when and where we engage in our oblivious evil behaviors that we are disguising as good. It is necessary to see whom we harm and how they are harmed by our actions and what we need to do to repair the damage. We have to look in the mirror and allow our souls to tell us the truth about our self, the good, the not so good and the evil we disguise as good so we can ‘get ahead’, ‘be in charge’, etc. We are engaging in a life-long journey of rooting our evil within us so we can root out evil in our daily life so we can begin to root out the evil disguised as good in the world.

Today is the first day of Hanukkah, the first day of rededication to God, to self, to another(s). While we can light the candles, sing the songs, say the prayers, have the public displays, we are not engaging in the rededication that the Maccabees fought for, the rededication to truth, to rooting out evil within each of us, within our tribes, that wraps itself in “the guise of the good” and is done in the name of God. We are facing another opportunity to wake up, to leave the oblivion we live in because it is warm and cozy. Each night we light a candle, each night we watch the Menorah until the candles are done burning, each night we think about the miracle of the Jews winning against the Greeks, we have to see how we have become the Greeks, how we have run away from rededicating our self to truth and good, how we have been seduced by evil and seduced another(s) to run after evil. Only then can we truly turn around, only then can we change our ways, only then can we leave oblivion and do what is good and right in ‘the eyes’ of God, decency, etc.

This is how each of us came to recovery, through the intervention of another(s), through the intervention of a higher power/higher consciousness. We stay and grow in recovery based on our spiritual condition and our acceptance of what is true, good and right. We stay and grow in our recovery when we deepen our understanding and the nuances of living a principled, examined life. We are acutely aware that we cannot cheat in business because everyone else does and say we are living the principles of recovery, we are acutely aware that when we do, we are sinking back into the oblivion we were in prior to our recovery.

I have had many interventions in my life, some I have denied and run away from and, since December 17, 1988, others I have embraced and, when I want to deny any intervention, I don’t reject them out of hand. I am aware of how even in my recovery, I have disguised evil as good and done this unwittingly. I am also aware of how I believed in people who were doing evil in the guise of good and my inability to tell the difference harmed me, harmed them, and harmed another(s). I am committed to constantly unearthed these hidden evils in me so I can live better, do more actual good and stay truly connected to people, to loved ones, to God. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 71

“Indeed the most horrible manifestation of evil is when it acts in the guise of good. “Such monstrous evil deeds could religion urge man to commit” (Lucretius)”. (God in Search of Man pg.370)

The words of Lucretius quoted here and Rabbi Heschel’s reminder of how easily evil is disguised as good, remind all of us of the teachings of all spiritual disciplines/religions to be very careful and scrutinize our thoughts and actions lest the evil inclination fool us as the serpent fooled Adam and Eve. Yet, we are not and herein lies the great enemy of freedom, of democracy, of goodness, of connection with God, truth, kindness, mercy. Our inability to heed the teachings above have given people the ‘right’ to wage war and say it is for the sake of God, when it is really for the sake of self. Our inability to heed Rabbi Heschel’s call to us have given the people the ‘right’ to go along with hatred, anti-semitism, racism under the guise of promoting a “Christian Nation”, which, of course is anything but Christian. The ignoring of the wisdom above has given people the ‘right’ to burn crosses, hang people and leave them overnight (against Biblical Law) and celebrate their cruelties as ‘god’s will’!

Yet, we continue to ignore this wisdom, we continue to use religion to cover up our “monstrous evil deeds” and revel in them. We see this in our politics today as we did during the period prior to, during and after World War II, with our politicians being on the payroll of the German Government and working to overthrow our Democracy and establish a Fascist regime here in the US and then using their political power to kill any prosecution. We are watching this as the Republican members of Congress who voted against the results of the free and fair elections of 2020 are still in Congress, still voting their hatred and their ‘christianity’, they are still trying to cover up their role in the insurrections of Jan 6, 2020 by minimizing the assault of the armed storm troopers who invaded the Capitol, the armed mob they ran away from and let the Capitol Police deal with and then disrespect these saviors and heroes by saying there was no insurrection, it was just a protest! We are watching as these deniers of our constitution take power and use their ability to filibuster to stop the business of our country, the business of our citizenry. They are intent on stopping truth, promoting lies all for their own sake, for their own power and are using Christ as their reason, calling Trump and Jordan, Meadows and Greene anointed ones by Christ to “save our country” from the Jews, the people of color, anyone who isn’t a White Christian Nationalist. Using religion in to cover up evil is monstrous enough in politics and we see the effects of this throughout history and in real time here.

