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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 118

“Justice has always appeared as obligatory, but for a long time it was an obligation like other obligations. It met, like the others, a social need;…This being so, an injustice was neither more nor less shocking than any other breach of the rules.There was no justice for slaves, save perhaps a relative, almost an optional, justice” (God in Search of Man pg. 373)

On March 31, 1968, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a friend of Rabbi Heschel’s, said: “The moral arc of the universe is long and it bends toward justice”. This was 5 days before he was assassinated 50 years ago. He was, at the time of his death, fighting for the economic rights and dignity of laborers, of working class people of all races. He saw, I believe, how enslaved workers were/are and their need for dignity, a living wage were essential to their being free. Civil rights is not just about black/white, Jew/Gentile, Latino/white, etc, is the teaching I take from Dr. King’s and Rabbi Heschel’s work together and separately. Civil rights happens when all people are recognized as equally worthy and valued, when “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”(Declaration of Independence)

Yet, as Moses warned the Israelites in Desert, “But Jeshurun became fat and kicked…then he forsook God who made him and lightly esteemed the Rock of his salvation”(Deuteronomy 32:15-16), many people have done the same with the words of the Declaration of Independence, with our Constitution, our Bill of Rights, the words, wisdom, brilliance, and teachings of Rabbi Heschel and Dr. King. Both of these men are prophets carrying the word of God to us, leaning into the Divinely Inspired knowing of our founding fathers, leading us to make our country “a more perfect union” than it was when they found it.

We find ourselves today in an economic crisis of our own making, a crisis of faith in our young people, in our working/blue collar people, that hard work, good education/training will allow them a slice of the “American Dream”. While many people equate this dream with home ownership, etc, I believe the true “dream” is for each of us to live “these truths to be self-evident” rather than continue to enslave people because of their lack of formal education, because they are laborers, because they are not part of the 1%, because of the color of their skin, because of their lack of guile, because of their religion, etc.

This crisis is being promoted by people who say: “Jews will not replace us”, who believe that “Jesus was the Lion”, who want to “sunset Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid”,  who believe that blacks/latinos are ‘second class citizens’, who want to investigate bogus claims while giving aid and comfort to Putin, Orban, and other autocrats. This crisis is being promoted by the mendacity and deception of people who have such disdain for their own constituents they are willing to enslave them for the sake of the ultra wealthy and their own power. This crisis is being waged by modern day Pharaohs ‘who do not know our founding principles’. This crisis is being supported by the very people who are being harmed because of their own prejudices, their own self-deceptions, and their belief in the deceptions of another(s).

We are being called by our founding fathers and by God to engage in living justly, to not take bribes because they blind the eyes of the righteous as Moses reminds us in Deuteronomy, to honor the infinite worth and dignity of every human being, to cease and desist in our need to enslave another. We are being called by Rabbi Heschel’s words and actions to stand up for the poor, the needy, the stranger; to no longer tolerate the rationalizations we are told/we use that enslaves another to a life of poverty, a life of injustice. There is no such thing as “relative, optional” justice in God’s world, Jesus did not say only some of the people should be fed, the declaration doesn’t exclude any human being from “all men”. We have to take off the blinders that causes us to value another(s) as less worthy than ourselves, we have to uncover the divine image/spark that is inside of us and inside of all people. We have to live lives that honor the dignity of another and ensure that “justice for all” is not a slogan rather it becomes an everyday practice. “There is one law for the citizen and stranger alike” we are taught in the Bible, and we have to make the necessary changes so we end tragedies like Tyre Nichols, mass shootings like Colorado Springs, Half Moon Bay, etc.

In recovery, we are colorblind. Our purpose is to “stay sober and help other alcoholics achieve sobriety”. I believe this to be my purpose as well and I live it to the best of my ability each day. I also know, from the examples of my father, my grandfathers, aunts and uncles, that I have to join with all people who are bending the moral arc of the universe towards justice in all my affairs. I am grateful to people like Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre who create opportunities for so many to be free as examples. I have and continue to do this as part of my living T’Shuvah, my living amends. I am heartened by my nieces and nephews who are engaged in this work, by the young and old people whom I have touched and touch me who are engaged in freeing themselves and helping another be free. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 117

“Justice has always appeared as obligatory, but for a long time it was an obligation like other obligations. It met, like the others, a social need;…This being so, an injustice was neither more nor less shocking than any other breach of the rules.There was no justice for slaves, save perhaps a relative, almost an optional, justice” (God in Search of Man pg. 373)

I disagree with one word of Rabbi Heschel’s teaching above, his use of the word “was”! We are witnessing a resurgence of the obligatory nature of justice, we are witnessing the indifference to injustice that Rabbi Heschel marched against, wrote condemnations of, and spoke out about. Even more so, we are witnessing ‘justice’ being bastardized to promote political agendas, so-called religious agendas, by supposedly ‘God-fearing’ people who are, in fact, idolators.

Our inability to elevate justice to a level that is higher than our other obligations is a root cause of hatred, racism, slavery, anti-semitism, Islamaphobia, torture, etc. Because we have relegated justice to one of a myriad of obligations we find ourselves and society doing what is expedient for our ‘good’ and for the ‘good’ of society. We are so blinded by seeking what is ‘good’ for self, what is ‘good’ for society, we have become deaf to the cries of people seeking true justice, we have become blind to our acts of injustice and indifferent to the injustices that are perpetrated by society on people who are voiceless and powerless. This has to end, we have to restore justice to it’s proper place, we have to live the words of the prophets and the Bible; “do justly, love mercy, walk humbly with God”. Society and individuals in power have decided they are the arbiters of justice and justice has to suit their needs, their desires and support their power structure. In the Bible, justice is to be rendered by “able men, men with awe of God, men of truth, hating unjust gain”(Exodus 19:21), yet we continue to appoint people who become blind to injustice when justice doesn’t serve their political/religious agenda!

Using justice to meet “a social need” is not justice at all! We have a ringside seat to the circus that is happening in our country, in our Capital where people, when they are called out on their injustices’, accuse the truth-teller of lying. We are witnessing first-hand the same conditions that have fostered, promoted and maintained authoritarianism throughout the ages, following Goebbels’ play book: “Accuse someone else of what you yourself are doing”. We saw this with Roy Cohn, we saw this with the people who were against the Civil Rights movement in the 50’s/60’s till today, we saw this with the promoters and defenders of the Vietnam war, we see this today with the people who are unwilling/unable to accept free and fair elections, with people who want to make it harder for ‘those’ people to vote, with people who want to spread anti-semitic literature and blame the Jews, with people who want to ensure that “the south will rise again” and slavery, mendacity, is the ‘law of the land’, with people who want to hold on to their grip on power because of the color of their skin-white supremacists.

Dark money contributions to political campaigns, politicians, political parties, abusive referendums, is not just-yet our Supreme Court decided it was okay to hide, to keep secrets from people and to not let us decide on candidates to represent us nor on ideas/laws that govern us with all the facts. A corporation is not the same as a human being, it is created to shield human beings from personal liability so the Supreme Court ruling that corporations are the same as individual human beings in campaign funding, in creating PACs, is as ridiculous as it is unjust. Overturning Roe v Wade is another example of political agendas and so-called religious ideas overtaking justice. When justice is seen as a social need, those in power are the arbiters of these social needs and their political leanings, their unreligious ways of not doing justly, not loving mercy, not walking humbly with God, their setting themselves up as gods, as all-knowing, overtake God’s sense of justice, God’s call to care for the voiceless, the powerless, the widow, the orphan, the stranger, the poor, the needy. This is where we find ourselves today as Rabbi Heschel witnessed some 58 years ago!

In recovery, justice is mandatory-not obligatory. Being just with ourselves, with everyone else is paramount to our recovery because we have spent so much of our non-recovery life being unjust, living in mendacity and following Goebbels’ path of accusing another(s) rather than being responsible ourselves. In recovery, we know that when we point our finger towards another, three more are pointing back at us. We know we cannot serve, we cannot be loving towards another(s) and ourselves if we are not living justly, loving mercy.

I am overwhelmed with trembling awe as I see, once again, the wreckage of my past in my rap sheet, as I experience the sadness of loss that I wrought, the pain that I caused. I am also overwhelmed with the injustices around me, personal and global. I have a fire in my belly still, the kind that the prophet Jeremiah describes, and the injustices that I witness to the people around me, to the non-ruling class people by the ‘progressives’ as well as the ‘conservatives’ ‘good people’ make me want to scream and shout. I can’t because I won’t be heard, so I have to find a new way-hopefully this blog is it:) God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 115

“Good and evil are not values among other values. Good is life, and evil is death. “See I have set before thee this day life and good, death and evil…choose life”(Deuteronomy 30:15-19) (God in Search of Man pg 373)

As Rabbi Heschel stresses throughout this chapter in God in Search of Man and throughout all of his writings, speeches, demonstrations and teachings; good and evil have been taken for granted, thrown around like footballs and become irrelevant to so many people. Our inability to discern one from the other is causing destruction, devastation, death and decline, yet we seem to be intent on continuing this descent into self-destruction! I hear Rabbi Heschel’s words: “"Indifference to evil is more insidious than evil itself. It is a silent justification affording evil acceptability in society”, demanding from everyone a new way of being, an end to our indifference, a new beginning of choosing life.

Watching the State of the Union address last evening reminded me of how indifferent to evil we have become. When people were calling the current President of the United States a liar for repeating their words back to them, when they extol the immediate former President for his lies, remember taking bleach to prevent Covid-19, we are witnesses to this indifference. When we consider a corporation to have human rights, we are engaging in indifference. When we go along to get along, we are being indifferent. We have to end our own indifference, not just complain about another human being, another law, another unmet desire. It is time for all of us to heed Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom above and beyond in order to save our own souls, to save our own lives and, of course the lives of everyone else and the life of democracy and freedom.

We seem to have forgotten the responsibility freedom puts upon us, we seem to have become indifferent to the fire for freedom that is in every human being. We seem to have become indifferent to the suffering of another human being and blame them instead of care for them. We seem to have become indifferent to our need to “choose life”! We do not have to see one another as adversaries, this is another step on our path to total indifference. When we set up ‘good guys and bad guys’, we can ignore the plight of people we disagree with, we can look past anyone and everyone who is not ‘with us’, we can look through the needs of another and forget they are our neighbors and we are commanded to “love our neighbor as our self”. I believe this is the key to our indifference. We have stopped loving ourselves enough to “choose life” so there is no chance for us to fulfill this demand, request, prayer of God! Our indifference to the primacy of the values of good and evil, our indifference to our actions towards our self, our negative self-talk, our indifference to our neighbor’s plight because we live in scarcity and miserly, take us to choosing death instead of life.

