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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 98

“Important as they may be, they do not reach the heart of the problem. Religion, therefore, with its demands and vision is not a luxury but a matter of life and death. True, its message is often diluted and distorted by pedantry, externalization, ceremonialism, and superstition. But, this precisely is our task: to recall the urgencies, the perpetual emergencies of human existence, the rare cravings of the spirit, the eternal voice of God, to which the demands of religion are an answer.” (God in Search of Man pg. 372)

We hear often from people that they are not religious and they are spiritual. Another line we hear is: “Religion are for those who are afraid of going to hell, spirituality are for those who have been to hell”. Both these and many other sayings like them miss the point of Rabbi Heschel’s teaching above. As I learned from Rabbi Jonathon Omer-man over 30 years ago: “ Religiosity enhances Spirituality which enhances Religiosity”, they are not separate from one another, rather, as I understand Rabbi Omer-man’s teaching, there cannot be one without the other. Spiritual disciplines need structure and consistency, as do Religious disciplines, Religious disciplines need letting go of old ideas, of our rational minds which harm our connections as do Spiritual disciplines. We have to stop pitting one against the other and use both to further Rabbi Heschel’s teaching above; “religion, therefore, with its demands and vision is not a luxury but a matter of life and death.”

The word religion comes from the Latin meaning “to bind, obligation, reverence, bond”, in Hebrew the words for religion, according to the Oxford Languages dictionary, are Daat, and Emunah; the first meaning “knowing” and the second meaning “faith”. Spiritual, from the Latin means “breath”. We have to begin anew to breath ourselves into the obligation to bond our souls, our life with the life and soul of God, of a power greater than ourselves so we can truly ‘know’ how to connect with one another rather than need to have power over one another. We are in desperate need of letting go of diluting and distorting the call of religion through our pedantry, through our need to twist the demands of God, of our souls, of higher consciousness, of spiritual yearnings to selfish desires and grabs for power. We have to stop using our minds to control what is uncontrollable, God. We have to stop using our words to prove that we our desires are God’s desires. We have to stop being so concerned with the minor issues and the minor rules, our showing off of our ‘academic brilliance’. We have made religion and spirituality into business’ for profit, for power, for abuses, for self-centered needs and this is the tragedy of not adhering and living into Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom. This is the tragedy of not responding to the demands of God’s call through religious teachings.

Our world, our country are in desperate straits because of our inability to actualize the visions of spirituality and religion. We are suffering mental health crisis’, homeless’ crisis’, health crisis’, economic crisis’ for most of the people, and they all lead back to the root cause, in my opinion, willful blindness to the visions of religion, obliviousness to the call of our souls, the call of God, the call of our neighbors. We have treated religion and spirituality as tools rather than as pathways. We have decided to use them for our own benefit and not allow them to go through us. When religion goes through us, we change, when spirituality goes through us, we change. The change is that we live differently, we let go of our concern to control and to wield power, we let go of our bastardizing principles to soothe our false egos, we live a more authentic life, we seek and do justly, we see and respond to life with more mercy, more gratitude, more grace, more love, and we seek out truth. When religion goes through us, rather than our going through it, we become servants, we worship God and we use our intuitive mind, our soul to experience and get through the trials and tribulations, we embrace the joy and the sorrow, knowing we are safe and secure in our beingness, in our connection to God and to the people around us.

In my recovery, I remember the day this shift happened. Rabbi Mel Silverman, z”l, and I were studying Rabbi Heschel’s Interview with Carl Stern and Rabbi Heschel said we have to immerse ourselves in the Bible, not just pick it apart. Rabbi Mel and I spoke about this idea of immersing myself in my living rather than just playing at life. Years later, when studying Numbers 15:37-41 with Rabbi Ed Feinstein, he taught me not to be a tourist in my life. I am painfully aware of when I slip into using pedantry to prove a point for my sake rather than for the sake of another person. I am painfully aware when I have used my knowing for power and control, as a buffer against my fears and I am also joyfully aware of how much more often I have surrendered to Rabbi Heschel’s brilliance of “Religion, therefore, with its demands and visions is not a luxury, but a matter of life and death”. It has, is and will continue to be a matter of life and death for me, as it is for every recovering person, whether it is religion, spirituality, to surrender to these “demands and visions” because surrendering to our own has brought us to the point of destruction and annihilation. I have immersed myself in Torah, in tradition, in Rabbi Heschel, the 12-Steps of AA, and they have gone through me and changed me in so many ways-not completely, not perfectly, yet a helluva lot better! 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 97

“Important as they may be, they do not reach the heart of the problem. Religion, therefore, with its demands and vision is not a luxury but a matter of life and death. True, its message is often diluted and distorted by pedantry, externalization, ceremonialism, and superstition. But, this precisely is our task: to recall the urgencies, the perpetual emergencies of human existence, the rare cravings of the spirit, the eternal voice of God, to which the demands of religion are an answer.” (God in Search of Man pg. 372)

Rabbi Heschel is reminding that, while technology, efficiency, and social engineering are important, “they do not reach the heart of the problem.” We, humans, have substituted our minds, our inventiveness for our need for solutions to the problem of evil, to the confusion of good and evil, to be able to discern one from the other and to tell the difference between the holy and the good. We have substituted and come to worship our intellects, our inventiveness, even using our intuition to serve technology, efficiency, and social engineering. Darwin’s survival of the fittest came to mean strength and power, we have dismissed the spiritual power that keeps human beings alive. We forget about the survival of the Jewish People against all odds, against all the hatred that continues to this day. We forget that how Black people survived slavery and all the hatred spewed against them to this day. The spiritual power within these two ‘groups’ of people, within many other people like the Russians who overthrew Communism, doesn’t seem to matter to these mendacious quoters and followers of Darwin.

“Religion, therefore, with its demands and visions is not a luxury, but a matter of life and death” is as true today as it was then. The basic demands of religion are: “Choose Life”, “Love your neighbor as you love yourself”, “Do not make false images of God”, “Don’t murder, steal, commit adultery, bear false witness, don’t covet”. These and many other demands of religion, like T’Shuvah, making atonement for the holy and the evil, learning to live together and care for the needy, the poor, the stranger, having one law for both the citizen and the stranger, etc, are what will save humanity. This vision of a world where God is sovereign, where we live from our souls, where we connect with one another on a higher level than I/it or I/object cannot be accomplished through our intellects, through technology, through efficiency, through social engineering. All of these methods have gotten us to the place we are at now: unprecedented hatred, fear, disdain of anyone ‘not like us’; a move from religion which grows our spirit to intellectual superiority and rational mind being worshiped. We are proving Einstein’s quotation: “the intuitive mind is a gift and the rational mind a servant; we have come to forget the gift and worship the servant.” It is not about satisfying demands, it is about what demands are we going to satisfy; the demands of rational/intellectual thinking or the demands of spiritual knowing?