And, it is even more monstrous in the ways we treat one another! We have all see how people don’t associate with ‘those people’ because they are different than us. They worship that vengeful Jewish God and they killed Christ, our Lord. This latent anti-Semitism is learned in the Church, not in the schoolyard, it is learned at the kitchen and dining room table, not in the restaurants and marketplace. We are watching, in ignorance and in compliance, the beginning of some of the same anti-Semitic, racist speech and actions as in the 30’s, 40’s in Germany, in America, that the Klan and the Birchers promoted. We are willing to call people who have been warning about these charlatans, these practitioners of evil under the “guise of good”, these promoters of “monstrous evil deeds” under the guise of religious adherence and fervor. We seem not to be able to call out the truth of what is happening, we seem not to be able to say NO to these racists, these anti-semites, these haters of everyone and everything that does not fit with their revisionist view of what it means to be Christian.

This was the power of Rabbi Heschel, Rev King and the Berrigans, and so many other people of faith who lived their faith in all their affairs. They called out the charlatans, they called out the evil that was being done under the guise of religion, the evil that was being done under the guise of good, of patriotism, of … It took a while for them to be heard, it took time for enough people to join and demand action by the Government on Civil Rights, Voting Rights, Vietnam Protests, etc and they stayed the course. It was not only the government they called out, however, they were especially critical of their fellow clergy and people in the pews over their mendacity, their evil actions they covered up by using God as their excuse, the Bible as their proof it this evil action was the right thing to do. Rabbi Heschel saw religious behaviorists as dangerous and people who were hiding their evil and trying to promote hatred and lies under the banner of religion-proof of Lucretius’ statement above. He railed against “spiritual plagiarism” because it is an easy doorway to self-deception which leads to the deception of another(s) which leads to “the most horrible manifestation of evil” because it is in the guise of the good!

In recovery we stop kidding ourselves as to what is real and what is true. I am not a saint, I just no longer excuse my errors in judgement and action as “for the sake of heaven”. Just as recovery keeps reminding all of us, just as T’Shuvah keeps showing us, we have to examine ourselves. Plato said an unexamined life is not worth living and Malcom X said, “the examined life is painful”. This is the paradox we in recovery live into and it is the one that guides my living. Happy Hanukkah to everyone-let us all rededicate our living to serving truth, goodness, mercy, justice, kindness as God would have us do. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 70

“Indeed the most horrible manifestation of evil is when it acts in the guise of good. “Such monstrous evil deeds could religion urge man to commit” (Lucretius)”. (God in Search of Man pg.370)

Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom stays with me day and night. It keeps giving me a bad conscience and makes me review my life in new and different ways, causes me to take a breath when I am sure I know what is right, and elevates me to new ways of being, thinking and acting. Rabbi Heschel’s teaching above goes so unnoticed by most people because, as Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzatto an Italian Rabbi who lived in the early 18th Century wrote about his own work Path of the Just, what is being said is so true and so accepted as truth that we pay little attention to it. So many of us believe the words above and forget that this teaching is for all of us, for all our interactions, for all of our doings and beings in the world. Rather, many people use the truth of Rabbi Heschel’s teaching, or some variation of it, to blame, shame, attack someone else and set themselves up as the only ones who can see this way of being in another(s) and can always sift the evil out of the good they do so they are “the pure ones”.