We need to heed Rabbi Heschel’s brilliance, we need to heed the wonder and radical amazement of Dr. King, we need to live into the words of Jesus, of Moses, of Mohammed, of the Dalai Lama, of the Buddha, etc instead of bastardizing the foundational spiritual principles of faith and of living well. We need to demand of our clergy: kindness, truth, love, justice, mercy, forgiveness, compassion, caring, etc instead of putting up with the outlandish lies, the confusion of good and evil that comes from too many pulpits. We need to stop seeing anyone else as “the other” and remember everyone else is created in the Image of God. We need to “walk in God’s ways” instead of trying to convince ourselves and everyone else that God is walking with us in our race to do evil. We have to stop being indifferent to God’s call which is heard in every cry from another human being for aid and comfort, for freedom and opportunity, for fresh air to breath and healthy water to drink.

In recovery, we are choosing life each and every day. We know our lives depend on the state of our spiritual condition each and every day. We know we no longer have the luxury of being indifferent to anything. We know we must be engaged, involved and active in our daily living and in being of service to everyone who crosses our path. We seek to remove the blinders from our eyes so we can see and discern what “choose life” means today and how to accomplish it. In recovery, we are dedicated to living well.

I just received my past criminal record in the mail for a license I am applying for and looking at it has given me great pain. Not that I was unaware of what is in it, the pain is from my indifference to the evil I wrought with my prior actions, the pain is that I am seeing the wreckage of my past in 6 pages of charges and convictions. The joy is that this is in the past, I have a certificate of rehabilitation from the courts and, most of all, I have a certificate of rehabilitation from God, from my years of service and from the people who love me. I am loud and abrasive when I sense evil, when I sense indifference to evil because I am so sensitive to the slippery slope of indifference which leads to destruction. I am not pretty when I sense it, I am not ‘nice’ when I see it, I get a lot of dirty looks and comments because I have no filter when indifference and/or evil surround me. I am too afraid of both to keep silent. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 115

“Good and evil are not values among other values. Good is life, and evil is death. “See I have set before thee this day life and good, death and evil…choose life”(Deuteronomy 30:15-19) (God in Search of Man pg 373)

Rabbi Heschel’s first sentence above seems obvious, yet he has to state it. In fact, he states it again later in this paragraph. I wondered why at first and then, DUH, he has to state it because we had/have become guilty of confusing good and evil as just another value like honesty/dishonesty, being overcome with a desire/controlling our desires, etc. In the shadow of the Shoah, in the shadow of the Concentration Camps, in the shadow of people’s inhumanity towards people, in the real time of nuclear bombs build-up, in the shadow of the McCarthy Hearings/witch hunt, in the shadow of the killing of Ethel Rosenberg even though the government knew she was innocent, Rabbi Heschel saw truth, saw the way good and evil were tossed around.

I imagine he was abhorred at the idea that the words, good and evil, were just thrown around to justify inhumane actions, to justify life-taking, freedom-denying actions that ‘the people in power’ were taking. Dropping the Atomic Bomb on Japan, while it saved so many lives as opposed to invading Japan, it was not good, it was not life-giving nor life-saving to those who died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki! McCarthy and his ‘commie witch hunt’ was not to save our country, it was not to unearth actual treason, it was to make a name for himself and to punish people who’s politics he did not like. Killing Ethel, and for that matter Julius, Rosenberg did not serve any purpose except to show the anti-semitism that was still abounding in the US at that time (and now). Knowingly putting an innocent woman to death for not telling something she did not know, knowingly suborning perjury from her brother to save his life is not a good thing.

Yet, we continue to confuse good and evil as just another utilitarian value. How do I use them to my advantage people think, then and now-possibly it has been this way forever. When the Congress is going to call Illhan Omar an Anti-Semite because of her comments of years ago and extol Paul Gosar and Marjorie Taylor-Greene who participated in rallies with White Supremacists who spewed out hatred of Jews and they seem unable to pass a bill that ensures equal and fair access to the process of voting while claiming stolen elections and the Republicans call this good, call this living good American values; Rabbi Heschel’s concern and need to re-iterate this seemingly obvious statement that “good and evil are not values among other values” is warranted and necessary.

We must stop using ‘spin’, ‘half-truths’, cover-ups, ‘alternative facts’, etc to define what is good and what is evil! This has gone on too long and look where we are at. We have almost 50% of our country who believes the 2020 election was stolen, that the Jan. 6 insurrection and storming of the Capital was a peaceful demonstration by people who wanted truth restored by overturning a free and fair election. We have elected representatives who supported the insurrection in words and deeds before and after it happened while cowering while it was happening for fear of their lives! We listen to Tucker Carlson, et al spew out so many lies, so much evil that Russia hails him as a hero! We have people who believe it is okay for Putin to invade Ukraine because he is ‘the savior of the white race’! We are watching, finally in some horror, as Police beat Black men to death just because they are black and make up lies to validate their behaviors and call them good. We are watching, some of us in horror, as these same evil Police (not all Police are evil) get away with these actions as they have forever. There is no personal accountability and, in the overwhelming amount of cases that are brought against them, they are acquitted.  We use the words good and evil without truly ascribing the the life and death values they embody. We have come to make them like most values-in the eye of the beholder and to be used for personal validation rather than to save life, to serve another and to serve God.

In recovery, most of us realize we were both at death’s door many times and we were the bringer of almost death, certainly spiritual death, certainly emotional suffering to the people closest to us, to the people who loved us and to the stranger. Instead of caring for people, we used them; instead of bringing good, we perpetrated evil. Our recovery is based on making our amends not just for past actions, it is based on living amends by “practicing these principles in all our affairs”. We know, firsthand, that evil is death, because we were close to spiritual death. We are learning that good is life.

I know how much death evil brings. I saw it in the eyes of the people closest to me, I saw it in people who came for help. I see it in people on the street who are suffering because of the evil that is being perpetrated. It is not okay for me to just not do evil anymore, that was okay for a while. Immersing myself in Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom reminds me that I have to seek to do good, I have to find good to bring to each and every day-otherwise evil wins! God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 114

“After the Lord had created the universe, He took a look at His creation. What was the word that conveyed His impression? If an artist were to find a word describing how the universe looked to God at the dawn of its existence, the word would be sublime or beautiful. But the word that the Bible has is good. Indeed, when looking through a telescope into the stellar space, the word that comes to our mind is grandeur, mystery, splendor. But the God of Israel is not impressed with splendor; He is impressed with goodness.”(God In Search of Man pg.372-373)

God’s repeating of the word “good” in the first Chapter of Genesis points to the validity and wisdom of Rabbi Heschel’s teaching above. In the first chapter we are told that light and good comes from God’s declaration of the need for light that emanates from the darkness over the deep and the chaos and void that precedes the light. Only upon seeing what is needed to make the world better and fill that need can God declare “good”. Immersing ourselves in the text of this first chapter and in the wisdom above, gives greater definition to what it means to be human, I believe.

Humanity became obsessed with creating splendor and beauty, grandeur and solving the mysteries of the Universe while ignoring the teachings of God in the first chapter, deceiving itself that it was caring for the earth, that self-satisfaction, self-importance, self-empowerment was ‘good’. We made up laws and rules that served the strong, the mighty, the rich, the ruling class in order to control another(s) and to make oneself into an object of worship. Bowing down to kings, queens, etc became more important than worshiping God, from taking a “leap of action”, as Rabbi Heschel teaches, to fulfill the need that only we can fulfill. We became and continue to be a society that is obsessed with power, glory, beauty, splendor, grandeur, solving mysteries; a society that is obsessed with our mental acuity at the cost of our spiritual health, at the cost of “goodness”, at the cost of being human and humane.

We have forgotten that light/good comes from the darkness, the void, the chaos that life is. Nowhere in the Bible are we told that these three basic elements of creation are eradicated, nowhere are we told that they disappear and/or they have no effect on us. Because each and every day is new, each and every day is pregnant with possibilities of creations, the three foundational elements are with us each and every day. Yet, we keep trying to ignore them, go around them, explain them, overpower them with our intellects as Descartes said: “I think therefore I am”. Rather, as I understand Rabbi Heschel today, We are therefore we act, think, etc. We have to see ourselves and all humanity as beings that are created in the Image of God, we have to accept that everyone is needed in order to fulfill the need only they can fulfill. Rabbi Heschel is reminding us that we need to return to our basic goodness of being that is implanted in us by God. We are being called to imitate God’s goodness, to “do justly”, to “walk in God’s ways”, to return to God each and every day.

We are in a state of being, as has been the case to a lessor and greater degree forever, of crowing and reveling in our power. We are engaged in a war with false ego, false pride, power for the sake of enslaving another(s), worshiping our minds and fawning over beauty, splendor, mystery, etc. We see this in our government, we see this in our institutions, we see this in our obsession with social media, we see this in the ways we hide from self and one another, we see this in our religious institutions, we see this in our families. Yet, we have come to normalize these behaviors and are bewildered that someone would call us out on it. We have all the excuses and reasons as to why and how we are ‘good people’ and ‘doing God’s will’ while we are blind to our indifference to the “goodness” God desires, the “goodness” our souls cry out to do. We engage in the ‘goodness’ our intellects direct us to and it is almost always tinged with self-aggrandizement, self-centeredness.

In recovery, we “turn our will and our lives over to the care of God…” and we have a prayer that asks to be relieved of the “bondage of self”. We know we are in need of help from a source greater than ourselves because we have failed in our attempts to think our way out of the darkness, chaos, emptiness of life. We know we have a strong ego that wants to, and has in the past, overpower our soul, drown out the “still small voice of God” within us. So we ask to be relieved of the “bondage of self” and in this way we can see/hear how to live in the “goodness” God is calling for, how to act ourselves into the “goodness” God is demanding of us. This is, again, a foundation of our recovery and needs to grow at least one grain of sand each day.