Religion has not only become a luxury, something we do for show, out of obligation to our past; it has become a weapon for some people against anyone they do not agree with. God’s name is used in vain all the time, by Clergy, by Anti-abortionists (they are not pro-life because they care nothing about the fetus upon birth, they support the death penalty, etc), by politicians who want to invoke Christian Law, Shariah Law, Jewish Law for their own power and not for the sake of the visions of Christianity, Islam or Judaism. Would these charlatans only adhere to the demands of religion and faith, would they only “turn their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks” as God demands through Isaiah 2:4. The proselytizing actions do not reflect anything but the proselytizers need to have power, to make everyone the same, to create a society that is some human image, not in God’s Image, not recognizing we are all unique and equal by God’s design and any human attempt to disregard this truth leads to war, death, and ruin. Yet, people of all religions and faiths continue to regard their stature and place in the peking order as a luxury, an entitlement and an opportunity to wield power for themselves, while claiming they are serving God. In reality, they are serving their evil needs to be right, to enslave another(s), to deny rights to all, to worship their rational minds and forget about their intuitive minds, their spiritual knowledge and God’s call.

In recovery, we are acutely aware of our need to surrender to a power greater than ourselves. We have experienced the wreckage we have caused by believing in our rational minds and intellects, we have experienced the trauma we have caused and has been visited upon us because of the bastardization of God’s name. We have experienced the rejection of faith leaders and communities because of our addictive thinking and acting. We have not been welcomed in as human beings who sin, who need help, who are needy, we have been banished by the very people who claim to be servants of God! Our surrender to a power greater than ourselves is our path to serving the demands and visions of God, of our soul, of our intuitive minds which we let lie fallow and starved prior to our recovery.

Hearing the demand of God, the demand of religion, the demand of AA, the demand of my soul each and every day through prayer, meditation, Torah, and Rabbi Heschel, has caused me much angst and reflection. I am grateful for these demands, which are actually one in the same. More tomorrow. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 96

“Let us not labor under no illusions. There are no easy solutions for problems that are at the same time intensely personal and universal, urgent and eternal. Technological progress creates more problems that it solves.. Efficiency experts or social engineering will not redeem humanity.” (God in Search of Man pg. 372).

Today, being the official celebration of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday, the truth of Rabbi Heschel’s words above are obvious. Here we are, not even 55 years since his assassination, not even 60 years since the Civil Rights Bill and the Voting Rights Bill passed Congress and powerful people have been and continue to whittle away at both of these bills, they continue to deny Black people their dignity and rights as citizens of this country and they use technology to ‘prove’ themselves correct. Like Hitler in the 30’s and 40’s, we still hear from these White Supremacists that Blacks are inferior because of their ‘scientific studies’, much like the Jews being subhuman in Nazi Germany and beyond. Technology and science, like religion are being used to deny truths, rather than promote them. Opinions become facts by these deceivers, these haters using both technology and science and too many people buy into it, subliminally and outwardly.

These White Power people, who are in power in the House of Representatives now, in power in business, like Leonard Leo, Charles Koch, etc, they use social engineering to prove they aren’t prejudiced, they just are following the ‘facts’ from social engineering that will give us the best outcome. They just believe in the “survival of the fittest” theory of Darwin. Yet these White Power people, being led in the House of Representatives by Kevin McCarthy and his aide de camp, Jim Jordan, are not the fittest because they would have never survived the enslavement and disempowerment that Black people have in this Country. They voted to kill the John Lewis Civil Rights Bill that is necessary because the Republicans, including Moscow Mitch gutted it when it came up for renewal and Jordan was one of the loudest voices saying we didn’t need it anymore, Mark Meadows using Elijah Cummings as his proof he wasn’t a racist and then has proven his true colors through his actions. 55 years since Rev. Kings assassination and these gutless deceivers, these scared little white boys who have never served We, the People, are trying to kill Social Security, kill Medicare, kill the necessary fundamentals so the powerless and the voiceless can live and some American people, ie other White Power/White Supremacists, think this is efficiency  and will redeem our country and all of the people in it!

In a recent poll, it was revealed that 85% of Americans believe, speak or repeat some AntiSemitic Trope. As Rev. Al Sharpton said even Black people and Black Preachers are spouting this vile trope. 85%, that could be more than are racist in this country! Now everyone knows that Jews should have been social engineered out of existence. We should have gone the way of all the civilizations from Antiquity went-extinction. Yet, here we are, we may be the fittest because we have survived 2000 years of hate, war, being tossed here and there, the Spanish Inquisition Nazi Germany and now the anti-semitic doings of Orban, Jordan, et al. These “good christian people trying to annihilate Jews, Blacks are doing the exact opposite of God’s Will and Christ’s teachings.

Rev. King, Rabbi Heschel came together from their souls knowing one another, from their deep faith and believe in Biblical teachings, from being immersed in the Bible, from being color-blind and judging one another “on the content of their character” and because they both knew the effects of hate, of racism, of anti-semitism, etc. No amount of lies and deceptions could shake their connection, they were more than friends, they were brothers, they are warriors in the fight against evil, they are lights to illumine the path out of our confusion of good and evil, they are our teachers, our leaders, and we are their heirs. Will we grow our inheritance as the White Supremacists grow theirs or will we wilt and give up, be overtaken by technology’s lies and succumb to the efficiency of going along to get along?

In recovery, we surrender to gain/regain control of our living. We have been the haters, we have had our prejudices and we, sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly, drop these false selves, these false personas we had adopted because we were afraid to be hurt, to be laughed at, to be ‘caught’ in our lies and deceptions. We work hard to not bastardize the Grace God has granted us to be alive, to be healthy, to be in recovery and be part of a group that is multi-racial, multi-cultural, welcoming people of all faiths and of no faith.

I have learned being color-blind is not enough, as I ponder Rev. King’s words, Rabbi Heschel’s words, we have to see the differences in color, religion, thoughts and welcome them, embrace them, discuss them and learn from everyone. I have to notice that Black people are more easily singled out for prejudice than Jews like me. I have to notice that some Jews are still afraid to speak up, less the christians come for them again. I have to engage with people who still have antiquated ideas about Jews, Blacks, etc, so I can open their thoughts up and/or know who to be wary of. There are no easy solutions, true solutions take a lot of hard work and dedicated souls. 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 95

“Let us not labor under no illusions. There are no easy solutions for problems that are at the same time intensely personal and universal, urgent and eternal. Technological progress creates more problems that it solves.. Efficiency experts or social engineering will not redeem humanity.” (God in Search of Man pg. 372).

Rabbi Heschel published God in Search of Man in 1955, imagine what our world could be had we all heeded his teaching, wisdom and insight above! People are still looking for “easy solutions” and failing to see what the real problems are. We are still laboring under illusions of grandeur and superiority over evil, we are still believing in our mind’s capacity to think and solve these “intensely personal and universal” problems. We are as stuck in our own “stinking thinking” as we were some 58 years ago, maybe even more stuck than when Rabbi Heschel wrote these prophetic words.