We have all witnessed the events of Jan. 6, 2021, both the insurrection and the desire of many of the Republican House of Representatives and some Senators to invalidate the free and fair elections of Nov. 2020. There were two insurrections that day, one violent and the other was “the most horrible manifestation of evil” because these Congresspeople, actually idolators posing as “God-fearing believers”, were rebelling against the wishes of the majority of the people, they were trying to install their person as ‘the anointed One’ and crush the democratic system and the spirit of freedom for all that our Country has promised since it’s inception. These people in Congress were/are wrapping themselves in ‘godliness/idolatry’ to justify the evil they were perpetrating on America. Now, these liars, these mendacious folk are going to be in charge of The House of Representatives and investigate, castrate, bully, pummel anyone and everyone they see as standing in the way of their next attempted takeover of our Government, democratic system and rule of law. We are aware of their knowledge of the way they tried to disguise their evil as good because they asked for Pardons from Mark Meadows, chief of staff to Donald J Trump! If you didn’t do any crime, why would you need a pardon?

While it is easy to pick off the hypocrites and the non-believers, non-practitioners of the good in public life, it is crucial that we see how we disguise the evil we perpetrate in our personal lives. In our faith communities we manifest evil whenever we ‘sell’ our religion, our faith as better than any other. Whenever leaders demand strict adherence to the ways of past generations without seeing how the principle of past decisions and the ways past generations understood the paths of faith, the ways of God, and use their experience to inform rather than dictate, they are disguising evil as good. In the prayer Jews say as we put the Torah into the Ark, we declare that the Torah is “a tree of life” and all of its ways are ways of pleasantness and all it’s paths are peace/wholeness. There is no one way, there is no way to be certain that my way is the best way and the only way. There are many paths to God, to decency, to being human and we have to find, live and immerse ourselves in the path that speaks to our soul, otherwise we run the risk of disguising evil as good to our self and harming another(s) with our false ways of being. We, the people, have to demand of our faith leaders: truth, the ability to admit the ways they ‘miss the mark’, the humility to ask for forgiveness, carefully screen their words and their actions for their “most horrible manifestation of evil disguised as good”. No more ‘anointing’ of a leader as the messenger of Jesus Christ because this denigrates God, the concept of the Messiah and the paths of faith and religion when it happens.

In recovery, we no longer need to prove our faith, we no longer even have to name our faith, we just have to live our faith. Faith begins with accepting the love of another(s) when we are unable to love our self. It continues with our acceptance of our powerlessness over people, places, things, substances, process’ that have injured us and everyone around us. Faith continues for many of us in recovery as we engage in good actions, see more and more truth and proof of our goodness and the goodness in the world and find a “power greater than ourselves”. With each step in our recovery, we weed out, scrape off another way that evil has perpetrated the good we are doing. It is a painstakingly slow assent, it is a life-long exercise and we know we never ‘arrive’. It is a journey that helps us grow out of mendacity and into truth, out of excuses and into responsibility.

As I said yesterday, I am aware of the past ways I lived this teaching in the negative and how attuned I am to ignoring this wisdom and warning of Rabbi Heschel’s. I also realize how much it has lived in me and how my father and grandfather instilled in me this sense of right/wrong, holy/unholy, and they taught me how easy it is to confuse one for the other. I am dedicated to helping my self and anyone else continue to grow along spiritual lines so we can stop living the first sentence above of Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 69

“Indeed the most horrible manifestation of evil is when it acts in the guise of good. “Such monstrous evil deeds could religion urge man to commit” (Lucretius). (God in Search of Man pg.370)

The wisdom of Rabbi Heschel’s words above are undeniably true, yet, they go unheeded and ignored by so many of us! We are in a constant state of struggle between what is good and what is evil and we are so unaware, so caught up in our ‘need to be right’ that we manifest evil while thinking we are doing what is good, right and what is God’s Will. We have struggled with this way of being for millennia and good triumphs eventually, otherwise we would have destroyed ourselves and the world long ago.

I keep pondering this dilemma daily, both in my own life and in the life of our world. I listen to people who decry the Respect for Marriage Act that was just signed into law for no reason other than they disagree with same-sex marriages as well as inter-racial marriages, even though they will not say the latter. I am listening to these “God-fearing believers” speak as if they are 100% sure of what God wants. We watch with horror the degradation and inhumanity that these “unrighteous believers” show to people who are not like them. Is it really their business whom someone loves and want to share their lives with? What satisfaction do they receive from denying the rights they enjoy to another human being?