I am loud and abrasive, impractical and demanding, and constantly seeking ways to live in the “goodness” Rabbi Heschel is teaching me about and that God is demanding. I fall short as does every human being; this is not the core of this teaching, the core of God’s Demand. The core is to keep “failing forward” as I learned from a businessman many years ago. The challenge is to never give up, never get stuck in the chaos, the void, the darkness. The challenge is to continue to reach up to the spirit of God that hovers over our world and reach down within us to our soul’s knowledge, strength, power so we continue to be 51% decent, 51% kind, just, loving,caring, truthful; thereby living 51% in goodness each day. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 112

“After the Lord had created the universe, He took a look at His creation. What was the word that conveyed His impression? If an artist were to find a word describing how the universe looked to God at the dawn of its existence, the word would be sublime or beautiful. But the word that the Bible has is good. Indeed, when looking through a telescope into the stellar space, the word that comes to our mind is grandeur, mystery, splendor. But the God of Israel is not impressed with splendor; He is impressed with goodness.”(God In Search of Man pg.372-373)

“To teach humanity the primacy of that distinction is of the essence to the Biblical message”, Rabbi Heschel is using the Bible as his proof text. God is not concerned with splendor, with grandeur, with mystery as Rabbi Heschel teaches us, God is impressed and, I would add, concerned with goodness. We keep seeking to uncover the sublime, the beautiful, we worship splendor and grandeur, we continue to follow ‘the beautiful people’, we make idols out of celebrities and our need for dopamine has reached such a level that we are constantly seeking greater and greater acts in order to feel alive, in order to experience grandeur, etc. Rabbi Heschel is reminding us, chiding us, imploring us, as I hear his words ringing in my head and heart, to get back to goodness, return to distinguishing good from evil. Otherwise, I believe he is teaching us, we lose our humanity and we stop being human and become a human being that exists and is empty.

We seem to be so caught up in looking good, feeling good, that we miss the opportunities to do good and to be good. This is a trait that has been passed down through the generations beginning with Adam and Eve, Cain/Abel, Jacob/Esau, Joseph/his brothers, etc. We are trying to impress one another, we try to impress God with the grandeur and beauty of our sacrifices, our rites and rituals, and it doesn’t work according to the wisdom above. We are left empty and God is the opposite of impressed, God is disgusted according to the Prophets! They railed against our beautiful sacrifices and rituals that did not change our attitudes nor our actions towards the stranger, the poor, the needy. They told the people stop with these sacrifices and engage in “love your neighbor as you love yourself”. Yet, the people could not hear them, just as we have not been able to hear Rabbi Heschel and other modern-day prophets such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Father Gregory Boyle, Pastor William Barber, John Pavlovitz, Pastor Mark Whitlock, Rabbi Harold Shulweis, John Lewis, Martin Buber, Pastor Ed Treat, Reinhold Niebuhr, etc. Instead we listen to and follow the false prophets like John Hagee, Jerry Falwell Sr and Jr, Pat Robertson, Franklin Graham, the Fellowship Foundation and their false rhetoric of what God wants, their false actions in pursuit of power for themselves and for their cronies, the lies and deceptions they are selling to people in the name of God that is actually in the name of IDOLATRY!

Goodness is what impresses God as Rabbi Heschel is teaching us, yet, we continue to put more stock in grandeur, beauty, the sublime, the mystery. We are seeking to know God and to find God rather than to “walk in God’s ways”, rather than “do justly and love mercy”. We are not supposed to know God nor find God’s Abode because the “whole world declares God’s Glory” so God is everywhere, within everyone, every creature. We are being called on to practice goodness, to make distinctions between good and evil and we continue to be impressed with grandeur, we continue to believe that our minds will save us and the distinctions can be made by our lower/rational mind rather than our higher consciousness, our spirits, our intuitive mind. Rabbi Heschel is demanding we return to our basic goodness of being and our seeking beauty, grandeur, the sublime, etc will be found within our being good and distinguishing good from evil.

In recovery we “made a decision to turn our lives and will over to the care of God as we understand God”. This step encourages us to find our own understanding of God as we learn in Chapter 15 of Exodus after the Israelites crossed the Red Sea. This step is the only way we can continue to grow in our recovery because it is a return to our basic goodness of being, it is a return to relearning how to distinguish between good and evil, between deception and truth, between mendacity and authenticity. We return to a primordial state of openness, of knowledge, and of action. Our hearing improves so we can tell when deception abounds and when we are in truth as well as when others are in truth. We return to a state where service to God, to another human being, to tending our corner of God’s Garden becomes a daily opportunity and a daily joy.

Writing this today, I am in deep remorse for the times when my hearing, my seeing, my actions were for the sake of self and I believed/disguised them as being for the sake of God, of another. I am, in hindsight and with the help of Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom, able to discern the subtleties that easily disguise good and evil. I see how my own self-deception and fears led me to not say things I should have and say things that I should not have. They led to make bad decisions and take wrong actions that I regret and caused pain to another(s). I am sorry for these errors, From these ‘missing the marks’ I continue to grow in sight, grow in goodness, grow in being responsible and grow in service. The key is to serve people, to serve God and in so doing my soul is served and my life just keeps getting better and better. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark.

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 112

“The power to make distinctions is a primary operation of intelligence. We distinguish between white and black, beautiful and ugly, pleasant and unpleasant, gain and loss, good and evil, right and wrong. The fate of mankind depends upon the realization that the distinction between good and evil, right and wrong, is superior to all other distinctions. As long as such realization is lacking, pleasantness in alliance with evil will be preferred to unpleasantness in alliance with good. To teach humanity the primacy of that distinction is of the essence to the Biblical message.”(God in Search of Man pg.372)

Rabbi Heschel’s observation regarding the “pleasantness in alliance with evil” and the “unpleasantness in alliance with good” is counterintuitive to what most people think they believe. Most of us equate good/right with pleasantness in our self-deceptive thinking. The truth, as Rabbi Heschel illuminates for us above, is that we are more comfortable and joyous in our alliance with evil than with good.

It is unpleasant to do the right thing, to take the next right action, to admit our flaws and errors, to stand up to the majority who are running to do evil, to act in ways that are Holy, to live the 10 Sayings, etc. It is unpleasant because we will not always be popular, it is unpleasant because we reveal what is underneath the facades we wear and humanity wears. It is unpleasant because we have to face the truth of our actions, we have to no longer blame anyone else, we have to accept our self for who we are, we have to make the commitment to change and grow in goodness and in being one grain of sand better each day. It is unpleasant because we have to stand with the poor, the stranger, the needy not just to help them, we have to see how we ourselves them. We have to feed our souls so we are not a stranger to our self, we have to enrich our learning  and our actions in order to not stay poor and we have to fill the needs of our soul for connection with authentic connection, with covenantal connections not just the transactional ones we have been engaging in.

It is unpleasant to do a daily T’Shuvah, a weekly T’Shuvah inventory. It means we have to take a truthful look at our self, we have to acknowledge our errors, our missing the marks, we have to see our imperfections and not hide, blame, reason, explain, deny them! This is not a pleasant activity. We have to take our part in our interactions that go south, most of us are not all innocent in any interaction, in any experience- exceptions being made for the assaulters on us, on our freedoms, ie, Ukraine, driving while black, being a Jew, a Muslim, an Irish, an Italian. It is not fun to say, “I made a mistake”; we know this because so many people are unable to say it, to mean it, to correct their mistakes. We see this in the ways we continue to do incarcerate people for drug offenses and other crimes caused by addictions rather than treat them, help them. It’s far better to validate our “tough on crime” stance than look at our failures in this area, it is very unpleasant to look at our own ‘criminal’ behaviors in the ways we treat another(s) person, the ways we deny the dignity of groups of human beings because they are not like us.

It is much more pleasant to deceive ourselves that we are denying freedoms to groups of people ‘for their own good’, ‘because they would not know what to do with it’, and other such lies we have told ourselves, our children, our neighbors. It is far more pleasant for Jim Jordan and his cronies to berate and investigate the Justice Department regarding Hunter Biden than investigate themselves for their part in the Jan.6th insurrection. Kevin McCarthy will investigate so he can retain power, so Republicans can serve Tucker Carlson-a Russian favorite talk host-, serve the rich donors and corporations rather than care about the poor, the needy, the stranger. They can say all they want about Ilhan Omer and her inappropriate anti-Semitic comments from years ago without confronting their own White Supremacist agendas, remember Marjorie Taylor Greene’s quote about Jewish Space Lasers and she is rewarded?! It is more pleasant to quote the Bible and live in opposition to the principles of the Bible, of God, of Jesus that it is to confront their idolatry, their taskmaster mentality, their insatiable thirst for power to hurt another, to deny the dignity of human beings.

In recovery, we are engaged in turning away from the pleasantness of evil because we were so engaged in it prior to our recovery. Recovery itself is about dealing with the “unpleasantness in alliance with good”. We are constantly engaging with our better natures in battle against our more negative natures. We know we have to be aware of the cunning and baffling nature of evil with it’s pleasantness and ability to disguise itself as good. This is a daily challenge and we do a 10th step to keep ourselves accountable.

T’Shuvah is the response that has made my life what it is. It is my solution for every day living-I am not always aware of the missing the mark I did each day, yet eventually I realize them. I engage in the unpleasantness with good with excitement and humility. I am also aware of the traps of the pleasantness with evil and am constantly checking myself when I am feeling too good about my actions. Immersing myself in Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom reminds me to stay in touch with my inner life and not allow my emotions to tell me what is right, what is good because I can easily deceive myself! God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 111

“The power to make distinctions is a primary operation of intelligence. We distinguish between white and black, beautiful and ugly, pleasant and unpleasant, gain and loss, good and evil, right and wrong. The fate of mankind depends upon the realization that the distinction between good and evil, right and wrong, is superior to all other distinctions. As long as such realization is lacking, pleasantness in alliance with evil will be preferred to unpleasantness in alliance with good. To teach humanity the primacy of that distinction is of the essence to the Biblical message.”(God in Search of Man pg.372)

We have never been great at the realization of the second sentence above. Human Beings continue to seek out ways to destroy their ‘enemies’ while thriving themselves and it always results in tragedy. This is true since the beginning: Cain did not thrive after killing his brother, the Israelites became slaves, free people, then lost their land, we do not hear of the Assyrians, the Babylonians, Romans, Greeks of antiquity except in history. What has saved humankind, I believe, is that the messages of the Prophets, the messages of God through Moses has survived and, at times, thrived. No matter how close we come to annihilating ourselves, we have managed so far to be saved by their messages of return, of hope and realizing the “distinction between good and evil, right and wrong, is superior to all other distinctions”. We faced this 90 years ago with the election of Adolf Hitler in Germany and it took us 6-9 years to stand up to him and his Nazi collaborators, ensuring the buildup of the German Army and Concentration Camps and 12 years to defeat the Axis Powers and save the remnant of Jews, Gypsies, LGBTQ, and resisters from their death camps.