We are continuing to live in a world where atoning for our sins is difficult and rare. To atone, I believe, means to become ‘at one’ with truth, with self, with humanity, and with God. We are still using our mind to show how smart we are, rather than using our spirit to learn how connected and in need of “a power greater than ourselves” to help us with these “urgent and eternal” problems that can and do harm our humanity. “To atone for the holy” doesn’t even enter the realm of necessity for most people so we continue to mix up evil and good, unholy and holy in willful blindness and in our obliviousness. At issue, as we immerse ourselves in Rabbi Heschel’s teaching above, is do we even realize that we are suffering in such delusion that we don’t even recognize the “intensely personal and universal, urgent and eternal” problems we are facing? It seems as if there are enough people who do not see this suffering, who when they do want to blame anyone and everyone else for it and believe there are easy solutions! We hear this from religious leaders, we hear this from political leaders, we hear this from teachers, parents, etc, “just follow me, just listen to me, just do what I tell you, don’t believe your soul, don’t believe your eyes and/or ears, I have the answer, etc”. This mendacity that we hear from these ‘smart people’ is killing us, wounding our souls and keeping us stuck in our own self-deceptions.

Technology is important and good, as well as being a weapon to harm and used for evil purposes. We are witnesses to ‘bots’ targeting susceptible people with lies and hatred so the puppet masters who are sending them can cause chaos, stop truth, turn elections and sow more hatred and suspicion in our country, our world, our homes, our inner lives. We have fallen for the lie that technology will solve our problems, it will be the solution for the problem of evil, it will save us from the mendacity we are bombarded with daily through ‘the media’. Instead, technology is used very often to create more problems, it is used to confuse and deflect us from what is really happening, it has become a tool in our political wars to engage in lies so they can win elections. Technology is being used to kill free and fair elections, as we have seen over the last four election cycles. Technology has made it easier to get information out quicker which in cases of emergencies is a great gift and tool. It has also, by design, gotten so many people addicted to their devices and interested in how many likes, how many clicks, how many shares we get, the content is no longer important, only how famous we can become through technology matters.

We labor under the illusion that ____ will solve our problems, there is an easy answer if we only seek it and/or listen to people who proclaim they know the answers. Those of us in recovery are well aware that solutions are never easy and there are simple solutions to the intensely personal problems we face daily. Simple does not mean easy, it does not mean these solutions are not complex, it means that we stop complicating our solution seeking with the lies, deceptions and blinders we seem to approach all issues. These complications begin with seeking an answer-the one right way out of our personal predicaments and these is none. An answer implies that we will have a result and people in recovery know, just as there are many layers to peeling an onion, there are many layers to each and every solution. Our experience is when we are in the solution, there are many doorways to go through and we become less intent on finding the answer, less in need of a certain result and more engaged in what we are learning, how this impacts our past actions and what it means for today and tomorrow.

I have relied too often on people seeing and knowing me, I have relied too often on ____ to ensure that people hear and understand me. I have bought my own press at times as well. I have never, in the past 36 years since my last incarceration, believed in easy solutions, I have, though, labored under the illusion of being in partnership with people seeking solutions forever, not realizing that at different points our agendas become different, our visions become different and I haven’t seen this, I haven’t heard this and the loss of connection I have experienced has wounded me deeply. These experiences bring up my deficiencies, my sins, my self-deceptions and have taught me to take off my rose-colored glasses, stop deceiving myself and not depend on technology to get my messages out clearly, to take off the blinders when I am dealing with my inner life and with another human being. These experiences continue to remind me that serving God, living a life of reciprocity is part of the solution and it is difficult at times while being extremely simple. 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 94

“On the most sacred day of the year the supreme task was to atone for the holy. It proceeded the sacrifice, the purpose of which was to atone for the sins.” (God in Search of Man pg. 371-2)

Rabbi Heschel’s teaching above is like a fastball coming at us at 100+ miles per hour, we don’t really see it until it is right on us, we are not sure which way to turn to hit it and/or not be hit by it. We Jews have gotten it all wrong for centuries, I believe. We have not spent the time and the effort to atone for the holy either because we erroneously believed/believe that our holy is pure and clean and/or because we were/are too oblivious to see the need to atone for the holy. I believe each and every Synagogue and Temple, each JCC and Federation Buildings, each home needs to atone for the holy by searching their holy spaces and doing T’Shuvah for the transgressions in our holy spaces and the sins we commit wittingly and unwittingly in all of our affairs. We have to no longer depend on clergy to do this, as they did in the Temple of Jerusalem and the Tent of Meeting, we have to all pitch in “to atone for the holy.” We are being called by Rabbi Heschel to remember that prior to our atonement for our sins, we have to first atone for and make clean the holy. I believe his teaching above is for our physical spaces and our inner lives.

Once again, Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom encompasses all human beings and is eternally timeless. We are engaged in a great spiritual war with the forces of holiness who don’t believe they have anything to atone for! We are living in a world where humility before God, before one another is seen as weakness because we already KNOW what God wants and we are ‘the chosen’ who can, must, and will carry out God’s Word. Yet, these same people are unable to, oblivious to the teaching above, they conveniently forget the verse in Leviticus that teaches us “to atone for the holy”. Instead, they engage in such self-deception that it is impossible to reason, to negotiate, to compromise with them until we succumb to their demands. While their demands are totally selfish and self-serving, their self-deception has given them the persuasive powers to deceive millions upon millions of people around the globe and in every country. Our unwitting and/or willful ignoring the teaching above by our clergy contributes legitimacy to these charlatans because our clergy support their lies, their mendacity though a complete misreading of Scripture. Whenever Scripture is read for the sake of power over the people, whenever religion is practiced as oppressive, insipid, irrelevant and tone deaf to the spiritual progression of people and the world, whenever religion is used to support tyranny, slavery, class and caste systems, it is not religion as God intended. This extremism points out the need “to atone for the holy” that Rabbi Heschel is teaching us.

We have become so engaged in pointing out the sins and transgressions of another(s) that we have forgotten to and/or have become willfully blind to our own. Rather than being responsible and aware of the holy in our living, the holy opportunities that are constantly put in front of us, we are oblivious to them and this could be our greatest transgression that points out our need “to atone for the holy”. I call out the churches, mosques, the Jewish Federations and Jewish Institutions as well as Temples and Synagogues to clean their houses and “atone for the holy” in their midst. I call on my colleagues in the Clergy to stop trying to keep their jobs and remember who our employer is: God and our employer is demanding we DO our jobs rather than engaging in the mendacity and self-deception we practice in order to keep them. I call on all of us to search our innermost selves in these next 76 days prior to Passover and “atone for the holy” that we have neglected to do. I am calling on all of us to send the charlatans -anyone and everyone who is not taking care of the stranger, the poor, the needy; everyone who is not “doing justly, loving mercy and walking in the ways of God”-packing from our governments, from our churches, mosques, synagogues and temples so we, the remnants, the people who have left Egypt, can clean our holy spaces, clean our holy souls up and “atone for the holy”.

This is the essence of recovery for so many of us. We have let go of our false egos as the driving force in our lives. We have come to believe we can’t save our face and our ass at the same time. We know how insidious our imperfections are and how powerful the lies we tell ourselves are. We “atone for the holy” each and every day by searching what we do well and how we are of service to make these actions and deeds as clean as we possibly can knowing we will always have some self-interest involved. We are engaged in reciprocity, we give away what we have so we can keep it, we donate, we show up for service and we reach out to one another and those who are not in recovery yet with an open heart and willing spirit. We cleanse our inner lives daily so our outer lives are cleaner, more open and transparent and relevant, free and peaceful.

I have made mistakes, I have done well, I am human. I have engaged in atoning for the sins and transgressions a lot over these years. I have cleaned the sanctuary of my soul for years and the physical plant of where I worked as Rabbi for 20+ years, and I realize when I allowed the shmutz to build up, when I allowed ego to triumph over truth, I was making my inner and outer sanctuary unclean. I am deeply remorseful for these times and I continue to make living amends. 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 93

“While the purpose of the goat upon which the lot fell for the Lord was to atone for the holy, “to make atonement for the holy place, because of the uncleanness of the children of Israel, and because of their transgressions, even all their sins; and so shall he do for the tent of meeting, that dwells with them in the midst of their uncleanness.”(Leviticus 16:6f Sifra) (God in Search of Man pg. 371)

Continuing from yesterday’s quote, Rabbi Heschel is, once again, reminding us to never be so sure of our purity, our holiness. Even the Tent of Meeting and later the Temple had to be atoned for, even our holy places had to be cleansed because of our transgressions, our sins, that we bring into our holy places both as congregants, adherents, even as priests. I hear Rabbi Heschel calling us to account for the ways we miss the mark when praying, when entering into God’s space, and in all of our actions of holiness. We are never so pure that we do not have “to atone for the holy”!

Yet, here we are as we have been throughout history, believing the lies and deceptions of people who wrap themselves in the Torah, the New Testament, the Koran, etc and proclaim their holiness without ever believing they too have “to atone for the holy”. We are so caught up in our self-deceptions that we forget to take these actions, we are so caught up in ourselves that clergy people are afraid “to atone for the holy” lest we lose our flock. True believers need perfection and purity from their clergy so they can feel cleansed by being blessed and forgiven by clergy, they need to see their clergy as living at a higher spiritual level so they can be imperfect, true believers even go so far as believing their faith will make them pure and not need “to atone for the holy”.

Rabbi Heschel’s teaching above is a polemic against this mendacity and our self-deception. I am thinking about the years of opportunity every clergy, including me,  had “to atone for the holy” in my sanctuary and we blew by this important distinction. Rabbi Heschel’s close reading of the text in Leviticus, his immersion in the works, the meaning, the spirit of the text should give all clergy, all congregants, all scholars, all laypeople, everyone pause. We are so wrapped up in the lie of perfection, we are so engaged in thinking we are right, we are unable to acknowledge our own uncleanness and we continue to build up transgressions and sins that make our holy spaces impure, make our holy spaces caked with lifetimes of uncleanness and we are oblivious to this situation, we are deceiving ourselves into believing the lies of clergy, elders, and our selves that our holy spaces, our holy places stay cleansed forever. Rabbi Heschel is debunking this myth and demanding we begin “to atone for the holy place” we frequent.

Since God is everywhere, and the Mezuzah, in my understanding, represents the reminder of who’s space we are entering, ie God’s, when we go into our homes, our offices, buildings, etc and when we leave-all space is God’s, isn’t it time for us “to atone for the holy” that is everywhere? As I understand Rabbi Heschel, we have to begin our atonement with ourselves, we have to search our inner life for the uncleanness we have taken for granted, we have to clean up the lies we tell ourselves, we have to let go of the negative self-talk we have engaged in for so long, we have to see ourselves anew and clear out the self-deception and the mendacity of society that we have bought into for so long in order “to atone for the holy place” within us. Just as God is everywhere, so too is God inside of us for we are created “in the Image of God”. I believe this is Rabbi Eliezer’s teaching in the Talmud that we should do T’Shuvah every day, when we do this, we are preventing the schmutz we create from becoming like barnacles on our souls, in our holy places, in the entire world. While many bitch and moan about the EPA, I see their regulations as an attempt “to atone for the holy” of our environment and it has worked, not perfectly and better than no attempt at all.

In recovery, we are aware of the state of our uncleanness, we are aware of our need “to atone for the holy” as we dirtied up our relationships, our holy places, our inner lives to such an extent we could not discern the difference between the holy and Azazel, between what was real and what was phony, what was love and what was expediency. We do our large inventory, our deep dive into the gross uncleanness we have perpetrated and then we “continue to take inventory” so we can do daily maintenance and “keep our own house in order”.

I am trembling as I look back on the ways I didn’t “atone for the holy” and I am heartened by our attempts to have people do their large inventories and look at themselves. I am sad that I could not lead more people to do this and even sadder about my own deficiencies in this regard. I realize that my daily T’Shuvah practice has shown me nuances of my living both negative and positive, I strive to “keep my side of the street clean” and am constantly uncovering and prying off barnacles that have been on my soul, in my inner life for years. It is an exhausting endeavor that infuses me with exhilaration, energy, and exaltation. Rabbi Heschel’s uncovering the truth above is humbling and hopeful, an aha moment and a duh moment. He has, once again, illuminated a truth that I knew and was oblivious to, he has enriched my life with this teaching and I pray yours also. 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 92

“At the ritual of the Day of Atonement the High Priest would cast lots upon two goats: one lot for the Lord and the other for Azazel The purpose of the ritual of the goat on which the lot fell for Azazel was to atone for the evil. The High Priest would lay both his hands upon the head of the goat “and confess over him all the iniquities of the children of Israel, all their transgressions, all their sins”” (God in Search of Man pg 371)

On this day, the 50th Yarzeit of Rabbi Heschel’s death, I am in absolute wonder and awe of how, for so many people of different faiths and of no faith, Rabbi Heschel was, is and always will be the Priest who helps so many of us to atone for the evil that we have committed, wittingly and unwittingly. While he probably did not get a goat to confess our sins on its head, he has drawn so many of us to T’Shuvah, to atonement, to spirituality and to God, higher power, higher consciousness with his teachings, his poetry, his prose and the spirit of love, calling, demanding and belief in our ability to change.

Our world is in desperate need to atone for the evil, instead of using scapegoats, instead of blaming another, instead of hijacking speech and using words and phrases that sound wonderful while using them for evil, we have to send the hijackers packing. We need to have a national day of atonement, a day where our entire country participates in the ritual initiated by the High Priest, we all need to lay our hands on the heads of one another “and confess over him/her all the iniquities” we have committed. From the mendacity of ‘stop the steal’ to the deception of ‘select committee to investigate the weaponization of Government’ by the very people who voted to overturn the free and fair election of 2020, to the self-deception that we all participate in of ‘being right and righteous’. The greatest iniquities we commit are those that are in the name of God, in the name of country, etc. Yet, we continue to watch in horror as the politicians, another name for liars, set out to destroy democracy so they can be authoritarians or we participate in this sham, this coup, this taking away our basic freedoms in favor of enslaving and controlling ‘those people’-anyone who doesn’t agree with us and/or subjugate themselves to our will.

On this 50th Yarzeit, I believe we must stand up against the tyranny of liars, the debasement caused by mendacious speech, the slavery caused by our own self-deception. Not just today, we have to be diligent in our daily living and each day, confess “all the iniquities” we have engaged in, all of our unwitting errors of judgement, of speech, of dismissal of another human being. We have to see each person’s divine image and respect the infinite dignity of another human being, especially the people we disagree with. We need to engage our souls and seek our spiritual guides who help us to see our authentic self as Rabbi Heschel does for so many of us.

This weekend is Martin Luther King Jr weekend and Rabbi Heschel and Dr. King were ‘kin under the skin’, as my friend Pastor Mark Whitlock likes to say. They joined together not just as members of a movement, they joined together because their reverence for God, for humanity, for individuals was so great and powerful, they knew together they could “declare liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants” as the Bible teaches and is inscribed on our Liberty Bell. They knew how to reach out and touch the souls, not just the minds, of all people without regard to race, color, creed, sexual orientation. They are the leaders we all need, they are the Priests who have confessed our iniquities and given us a pathway to being whole again, a pathway to understanding the road to freedom that the Bible, the Constitution, etc give to us. am calling for a Day of Atonement for our Country, our communities, our families to both confess our iniquities and find solutions to live the principles of the Bible, the Constitution. I am calling for this in the names of Dr. King and Rabbi Heschel-what better way to honor their lives than this?

In recovery, we put aside any and all differences to help one another maintain recovery. Color, religion, politics, sexual orientation, etc are left at the door so we can learn, mentor, guide and be guided by one another in our quest for redemption. We are engaging in a practice “to atone for the evil” we have committed and to “forgive those who have trespassed against us”. The more we are able to not focus on our differences and embrace our similarities for our recovery, the more we are able to live our recovery and practice these principles “in all our affairs”!

On Yom Kippur, I make it a practice to ask for forgiveness for my sins and for the sins of all clergy throughout history. I have learned from Rabbi Heschel of the dangers of being separate from community, to whitewash the actions of myself and all clergy, make scapegoats of another rather than confessing “all our iniquities”. I learn from Rabbi Heschel that this Day of Atonement can be a Day of At-One-Ment, we come together as a whole human being and a partner as well as servant of God and one another when we truly confess our iniquities, our transgressions and our sins. This “unnoticed miracle” of T’Shuvah as Rabbi Heschel describes it is one of the pillars of my living along with Radical Amazement and not giving in to despair. Distinguishing the good from the not good, the holy from the unholy only comes with the deep introspection that T’Shuvah brings and I need to continue to refine my ability to distinguish. 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 90

“At the ritual of the Day of Atonement the High Priest would cast lots upon two goats: one lot for the Lord and the other for Azazel The purpose of the ritual of the goat on which the lot fell for Azazel was to atone for the evil. The High Priest would lay both his hands upon the head of the goat “and confess over him all the iniquities of the children of Israel, all their transgressions, all their sins”” (God in Search of Man pg 371)

Tonight is the 50th Yarzeit of Rabbi Heschel’s death and I encourage everyone to participate in one of the webinars/zooms honoring him and his teachings. Rabbi Heschel saves my life and helps me live a life of meaning, purpose, and joy each day and has saved 1000’s of people lives through his wisdom, brilliance, kindness and empathy.

Rabbi Heschel is reminding us that the ritual of the Day of Atonement included was two-fold, “one lot for the Lord and the other for Azazel. I hear him calling us to remember what the rituals were for, to stop bastardizing the ritual of the goat for Azazel. We have to end our need to use people and things as ‘scapegoats’, we have to stop blaming and shaming another rather than confessing our sins, instead of taking responsibility for our “iniquities, transgressions, sins”.

Yet, we seem to have forgotten this, we seem to have made this ritual into a ‘ritual’, a performance art rather than a solemn act. Religious comes from the Latin meaning “reverence/obligation” and obligation comes from the word oblige which means “to bind”. Rabbi Heschel’s words are telling us to bind ourselves to these solemn actions that uplift our spirits, that help us discern “evil’s intrusion into the sphere of the good and holy”. When we participate in the ritual of the Day of Atonement without binding ourselves to the meaning, to the solemn actions of the day; when we go and recite a formulaic confession, when we ask people to forgive us through the ritualistic emptiness of “please forgive me for anything I may have done to harm you…” we are not bound by the ritual, we are not taking responsibility for our transgressions, iniquities, sins, we are filling a deeply meaningful ritual with performance art, with mendacity, with self-deception. This is how religion has become “irrelevant, dull, oppressive and insipid” as Rabbi Heschel reminds us on page 3 of God in Search of Man.

We, the people, are the perpetrators of the irrelevance, dullness, oppressiveness and insipidness that has come to characterize religious life today! We have forgotten how to discern “evil’s intrusion into the sphere of the good and the holy” because we are the people who are infusing evil into these spheres! We have infused our rituals with blandness rather than obligation, we have turned our Houses of Worship into shrines to history, we have bound ourselves to irrelevance rather than binding ourselves to the rituals that give life meaning, purpose, passion, truth and service. We have forgotten to look at our sins, our transgressions, our iniquities and make atonement for ourselves, we erroneously believe the ritual of confession will be enough, the majority of people go to Temple on the Day of Atonement out of superstition, because this is what Jews do, to be seen, etc. Sitting in the pews is not for our entertainment, it is not to complain about the Rabbi’s sermon being too long or boring, it is to make atonement for the wrongs we have perpetrated on those closest to us, those farthest from us, everyone in-between, and God. It is “to bind” us to living differently in the coming year, it is to engage in an inner transformation from blame, shame, irresponsibility to a reverence, truthfulness, kindness and being responsible for our actions, both good and evil. It is to mature our inner life more each day so we can more easily discern “evil’s intrusion into the sphere of the good and the holy.”

This is the power of T’Shuvah, which in the life of a person in recovery, would be steps 4-10. In T’Shuvah, as in recovery, we search the darkest corners of our inner life, we search out the lies we have been telling ourselves and we confess them-not on the head of a goat anymore, rather to another person, aka Spiritual Guide/Sponsor, and make a plan to repair the damage we have wrought. We are engaging in a ritual that dates back to Biblical times, we are then obligated to go to those we have harmed, make restitution (financially and/or spiritually), seek the forgiveness of those we have harmed through confession and having a plan to not do the same actions again. While we and they know we will “miss the mark” again, it will not be malicious and purposeful. Then we can ask God for forgiveness and complete the ritual of T’Shuvah by binding ourselves to what is good, what is right and what is our unique service to God. We accomplish this by first forgiving our selves completely and being responsible for our daily living through a 10th step in the program of AA and by doing T’Shuvah each and every day. Then, on the Day of Atonement, we are engaged in the ritual and know we are clean and have been forgiven by God and people.

I have been practicing T’Shuvah for the last 36 years and each year I find more from my past that I need to make T’Shuvah for, things that did not occur to me before. I know my inner life is maturing because I am able to see things that I have never seen before from my past and my present. Tonight, I will say a prayer of gratitude for Rabbi Heschel, his life has made mine so much better, so much worthwhile and so much more connected. 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 90

“The awareness of evil’s intrusion into the sphere of the good and the holy has, in our tradition, often come to expression. It may have been the meaning of one of the great acts that took place annually at the Temple in Jerusalem.” (God in Search of Man pg 371)

For me, everything Rabbi Heschel writes is a teaching because it has so much meaning, so much relevance and aids us in rising up to live a life “compatible with being a partner of God” as he reminds of often. While our religion and every other religion and spiritual discipline is aware of “evil’s intrusion into the sphere of the good and the holy”, we seem to be incapable of recognizing when this is occurring. We, the people of spirit, have continued to buy into the lies of societal norms, the ‘reverence’ for people(used to be men) of the cloth, and our own need to be certain and explain away the “evil intrusion” of our role models in our particular spiritual discipline while exhorting the misdeeds/evil of the role models of another spiritual discipline.

While “the awareness of evil’s intrusion into the sphere of the good and holy” often comes to expression in each and every spiritual tradition, many people either cover it up, clean it up, or use it to deny the validity of spiritual traditions, the ones they were born into, the ones they converted into and/or all of them because of their denial of a power greater than themselves! This is the great horror of our time and of all time. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, King David, etc all were imperfect human beings. What people call the “vengeful God” of “the Old Testament” is really God informing us through words, stories, experiences that we can relate to and the consequences, positive and negative, of our actions. When evil occurs, when we perpetrate evil onto another, there is a price to pay for all concerned, even God. Yet, many Jews are afraid to admit the “missing the mark” of our ancestors, many Jews are afraid to admit their own errors and need to ‘clean up’ and explain away these errors and evil that all human beings commit, to defend the confusion of evil and good, to vilify and blame another for “evil’s intrusion into the sphere of the good and the holy”. When will this ever end?

Other faiths, like Christianity do the same thing. People have now changed Christ from the lamb to the lion, from the one who cares for everyone to the one who shows favor to successful and wealthy people. The have changed Christ from one who decries “evil’s intrusion into the good and the holy” to the one who is leading them to bring evil into the People’s Place, into homes and communities through the abuse of power, through not caring for and vilifying the poor, the stranger, the needy, through elitism and through hatred; all in the name of Christ. Of course each and every Spiritual Discipline and Religion have their charlatans, while the foundational texts of true spiritual disciplines have within them “the awareness of evil’s intrusion into the good and the holy”.

What is our need to be willfully blind to the wisdom and truth of Rabbi Heschel’s teaching above? It coincides with our need to quote him, quote Jose Marti in Cuba, quote MLK, quote Scriptures, etc to make ourselves right, to make ourselves powerful and to deceive people into following us. We are afraid to face our own errors in judgement and action, we are afraid to be wrong, we are afraid acknowledging our imperfections will make us weak and subject to being enslaved, put in Ghettos, laughed at, etc. Because of our fears, because of our uncertainty, we have become blind to the awareness that our spiritual disciplines give us, ergo-we continue to make the same mistakes as our ancestors, we are unable to learn the evils of history because we want to be ‘the winners’. We have deceived our self and everyone else for so longs, we are unable to distinguish “evil’s intrusion on the good and the holy”. What is so interesting is the moral code of society is based on the losers’ writings, the Old Testament. We lost our country and were wandering for almost 1900 years, yet our foundational book, The Hebrew Bible, is the foundation of morality, the foundation of our Justice System, etc.

In recovery, our basic text, the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous, is full of stories of how evil intruded on the good and the holy and how we became aware that we could unravel and unwind the evil from our modus operandi; before, during, and/or after our actions. We are students in awareness, we are practitioners of distinguishing the one from the others, we are messengers of the possibility of change once we allow our lives to adhere to the standards set so long ago like: “love your neighbor as you love your self”.

In my life, I have always been aware of evil’s intrusion and for quite a while I hid from my own evil, my own bastardizing the good and the holy, saying I did good so why doesn’t that count against the evil? It is not a zero-sum game, I learned. One good deed doesn’t guarantee a good deed in return from the one I/we have helped. The purpose of doing the next right thing is not the reward, not the reciprocity from the person I am helping, the purpose is to make me more aware of “evil’s intrusion on the good and the holy” and distinguish one from the other and raise my spiritual awareness, spiritual growth so I can continue to serve God’s Will for me, with or without recognition. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

As we approach the 50th Yahrzeit of Rabbi Heschel this week, I am dismayed at the lack of the Jewish World to take proper notice and heed his immense wisdom, compassion, strength, and spirit. In 2023, we will commemorate the 55th assassinations of Rev. Martin Luther King, Senator Robert (Bobby) Kennedy, and the 60th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy. While we, as individuals commemorate our own personal, familial losses, I bring these 4 people up to all of us because they each, in their own way, with their own charisma and spirit, sought to better the plight of all people, sought to make this a more perfect union, and, in the case of the last 3 people, were assassinated for their efforts. Next weekend is Martin Luther King weekend, where, as with Rabbi Heschel, his words will be celebrated, his accomplishments will be celebrated, and most people have no idea that to celebrate great spirits and their wisdom is to take actions in their name, from their teachings and carry on the work they started.

This is a prime example of the intertwining of “the good impulse and the evil impulse…” as Rabbi Heschel reminds us of above. Most of the disciples of all of these leaders, these spirits, believe we are carrying on their work when, because of the confusion of our impulses, because of our self-deception, we are only parroting their words and not, as Rabbi Heschel teaches, immersing ourselves in them. This phenomena is not limited to Rev. King and Rabbi Heschel, Bobby and Jack, it goes all the way back to biblical times with Adam and Eve hiding and blaming after they disobeyed God’s command. It continues with Noah’s drunkenness, Sarah’s denials, Rebekah’s subterfuge, Jacob’s conning, just to name a few. We have continued to bastardize and ‘re-interpret’ the wisdom of Scripture to where people are saying Christ wants ‘white supremacy’! While it is easier to point out the confusion and intertwining of powerful people, of people in government, celebrities, etc; we have to remember that all of us are born with these two impulses and all of us confuse and intertwine them knowingly and unknowingly.

“Tshuvah is the most unnoticed miracle” Rabbi Heschel writes when he was in Nazi Germany in 1936, and it is such, I believe because so few of us engage in it. We are so confused and conned by our “evil impulse” that we cannot see the error of our ways, we are oblivious to our inaction of the wisdom and the work started by our teachers, guides, prophets like Rabbi Heschel and Rev. King. Many people believe that Rev. King was a leader in the Civil Rights movement for Black people, he was a leader in the Civil Rights movement for all people, which is why his coalition included so many different people. Rev. Jesse Jackson tried to carry it on with his Rainbow Coalition, and it has never reached the power of Rev. King’s movement because of the selflessness, the wide tent and the power of speaking to people in ways they could understand, Scriptures were explained and personalized by both Rev King and Rabbi Heschel. This love of God, love of all of God’s creations, love of humanity, horror and misery over how we have confused “the good impulse and the evil impulse” is the cornerstone of their teachings, their lives’ work along with an amazing optimism in the face of negativity, derision, and hatred.

It is time for all of us to learn from the insanity of this week’s House of Representatives, like Chamberlain, Kevin McCarthy sought to appease and give away the store to fanatics who believe the election of 2020 was stolen, Jews have space lasers that cause wildfires, black people are not capable of voting, immigrants who are of color should not be allowed into the country, and hatred is a badge of honor. If this isn’t an example of intertwining “the good impulse and the evil impulse”, I don’t know what is. The 90% of the Republicans who stood with McCarthy were sold out for the sake of crazies and none of them are standing up for themselves and their constituents and the country? In our willful blindness and self-deception we don’t stand for and with what is right, as Rabbi Heschel, Rev King and the Kennedy brothers taught us, showed us and engaged us in, rather we spout their words and act in opposition to their ways, their teachings, their brilliance; much like we do with the wisdom of the Bible, much like we do with changing the Gospels into the “prosperity gospels” and believing poor people are less loved by God, by Christ, what poppycock!

In recovery and in my own life, I and we work diligently to unravel these impulses, we immerse ourselves in the dream of being “judged on the content of their character rather than the color of skin”, we immerse ourselves in Radical Amazement and Wonder, staying optimistic and hopeful. We dream of what isn’t and ask why not. We are students, torch bearers, participants in evolution of  the revolution that the 4 men above carried on from Biblical times. I pray all of us make this year the year of participation in their wisdom and love for all. 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 88

“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)

“And all are intertwined, the good impulse with the evil impulse…” what a frightening, awesome, statement of truth that most people are unwilling to accept, unwilling to see and believe they have unraveled these two impulses and “know they are good, they are right, they are the truth”, and other such nonsense. This last phrase has struck fear in the hearts of people who truly hear, see, and engage in truth. Our impulses are intertwined, they are confused, they are wrapped in one another and it is time for everyone to accept this truth because not accepting it leads to death, destruction, authoritarianism, demagogues, senseless hatred, prejudice, racism, anti-semitism, anti-anyone other than me-ism. Any student of history can see this intertwining and confusion when one realizes more wars have been fought in “God’s Name” than for any other reason. Kings, Leaders of countries, many leaders of revolts, rebellions  have used the intertwining of their impulses to validate going to war for “God’s Name” when it really was for their own welfare.

The American Civil War was about slavery and freedom, yet 157 years later, many people who claim to be conservatives, claim to be ‘the religious right’ are winning in their states, winning in the Congress what they could not win on the battlefield and proclaiming their rightness/whiteness by wrapping themselves in bastardizations of the American Constitution and the “Prosperity Gospels” where Jesus believes poor people should be ignored, that strength and might, winning at any cost, is the proper way to serve Christ!!! These people are so confused because they cannot discern the difference between their impulses and their evil impulses have taken over their thinking, their evil impulses have disguised themselves as their good impulses and they are so confused that they believe in their white supremacy, no matter how often they trot out people of color as their ‘friends’.

Nazi Germany, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, and so many other examples of the intertwining the Zohar is speaking about are not being heeded by us. Hitler and Putin are hailed by some people as the bastions of White people. Many Republicans were fans of Putin because “he stands up for white people” while NATO and the United States doesn’t” was a cry during the Obama years and I hear it coming back in the Biden years. We are in a constant tension between these two impulses and we need to realize we can never sit back and believe we have “vanquished the devil” because at that moment, we have become the devil, we have been overtaken by the evil impulse and we are blind to our situation. From this blindness, we harm and destroy our souls, and the souls of so many other people around us. Since the Zohar is 100’s of years old, we have to face the fact that we are being willfully blind to this intertwining, to the confusion of our impulses, to the destruction we are creating and causing because we refuse to see what is, we refuse to grow spiritually and we refuse to have a practice of humility.

We all need to look at ourselves in the mirror, we all need to stop believing the lies we tell ourselves and the bullshit from another(s). We have to work with our spiritual practice, our spiritual guides, we have to immerse ourselves in God’s world rather than believe we can manipulate God to satisfy our selfish needs. Humility begins with knowing we don’t know everything, we are not the smartest person in the room, we are teachable and we need to/want to learn. Willful blindness, stubbornness, pontification, hatred and prejudice of any and all kinds, become signs of weakness and pity; we reach out a hand to people who are still trapped in their ‘rightness/whiteness’ and minister to them so they can heal their spiritual malady and know they are loved and cared about as well as our actions of caring for.

This is the main characteristic of recovery, taking off the blinders, getting a fresh and true look at what is, seeing a vision of what is ahead of us as “long as our own house is in order”. In a meeting last night, the leader asked us about our spiritual fitness and I believe every person needs to be engaged in a spiritual fitness program, a discipline which uncovers our spiritual condition, gives us a path of spiritual exercises to strengthen our spirit and a program of maintenance to keep our spirits fresh, alive and in good working order!

I am as guilty as the next person of intertwining the two impulses, of being willfully blind to what is happening, etc. I also know I am doing this less and less each week, each year. I am sorry for the harm I caused when I have intertwined my two impulses and my plan of change includes this writing, as I learn more about me and the world. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 87

“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 and the mystics who put the Zohar together make many of us very uncomfortable with the teaching above. The last sentence is very difficult for many of us to take in and accept, I was speaking with someone yesterday about this sentence and the difficulty this person was having with it. We both came to realize the humility involved in accepting the truth stated above.

“From good issues evil and from mercy issues judgement, and all are intertwined” teaches us humility by reminding us to not be ‘so sure’ of the ‘rightness’ of our attitudes, our beliefs, our stands. To be human, as I am understanding the teaching above, is to know that even my best intentions, my best actions could bring about evil. One of the ways this occurs is our good actions could give us a false sense of self, a surety that will blind us to any negative consequences of our ‘good actions’. Rabbi Harold Kushner wrote a book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People precisely because we erroneously believe our good actions protect us from negativity. Yet, as God tells Cain, “sin couches at your door, it desires you much, and you can master it”. Negativity, evil, missing the mark will never leave us, we are not perfect, we do not know everything and yet, so many people either believe these lies about themselves and/or believe these lies should be true and there is something wrong with them because evil, negativity, missing the mark has not left them! This is a classic example of how “good issues evil…and all are intertwined.”

Rather than facing the complexity of being human, rather than engaging in and deepening what has been and is being revealed to us humans, we have bought into the deception of society that we have unraveled or are unraveling what is good and what is evil, what is hidden in the depths and we have found the light in the darkness. It is the hubris of being human, it is our self-deception that allows us be oblivious to the mystery and believe we have solved it and/or can solve it. We have always lived in a world where some people believe they know what is good and what is evil and they take power when they can, by any means, and impose their sense of good, their sense of mercy upon all they believe they should rule. Even today, there are people who believe that slavery was good for our country and for the slaves themselves! While one could say we are doing wonderful in our low unemployment which is good, giving someone a job and not paying a living wage is not so good. Watching the advertisements for charities during the end of the year giving season was painful for many, seeing people with disabilities, children suffering cancer and other illnesses beg us for money was painful. It evoked feelings of mercy in many and along with mercy comes judgement about the way we are being asked, the constant barrage of asks after we have already given, etc.

Listening to the debacle on the floor of the House of Representatives is another example of people being deaf, dumb and blind to what the wisdom above comes to impart upon us. Jim Jordan and others of the “freedom caucus” want to not raise the debt ceiling, not support infrastructure improvements, not bring chip manufacturing back to our country, lower taxes for the rich and the corporations, support the insurrection of Jan.6, 2021, get pardons for themselves and their friends, close our borders to people of color while cozying up to Russia, white people who want to immigrate, get rid of any ethics restrictions on them, etc. all the while proclaiming this is what America wants! While, at first, I thought this was just pandering to the White Supremacists and white people who are fearful of anyone who is ‘not like them’, part of their tribe, I have come to realize that they believe their bullshit and their lies, they believe they are doing what Christ wants, they believe this is what America was founded for, they have no idea of the evil that issues from their ‘good’, they are incapable of unraveling what is intertwined. One of the evils that issued from the good of Christianity, of course, is Anti-Semitism against Jews and the Anti-Muslim since the Crusades!

I have been immersed in this teaching and unwrapping my confusion of good and evil, unraveling the profound from the impenetrable for a long time and I am constantly finding new confusions, new insights, new evils, new darkness and new good and new light in my living. I have worked and am working diligently to accept my powerless over the truth Rabbi Heschel and the Zohar give us. I continue to refine my mercy to be merciful without being judgmental, to do good for the sake of doing good rather than for my gain, I work hard to lessen the evil and the darkness that I bring to the world and I fail often enough to remind me of my humanity, my fallibility. This is what keeps me humble, keeps me right-sized, or at least brings me back to humility when I get too puffed up:) This is the cornerstone of recovery for me and for many. 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 86

“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 challenge to us is to absorb the profound from the impenetrable, as I am hearing him today. It is not that the profound is too far away, it is not that the profound is too etherial, it is our obstinance and self-centeredness, our immature ego and our rationalizations that prevent us from absorbing and acting on the profound that is revealed to us. It is not for lack of knowledge, it is our lack of effort that prevents us from being human, I believe.

It is a profound idea to “care for the stranger, the poor, the needy” and it is revealed to us through Scriptures and Eastern Philosophies. Yet, we seem to be incapable of seeing the “stranger, the poor, the needy” as us, both our inner experiences of being a stranger, poor and needy in the sea of humankind and to see the stranger, poor, and needy that surrounds us, meets us, asks for our help each and every day. We have turned this profound idea into a “mark of Cain” instead of an opportunity to fulfill a Divine command, to engage in actions that befit what being human means. Of course, it is a command precisely because we are so reticent to act from our humanity, our souls direction to “care for the stranger, the poor, the needy”. Our reticence seems to stem from our fear of facing our greatest fears and acknowledging our own inner feelings such as feeling unworthy, not good enough, not fitting in, helpless, powerless, etc. We are being taught by Rabbi Heschel and the Zohar (the Jewish Mystical Text) to unwrap the opposing forces of dark and light so we can penetrate the impenetrable and live a life that is worthy of being a partner of God, a life that is compatible with being God’s partner in creation.

We continue to keep light and dark, good and evil, mercy and judgement wrapped together and deceive ourselves into believing that we are actually unwrapping them. When people go on social media and claim that the Covid-19 vaccines were the cause of Damar Hamlin’s cardiac arrest and believe they are warning everyone, believe this proves their anti-vaxxer actions, they have completely confused good and evil, light and dark, mercy and judgement! Yet because of this confusion, they are unable to learn, to listen, to engage in meaningful dialogue as they wrap themselves in their ‘truths’ and deny everyone else’s beliefs. While for a long time, I thought these people were being stubborn and stupid, I realize from the wisdom above that they are just unable to unravel these opposing forces which have been unraveled, have been disclosed and, we humans, have stubbornly hidden from. This is the real tragedy of human history, I believe: our inability to absorb the path of unraveling that is in our spiritual DNA, in our higher consciousness.

We saw this in the House of Representatives yesterday, 20 Republicans stopped the workings of one branch of Congress because of their self-deceptions, even people like Jim Jordan who ‘stood up’ for Kevin McCarthy spoke about tearing down the progress we have made in caring for “the stranger, the poor, the needy”, blowing up our progress in unraveling mercy from judgement because he is all about judgement according to Jim Jordan! We have people who supported the coup attempt of Jan. 6, 2021 still in Congress, still deciding the fate of America. They have been voted into office by people who believe them when they say they are for American Values, like authoritarianism, Christian Nationalism, racism, anti-semitism, and other such prejudices. We, the people, have to cure our “eye disease” of prejudice, as Rabbi Heschel describes prejudice. We, the people, have to cure the “cancer of the soul”, another description by Rabbi Heschel, that hate has infected us with. We, the people, have to return to our original state of being able to unravel and discern light from dark, good from evil, mercy from judgement and live into our need to live profound lives instead of the false, shallow, ego-centric ones that we are living now.

In recovery, we engage daily in peeling back the layers of the onion of falsehood and mendacity. We are constantly and consistently seeking truth, seeking to discern light and good and mercy from their opposites which we have a PhD in practicing from our time prior to our coming into recovery. We are not perfect nor are we so arrogant to believe we have and need to have power over anything other than our responses to what truly is happening in life, ours and the world’s. We are powerless to fix, we realize, and we are not powerless to be in the solution, we are powerless to open the eyes of another human being and we are not powerless to share our experience, strength, and hope. We know we will never unravel all the opposing forces in the world and in ourselves and we know we can be in the solution and, one step at a time, one day at a time, one grain of sand at a time, be able to discern more of the light, the mercy, the good and the truth. 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 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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