While we claim we are just ‘standing up for God’ when we immerse ourselves in the words above, when we search our inner life, we will find that we are really ‘going down’ to our fears of not being in power, our insecurities and uncertainties about how to live. While LGBTQ+ are the main targets in the railing against same-sex marriage, this is no different than Hitler’s wanting to “keep Aryan blood pure”. It is no different than the fear of Black power that people have had in this country since it was founded. It is no different than “Jews killed Christ” and “Jews kill Christians for their blood which they bake into their Matzah”. It is no different than any other trope that has been used against anyone who is not a White Anglo Saxon Protestant. The evangelicals and religious right have taken these old ways of being to new lows and claim they are doing good by this ethnic, gender, racial cleansing they keep attempting to make happen. If this is not a manifestation of Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom above, I do not know what would be. I am at a loss to understand how people can engage in such hatred, such vitriol while going to Church, Temple, Mosque, Yoga, Meditation, etc. It is beyond me how we can keep looking for ‘bad guys’ outside of us without seeing “most horrible manifestation of evil is when it acts in the guise of good.”

It is time for all of us to get off of our soapboxes, stand down from our pulpits, take off the robes of self-righteousness, and look in the mirror, look into the soul of another human being and truly see what is inside of us. The world is in desperate need of everyone cleansing themselves of the evil that is disguised as good. The most horrible manifestation is how we make hatred of another human being, good. How we forget the terror and the destruction that such evil has brought in generations past is mind-boggling and dangerous. We are still hearing that Covid-19 was a hoax, we are witnessing the Nazi tropes being used over and over again. We see how Goebbels teaching of “if you repeat a lie often enough, people will come to believe it, and you will eventually come to believe it yourself” is alive and well in this moment, in this country, in the lives of so many of us. Our inability to look in the mirror, our inability to see the manifestations of evil we disguise as good is eating us up from the inside and many of us have become homo-sapiens rather than be human.

In recovery our first “searching and fearless moral inventory” is the hardest part of our journey. We come face to face with our self, with our immoral deeds, the lies we have told ourselves to make it okay to do such despicable actions that deny the dignity and humanity of another human being and our self. We begin to see the pattern of how we disguised these “most horrible manifestation of evil” as good and we feel the guilt of our actions. When we read this inventory to our self, God and another human being, we usually experience relief at no longer hiding from the truth, no longer needing to disguise our self, disguise evil nor disguise the good we have done as well. We learn to discern and tease out the evil from the good a little better and grow this skill throughout the rest of our living.

I tremble with awe and gratitude from the Grace God has shown me. Opening my eyes up to the ways I have disguise evil as good early on in my recovery has allowed me to realize when it is happening sooner and sooner. This awareness has even caused me to not disguise evil as well. It also has made me hyper-sensitive to these “most horrible manifestations of evil” and, when I have been loud in my calling it out, I have confused the good I am doing with the evil of the way I am doing it. I am guilty of this confusion and I am grateful that my ability to see these manifestations in my self and in another(s) has allowed me to be of service to people and to respond to God’s call/demand of me. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 68

“The great contest is not “between God-fearing believers and unrighteous believers.”(God in Search of Man pg. 370)

Immersing oneself in Rabbi Heschel’s words above causes us to ask ourselves to define “God-fearing believers” and “unrighteous believers”. To be God-fearing, I believe, is to live with trembling awe of being a partner of God, to be aware of our capacity and call to make our corner of the world better, to stay connected to what is good and holy, to think ‘what is the Godly action to take now’ and follow our soul’s knowledge as to the next right action. It is not to be afraid of being struck down by a vengeful force that wants to control us. The sages say:” All is in the hands of heaven except the awe of heaven”. We are in control of us, we are not automatons, we are not robots, we are not angels nor animals. It is imperative for us to stop using God as a weapon, as an excuse, as a clean-up for our unGodly actions. It is time for us to stop anointing people as our saviors and save our own selves. To do this, we have to take responsibility, we have to, as Rabbi Heschel teaches, “immerse ourselves in the thoughts of the Bible”, we have to stop being literal and put ourselves into the text, see the myriad of ways to understand the teachings and the actions that the Bible gives us and no longer ignore the gift of our intuitive mind, our soul’s call.