We can see how “pleasantness in alliance with evil” is being preferred today as it was then. In the USA, we hear about Christian Nation, America First, we hear about the ‘dreaded immigrants at our Southern border’, we don’t hear about the horror and consequences for the murder of Jamil Koshoggi, the consequences of the Saudi’s who attacked our country on 9/11, we hear words of praise and defense for the leaders of the Confederate Army and anger as well as disdain when these traitors’ statues are removed. We hear about bans on teaching the true history of slavery in this country, we hear anger and protests against Jews such as “Jews will not replace us” and we hear about using Congressional hearings to attack and weaponize government against the enemies of the Freedom Caucus, the enemies of the MAGA crowd and the silent acquiescence of other Republicans to these attacks, to these protests, to these bans. The people at the extremes have absolutely let go of any and all capacity to not only distinguish between good and evil, they have completely prefer  the alliance of “unpleasantness with evil”. They can no longer distinguish one from the other-this is true no matter which extreme one is on, their pleasantness with evil is a prerequisite for their extreme positions because this position doesn’t allow for any doubts or questioning. The people who, I believe, Rabbi Heschel is speaking to us is everyone else. And, I am sad to say, we seem to be failing in our duty, our need, for humanity to remain humane, for power and greed to not rule us, to stop buying the lie of powerless and voiceless. The fact that the Bible has survived these 2500+ years, the fact that it is still the foundational basis of western morality, the foundational basis of freedom, is proof that we are not powerless nor voiceless in this war against being human that has always been waged by the rich, the powerful, the ruling classes against the rest of us.

We, the People, in order to form a “more perfect union” have to live into this realization that the distinction between right and wrong, good and evil is the primary distinction we have to make, each and every day, in each and every action we take. History, personal and global, has taught us that we have to make this distinction before taking an action, before deciding to go along to get along, before running after the majority to do evil, before deciding our fears are going to override the courage and knowledge of our souls/higher Consciousness. While we may not all be Mensa people, most of us, I believe and others disagree with me, learn to make the distinctions between good and evil, between right and wrong; most of us can hear the call of our souls and allow this call to lead us to do the next right thing. We can only do this when we are ready to fight for what is right, fight against evil, end our indifference to evil, stop taking our freedoms and way of living for granted. We have to tune our ears to God’s frequency instead of tuning into the “I will save you” frequency, instead of the “they are out to get us frequency”, etc.

This is one of the major changes we make in recovery. We stop following the “k-fuck” radio station that has been playing forever in our heads and we tune into hearing the call of our inner lives, the call of a trusted friend, a sponsor, a spiritual guide to help us distinguish between right and wrong actions, between what is good and what is evil both in the moment and for the long term. We use another person because we are humble enough to know that no matter how long we have in recovery, the ability to lie to ourselves, the ability to become willfully blind, never leaves us. After having not made the right decision for so long, this change becomes part of our foundation and living principles in our recovery. While difficult, this distinction is what our survival as human beings able to make free-will moral choices depends on. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 110

“The power to make distinctions is a primary operation of intelligence. We distinguish between white and black, beautiful and ugly, pleasant and unpleasant, gain and loss, good and evil, right and wrong. The fate of mankind depends upon the realization that the distinction between good and evil, right and wrong, is superior to all other distinctions. As long as such realization is lacking, pleasantness in alliance with evil will be preferred to unpleasantness in alliance with good. To teach humanity the primacy of that distinction is of the essence to the Biblical message.”(God in Search of Man pg.372)

We have come to worship our intellects, I believe, precisely because of this “primary operation”, yet we seem to be like surgeons without training, spiritual leaders without a sense of a power greater than themselves/higher consciousness, CPA’s who can’t read a balance sheet, musicians who don’t know how to play their instruments, etc. We worship intellect and we do not always make the distinctions Rabbi Heschel is talking about. We may do the prayers of Havdalah, the ending of the Sabbath in the Jewish Tradition, with the prayer of gratitude for distinctions, yet we ourselves seem incapable of distinguishing fact from fiction, lawful from lawless, what we are called to do and what we want to do. We seem to be a society, that knows how to make distinctions and yet, we only make the ones we want to serve our self, and we will engage in mendacity, self-deception to defend our inappropriate choices.

This is, as Rabbi Heschel suggests with the last sentence above, an age-old problem. We are witnesses to what Rabbi Heschel is warning us against. He wrote in the backdrop of the Shoah, of WWII, what we believed then as “man’s greatest inhumanity towards man”. We get to immerse ourselves in his wisdom today in the backdrop of anti-semitism rising again, Hitler being praised, racism, police brutality that goes beyond color lines, Russia invading Ukraine, Middle East unrest, ‘alternative facts’, etc. We have watched our country fade from being a shining city on the hill to a mere facade and empty shell of democracy with politics being about combat nor governing. We have watched one group of people, both lawmakers and the citizens who elect them,  say they are for law and order and they will not support the Capital Police, they will not hold the leaders of Jan. 6th responsible. They extol people who support White Supremacists, Anti-Semites, Killers of innocent Journalists, business people who only care about the bottom line while cheating the people that work for them. More tax cuts and more safety net cuts Kevin McCarthy brags about, while the people of his district will suffer from a government shut-down, from a loss in Social Security and Medicare.

We seem to be incapable of staying the course of making the distinctions between good and evil, right and wrong, when it serves our selfish needs. We seem to be able to distinguish between Jew and non-Jew, hence anti-semitism is on the rise, we seem to be able to distinguish between black and white, hence bi-racial couples and children are vilified and driving/walking while black is a crime punishable by death by cops! We seem to be losing the capacity to distinguish between pleasant and unpleasant because we have upended their definitions, we are in a time of spiritual crisis, a crisis of the soul which Maimonides, the famous Middle Ages philosopher and Rabbi speaks about in his book, The Eight Chapters.

The main issue for us today is that we are too blind, too scared, too selfish, too boorish to realize our blindness, our incapacity to make the proper distinctions. We are being aided in our blindness and incapacity by the very Clergy who are supposed to represent, teach and live “the Biblical message”! People are leaving the Churches and the Synagogues because their souls are not being fed with truth, rather with pap, with hearing what they want to hear and it being delivered tepidly. Or the messages of what is right is being so bastardized by the people in the Pulpits that the only people who go are those ‘true believers’ who want to hear validation of them making the wrong distinctions, validation of their “eye disease” of prejudice, etc.

In recovery, we learn to make the proper distinctions from the moment we enter this life-saving process. We begin with the first step: we begin to distinguish what we are powerless over and what we can control. We learn that controlling another person is not within our purview and being able to control our choices is. We learn that while we could have one drink, one bite, one snort, one bet, one quickie, we will not be able to NOT have the second, third, etc. We distinguish between what is our selfish will, our messages of lies and deceptions that emanate in our minds and from the minds of another, of society and what is truth from within and from our Higher Power/Higher Consciousness.

One of the great distinctions I have been aware of in my recovery is to see the Divine Image in every person, whether they show it to me, whether they live it, even when the hide it, I see it and try to speak to it, try to embrace every person’s divinity and I fall short. I am grateful for this sight, I also do not hide my Divine Image from anyone so that I am never alone, I am never lonely. Living through my Divine Image makes me closer to being One with God each day. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 109

“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)

This is the last day I will spend on this teaching of Rabbi Heschel’s. It has profoundly changed my being and my way of living. While I knew much of what Rabbi Heschel is saying, I didn’t really know it. This is the wonder of Rabbi Heschel for me, he gives us a doorway, a window, an insight into how religion can help us live better, how hearing God’s call, while challenging, is not impossible. Yet, he also calls religious people out for the ways they have cheapened, bastardized, diluted and distorted the wonder, beauty, awe, live giving and enhancing necessities religion/spirituality give us.

10) Don’t hate your brother in your heart, take no vengeance against the children of your people. What a strange statement at first blush and it tells us much about sibling rivalry. Since Cain and Abel brothers have hated one another in their hearts which I understand as a basic hatred that my brother/sister are going to get more than me, be better liked than me, etc. This competition and comparison that has been going on forever is destructive to family life, it is destructive to communal life and it is destructive for our inner life. Our need to be #1, our need to be ‘the best’, causes a rivalry that the Bible calls hatred! We are told not to hate our brothers in our heart precisely because we were, we do, we will if/when we think we are not getting ‘our fair share’ of attention, love, money, etc from our parents, from our extended family. “My son, the Doctor” is something that Jewish Comedians made/make jokes about, yet it comes from a very real pain of anything less didn’t measure up. “Why can’t you be more like your brother” was/is a popular refrain as well. This commandment calls us to see one another for who we are, accept each other for our strengths and weaknesses, and work together to make family, community and one another one grain of sand better each day.

The second phrase reminds me of when this started, back with Noah. When he cursed Canaan for his getting drunk and Ham’s uncovering/making fun of him, this began the vengeance against the children of your people. It continued with Sarah, Hagar and Ishmael, on to Esau’s rage against Jacob. It has continued to this day; the Arabs and Jews are cousins, we share the same father, Abraham and his sons are the different branches of his family-Jews and Arabs. Isn’t it time for us to put down our swords, stop being vengeful and stop hating our brothers/cousins in our hearts. I believe once we see each other as kin under the skin, acknowledge our shared lineage and accept one another as worthy human beings, we will find a solution to the current conflict-that was stoked by the British to keep control of Palestine for themselves!

The last commandment is: “You shall love your neighbor as you love yourself, I am God”. The addition of “I am God” gives us an idea of how important a demand this is. While this is used in other verses of the Holiness Code, I mention it here to emphasize how important love between one another is to God. We are not told to love our siblings, to love our parents, only to love God and our neighbor! I believe the call here is to remember that each and every neighbor is a representative of God, reminds us of God’s presence, is a partner with us in our endeavors as we are in theirs, etc. We are also being told to love ourselves, that living these earlier demands, living the 10 Sayings, will bring us to love ourselves as we love our neighbors, love our selves as God loves us, and then we will create space for love, kindness, rebuke, charity, kindness, justice, mercy, truth. This is the goal of these demands, not to serve some power hungry human being, not to serve some false idol, but to create a world that honors and relishes God as our neighbor, that honors and loves the Divine Image of one another so we can each be better at being human.