Yet, as we can see from what is happening and what has happened over the millennia, this way of being is perverted for the power of the “unrighteous believers. In reading some of the text messages from Republican Congresspeople to Mark Meadows after the 2020 election, we see people who want to use God as a weapon for their power, for their elevation, for their enslavement of people they see as their enemies. I am overwhelmed with grief and sadness that God is being used as a pawn and a club by these “unrighteous believers” who call themselves “God-fearing believers.” Immersing myself in Rabbi Heschel’s teaching above, I am experiencing his words as a cautionary tale to us. We have to be careful or we will easily turn from the trembling awe experience of connection with God to “God-fearing believers” and then to becoming “unrighteous believers.” It is a descent that seems seamless, it is a movement that seems logical to our rational minds. It is a way of being that gives in to our desire for power, prestige, wealth, certainty and control. Both “God-fearing believers” and “unrighteous believers” experience God as a tool, as a weapon, and make God into an idol.

God is infinite, unknowable, ineffable, yet we know that people, in our need for certainty and control, want to define, know and have the corner on God’s Word. Jesus spoke in parables, the Torah is to be understood in 70 ways, all of the translations from the original Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, Chinese, etc are commentaries based on the translators beliefs and prejudices. How can any of the “God-fearing believers” say they know what God wants? How can any of them declare people like Shabbtai Z’vi or Donald Trump as the Messiah? How can anyone say that Godliness comes about through ignoring the cries and pleas of the stranger, the poor, the needy? How can anyone state they are the ‘true Americans’ while denying refugees safe harbor-be they Jews from Nazi Germany, Cubans fleeing Communist Cuba, Central Americans fleeing for their lives, Syrians fleeing the chemical warfare of Assad, etc? How can we continue to dishonor the treaty we made with Native Americans in the 19th Century? How can we continue to treat people of color as 2nd class citizens? How can we continue to use Anti-Semitic tropes while proclaiming our love for Israel? We can do this when we falsely believe, when we deceive our selves with the lie of being “God-fearing believers” and accuse everyone else of being “unrighteous believers”!

Those of us in recovery are certain of one thing, we can never know God, we can only seek to understand God’s will for us. We know that the “power greater than ourselves” that is in charge sends us anonymous messages through people, through signs and through our soul’s knowledge. We are acutely aware of the dangers of being too sure of what God is telling us, of confusing our desires with God’s will, and of returning to a way of being that is incompatible with being a partner of God!

As I immerse myself in these words, I realize I am guilty of being an “unrighteous believer” at times.I have gone overboard in my zealotry and my desire to ‘be right’. I am embarrassed and guilty which gives me the strength to retreat from these false stands I have taken. It is difficult at times to separate my trembling awe of God to act Godly and my fear of being left out, unheard, irrelevant. This is a challenge that I face each and everyday. I know that I meet the challenge most days and there are times when I don’t. I agree with Father Greg Boyle that we have to erase the margins if we are to live with the trembling awe of being a partner of God. I also realize that I want to erase the margins because I have lived on the edge of what the “unrighteous believers” and “God-fearing believers” have determined to be acceptable and normal. I realize the threat that I pose to proper society, I realize the threat that all people in recovery pose to proper society, I realize the threat equality, freedom, seeing that each person matters poses to society. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 67

“The great contest is not “between God-fearing believers and unrighteous believers.”(God in Search of Man pg. 370)

Herein lies the issue that we are facing today as we have throughout history. Societal norms dictate an either/or way of being. We are either “God-fearing believers” or “unrighteous believers” according to the lines that society has drawn. People use God as an excuse, an instrument for the validity of their actions and cruelty. As Bob Dylan wrote “With God on Our Side” we can make everything we do right and good, even killing 6 million, venerating the traitors of the Confederacy, massacring Native Americans, enslaving Black people, engaging in Anti-Semitism, etc. We have seen how “God-fearing believers” have bastardized the name of God, the Word of God, Biblical principles and morality for their own benefit, for their own gain with no regard to what is true, what is good. We wrap ourselves in the ‘cloak of Godliness’ all the while practicing evil and idolatry.

We are at another inflection point in our country, in the world right now. Yet, so many “God-fearing believers” are confusing good and evil without any awareness of the evil they are creating, the decency they are defeating, the humanity they are crushing. These ‘good’ people are screaming at the top of their lungs, shouting down anyone who has a differing point of view, another response to what is happening, all for the ‘sake of heaven’ according to them. Tucker Carlson and his ilk decry ‘drag queens’ and don’t realize that Shakespeare had men dressing as women in his plays! People are venerating Jesus as the hero who crushes people, who discards people, who marginalizes people and one wonders if they have ever read the Gospels. These “God-fearing believers” are touting their rights to assault weapons while denying the rights of women to control of their bodies, their minds, etc. We are seeing Ron DeSantis deny people and children their right to be who they are, wanting them instead to be who he wants them to be. When “God-fearing believers” deny the Godliness and Divine Image in another, they are engaging in evil for their own power, their own agenda, their own fears, their own denials, not for the God.

We are in a crisis that is reminiscent of the American Bund, the Klu Klux Klan heydays, and that is to use governing as a weapon of hatred and denial. When the Republicans cheer Marjorie Taylor Greene for her outlandish hate speech, for her desire to ‘make America a bastion of hatred and inequality’ again, when Jim Jordan is lauded for ‘investigating enemies of our good country’ in the name of God and conservative values, when Kevin McCarthy is selling his soul for the title of Speaker of the House, knowing he doesn’t have any real power because he gave it away to the Freedom Caucus, we are in desperate straits, we are in the throes of self-destruction. Yet, these “God-fearing believers” will keep spouting their lies in the name of God, they will continue to exert their power and control, their hatred, their anti-semitism in the name of God and their followers will support them because they are “god-fearing believers” too! How sad and how scary.

Rabbi Heschel’s teaching above is a call to action for all of us. People who are truly “God-fearing believers” are aware of the insidiousness of evil that permeates and/or tries to permeate all of our actions. We are aware that our good deeds are not devoid of evil, that there is some self-interest in everything we do. We know that we serve God and not our selves, yet we are acutely aware of the difficulty in separating our self-interest, our self-satisfaction with our service to God, to decency, to one another. We know we have to be continually on guard to not point our fingers at anyone else without realizing our own errors, our own evil. We wrestle within our being each and every day, just as Jacob wrestled with his competing claims prior to meeting with his twin brother Esau, whom he had screwed over. We have to stop allowing the charlatans, the liars, the practitioners of evil dressed in white robes (a la Klansmen) from overtaking the good, the holy and the Godly.

In recovery, we speak of spirituality as for those who have been to hell and returned. We know what our self-deception and the deception of another(s) has wrought; evil, destruction, spiritual violence, inner turmoil, hatred and enslavement. We are saddened by our actions, we are desperate to make amends and change our ways, we are aware of our inability to be perfect, we know we are incapable of being all good. We also use this knowledge to minimize the evil that is embedded in the good we do, we own our agendas in our actions and we continue to be of service to God, to another(s) and to our  authentic self in our recovery.

I am constantly seeking the good and on guard against the evil contained in my actions. I know I am guilty of having evil in my actions and I do T’Shuvah upon my realizations of this truth, rather than compound the evil with my denials. I have learned that I cannot convince anyone of the truth of me, I cannot change the ‘rap sheet’ I have, some of earned and some unearned. I also cannot and do not deny my service to God, to people I meet, to people I love and I am unwilling to allow the evil that I experience to negate the good and the holy I have accomplished. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 66

“The greater the man, the more he is exposed to sin. Piety is at times evil in disguise,, an instrument in the pursuit of power.” (God in Search of Man pg. 370)

Last night we were privileged to be with Rabbi Shmuly Yanklowitz, Rabbi Nissan and the combined communities of Temple Beth El and Valley Beit Midrash for a screening of the Documentary: The Jewish Jail Lady and the Holy Thief. Sitting with this combined community and with Rabbi Shmuly and all of the amazing work he does each and every day to promote a piety that is not rooted in ritual, rather in spirit and the call of the Ineffable One, we experienced the exact opposite of Rabbi Heschel’s warning. The reason this is important to me is because we get lost and adjusted to our negative experiences with the false piety of some of the Religious Leaders and Politicians who are promoting “evil in disguise” who want to use “piety… as an instrument in the pursuit of power”, as Rabbi Heschel warns of in his wisdom above.