In recovery, as in my living these past 35+ years, this is what we strive to fulfill; a world of love, justice, mercy, kindness, truth. It is a world that honors the divine image of another and see’s our own reflected in the eyes of one another. We welcome the stranger in recovery, we learn from one another, we truly practice love for our neighbor-one of the phrases we use in recovery: “Let us love you until you can love yourself” is our way of fulfilling the ultimate demand of the holiness code. It is our way to acknowledge the importance of every human being and the spiritual awakening that results from opening our hearts, our arms, our minds to care for “the alcoholic who still suffers”.

I have more love for my neighbors than I might show, I have no vengeance for my people, which is God’s people, I have no hatred for my siblings only love. I have seen how much I have fulfilled these demands of God, I have witnessed how many people fulfill these demands all the time, every day. I am aware of when I have fallen short and am deeply remorseful and apologize to the people I have harmed by not loving them, I also know that not loving another human being is a sign that I am not loving my self also. I commit to loving you and me more each day. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 108

“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)

Both religion and every spiritual discipline demand ways of being from us and, while many want to rebel against these demands, these demands are actually the pathways to answers to the questions that haunt us all: “why am I here”, “who am I”, “how do I feed my desperate need for connection”, “what is God saying to me” are some of the most common questions we wrestle with. I believe the holiness code has within it so many of these demands that help us find our unique answers to these questions and so many more. Continuing with the demands of the Bible and my explanations of them:

9) You will not stand idly by the blood of your neighbor, you shall rebuke him/her and not put missing the mark upon him. While these two phrases do not follow one another in The Bible, I am putting them together for our purpose. In their own ways, they speak to the demands of living in communal spaces, a response to our selfishness and self-seeking. We are witnessing the exact opposite of the first phrase in our world today. The Police killings of Black men simply because they are black with no real change in policing techniques, with still not holding most of the offenders responsible and shielding them from lawsuits is “standing idly by the blood of your neighbor”. Applauding the hate speech and the anti-Semitic tropes on the different social media platforms and at rallies is “standing idly by the blood of your neighbor”. Remember the phrase ends with neighbor which means anyone who lives in the same neighborhood, city, county, state, c country is considered, in Biblical terms, one’s neighbor. We are witnesses and, for some, participants in watching the demise of someone else with apathy, with joy, with schadenfreude. We want to take down the powerful, we want to take down our ‘enemies’ and we see so many others as more powerful than we, we see enemies behind every door and through every window. We are standing idly when we do not vote in our elections, we are standing idly by when we make ‘good guys and bad guys’, when we allow the cancer and eye disease of prejudice to blind us to the humanity of those ‘bad guys’. We watched, hopefully in horror, as people seeking refuge were treated like animals, their children separated from them only to cause pain and suffering, and we did not hold the perpetrators responsible, instead many of them got re-elected. The Republicans who mocked Nancy Pelosi and her husband after a man broke into her house and almost killed Paul Pelosi with a hammer stood idly by the blood of their neighbor! We see this all the time, we see people who witness crimes who don’t want to get involved. We must recall Martin Neimoller, a Lutheran Minister who wrote a poem that captures this demand so well: First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me. We have witnessed this over and over again and we still do not speak out, we still do not stand up, stand with our neighbors who are being treated explicitly or implicitly with bias, with prejudice, with hatred.

We have to stand up, we have to stand by, we have to risk the wrath of those in power for the sake of our neighbor and for the sake of our soul. This demand is not just about helping those in need, it is about helping our self be more human. It is to remind us of our dignity, our value, our internal need to connect and care for another human being. It is a demand that makes us more whole internally, spiritually and emotionally. Not standing idly by the blood of our neighbor is not about vengeance, it is about giving voice and power to overcome our own fears of persecution, our own fears of being harmed and to rise above our fears and worries to answer the demand of religion/spirituality, the demand of God, and the demand of our souls. We are not just being ‘do-gooders’, we are satisfying a deep need inside of us that most of us have tried to starve out of existence and never do.

In recovery, we say the only requirement is a desire to stop__. We welcome the drunk, the sinner, the ne’er do well, etc. We will not let anything come in the way of our helping another alcoholic, addict, in any and all forms. We are dedicated to carrying a message to alcoholics who still suffer so they can find and follow the demands of their spirit, the demands of their higher power.

I remember being turned away from the Temple I was Bar Mitzvah and who’s clergy had officiated at my father’s funeral and my brother’s wedding on Yom Kippur because I didn’t have a ticket. I responded to the institution that stood idly by the blood of their neighbor by making sure that no one was denied entry to Beit T’Shuvah for a lack of funds. Because we responded to God’s Voice,  we were able to help people who had no where else to turn. We never stood idly by the blood of our neighbor. I know there were times when I did stand idly by and I am sorry for those errors. I also know I did not stand idly by for most of these past 35 years. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 107

“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)

God calls to us, according to Jewish Wisdom, each and every day. God cries that we are in exile. God wants a relationship with each of us, our souls cry as well to be heard, to be followed, yet we continue to run the other way. We say we are confused, we believe we are following God’s Will when we are distorting and diluting God’s call and the call of our souls. Here are more ways to hear, listen, understand; to live the Shema Yisrael, daily.

7) Do not curse the deaf, do not put a stumbling block before the blind. We go against this command all the time. Society, for the millennia, has taken advantage of people, has used our vulnerabilities against us. We use double speak and false flags, alternative facts and spin to confuse one another. We speak in ways that are so easy to misunderstand in order to ‘win’. We refuse to hear the call of our souls, we refuse to discern truth from fiction, we are proper and polite rather than real and messy. We believe Caveat Emptor is the way to go rather than disclosing everything to someone else. We hide the real us so we can get along, so we can overpower, so we can be ‘king/queen of the hill’. We live in a world where leaders and us play 3-card monte with the truth. God and our souls are calling for us to live authentically, to be messy and to return to our basic goodness of being.

8) Practice righteous judgement, do not slander. Rather than judge according to our bias’ we have to discern what is true, what is righteous, what is charitable. We have to stop allowing our feelings, our political bias’ from blinding us to truthful and correct. We are so caught up in running with the majority to be liked and be with the ‘in-crowd’, we go along with distortion, with dilution and with evil! We have to stop slandering one another as well as ourselves. We have to heed God’s call to judge ourselves and one another with righteousness, we have to stop slandering ourselves with negative speech and we have to engage with one another in truth. We cannot return to our purpose and/or our authentic self without living these commandments.

These four ways of heeding “the eternal voice of God” that religion provides for us as solutions to the problem of evil, the problem of living well are essential for us to recover and to live. We are in the depths of despair, we are in the throes of a pandemic which are isolating us more and more from one another and from our self, our soul. We are living in an epidemic of addiction and it touches each and every one of us. This epidemic is not just about drugs, alcohol, gambling, etc, it encompasses the lies we are telling our selves, the lies we tell one another, the anger and hatred that is being spewed in the halls of justice, in the halls of government, in the halls of our schools, in the restaurants we go to, the business’ we enter, in the halls of our workplace and within the walls of our houses of worship and within the walls of our homes. We are willing to throw people who have helped us away when they can no longer do something for us, we are willing to throw people away when they speak truth we do not want to hear, we are willing to throw people away for being themselves, messing up and not giving them a path of repentance, repair and new responses. Yet, we never want to be thrown away by God nor by another! We are engaged in violence in our speech, in our actions towards another and towards ourselves. This is why the Holiness Code is so important to our well-being!

In recovery, we put down our swords and our shields, we turn them into pruning hooks and plowshares. We stop making war with another and within our self. We engage in these actions that God calls us to do. We “practice these principles in all our affairs” because we have woken up to truth, we have woken up to what is authentic inside of us and outside of us. We let go of needing to be right and we engage in learning how to leave the past in the past, see today as a gift, and be of service as a way of paying God back for the bounty we enjoy in our new way of living.

I know how difficult living these principles are, I am aware of the times I have fallen short in achieving them and I know that over these past 35 years, I have made spiritual progress. Rabbi Heschel speaks of “taking a leap of action” and these principles give me the opportunity to do this. I slander less, I am more righteous in my judgements, I work hard to uncover my eyes, let go of my prejudices so I do not curse the deaf nor put stumbling blocks before the blind, beginning with myself. The more I take these actions towards me, the more I act in these ways towards everyone else. I repent, I repair and I have new responses to old ideas, old ways. This allows me to be present, relish this day and hear God clearer and improve my spiritual connection with God, with you and with my soul. God Bless, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 106

“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)

Answering “the eternal voice of God”, which is one of the two most important “cravings of the spirit”, is a hidden craving as well. Most of us are not able to put words to this craving and Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom above not only puts words to this internal craving, he gives us a path to responding: “the demands of religion”. I am continuing from my blog from yesterday to use the “Holiness” code to show both the “eternal voice of God” and how we can answer by following “the demands of religion”/spirituality.

5) “Do not steal, deal falsely, not lie to one another”. While we are told in the 10 Sayings not to steal, it is repeated here again along with dealing falsely and lying. When we stop looking “for an angle/edge”, when we end our belief of caveat emptor, when we end out incessant need to be false, lie to another, we are able to stop stealing. Dealing falsely and lying to one another are the same as stealing; we are stealing the dignity, the trust, and seeing another as less than we in value and worth. Living in truth is the demand of religion/spirituality and the call of “the eternal voice of God”.

6) “You shall not defraud your neighbor, nor rob him, the wages of your workers shall not remain with you overnight”. Here again, we are being called to be honest in all of our affairs, we are being demanded to be a neighbor, not an adversary. This is another form of stealing that we are being told not to do-cheating our neighbor, being deceptive with the people around us, anyone we come into contact with. When we are stingy, when we refuse to given another person something that they need in order to survive (without putting ourselves in the same position) we are robbing them. When move the boundaries of our land markers, we are robbing our neighbor. When we refuse to help those who are helping people, we are robbing people.

The last phrase, regarding people who work for/with us is (or is supposed to be) the foundation of all labor laws. It is part of this demand, I believe, because to hold the wages of people who work for us is to cheat them, rob from them, treat them as our adversaries rather than as part of our team. Do we really need to hold their wages so we can get another day of interest, see the numbers of our bank accounts go up? Do we really need to hold their money so we can ‘show them who’s boss’? Do we really need to not pay our credit cards and bills when due? When we do this, we are running away from the demands  religion (and spirituality) are the answer!

It is incumbent upon us to reach across the land boundaries to engage with our neighbor, to meet and greet them with smiles and recognize their worth, remember we live in the same neighborhood and we need one another to make our homes, our neighborhoods, more welcoming, more friendly. God dwells not only in our Houses of Worship, God dwells in our homes and neighborhoods. Being a good neighbor, a helpful neighbor is responding to “the eternal voice of God”. When we pay people a living wage, when we make sure our pay periods work for the people we hire, when we treat them as teammates, making sure we honor their work/service, their skills, we are responding to God’s voice, we are living a little more holy with each action.

In recovery, we are constantly seeking to improve our character traits and bring them back into proper measure. We stop being stingy and we don’t become spendthrifts. We let go of resentments and we don’t become doormats. We don’t steal nor deal falsely with anyone and we learn how to discern when someone is attempting to cheat us. We let go of our self-centeredness and experience the freedom that comes from being of service. We continue to clear out the schmutz that blocks our hearing “the eternal voice of God”. We are work hard to respect the dignity, the value, the worth of every individual and we no longer take people for granted, we no longer believe that anyone, even those who work for us, ‘owe us’ and we no longer treat our neighbors nor our workers with disdain. In recovery, we are recovering our holiness, we are recovering our hearing, we are heeding the demands that spirituality/religion are putting on us and experiencing these demands as gifts rather than burdens.

Stealing, defrauding, dealing falsely, not paying bills on time, lying were all part of my actions prior to my recovery, my T’Shuvah, my return to religion/spiritual principles. While I have not been perfect, I have made it a point to give more than I receive, not knowingly steal, defraud, hold someone’s payment, lie to another nor to myself. People may believe I have done these actions, I just did not do them willingly and/or with malice as I did prior to my return. In this writing, I realize my need to believe brought me pain and loss when the people I trusted lied to me, abandoned our friendship/agreement, defrauded me and robbed me of my dignity. The hurt is still here, and it does not prevent me from trusting, it doesn’t make me wary, it makes me aware and is my hearing aid so I know when truth is being spoken and when it isn’t. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark.

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 105

“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)

As I wrote yesterday, the top 2 “cravings of the spirit, the eternal voice of God” that we are to recall and respond to with “the demands of religion” are: 1) being free and being human; 2) Answering God’s call to do justly, love mercy, walk in God’s Ways. I wrote about the first using the 10 Sayings/Commandments and today I want to delve into the second. What does religion demand of us to do, why does the word demand bring up rebelliousness immediately? When something is demanded, we know the truth of the demand when it is from a power greater than ourselves and we are afraid we won’t get it done right, we want to do what we want, we do not want to open the door to hear the cravings of our souls, hence Rabbi Heschel’s use of the word “rare”. Yet, as we see from all of Rabbi Heschel’s writings, the eternal voice of God calls us to use religion/spirituality to fulfill the demands of God and, in turn, be more human and freer.

What does religion demand of us (no matter how people practice or preach, we are speaking of the original texts)? I find it throughout the Bible and especially in Leviticus, Chapter 19, verses 1-18

1. We are holy! The 2nd verse teaches us, the word “shall” as in “you shall be holy” is in the future/imperfect tense which denotes an action that is begun, just not completed. We are born holy, we never lose our innate holiness, we never kill the divine Image we are created in. By fulfilling the “cravings of our souls” we grow in our holiness and we grow in our humanness.

2. Do not worship idols, don’t make idols for yourselves. Stop finding ways, things, facades, masks, intellects, rationalizations, etc to hide behind and hide from people and God. Become more open and authentic about your strengths, your weaknesses, your fears and your facades. Stop engaging in faux connections and be in true connection with self, with another(s), with God.

3. “When you bring a wholeness offering, do it from your own free will”. This could be one of the most overlooked demands and freedoms. We are called upon to donate when things are good as a sign of gratitude, wholeness, etc. Yet, too many of us have to be asked, cajoled, courted, and need to get our needs met, put strings on our giving, which is in direct violation of the demand to give freely and from one’s soul. We misuse the demand of religion/spirituality/God to make people dance to our  tune rather than give freely and enjoy the bounty God has provided us with and the bounty we are passing on to another(s).

4. “Leave the corners of your field, don’t gather the gleanings of your harvest, don’t glean your vineyard nor gather every grape of your vineyard, your shall leave them for the poor and the stranger. I am God.” God, through our religious and spiritual disciplines is demanding that we not be pigs! The demand is we give each person their inherent dignity and honor their intrinsic worth. That we stop thinking we are the cause of our successes, that “only I can save you”, “I made it on my own”. We are being called on to remember that everything belongs to God and everything we have we have to tithe as Jacob promised back in Genesis. We have to stop our greediness ,we have to stop our protectiveness of our things. Religion is demanding we realize that our success doesn’t set us apart, it gives us the opportunity to fulfill a need of the stranger and the poor-food, shelter, health, jobs, etc. It also frees us from the “bondage of self” that so many of us fall into and become enslaved by.

I will write more on this tomorrow.

Recovery is a spiritual discipline that is totally in concert with spirituality, with religion, especially when we consider these four demands: Be Holy- we recognize the divine image in each member and we help one another polish our souls and get the tarnish and junk off of our souls, we pry off the barnacles of negativity that surround our spirits and our minds; Don’t worship Idols- acknowledging  our powerlessness over ___, we are surrendering our idol worship to God, we are returning to our source and the source of all/everything; Free-will offering-we pass the basket and people put their money into it without anyone knowing who gives and how much they give, there is no names on the doors, buildings for our free-will donations; leave the corners of the field- we tell people to take from the basket if they need to, we help one another with housing, with jobs, with places to get help, we respect and honor the worth and dignity of every human being without fear nor favor.

I am a witness to the power of these demands, I can testify to their constant challenge, the consistent way they raise my humanness, lift up my spirits, help me answer the demand and call of God. I can also testify to the power of connectedness I experience with family, friends, strangers, etc. as a result of responding to these demands. I can testify to the power of living into these demands and living into the repair when I fall short of the demands. I am seeing the Holiness Code and the 10 Sayings completely new because of Rabbi Heschel’s brilliance. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 103

“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)

What are the “rare cravings of the spirit, the eternal voice of God, to which the demands of religion are an answer”? I believe the top 2 are our spirit’s craving to be free, to be human, and to respond to the God’s call/demand to “do justly, love mercy and walk in the ways of God”. Freedom is not to be confused with liberty, doing what we want when we feel like it; freedom is our ability to make free-will moral choices, as I understand the teachings of Rabbi Abraham Twerski, z”l, Rabbi Heschel, Dr. King, etc. It is the fundamental craving and cry of our spirits as we hear from the Israelites, the slaves who were in Egypt. When the Israelites groan upon a new Pharaoh making their slave labors even harsher, this is the cry of their spirits yearning to be free. They are unable to make free-will moral choices because they were so burdened by their tasks, beaten so often by their taskmasters, their spirits were so broken they became hopeless. This was the point where they almost gave in totally to their despair and the moment God sent Moses to redeem them. Religion/spirituality give us pathways to being and staying free. Religion lays out the blueprint for freedom in the 10 Sayings/commandments, which’s the Kotzker Rebbe teaches we have to make and take personally. Here is my way of making them personal and satisfying the cravings of my soul. 1)accepting that God is God and we are not; 2) not making false images of God and/or my self, living my authentic life; 3) not taking my name nor God’s name in vain; 4) taking time to connect with my soul each day; 5) honoring the wisdom of my ancestors and my inner wisdom; 6) not murdering my soul nor any other soul; 7) not prostituting my self, not whoring after ‘other gods’, not taking advantage of the vulnerabilities of another human being; 8) not stealing from my self, not stealing from another; 9) not lying about my self, not lying to my self, not lying about another self, accepting me and you for who we truly are; 10) Wanting the life I have, the life I am created to live, adding to my corner of the world in my own unique way, no longer comparing my self to another self, being “happy with my portion”.

These paths come from religion and spiritual disciplines that we get to live each and every day-if we so choose. These paths will always satisfy the “cravings of the spirit” and respond to “the eternal voice of God” that we wrestle with each and every day. None of us will be perfect in them, our heroes in the Bible were less than perfect as we see from the stories. Yet each of them, in their own way, did their best to satisfy the “cravings of the spirit” more often than the cravings of their ego, the call of their lower/negative/selfish self. Again, these pathways will not eliminate the cravings of our selfish, egotistical selves, they will give us the strength, the discipline, the habit of rising above them. These pathways lead us to the freedom of knowing our deepest truths, speaking of them when we are alone and with another human being(s), and living them a little more each day.

Without religion/spirituality being lived out according to our texts rather than through the lies and mendacity of some clergy and practitioners, we will always fall back into the negativity/evil that disguises itself as good. We will buy into the false stories of “those people are out to get us”, “they are trying to take our wives, children, money, etc”, “they are heathens, they don’t have the same rights as we have”, and other such bs that is spread of some ‘god-fearing’ people. Doing justly is a demand of God that is universal, not just for ‘our people’, it is a demand that “there is one law for the stranger and citizen alike” as the Bible teaches us. Doing justly means each case has to be decided on its own merits and, as we learn in Deuteronomy, we are called to mete out charitable justice, righteous justice, not strict letter of the law justice, rather justice that satisfies the combination of the letter and the spirit of the law.

In recovery, we use the 12-Steps to find “freedom from the bondage of self” and to “act our way into right thinking”. We seek freedom from the first moment we surrender to the truth that we need to recover, we continue to seek more freedom as we “peel the layers of the onion” that has been starving our spirits. We recognize that we are not the end-all/be-all and there is a “power greater than ourselves” which “we came to believe could restore us to sanity”. In recovery, we readily admit that we acted in insane ways prior to being awakened by God and/or God’s angels that are always around us.