We have seen forever how false piety has led to ruin, destruction, slavery, hatred, mendacity and conquering. The New World is a case in point. Spain, England, France were all going to bring Christianity to the ‘heathen Indians’, to the Aztecs, etc. They brought it here at the end of a sword, with rifles and bullets, with concentration camps called reservations, etc. It is believed that many of Columbus’ crew were made up of Jews trying to escape the Inquisition because of the false piety that “was evil in disguise, an instrument in the pursuit of power.”

What these ‘pious people’ then and now forget is the demands of the prophets to turn away from their false piety that serves only them and their pursuit of power. The prophets calling to these charlatans to end their misuse of God’s will and word for their own power-seeking and evil pursuits. Yet we are mired in their negativing and their power wielding ways. We are being called a Christian Nation and a new wave of Christian Nationalists is rising up to ‘take back our country’-forgetting that OUR country belongs to all the people, to the principle of separation of Church and State, to the principle of Freedom of Religion, Speech and the Press. All of these founding principles can and have been manipulated by these ‘pious people’ (of all faiths) and are being used “in the pursuit of power”.

Mike Pence and Mike Pompeo declare themselves for a “return” (false claim) to the US being a Christian Nation and Jews are clapping because they believe they are kin in their piety, it is a sign of the self-deception some people live under. While belief in God is important to and for many of us as a blueprint for living well, joining with these people who engage in “piety is at times evil in disguise, an instrument in the pursuit of power” is a recipe for disaster, for denying the freedoms this country was founded on to ‘those unholy heathens’ who do not bow down and worship these charlatans of false piety.

This is true not just in politics, it is happening in our daily living. Religious freedom is not a reason that Hobby Lobby should exclude birth control aids from their health insurance for their employees. Religious freedom is not a reason that a woman’s body and what she does with it should be a man’s purview. Religious freedom is not a reason to deny a person their own sexuality. Religious freedom is not a reason to misinterpret Biblical truths. Religious freedom is not a reason to enslave, to deny, to turn another human being into second class citizens. Yet, there are so many ‘pious’ people who wield their religion like a machete cutting down fruit. The brilliance of Rabbi Heschel above must give all of us pause and do our own T’Shuvah, our own personal inventory to see how our piety in any and all realms, our adherence to a fundamentalist viewpoint (extreme conservative or progressive) denies rights, freedoms and acknowledgements to/of another human being.

In recovery, we “continue to take daily inventory and promptly admit when we are wrong” in order to ensure that our piety and adherence to the principles of recovery, our principles of faith do not turn into false rhetoric, do not become “an instrument in the pursuit of power” and we do not go back to a way of living that is indecent, unkind, dishonest, etc. We are aware of the myriad of ways we have engaged in self-deception so our continued daily inventory helps us nip these destructive ways ‘in the bud’.

I have railed against this type of false piety forever. As a kid I saw that “the emperor had no clothes” and this has continued to this day. I have caused great turmoil because of the loudness and the crassness with which I have pursued and uncovered the false piety in the world and in individuals. I am not aware of when I have used my own piety as “an instrument in the pursuit of power”. I have used my passion, my beliefs, my ingenuity, my caring, love, and truth in my positions of power, just not piety. I have been aware of my flaws and my errors sooner or later and made amends/did T’Shuvah for them upon my awareness. I have been rebuked and accept the truth of what someone is telling me, even if I don’t agree with everything they say. I do this so I can stay right sized, I do this not to show my piety, but to live it. I am able to hear the call of another soul, to hear the call of my soul and to hear the demand of God because I continue to engage in my piety, my adherence to principles and clear out the falseness I am susceptible to each day. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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