I am not perfect in the living the 10 Sayings as I outlined them above. I get better each day, I make amends for the errors I make, I continue to lean into these pathways so I can respond to “the eternal voice of God” and satisfy “the cravings of the spirit”. I work hard each day to take one more step into a deeper freedom than I have experienced already and I know if I am not moving deeper into freedom than I am closer to being enslaved again by my own negative/evil impulses. My journey into freedom has taught me how to transform the negative/evil impulse energy to enhance my desire to do good. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 103

“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)

The more often I immerse myself Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom above, the more I turn it over and over as we are taught to do, the more my eyes get opened, the more my soul gets infused with spirit and strength. Rabbi Heschel not only is calling on us to “Choose Life, as Moses exhorts us in Deuteronomy, he is teaching us that the cravings of our spirit, however rare we may be aware of them are part of being human! He is demanding we listen to and for “ the eternal voice of God” and use religion and/or some spiritual discipline to respond to these cravings and to the Voice.

There are many stories about the transcendent nature of God and Rabbi Heschel is reminding us of the very immanent experience of God. This is the experience the Israelites spoke about after they crossed the Red Sea, at Mount Sinai, the experience people had of Jesus preaching to and caring for the needy, the stranger, the poor, the outcasts, that Muslims had listening to Mohammed prophecies. It is the experience of the Buddha, of being in the presence of the Dalai Lama, Dr. Martin Luther King, Rabbi Heschel and so many others. God’s voice has never left this world, God calls to us each and every day and evening, our Higher Consciousness is always attempting to pierce the veil of our egotistical will. Our task through our spiritual disciplines, our religions is to reacquaint our ears with the decibel level of God’s voice, God’s call, God’s demands.

We all have cravings of the spirit more often than we want to realize, I believe Rabbi Heschel is calling upon us to be more aware of these cravings and not replace them with cravings of our egos, of our vanity, of our thirst for power, prestige, etc. The Bible tells us stories of experiences of this battle between the cravings of our spirits and the cravings of our egos: King David who fights the battles God tells him to, who brings together a fractured country, who writes the Psalms as an ode to God and to the human condition; is a sex-addict who goes so far as to kill the husband of a woman he covets! Moses brings us out of the land of Egypt and communicates with God, yet is petty and defensive in the Korah affair and is ego driven at the second rock story in Numbers.  The Maccabees who free us from the Seleucids and then went on to adopt Greek names, took over Judea and served themselves more than they served God and people.

We see this in our world today, many revolutionaries have these great slogans and speak of “the people” as their sole concern, yet really the concern becomes power. It has happened in Cuba, Russia, Hungary, China, Venezuela, the Arab dynasties, Iran, and we see it happening in the United States and in Israel. This inner war between the cravings of our spirit, the eternal voice of God and our egos and our thirst for power is the inner war that needs religion’s/spiritual discipline’s intervention so we can defeat the false ego in us, so use the cravings of our soul, the caring for another(s), responding to God’s demands as water for our thirst, that power no longer is for our sake, it returns to it’s original purpose, we use our power for the sake of Heaven, for the sake of people who are in distress, for the widow, the orphan, the stranger, the poor, the needy. This transformation cannot take place without the intervention of spirituality and/or religion. God knew that “we are evil from our youth”, that our evil inclination can and does overwhelm us at times as was discussed in earlier blogs so God gave us a myriad of religions and spiritual disciplines for us to find one where we belong, where we can learn how to hear, respond, and take seriously this “matter of life and death” that we are all engaged in.

Recovery is based on exactly this idea. We are recovering from being overwhelmed with our negativity, our self-loathing, our giving into the cravings of evil, the cravings of ego, the cravings of power, the experience of not being understood nor accepted for who we are and the experience of an immature inner life. We have a spiritual path that leads us back to our inner essence, to the strengths and guidance of our souls, to being able to hear the voice of God/Higher Power and follow through on being of service to another(s) and becoming more selfless. We no longer deny what is, we accept it and we work hard to use what is and turn it into something good, beautiful and holy.

This war within is never over, it doesn’t stop when one retires, it doesn’t stop even when one is “happy with their place” because the more I learn, the more I understand Torah,  the more I hear Rabbi Heschel and so many other people in my life, the more I have to incorporate into my being, the more I have to heal within me. Overall, I have a winning record of hearing and answering God’s eternal voice. Yet, this teaching is a lesson in humility, in truth and in forgiveness of self, of another and acceptance of what is. I do regret the people harmed, especially Heather and my family, from my early in life losses. I am grateful that I could repair the damage and reconnect with them and connect with and be of service to so many. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark.

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 102

“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)

There are so many urgencies and perpetual emergencies that are not only too numerous to elucidate, they are overwhelming for most of us when we begin to think about them. We have, however many times, confused ego-centric urges for urgencies, personal desired as emergencies; doing this causes the real urgencies and perpetual emergencies to go unnoticed by most people. In unpacking this phrase, we can begin to discern the differences. In today’s society, as in all prior societies, we have confused the urgency and perpetual emergency of freedom with personal liberty. As I was taught by Rabbi Jonathan Omer-man, prior to receiving the 10 Sayings at Mount Sinai, we were slaves in Egypt, upon our redemption from slavery in Egypt, we spent 50 days in liberty-doing what we wanted to- and upon receiving the 10 Sayings, we became free. Freedom, as defined by Rabbi Omer-man, is when we surrender to God’s Will rather than follow our self-will. Even prior to our enslavement in Egypt, we were in the narrow straits of doing what we thought best, disregarding even the Noahide Laws given after the flood. We were seeking power and control in order to have certainty and feel good about our self without dealing with our inner life and our imperfections.

Unfortunately, we have not truly embraced the free-will choice to follow the 10 Sayings and the rest of the Torah, etc to “nullify our will before God’s Will so God’s Will becomes our will” as we learn in Ethics of our Ancestors Chapter 2:4. We have not “turned our will and our life over to the care of God as we understand God” as we learn in the third step of Alcoholics Anonymous. Instead, we are still confusing our personal desires, our ego-centered feel good urgencies with authentic needs for our souls, our bodies, our minds. We are still hiding from our imperfections, we are still hiding from a power greater than ourselves, we are still hiding from our Higher Consciousness, we are still hiding from our selves. While it is easier to substitute our personal desires for the “urgencies, the perpetual emergencies” Rabbi Heschel is reminding us of, it is an error that causes us much more pain, suffering, angst, anger, retaliation, violence, self-deception and deception of another(s) than most of us realize. We are in desperate need of unraveling the confusion we have created out of the fear of truly facing our self, having our authentic and true self face the world and risk being laughed at, being scorned, being ridiculed, etc. Only when we let go of the masks we wear, when we drop the pretenses upon which we have built our egos and our life will we be able to respond to the authentic urgencies and perpetual emergencies that are present each and every day.

Letting go of our inauthentic needs, facing our true self, presenting our authenticity to the world is freedom. Freedom is one of the most basic urgency and perpetual emergency we face each and every day. We are tormented by our inner slaveries each and every day. We are tormented by the outer enslavers each and every day. We seem to be powerless to meet these challenges and challengers, we seem to ‘give in’ to these false ideas and our own self-deceptions. Yet, we can go through these embedded ways of being, we can surrender our will to the Will of a power greater than ourselves. We can stop worrying about how exacting we are in the performance of God’s Will and immerse our self in the spirit of the God’s Will so that our will becomes like God’s will! It is a hard road, it begins with the action of surrender as Pirke Avot has taught us for the past 2000+ years, and as every spiritual discipline teaches as the first step to finding our true and authentic self. It is also the way to healing our shame and stopping our blame, it is the path to responding to the urgent pleas of everyone around us to be free. It is the path to knowing we belong, we are loveable and loving, we are forgivable and forgiving.

This surrender is what the first three steps of Recovery are all about. Each day we remind our self that we are powerless over ___ and we “came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity”, leading us to “turn our will and our lives over to…”. Using these three steps every day brings us closer to our Higher Power/God, brings us closer to our own inner dialogues, brings us closer to discerning the stumbling blocks that caused us to fall into the abyss of self-centered fear and self-loathing. Each and every day for those of us in recovery know we have to surrender and look at our actions, our thoughts, so we can discern truth from fiction, desire from authentic needs, God’s Will from our ego-centric will.

I longed for freedom long before I realized it. I also misunderstood and mis-defined what freedom is/was for a long time. My life, these past 35+ years is based on God’s definition of freedom, based on understanding the layers of shit I have to let go of, wash away so I can continue to grow into more “freedom from the bondage of self”. I can say, without shame, that I made errors and hurt people because of my misunderstanding of the layers of freedom and thought I was there. I will never be completely free and I am truly freer than I have ever been because of my surrender, the love I receive and give and knowing the embrace of God. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 101

“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)

Humanity is in desperate need of immersing itself in Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom, brilliance and teaching; not just quoting it, not just reading them, not just studying them rather to immerse ourselves in the wisdom above, the cautionary calling and the spiritual demand to be human. This means we have to be changed by these words, we have to be in dialogue with these ideas inside of us. To immerse ourselves in the wisdom above is to become more acquainted with, in dialogue with and adhere more to the call of our souls,  meeting and engaging with our unique Divine Image so we can bring this to the world instead of the distortion of religion and spirituality “by pedantry, externalization, ceremonialism, and superstition” that seems to be employed and amplified by the charlatans, the idolators, the deceivers.

What are “the urgencies, the perpetual emergencies of human existence” facing us today? They are no different, I believe, than they were from the time of Adam and Eve: how to live into, lean into our humanity a little more each day; how to stop the blame game; the need to be right; the search for and taking of power for our sake instead of using our power for the sake of heaven; taking care of our fellow human beings rather than using their vulnerabilities against them; continuing the Exodus from Egypt for all people, all races, colors, creeds, religions; continuing to bring ourselves our of our internal slavery and the self-deceptions we live in like a warm blanket covering us because we are shivering we will be found to be imperfect; etc.  There are more urgencies, I know, in fact each of us has our own personal urgencies and emergencies that we are afraid to speak of, afraid to face for fear we will be seen as weak and useless in the eyes of another(s) and in our own eyes as well. This is how much distortion and dilution has happened in our time and before, we are afraid to go to our clergy to seek spiritual guidance, spiritual progress, spiritual counseling, because we don’t want to “look bad”. We are afraid to ask our community for help for fear of being seen as ‘one of those people’ who are incapable, maybe lazy, ‘tsk, tsk, you poor unfortunate’, etc. We are so far away from the truth of religion and spirituality that we make it a crime to be poor, to ask for help, asylum, equality, etc!

We have to stop this way of being, it is imperative to recall the urgencies of the Bible, New Testament, Koran, every other text that is the foundation of the numerous spiritual disciplines. They are there not just as stories, not just as ‘history’, they are in our Holy texts to warn us, to educate us and to urge us to become aware of and respond to the “urgencies and perpetual emergencies” that life will always bring to us. We are told it is a command to do whatever it takes to “Ransom the Captive”, even sell our Holy Torah Scroll. Yet, we have come to worship the law and forget the spirit of our Torah, we have come to bow down to our Torah instead of imbuing the spirit and words of it. We have seen how ‘good christians’ are using the New Testament as a weapon against the very people Jesus called “his people”! We are witnesses to the bastardization of the Koran to make terrorism and killing innocent people an act of god! It is time for this to stop, it is time for us to engage in these urgencies as responders rather than exploiters.

We begin and do not end with our self. Until we open our minds and emotions up to hearing the words, the wisdom, the call and demand of our soul and of God, nothing will change. 70 years from now we will still be in awe of Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom and still stuck in the morass of our deceptions and the deceptions of another(s), of society. We have to come out of hiding from God, from one another, from our own self. As our souls become the voice we listen to and heed more often, we begin to find new and healthy responses to our “urgencies and perpetual emergencies of human existence”. We begin even to solve some of these urgencies and emergencies so they don’t have to re-occur. We are in desperate need of finding teachers and friends, study partners and intimate partners who are willing to fight us and we them to find truth and solution rather than mendacity and self-serving bandaids to our urgencies and emergencies. In fact, being in truth, living with one another as equals and being “my brother’s keeper” could be one of the urgencies and emergencies we face now as we did at the time of Cain and Abel!

I have learned, through recovery and my return to living an imperfect Jewish way of life, that I have to embrace the emergencies and urgencies I had run away from most of my prior life. I embrace the emergencies and urgencies of another, pretty well, I am responsive and responsible when it comes to helping another human being for the most part. I am, however, not always aware of the urgencies and emergencies of my own soul, I do sublimate these urgencies and emergencies at times to those of another and this always proves to be disastrous either sooner or later. I have learned also that some people dislike being responded to because it makes them feel inferior and/or they are in debt. I repay the debt I owe to my teachers, friends, family etc each day by giving away what I have rather than using it for my sake. More tomorrow, God Bless, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 100

“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)

The more one immerses oneself in Rabbi Heschel’s teaching above, the more one allows this brilliance to go through them, the better we will adhere to his call to us, I believe. This is the issue, for me, with the “pedantry, externalization, ceremonialism, and superstition” paths of non-engagement with religion and/or spirituality. All of those ways of being are really pathways to self-centeredness, egotistical pontification, external beauty, etc and none of these ways of non-engagement change one’s inner life. There is no change because all of the ways mentioned above are ways to sound and look good while shielding one’s inner life, one’s soul with teflon so nothing can stick, nothing can get inside of one. These paths are used precisely not to “recall the urgencies…of human existence”.

We see this in our everyday life, when one says hello to a person walking on the street or in a store, the response is either shock or wariness most of the time. We have lost the urgency to recognize another Image of God, another spirit in a physical body, to be seen and recognized as a divine aid, divine partner, divine need, as Rabbi Heschel describes human beings elsewhere. When we see politics as combat rather than how do we serve, we put on great drama and comedy and do not regard the welfare of the poor, needy and stranger as urgent or important. When we are so intent on being right and have our tribe be in power, we see all those who are different as evil, as enemies, etc. Yet, we put on a great show of pomp, circumstance, externalizing and degrading human beings for being poor, needy and a stranger from another land seeking refuge and freedom! We hear the pedantic speeches of people extolling why it is right to infringe on the Civil Rights of people, to decide what a woman can do with her body, give aid and comfort to enemies of the Constitution, the four freedoms FDR articulated, freedom from fear and want, freedom of speech and worship, to the white supremacists who claim George Soros and Jews are enemies, who claim Black people should not have the right to vote(some believe both of these groups should not sit in the same restaurant as they), they are willing to bring down the ceiling, burn the House down so they can retain power, keep another enslaved, practice their hatred all the while wrapping themselves in the American Flag and the New Testament! This bastardization has caused more people to leave religions than anything else, these lies have caused people to sigh “God Help Me” and we know what happened to Pharaoh, yet, these deceivers have deceived themselves into believing they will not drown in the red sea of their own making, how sad, how terrifying!

We have a response, as Rabbi Heschel teaches us above. To “recall the urgencies, the perpetual emergencies of human existence” is the way to overcome and defeat these charlatans, these bastardizers of the holy and the good. We, the People, have to stop denying the perpetual emergencies of human existence: life, liberty, pursuit of happiness as our Declaration of Independence states in the second paragraph of this God-inspired document. We, the people, have to lead the revolution against tribalism, against mendacity, against our spiritual, religious, and democratic principles that are under assault by the pedantic, superstitious, externalizing ceremonialists! We have to stand up and speak out of the urgency of our spiritual life, the emergency we are once again in, “whether this nation can long endure” as Abraham Lincoln said. We have to not “let the light go out” as Peter Yarrow teaches us. We have the power to stand up for those who are experiencing these urgencies and emergencies physically and we need to exercise our spiritual power to meet the urgencies and emergencies of the souls of all of us.

These urgencies and emergencies are usually what brings people to recovery. Most people do not seek recovery when we believe everything is good and we can get away with our “little white lies”, our “secrets”, it is only when our ways of living/coping come crashing down on us that we seek to recover our souls, our decency, our dignity and find the life we are meant to live rather than the one of superstition, externalization, following the ceremonies and using pedantry to prove we are right. In recovery, we realize “the urgencies and emergencies of human existence”, of our own existence and begin to dedicate our living to engage in these urgencies, heal these emergencies by healing our spiritual crisis and then, helping another to heal their spiritual emergency.

I know both sides of this paradox, I am aware of the pull of mendacity and how to use all of the paths away from God, away from authenticity and still look like I am moving towards God and being authentic. I used to be frustrated ‘the good people’ who do this also and only point their finger at me, however, like Dr. Susannah Heschel taught me, now I have great compassion, great pathos for people who are so stuck in these self-deceptions. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 99

“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)

Religion is one of the main reasons we are where we are, both holy and unholy, good and evil, I believe. When we are engaged with religion in a pedantic manner-worrying about the minutia, so intent on showing how smart we are by expounding on issues that are so obscure no one cares about, we are pushing people away from the wonder, awe and beauty of religion, from the life saving and soul enhancing teachings and actions of religion. Caring about the outer actions of religion as well as making religion about the ceremonies and rituals is another way of hiding from the life-saving force that religion is and, along with superstitions, is a bastardization of a way of being that is meant to enhance our being human.

I am struck by Rabbi Heschel’s words above particularly because we haven’t heeded them, we haven’t used them to move out of the morass of “pedantry, externalization, ceremonialism, and superstition.” Actually, we have leaned into these soul crushing and bastardizing ways even more since he wrote these words some 58 years ago! Humans love the pomp and circumstance of the religious holidays, Yom Kippur, Rosh Hashanah, Christmas, Easter, state weddings and funerals, etc. Yet, instead of hearing what the words are, instead of taking in the meaning of these events, we are wowed by the external beauty, etc of the event, we go to some of them ‘to hedge our bet’ in case there is God and our parents, grandparents were right-we go out of superstitious duty. For others, they use their pedantry to take control of the religion they ‘practice’. We hear all the time about the ‘real Jews’, usually meaning the ultra-orthodox, the real Christians, usually referring to the evangelicals, many of whom spend their time showing off how much they know, accosting people on the street for them to wrap Tefillin(phylacteries) and/or “Come to Jesus”, they bastardize the spirit of religion even when following the law of religion. For the rest of us, rather than standing up for the spirit, most of us now believe Rabbi Heschel’s words about religion becoming dull, insipid, oppressive, etc. from the beginning chapter of his book above.

We are missing and forgetting how religion saved us in prior times and does everyday. The most amazing fact about the Bible, aka Old Testament, is that it was written by the losers! It was written by the Jews who lost their country, who put it together after the destruction of the 2nd Temple, while under Roman occupation and it still is the moral compass that guides us all. It is the manual of connection to God and to our humanness, it is a prophecy of what will and does happen when we stray from the wisdom, truth and love of its teachings. It is the story of how humanity operates and how we can change, how we can ruin, how we can return to the holy and good and what happens when we go further into the unholy and evil. It is not a guidebook for the faint-hearted. It is a life-saver to those of us who have lost our way, who have strayed from the path of living, who are on the doorstep of spiritual death. The same is true, I believe, with all spiritual disciplines, all religions at their core-CHOOSE LIFE!

This is the situation we face now, whether the truth and life-saving, life-affirming principles of religion will guide us or the power hungry, self-seeking, bastards of religious principles will overpower God’s will and our freedom. This is a situation that we have faced many times before, whether religion’s life-affirming principles will endure or they will fall prey to the mendacity, the deceptions, the bastardizations of the charlatans who we see on Fox, OAN, Newsmax, like Jim Jordan, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Rick Scott, Ted Cruz, etc. We are in, as we always have been, a struggle for life-affirming, life-saving, life-giving principles and pathways and the pathway of hatred, dominance, racism, anti-semitism, life-taking, etc. For all the worry about the the debt-ceiling, these charlatans are the cause of 1/4 of the debt because the wealthy are more deserving of tax cuts than the poorest are of living wages!

In recovery, we have participated in and promoted pedantry, externalization, ceremonialism and played on as well as to superstitions of another(s) as well as our own prior to being in recovery. Now we see religion, spiritual disciplines as lifelines that we hold onto dearly and loosely. We know that without hearing and responding to the demands of faith, decency, Good Orderly Direction, we will fall back into the abyss of ruin, hatred, life taking and soul crushing behaviors we used to engage in.

Religion/spirituality saved my life! It gives me a life worth living, it brought me to recovery and AA, it helped me find my calling and purpose, my partner, gives me a way of living that allows my daughter to have reverence for me, it gives me Rabbi Heschel and a community where I belong. I am blessed beyond words, beyond my deserving because I live in a State of Grace through spirituality/religion. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark