Comment

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

Daily Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 257

“Consciousness abides in the company of self-consciousness. With any perception or apprehension comes the awareness of my possessing it, which is dangerously close to vanity. The ego, with its characteristic lack of reserve or discretion, is prone to interfere obtrusively even in acts which had been initiated behind its back. Such interference or “alien thoughts”—alien to the spirit of the act—which was absent from the original motive constitute a problem of its own.”(God in Search of Man pg. 387)

Rabbi Heschel is posing a challenge for us in his teaching above. Our need to possess our “perceptions and apprehensions” causes us to defend them, to proclaim them as absolute truths, to, at times, deny the perceptions and apprehensions of another(s) and lead us into the temptation of “rightness”. This experience separates us from one another, separates us from God, separates us from our souls/spirits. It also separates us from continuing to learn and seeking the whole picture, seeking truth. We separate into tribes of ‘like-minded’ people and easily follow and go along with a leader and/or lead people to a “my way or the highway” mentality. When we are “possessing it”, we claim ownership, we believe we hold onto the only truth, we guard it and we fiercely defend it. We no longer engage in conversations, we no longer engage in hearing and learning different ways of understanding our “perceptions and apprehensions” because our egos won’t allow doubt, won’t allow anyone else’s ideas and wisdom to intrude upon our beliefs, perceptions, etc.

This way of being is dangerous because vanity is not only close, it is knocking at the door and we are almost always going to open the door and let it in! Vanity comes from the Latin meaning “empty”. Which is a wonderful way to describe what happens when “the awareness of my possessing” any “perception and apprehension”! We become empty shells, we are devoid of empathy, we are unable to learn, to have a conversation, we are unable to acknowledge our own errors of thinking, of doing, we are unable to forgive another(s) for their foibles and we cannot recognize our own imperfections.

Religion and spirituality fall prey to becoming “dangerously close to vanity” as much as governments, nations, businesses, communities, groups, etc. Every entity seems to be vying to be #1 and to do this they believe their “perceptions and apprehensions” are the only ones that are true, correct and the only ones that should matter. We see this in every aspect of society and, as so often happens, we come to find out they are as empty as the “Wizard of Oz”. We come to find out that ‘the man behind the curtain’ is a charlatan, a con man, a grifter, who preys upon the uncertainty of another(s), of a group in order to have power, riches, etc. In religious life, this way of being is anathema to Torah, to the Bible, to the Koran, etc. The prophets spoke to the people for hundreds of years and speak to us every day in prayer and study about this danger, yet we continue to remain willfully blind and willfully deaf to their words, to our history, to truth.

Teaching that slavery was good for the slaves, denying women reproductive health care and endangering their lives, worshiping a grifter and criminal like Donald Trump, being fed a steady diet of lies and propaganda, rewriting history as Kevin McCarthy is doing, listening to Mitch McConnell rail against the Democrats “politicizing the Court” after his denying to consider Merritt Garland because it was an election year and promoting Amy Barrett 1 month prior to the 2020 election, all are examples of people who are possessing “perceptions and apprehensions” that come from vanity, that actually show the emptiness and vapidity of individuals.

In recovery, we are acutely aware of the pitfalls of possessing our “perceptions and apprehensions”, we know the emptiness of vanity and how dangerous it is. We are recovering our spiritual lives, we are recovering our ability to have an apprehensions without ‘owning it’, to have a perception without ‘owning it. In fact, we speak often of not being able to have what one doesn’t give away. We have a community of people who ‘keep us honest’, keep us aware of the lies we tell ourselves, we choose sponsors and spiritual guides to help us stay ‘right-sized’ and on a path of truth and learning, all in order to leave the “vanity/emptiness” that we suffered from prior to our recovery.

In looking back and forward, I am guilty of vanity at times and I shared my “perceptions and apprehensions” with the goal of having them changed, massaged, grown by another(s) because I am here to serve another, God and self. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Comment

Comment

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 256

“Psychologically it seems inconceivable a person should be able to love God wholeheartedly, to do the good for its own sake, regardless of reward and expediency. We do not have to use a divining rod in order to come upon deep layers of vested interests beneath the surface of our immediate motivations. Anyone capable of self-examination knows that the regard for the self is present in every cell of our brain; that it is extremely hard to disentangle oneself from the intricate plexus of selfish interests.” (God in Search of Man pg. 387)

Rabbi Heschel’s teaching above gives us pause, it gives us the opportunity to examine our motives and actions, it allows us to take a breath and realize the fallacy of our ‘self-righteousness’, and it causes us to know we have to always be questioning ourselves, our motives, our actions and surrender our egos to a power greater than ourselves. Rabbi Heschel is, as Socrates taught, calling out to us to live an examined life. It is difficult to engage in this teaching because it calls into question our “regard for the self”, what are our “vested interests” and how can we separate ourselves “from the intricate plexus of selfish interests”. Plexus comes from the Latin meaning “plait” which means “fold”, and is defined as an “network”.

When we clothe ourselves in our own self-importance we give power and strength to our ego, to our “selfish interests”. When we don’t see how important we are, we give power and strength to the evil drive. It is a conundrum for us and living in the space in between these two conflicting emotions takes a great deal of inner strength, inner wisdom and the ability to separate “the intricate” strands/folds “of selfish interests” which we have constructed within ourselves. Without regard for our self, we will engage in activities that are too dangerous, risky, inappropriate, being willfully blind to the needs of another(s), the authentic needs of our self. With too much regard for self, we put blinders on, engage in self-deception and mendacity, and weave a never-ending network on “selfish interests” that we convince ourselves is ‘for the greater good’. We give power to the latter through speaking only of “our immediate motivations” and give short shrift to the “deep layers of vested interests”. All of this so we can feel good about ourselves.

Spirituality and religion are paths to achieve this balancing act, they give us the steps with which to dance this seemingly tightrope between too much self-importance and too little self-importance. While the myriad of spiritual and religious paths have been bastardized by the ways humans have abused the eternal truths and the paths for their own sake, for their own power, for their own self-importance, for their own “vested interests”, we should not “throw the baby out with the bath water.” Rabbi Heschel’s teachings, his wisdom, the work of art he created by living an authentic, examined life give us the example of how to live in the both/and of being right-sized. Knowing we are fulfilling a divine need when we live our gifts/talents, when we are tilling, nurturing and growing our particular corner of the Garden that is this world, when we ‘carry’ ourselves as divine reminders and see one another as divine reminders for us, we find the path that is ‘right’ for us in our journey to the “promised land”, in our journey to “be free”, in our journey to leave the enslavements of false ego, the burdens of self-righteousness and having to have all the answers, be the smartest person in the room, etc.

Religious and spiritual paths are not a ‘one-size fits all’, they are given to us in terse, veiled ways that call upon us to find ‘our proper place’ and the path the is good and proper for us, individually. We do this in community because we need help to find our place of adding to the whole, we do this in community because we need the assistance of Chaverim, spiritual friends who speak truth to us, who help us stay on the path that is true for us, who will always let us know when we are straying and giving in to our self-importance in a dangerous manner. Religion is not what people say it is, it is not a narrow path that is the same for everyone, and spirituality is not either. Both are one-way streets that lead us home. Home, in this context, is where we are living authentically, imperfectly, with an inner safety and courage to continue growing and maturing, helping and serving, being aided by another(s) and belonging to a community of spiritual seekers. Spirituality and religion are the guiding lights in our journey from “the intricate plexus of selfish interests”(Egypt) to doing the next right thing for its own sake(Freedom). It is a difficult journey with many wrong steps and turns, we will never be perfect and we can learn from each experience. This, to me, is the definition of recovery. It is a life-long journey and it leads us to living into who we truly are, surrendering falseness, living nakedly authentic . God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Comment

Comment

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 255

“Depth-psychology has made it clear to us that the springs of human action are complex, that the subrational either dominates or at least affects the conscious life, that the power and the drive of the ego penetrate all our attitudes and decisions. We may assume we love God, while in truth it is the ego we care for.”(God in Search of Man pg 387)

The title of this chapter is “the problem of Integrity” and this subchapter is called “vested interests.” The Latin word that integrity comes from means “intact” and the Hebrew word means “wholeness”, while the #2 definition is wholeness, the first definition is: “quality of being honest and having strong moral principles; moral uprightness”. The history of humankind, since Adam and Eve, has been one of incompleteness, ‘broken’, not intact. Our “subrational” keeps us off-balance and incomplete, “the power and drive of the ego” continues to help us lie to ourselves and believe we can be complete and/or we are complete. The deception of our selves because of the “subrational” and “the power and drive of the ego” has led us to war, famine, slavery, idolatry, authoritarianism, etc. Every time we ‘feel’ an ‘inner peace’, we are deceiving ourselves because to love God is to be challenged by God, Rabbi Heschel teaches. To love God is to be responsive to God’s calls, the demands of the prophets, the cries of the widows and orphan, the pleas of the needy, the poor, the stranger. It is not sitting back in comfort and thinking we have made it, we have reached the top of the mountain, it is not in believing we know what is best, it is not in the betrayals of and destruction of another(s) souls in order to feel good.

It is imperative, as I hear Rabbi Heschel today, to end our mendacity, understand that satisfaction is a momentary experience, not meant to last forever, and we cannot be whole without connection to, hearing, and responding to the call of the universe to us. As I am understanding Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom today, we have to to beyond the realm of “depth-psychology” and delve into the realm of the spiritual. We keep seeking pills, mindfulness, eastern philosophies, etc as quick fixes rather than as help and pathways to our inner life, to the spirit within us which will lead us to connection to the spirit of the universe. We are trying to be whole and intact by “keeping it together” rather than realizing until we “let it all hang out” we are trapped in a prison of our own making. “Vested Interests” from the Latin means “clothed in importance”. Putting this definition together with integrity, we see how our minds, our egos lie to us and we, in turn, lie to everyone else. As Bill Wilson wrote: “the deception of others is rooted in the deception of ourselves”. Our “vested interests” and our need to be “intact” and project “wholeness”, as well as smartness, along with our need to be #1 or #2 cause us to feed “the power and drive” of our egos that welcome the lies of the “subrational”.

We are living a lie that society bought into since the beginning. We are so intent on ‘being whole’, on proving ourselves to be ‘intact’ along with our need to clothe ourselves in importance, we have engaged in the very mendacity and false ego-driven activities that make having integrity impossible, that make knowing the importance of self and every other self to make the world whole and complete. We are being tested and called, by Rabbi Heschel’s words and teachings, by the teachings of the Bibles, the Koran, Eastern Philosophies to leave the world of subterfuge, to let go of our old ideas, to be “maladjusted to conventional notions and cliches” so we can live in “radical amazement”, so we can stop serving the idols we have made of ourselves and another(s). We can end the endless wars in the world when we surrender our false egos and follow the call of our souls, the demands of our spiritual life, the love call of the Ineffable One. It is not an easy path, it is not a perfect path, we will continue to stumble and we will continue to right ourselves when we seek to be whole in our inner life rather than keep our facades intact.

Recovery is just such a movement, it is a spiritual discipline that demands, surrendering our mendacity, surrendering our false-egos, surrendering our need for comfort and complacency. It is a spiritual path that leads us to truth, to self-examination.

Socrates said: “the unexamined life is not worth living” and Malcolm X said: “the examined life is painful”-both of these statements are true and my recovery, my living Rabbi Heschel’s teaches helps me live an examined life and move through the pain of it into the light, the spirit, the joy of truth, connection and love. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Comment

Comment

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 254

“Depth-psychology has made it clear to us that the springs of human action are complex, that the subrational either dominates or at least affects the conscious life, that the power and the drive of the ego penetrate all our attitudes and decisions. We may assume we love God, while in truth it is the ego we care for.”(God in Search of Man pg 387)

How to differentiate between loving God and loving self thinking it is loving God is a challenge for all of us. We say and hear often “this is for your own good”, “God will take care of you”, “God is punishing you”, “they are in a better place”, and other such inane sayings. My mother, z”l, used to look up to the heavens and ask: “Gott in Himmel, why do I deserve one like this?”, always in reference to me:) She was, as are most parents, worried about how she would be perceived because of my bad actions and believing she was more concerned about me. While she believed it was me she was concerned about, the “subrational” was affecting her without her knowledge. This is an example of how we lie to ourselves without realizing it, how we attribute good to our daily living without realizing “that the power and drive of the ego penetrate all our attitudes and decisions.” It is a challenge that most people are oblivious to which makes their self-deceptions, the believing the deceptions of another(s), and the mendacity penetrating our world so believable and so ‘true’.

We witness and participate in assuming “we love God, while in truth it is the ego we care for” on a daily basis. Religion has become anathema to many because it is not God that we are hearing from in our Churches, Synagogues, Temples, Mosques, it is the ego of the clergy and people spouting cliches and misinterpreting the word of God, the words of the prophets, the text of the Torah and the Bible(new and old testaments), the Koran, etc. Young people are staying away in droves, people who have grown children do not participate in worship because they know they are hearing ego instead of God. Religious membership has fallen to under 50% because “the power and the drive of the ego” has replaced God in our lives and most people are unaware of this fact. We live in a facade of righteousness and kindness, holiness and spirituality while we are actually, in many cases, worshiping our ego, satisfying our needs and desires, being nice and acting in ways that are in our best interests first, not necessarily caring for the poor and the needy, welcoming the stranger, loving our neighbors as we love ourselves, acknowledging the infinite worth and dignity of every human being, etc.

There is a movement by the Heritage Foundation to upend our democracy, to give such power to the President (if it is a Republican) that autocracy will be supplant democracy in the USA! These Heritage Foundation people believe they are following Christ’s teachings, they fervently believe the lies they tell themselves and one another that Christ wants white Christian men to rule and have everyone else, white women, people of color, people of different religions, spiritual disciplines, etc, bow down to them and do their bidding. We are witnessing and, for some, participating in the deconstruction of democracy, following and/or doing nothing while Steve Bannon, the Heritage Foundation, the Christian Nation, America First, White Supremacy groups work hard to finish the work that was begun on Jan. 6, 2021. For many of us, we are afraid to confront, we are afraid to ‘risk’ our position, our wealth, for fear of retaliation. We say we love God, we say we are spiritual not religious, yet our actions don’t always mirror our words and we are too oblivious to notice.

The 12-step movement uses ego as an anacronym, “Easing God Out” which is what Rabbi Heschel is teaching us in his wisdom above. We are constantly on the lookout for the lies we tell ourselves in recovery, we are reviewing our actions to suss out the self-serving aspects we claim to be for God, the insidious ways our ego fools us and we learn how to transform “the power and the drive of the ego” to serve God and then as the ego “penetrate(s) all our attitudes and decisions” these attitudes and decisions are more in line with the Divine.

I continue to see the lies I tell myself and transform them into truths that serve God. It is hard, the obliviousness I experience in myself is painful and I keep opening my eyes, my soul, my beingness to truth more each day. I am also aware of the lies that run the lives of people around me and how they affect me and the myriad of people they come into contact with. More on this tomorrow. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Comment

Comment

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 253

“The mitsvah, we have said, is our instrument in dealing with evil. But do we employ the instruments adequately? If kavanah is as intrinsic to the service of God as impartiality of judgment is to scientific investigation; if, in other words, it is not only essential what one does but also what one is motivated by, the possibility of true service, of genuine piety may be questioned.”(God in Search of Man pg. 387)

“The mitsvah, as we have said, is our instrument in dealing with evil” comes to remind us that we have to our deeds and actions have power. Yet, the “mitsvah” itself will not help us in “dealing with evil” unless and until our motivation, our kavanah, is pointed towards serving God. We are witnessing, once again, humanity’s use of the “mitsvah”, use of ‘the law’ to serve evil rather than deal with it. We are participating in this misuse as well. In yesterday’s LA Times, there was an op-ed describing “conspirituality”, a new concept to me, where yoga and conspiracy theories go together! Qanon and Yoga are being put together by some people. Deep and dark money is supporting the No Labels ‘party’ in a third party bid for the Presidency, Steve Bannon supports RFK Jr.’s ideas, Trump et al want to make the Presidency autocratic and usurp our Constitution by making the Executive Branch able to overrule the other supposedly co-equal branches of government. All of this in the name of religion, in the name of “love your country”, in the name of spirituality.

On a personal level, we witness and participate in the facade of ‘being on the right side of …” as a pedigree for a person’s ‘goodness’, a person’s service, a person’s piety. Are we forgetting the scandals that reveal the frailty of our clergy, our elected officials, our Universities? Are we forgetting the myriad of domestic violence perpetrated by “pious” people? Are we ignoring our own self-righteousness? We are suffering a loneliness, as the Surgeon General speaks about, precisely because, in my opinion, our institutions have engaged in false piety, they engage in service for their own sake, they ‘follow the rules’(which have become onerous and don’t necessarily serve anyone) and care about how it looks rather than how it is. We worship celebrities having no idea nor care about their inner lives, their issues, etc and are disappointed when they prove to be human. We have stopped saying hello and offering handshakes to everyone and have become suspicious and wary of one another. We are using ‘piety’ and ‘service’ for our own sake, not for the sake of another.

We are desperately in need of immersing ourselves in the teachings of Rabbi Heschel! We have the power and the path to return to the intent of the “mitsvah”, helping us to become more whole, more complete, more holy, more spiritually mature, more connected to our authentic self and more connected to people everywhere. The “mitsvah” with the proper kavanah, with the motivation of service to God, service to humanity, with the motivation of serving our authentic and ‘higher’ self is transformative. “It is not only essential what one does but also what one is motivated by” reminds us to be in truth with ourselves, to point our actions and motivations toward serving “a power greater than ourselves”, to have a routine of prayer, meditation, service that raises up our actions and motivations to the level of being human instead of being selfish. It is not an abnegation of our self, rather it is a raising of our authentic self, it is a connection to our self, to God, that helps to relieve/cure our loneliness. Rabbi Heschel was never alone because of his connection to God, to his soul, to his family, to his tradition. We have the same opportunity when we immerse not only our deeds but our motivation in using “the mitsvah” as “our instrument in dealing with evil” rather than using “the mitsvah” as an instrument to promote evil. It all depends on our motivation and our choice of whom to serve.

Each day, I take my own spiritual temperature through this blog, I am constantly doing my own inventory of these lessons and ways of being. As I write about this paragraph, I realize that my motivations were not always understood because of my ways, my loudness, my aggressiveness, my desperate need to prevent death and prison, sadness and evil. I am deeply sorry to the people who did not understand that my way was motivated by service to them, service to God, even when it seemed like it was service to me. I understand and apologize for my part in not making it clear and for my delivery which put some people off. I am also aware that I am not that pious as to say there was no motivation for self in my actions. Yet, my overriding “kavanah” was to serve, to save souls, to help another human being. I do my best to ensure that my heart is pointed in the direction of serving God and human beings first and I pray I continue to deepen this path . God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Comment

Comment

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel - A Daily Path to Living Well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 252

“The mitsvah, we have said, is our instrument in dealing with evil. But do we employ the instruments adequately? If kavanah is as intrinsic to the service of God as impartiality of judgment is to scientific investigation; if, in other words, it is not only essential what one does but also what one is motivated by, the possibility of true service, of genuine piety may be questioned.”(God in Search of Man pg. 387)

Rabbi Heschel’s teaching above is questioning the cloak we wrap ourselves in when we proclaim the ‘rightness’ of what we do, the ‘rightness’ of our actions that cause pain to some and, in many cases, use the “mitsvah” to actually do evil. He is reminding us, as he does often, that the action and the intention/the motivation have to be congruent “in dealing with evil.” Questioning the motivation of “what one does” goes unnoticed by many of us, today and throughout history.

We hear many people proclaim the ‘rightness’ of what they are doing using misinterpretations of Biblical Texts and Spiritual Texts to validate their actions. We are witnessing this over and over again in our world today. People use the action, the deed of a “mitsvah” to declare their ‘rightness’ while forgetting to acknowledge the “kavanah”, their motivation, behind their deeds. One of the habits people have gotten into is to perform the “mitsvah” for the sake of themselves rather than for the sake of God, for the sake of their neighbor. While every “mitsvah” is important, Rabbi Heschel is teaching us that the motivation, the “kavanah” behind each one is important as well. He is calling out to us to bring our motivation for actions to be congruent with “service to God”. “Service to God” implies serving one another, caring for the poor, the needy, the widow, the orphan, welcoming the stranger, honoring the infinite worth and dignity of every human being, embracing the uniqueness of each person, loving our neighbors as we love ourselves, etc.

Some of the people who claim to be the most pious, who claim to be taking action “in the name of God”, are the greatest violators of truly serving God, of having “true service” as their motivation and, because of their phoniness, have perverted religious life, have made being part of a religion exclusive rather than inclusive. Upon being questioned as to their actions, they rise up in anger and proclaim the questioner to be ‘against God’, idolators, blasphemers, etc. This ‘religious fervor’ has caused many people to lose belief in Rabbi Heschel’s words above: “the mitsvah, as we have said, is our instrument in dealing with evil.” Rather, many people have come to believe “the mitsvah” is the instrument of separation and exclusion, the instrument of power and a bludgeon to crush those who have a different understanding, way and motivation to do the same “mitsvah” so as to be inclusive, caring, compassionate, loving and truthful.

People are using the Bible, the constitution, the ‘moral code’ in ways that defy “service to God”, they are using them in ways that serve themselves instead. The motivation for a mitsvah is to deal with evil, the evil around us and, more importantly I believe, to deal with the evil inside of each one of us. Upon rising Jews proclaim our gratitude for being alive, for having our souls returned to us with compassion, and proclaim God’s faithfulness towards us and in us. This “mitsvah” is to clear our minds, our hearts, our emotions of the self-serving, self-aggrandizing thoughts that come up, it is to clear our thoughts of dread and of false ego, it is to point our hearts (motivations) in the direction of service to God, to human beings outside of our self, and, in doing this, be of ultimate service to ourselves. We begin our days with the knowledge that we are alive through the “grace of God”, compassion and faithfulness is bestowed upon us, and we are given the gift of being able to spread grace, compassion, faithfulness in our every interaction and action(“mitsvah”). We are being challenged by Rabbi Heschel to examine our self, our actions, our motivations and to make sure we are being of “service to God” rather than serving our selfish and egotistical desires.

In recovery, “we made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God, as we understand God”. This decision is not a one and done action, we have to continue to check in with ourselves, with another human being, to ensure we have not made our egotistical wants God. We use this “decision” to guide and judge our actions before, during and after we take them. We are constantly checking our motivations and actions, which is why there are no ‘gurus’ in recovery, just people who are a little farther down the road, there is no perfection in recovery, just progress. We continue to judge our actions and motivations to ensure they are for “service to God” rather than service to self. Because this is our ‘north star’ we are constantly stopping the natural drift towards self and righting ourselves back into service to God. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Comment

Comment

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel - A Daily Path to Living Well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 251

“To have joy in an object is to respect its individuality. This is implied in the very idea of delighting in it for its own sake. To have joy in what is real is to subordinate individual opinion wholeheartedly to the truth of the matter; to have joy in what is beautiful is to trust to the inspiration of beauty and not to the contrivance of artifice. The interests of the object dictate at each step the line of advance.(W. R. Boyce Gibson, Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, vol. VIII, p. 152a) (God in Search of Man pg 385-86)

“To have joy in what is real is to subordinate individual opinion wholeheartedly to the truth of the matter;” gives us all a moment to stop and reflect on “what is real” and do we seek “the truth of the matter” rather than what we want the truth to be. “Subordinate individual opinion wholeheartedly” is a very difficult action for most of us, yet it is required if we are to recognize both “what is real” and what “the truth of the matter” is. It seems so difficult to do these days, as I am sure it has been throughout the history of humankind. Without God, without a recognition of a “power greater than ourselves”, without seeking a higher consciousness, we will sink into our individual opinions, we will miss the joy life gives us, we will wallow in self-righteousness, self-pity and self-destruction, I believe.

We are in a constant ‘political cycle’ it seems, with politicians telling us one thing and doing another, with a tribalism that denies what is real, engages in mendacity rather than truth, and is unwilling to “subordinate individual opinion” at all, much less “wholeheartedly”. Watching the same elected officials who voted against the Infrastructure Bill take credit for it when it comes to their state or district would be laughable if it were not such a display of deception and lies. Listening to the “law and order” party want to defund the FBI and the Justice Department is mind-boggling and their unabashed brazenness is frightful. Listening to Mitch McConnell proclaim the Supreme Court to not be political causes one to shake one’s head because he refused to even speak to the nominee for the Court in 2016, because he went against his own reasoning when RBG died less than a month prior to the 2020 election! The subterfuge that is being perpetrated upon us, whether from our own press, elected officials, Vladimir Putin, et al is scary and dangerous. What is more scary and dangerous is how many of us buy into their lies, their deceptions and our own self-deception; having no awareness of “what is real”, what is “truth”, and we seem to “subordinate our individual opinion” to the group think of the best deceiver/liar.

This phenomenon happens because we surrender our ability to engage in seeing the whole picture, our surrendering of our will to the loudest voice in the room, our fear of being on ‘the losing side’, etc. All of this at the cost of our souls, our individuality, our mental, spiritual and physical health. Like the German people of the last century, we teach our children obedience rather than following the saying from Proverbs: “teach each child according to their understanding”, we are no longer (if we ever did) growing the individual spirit and gifts of our children for their sake, we are training them for careers, for power, for hatred in some cases, for our sake and not for God’s sake. We have twisted “reality” to whatever cause we want to take up, to whatever ‘feels’ good to us rather than seek to understand “what is real” and go on the journey of finding “the truth of the matter”. We are in a state of chaos and have come to regard this chaos as normal, we are in a state of mendacity and have come to see these lies and deceptions as truth. We are incapable of living in a state of joy because of the ways we are living and lying to ourselves and everyone else. Gratitude, prayer, have become more rote than real, more of a feeling rather than an experience for most and our Religious Institutions seem to be following the lead of the deceivers rather than the words of the Prophets! We need a revolution and the recovery movement is just such a revolution.

Recovery begins with a “surrender of our individual opinion wholeheartedly”. We let go of our old idea that we can never change, we stop believing the lie “a leopard doesn’t change it’s spots”, acknowledge that our ways of being make our life unmanageable and we are powerless over our “stinking thinking”. This is the first step in recognizing “what is real” and “the truth of the matter”. We never leave this new way of being, we continue to learn how insidious “our individual opinion” permeates our living, we change from knowing everything, from believing “the lies we tell ourselves” to asking for help, taking direction and seeking God’s help to live in reality, to live in truth, to elevate our being to the paradigm of joy. It is a slow and steady elevation, it is a gift we receive from the hard work we do to seek truth and find “what is real”. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Comment

Comment

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 250

“To have joy in an object is to respect its individuality. This is implied in the very idea of delighting in it for its own sake. To have joy in what is real is to subordinate individual opinion wholeheartedly to the truth of the matter; to have joy in what is beautiful is to trust to the inspiration of beauty and not to the contrivance of artifice. The interests of the object dictate at each step the line of advance.(W. R. Boyce Gibson, Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, vol. VIII, p. 152a) (God in Search of Man pg 385-86)

Gibson’s definition of joy is a very important distinction from happiness/pleasure. Society has  mixed up these two emotions/traits/states of being to the point of not having any distinction between them. “To have joy in an object is to respect its individuality” is an outrageous statement for most people. We see joy as something for ourselves, something that makes us feel good, yet Gibson is teaching us to have joy is to respect the object, to delight in it “for its own sake”, not for ours! What a radical idea! Yet, it is the only way we can perpetuate the joy of life, no matter what is happening in the moment.

We are commanded to “Choose Life”, seeing this command through the lens of the teaching above give us the opportunity to respect the individuality of our particular living as well as the particular living of every human being. Viewing life as a joy allows us to delight in being alive no matter what is happening, good or not good. This calls for us to let go of our self-centered actions, to let go of our need to be happy, let go of our need to respect only our individuality.

This teaching is calling on us to experience life as the object “to respect”, life as the object to delight in “for its own sake”, not just our own life, rather life itself. This changes our outlook, our perspective, it prevents us from staying neutral, it calls us to be engaged in our own lives and in life itself. We are witnesses to and participants in a way of being that is very small by this definition, it is a way of being that seeks pleasure in the moment, rather than the joy of living. We are witnesses to and participants in ‘low-grade misery’ precisely because we seek pleasure rather than live in joy, we seek our own individuality rather than “have joy in life is to respect its individuality”. We are suffering from this ‘low-grade misery’ and forcing everyone around us to suffer as well. We are not even respecting the individuality of our souls because we are seeking pleasure and happiness as defined by societal norms rather than by the our own inner compass, our spirit, our souls. We are being bludgeoned by people who gain power in order to be pleased by their cruelty, by their whims, by their pleasure-seeking mendacity. Life itself should be the object of our joy, choosing life is to respect the individuality of each person remembering that we are all created in the Image of the Divine, we all are “divine reminders” we all fulfill a “divine need” so we all need to be individuals who come together for a common purpose, service and joy.

Delighting in life “for its own sake” changes our paradigm of being, I believe. Just the fact that we are alive, that there is life, gives us delight, gives us joy, gives us energy to move forward. No longer do we have to ‘feel good’ to be in joy, no longer do we have to ‘be number 1’, ‘feel fulfilled’ to be in joy, joy becomes a state of being, a way of being rather than a feeling as I am understanding Gibson and Rabbi Heschel today. What a freeing experience, this is radical amazement in action, I believe, joy of living no longer is dependent on how we feel, what we accomplish, how much money, power, prestige, how well we can rule over another, etc. The joy of living comes from delighting in being alive! No longer can we deny the freedoms, the rights, the individuality of another, no longer can we ‘rule with an iron fist’, no longer can we unilaterally impose our desires, our need for pleasure on another, no longer can we see anyone else as anything but an individual, a human being, an equal. Choose Life becomes a call to joy, a call to delight, a call to respect oneself and the selves of everyone else.

Recovery is joy. We speak about happy, joyous and free, in our meetings, in our text, we live into the joy of living each and every day, we crave being of service rather than being served, we crave loving rather than being loved, we truly live into St. Francis’ prayer and we practice the Serenity Prayer each day. We have left the “bondage of self” and joined with people to live in joy, to delight in life, to respect the individuality of everyone. In my recovery, I have been living more and more in the paradigm of joy, I have been able to walk through death, betrayal, my own errors and the arrows, lies, and bludgeoning by some because of experiencing life as the object of my joy, not making joy dependent on what happens in my life. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Comment

Comment

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 249

“The experience of bliss in doing the good is the greatest moment that mortals know. The discipline, sacrifice, self-denial, or even suffering which are often involved in doing the good do not vitiate the joy; they are its ingredients.” (God in Search of Man pg.385)

In Rabbi Heschel’s last interview, done with Carl Stern, he says: “The role of learning is decisive. First of all, the supreme value ascribed to learning and learning being a source of inspiration, learning being the greatest adventure, learning being a source of joy, and, in fact, learning for the purpose of discovering, of the importance of self-discipline; the realization, namely, that a life without discipline was not worth living.” (Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity, Appendices). Incorporating this wisdom with the last sentence above gives us a path to indulging in and experiencing the truth of our need for “discipline, sacrifice, self-denial, or even suffering”. Without engaging in these, we will ruin the beauty of life, we will destroy the eco-system that keeps the world together, we will live in mendacity and self-deception, promote ways that keep one group in power to the detriment of everyone, we will fall prey to the lies of our “evil urges”.

“We are engaged in a great civil war”, these words of Abraham Lincoln not only described the situation during the Civil War, they describe our experience right now. This civil war is the war for civility, for decency, for freedom for all, for seeing everyone as a child of God, acknowledging our differences and welcoming everyone into our circle-erasing the margins, feeding the poor in material as well as the spiritual. We, the People, are being called upon by Rabbi Heschel, by our times, by the stranger, the poor, the needy to engage in “doing the good”. Through the ways enumerated above, we are able to fulfill our inner longing for joy, we are able to put together “its ingredients.” While it is an uphill battle, we have the power, the strength, the guidance of our Holy Texts as well as the examples of the prophets, Moses, the Judges, Jesus, Mohammed, and all of the spiritual leaders since antiquity to follow. Rabbi Heschel did not just write these words, he lived them. He rose above his sorrows, his sadness’, he reached out to everyone and stood against people like Clarence Thomas, Donald Trump, J.D. Vance, et al who are willing to sell out to the highest bidder. I hear Rabbi Heschel calling and crying out to us to stand for the good, to learn, rise up to our status as holy souls, to deny our selfishness, and to bear witness to the joy that “doing the good” brings.

Rather than complain about what is, we have to accept our world and then go about the work of bringing “the good” to the forefront through our actions. Paraphrasing Rabbi Heschel’s words from his interview, a day without learning is not worth living. Getting up each morning and being grateful for the day, for our life, for the opportunity to change and make our corner a little better today, knowing we will learn something today that helps us “do the good” a little more and better is exhilarating! Reviewing what we learned yesterday, taking time for prayer and meditation to realize our inherent holiness, our basic goodness of being allows us to respond to the negative self-talk we all engage in with the ‘rest of the story’ and with truth. Making a commitment to rise above our self-serving false ego needs, denying our desires for indulgence and over-indulging so we can help another(s), as well as knowing we can bear the trials and tribulations of doing good, and we can bear the scorn and arrows that people will throw at us because they want to “rule with an iron fist”, and/or “keep white people in charge”. We take these ingredients of living well, of doing ‘the next right action’ and we put them together in joy, in gladness, in spirit, in connection and in love. These “ingredients” enhance the joy of life, they do not vitiate/impair it!

In my recovery, reading the Garden of Eden story in a prison cell taught me to say “hineni”, here I am, each and every day-many times a day. It is the response God seeks from  all of us each day to God’s question: “Where are you?” It is the response we give to signal we are ready, willing able to be of service, it is the response we give to ourselves to remind us we live in joy when we “do the good”. Since that experience, I have continued to respond “hineni” when called, I have continued to listen for people’s and God’s call of “Where are you?” I don’t always hear clearly what people need/want, I don’t always hear God clearly either; so I have people I go to for advice and guidance, I deny my own self-centered needs, I surrender to the wisdom of another(s), I bear the arrows, the ways I am misunderstood at times, I continue to learn and deny my ‘self-righteousness’ and I seek to grow and mature my inner holiness and be of service to God and to everyone who seeks me out. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Comment

Comment

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 248

“The experience of bliss in doing the good is the greatest moment that mortals know. The discipline, sacrifice, self-denial, or even suffering which are often involved in doing the good do not vitiate the joy; they are its ingredients.” (God in Search of Man pg.385)

Immersing ourselves in the second sentence above can change our entire way of being, thinking and experiencing life. Discipline comes from the Latin meaning “knowledge, instruction”, sacrifice means “holy” from the Latin and “coming closer to oneself” in Hebrew, suffering means “to bear” from the Latin, while vitiate means “to impair” from the Latin. Putting these origins together allows us to experience Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom as: The instruction, holiness, self-denial or even the bearing “which are often involved in doing the good do not” impair “the joy. This is a radical way of understanding how to live life well, I believe.

We are so accustomed to not wanting to “bear” any discomfort, to believe we don’t need to keep receiving “instruction”, that we deny the myriad of opportunities each day to “come closer” to ourselves, to deny our pleasures, our desires of our hearts and eyes and engage in the self-deception that we are “doing the good”! We are afraid of truly “coming closer to ourselves” because of the changes we will have to make in our daily living. Rabbi Heschel is calling to us to see the truth of our actions, the truth of our inauthentic way of being and to change our ways, to come closer to our soul’s desires, to approach each day, each experience in daily living with a desire to learn, to add to our knowledge, to bear the ‘distresses’ we think are involved in “doing the good”. Yet, we continue to resist this wisdom, we continue to seek an “alternative truth” that makes us ‘feel’ good, that we can deceive ourselves and one another with.

We are witnesses to this happening around us, some of us watch in horror at the ways our freedoms are being curtailed, the power of the few who are afraid of being irrelevant cause them to seek ways back to “the good old days” denying the necessary march towards growing our knowledge, maturing our spirits, bearing the discomfort of progress, feeding our souls with the holiness that “discipline, sacrifice, self-denial or even suffering” bring. Some of us watch in delight and joy at these very same happenings and herein lies the challenge. We can’t seem to agree on what “doing the good” actually entails. We are at odds with one another and within ourselves over what God’s discipline/instruction for us is, we argue about basic, foundational principles like: welcoming the stranger, caring for the poor, the needy, the widow and the orphan; responding to God’s question of Ayecha, where are you; choose life; love your neighbor as you love yourself; and so many others.

Paraphrasing what Rabbi Heschel, in his essay, “Religion in a Free Society” writes, we have come to regard any denial of a feeling, a desire to be the cause of present and/or future mental illness/distress. We are so obsessed and addicted to “self-care” that we are actually engaging in self-indulgence. We are so fixated on what we think is “doing the good” we have become unteachable, we are so afraid of being wrong, making a mistake that we live in denial of what is happening around us so we can bask in the splendor of “the good old days” some of us are trying so hard to bring back. Listening to Tommy Tuberville take months to acknowledge that being a White Nationalist means one is a racist is painful. Yet what is more painful is that his fellow Republican Senators stood by and did nothing, they are standing by as he puts our Armed Forces at risk by denying necessary promotions and these Republicans shout how they support our military! Some of us are in opposition to the teaching above, some us believe that any “discipline, sacrifice, self-denial, or even suffering” do “vitiate the joy” and deny “they are its ingredients”.

In recovery, we know we have to remain teachable, we have to learn each and every day, we have to grow our spiritual life at least one grain of sand each day. We have to grow our inner life each day, we have to learn from our mentors, sponsors, newcomers, we have to deny the lies we have been telling ourselves for so long, we have to leave the aura of those who desire to deceive us, we have to engage in “doing the good” a little more each day and we have to be grateful for life each and every day. In recovery, we know the truth of Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom, we are aware of the demand to welcome all who have a desire to change the ways they have been living just as we were welcomed even though we might not have been fully committed at first. This is the way we practice “attraction not promotion”. I believe we all need a program of recovery from the self-deceptions and mendacity we live in. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Comment

Comment

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 247

“The experience of bliss in doing the good is the greatest moment that mortals know. The discipline, sacrifice, self-denial, or even suffering which are often involved in doing the good do not vitiate the joy; they are its ingredients.” (God in Search of Man pg.385)

The word bliss comes from the Latin meaning “to praise”, as well as to translate the Hebrew word “Baruch”, which also connotes blessing. Rabbi Heschel’s words above come to remind us of the blessings we receive and experience “in doing the good”. Too often we ignore these moments of joy, satisfaction, answering the call of God and another(s), too often we are indifferent to the experience of bliss, the experience of being a blessing, the experience of joy; which denies the truth and wisdom of Rabbi Heschel’s teaching above.

There is no moment that can reach the joy, blessing, praise, bliss we attain “in doing the good” because “in doing the good” we are at one with our authentic self, with the needs of the universe and the call of God. We are in complete attunement with self, another(s) and spirit of the universe which brings us to wholeness and covenantal relationship with self and the world. We are fulfilling a Divine need and being Divine reminder, which, according to Rabbi Heschel, is the actualization of “being human”.

Yet, unfortunately, too many of us ignore this experience in favor of another, the pleasure one receives from ‘winning’. In an op-ed in the New York Times, David French relates his experience of the ‘joy’ that MAGA Republicans have when they get together at a Trump Rally. This ‘joy’ is the communal feeling of being together and understood, having a common enemy, cheering their hero, feeling seen and heard, and a time to party. This ‘joy’, this ‘bliss’ they experience is not about being a blessing, it is about being seen, it is about getting together to rant and rave about ‘those people’ who are trying to steal our ‘way of life’ from us. It is not about serving God, higher self, it is about serving our false ego needs. While it is easy to condemn them for their thoughts and actions, it is more important to help people discern what is “doing the good” and what is serving their own  ‘ego’ needs rather than the authentic needs of God and another(s). This is the authoritarian way, this is the way many religions, countries, communities, families   have morphed into; making the needs of the leaders, clergy, wealthy more important than the needs of God, of human beings.

We can recapture “the experience of bliss” Rabbi Heschel is teaching us about. We have to rededicate ourselves to growing our inner life, we have to rededicate our selves to hearing our souls’ call, we have to rededicate our selves to responding to God’s call, we have to rededicate our selves to being immersed in the words of our Holy Texts, being immersed in the words of our prayers which will lead us to experience “the greatest moment that mortals know”! We are all capable of this rededication, whether it is through our practice of a spiritual discipline, our raising of our consciousness, our meditation, our study, our prayer, our acknowledging our gratitude, etc, we can have this “experience of bliss in doing the good”. Our challenge is to discern what is “the good” we can do in the moment we are in.

One way we discern the good in the moment is asking ourselves: what would God have us do; what is the next right action to take; what is hateful to us so we don’t do to another; do unto others as you would want them to do unto you; how does this action bring me closer to communion with my soul; etc. These questions lead us to knowing what is the good in the moment and give us the experience of being a blessing, of being blessed, of praising life, of being praised, of authentic awareness of what truly is as well as a comfort and joy in our inner life-the closest experience of inner peace I can imagine. We have the path to bliss, we have the path to being a blessing, we have the path to praise, we have the path to ‘inner peace’; it is “in doing the good”.

Recovering people seek and experience this “bliss” each day. We are constantly seeking out “doing the good” in all of our affairs. We know we are blessed by being in recovery and we have to put these blessings to work in the world because we “can’t keep what we don’t give away”. The experience of bliss, of living our praise of life, of being blessed beyond our deserving, gives us the fuel to continue “doing the good” and creates a new eco-system for us. We accept our foibles and we accentuate our goodness, we are responsible members of society and community, family and friendship, and we engage in “life on life’s terms” and rejoice in “being human”. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark.

Comment

Comment

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 246

“Everyone knows that out of suffering goes a way that leads to Him. Judaism is a reminder that joy is a way to God. The mitsvah and the holy spirit are incompatible with grief or despair.” God in Search of Man (385).

Over the years I have witnessed an enormous amount of people who are addicted to and “suffer” low-grade misery. This “suffering” is apparent in the way people get stuck in believing “life is hard and then you die”, ‘what’s the point’, ‘why bother’, ‘life’s not fair’, etc. When asked “how are you”, so many people reply “not bad”, “okay” rather than ‘life is good’, ‘I am glad to be alive’, ‘I am excited for what the day brings’, etc.Psychologically we have pathologized low-grade misery as dysthymia and give out meds for this spiritual condition. Judaism along with all spiritual disciplines, I believe, is a path to lift us up out of the morass of low-grade misery.

As we pray in the morning upon waking our gratitude for being alive, gratitude for God’s compassion and faithfulness towards us as well as God’s faith in us, it is impossible in that moment to feel “suffering”. As we watch and immerse ourselves in the sunrise, sunset, see the grandeur of the universe and experience the awesomeness of nature, it is impossible to feel abject suffering and/or the low-grade misery so many live in. In order to live in this low-grade misery, we have to deny the awe and grandeur of our world, our lives, and God.

Immersing oneself in Rabbi Heschel’s words above, we have to deny the power of the mitsvah, the power of holy spirit in order to live in grief and despair. Many people who claim to be spiritual and/or religious live into their low-grade misery which is a denial of the goodness of God as well as a denial of gratitude for being alive, a denial of their infinite worth, a denial of their uniqueness. We see the effects of these denials in the ways people treat one another with disdain, anger, ignorance, hatred, prejudice, etc. It is totally incompatible for one to call themselves spiritual, religious and not love human beings, to not “welcome the stranger, the poor, the needy”, to not “do justly, love mercy and walk in the ways of God” as the prophets teach. In the Bible, we are told to “Choose Life!” We cannot be choosing life and be in low-grade misery, they are just incompatible, yet so many people do. Anne Frank wrote: “It's really a wonder that I haven't dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can't build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death” This young girl, witnessing the horrors and trials of confinement, fear of being found out and persecuted for simply being Jewish could still lift herself out of this truth and speak truth to and for all of us. Her belief that “I must uphold my ideals, for perhaps the day will come when I can carry them out” is a lesson for all of us.

We cannot call ourselves religious nor spiritual and deny the grandeur of life, deny the goodness of God/Higher Power, deny the awe of nature, walk around with a ‘chip on our shoulder, waiting for the shop to drop’. It is time for all of us to recognize the awesomeness of being alive today! Acknowledging the miracle of living, returning the compassion God shows us in returning our souls to us each morning, being grateful that God still has faith in us no matter how many times we ‘miss the mark’ is a pathway to living in joy, to raising ourselves out of low-grade misery and “suffering”. We are told to worship God with joy, with gladness, and doing a mitsvah, praying, meditating, connecting with the Spirit of the universe, the Ineffable One, is a pathway out of despair and grief. How can one thank God for the food we eat and be miserable-it is totally impossible and many people do this-living into Rabbi Heschel’s words can and will lift us up out of despair, grief, and honor life, God and one another.

In recovery, we write, say, meditate on our gratitude lists. We know that our spiritual condition is the key to our recovery and gratitude is one of the best ways of remembering how blessed we are. We engage in life-affirming activities, we know that whatever happens during our days, we can and will rise above the feelings of despair and grief because of our connection to a “power greater than ourselves”.

I have been criticized for answering ‘great’ when asked how I am. What people don’t realize is from the imprisonment of alcohol, low-grade misery, criminality that I was in to the freedom of joy, I know that life is great, being is amazing and no matter what trials and tribulations come along, I will be able to deal with them because of my connection to God, to people, to family, to friends. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Comment

Comment

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 245

“Everyone knows that out of suffering goes a way that leads to Him. Judaism is a reminder that joy is a way to God. The mitsvah and the holy spirit are incompatible with grief or despair.” God in Search of Man (385).

Rabbi Heschel’s teaching above is so very important for all of us, especially in times of trouble, times of inequality, times of authoritarianism, etc. While “suffering goes a way that leads to Him” is accepted by all, it is also used as a weapon and way to deceive people into accepting ‘their lot in life’. Some religious leaders and followers use this truth to ‘keep people in their place’, maintain control, ‘keep the masses down’ and, even, convince people to accept their being controlled, used, abused as something good and ‘what God wants’. People in power have used this saying to remain indifferent to the suffering of another(s), make the ills and troubles the fault of the people who are suffering, even go as far as to say God must not love you and/or ‘you suffer here to enjoy the benefits in the afterlife’! What poppycock!!

It is true that for many of us, when suffering occurs we call out to God, asking: “God why is this happening to me?”. It is also true that suffering is a wake-up call to/for many of us to look inside of ourselves and see how we have accepted ‘the norm’ for far too long, how we have ‘been in the ether’ of societal mendacity and come to engage in self-deception to our detriment. Every life has suffering in it, the question is what we do with this suffering, are we going to be defeated by it, are we going to just accept it and live with it, or are we going to follow the pathway it opens to a higher consciousness, to God, to a better sense of self, to a growing of our inner life, to using the “evil drive” to endow the “good drive” with more power to change, to improve self, another(s), and the world around us? For far too long, we have allowed the essential sufferings of life to defeat us, to enslave us, to bring us under the thumb of mendacious people, to surrender our freedom, our will, our thoughts, and create false gods and worship idols instead of God.

We are witnessing this in today’s world as we have witnessed this phenomenon throughout history. Be it the authoritarian leader, the Clergy in our Houses of Worship, the parents, the teachers, we are being subjected to a bombardment of how “suffering” will make us stronger, how our “suffering” is for what we must have done, our “suffering” is God’s will, etc. These deceptions allow us to be lazy, they allow us to not seek the path to God that our “suffering” leads us to. We have become so accustomed to our “suffering” that we are not even aware of the harms they are causing, the ways they cut us off from God rather than lead us to God, and have enslaved us. We have become idolators at the altar of societal lies, societal power, believing that our shared “sufferings” create community, seeking a ‘bad guy’ as the source of our “sufferings”, and worshiping the ‘strongman/woman’ who will save us from ‘those bad people’ while seeing those of our community as ‘the good ones’, the ‘kind ones’, the ‘hospitable ones’ as David French writes in his Op-Ed piece in the NY Times on July 8, 2023.

What is the solution? We have to seek truth instead of settling for lies, we have to remember to learn each day, to grow our spiritual condition each day, to seek God rather than blame God for our plight, remember that “out of suffering goes a way that leads to Him”. As I write this, I am realizing that “suffering” could be another call from God to wake up, to hear God’s call to be human, to stop wallowing in despair and grief instead see the joy of living, honor the joy of living, attach ourselves to our inner life, our souls so we can be free and joyous no matter what the outer circumstances of our lives may be. Seek a different path of being present, a path that leads us to experience and rejoice in our being alive, being able to change, being able to resist, rising above the grief and despair that society and just living brings by connecting to the love, the friendship, of God and another(s).

I was freer in prison during the last prison term I ‘suffered’, than I had been in years. Many formerly incarcerated people find freedom from suffering, a path to God through their suffering and a new vision/way of living and being for themselves while they were incarcerated. People with life-threatening diseases, after they ask the “why me” questions, find a spiritual life that brings them peace and acceptance. Those of us in recovery find “a new freedom” through our surrender to God rather than the surrender to suffering we had done in the past. We are testaments to “out of suffering goes a way that leads to Him.” God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Comment

Comment

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 244

“We must learn how to endow “the good drive” with more power, how to lend beauty to sacred deeds. The power of evil can be consumed in the flames of joy.” (God in Search of Man pg. 385)

Two more paths to joy are found in the teachings of the first teaching of Chapter 4 of Pirke Avot, “Who is mighty, one who subdues their evil inclination” and “who is rich, one who is happy with what they have”. We all have within us the strength to “subdue their evil inclination”. “Subdue” comes from the Latin meaning “to draw from below” and one of the dictionary definitions is: “bring under control”. Contrary to popular belief, Ben Zoma, a 1st and 2nd century sage, teaches us that might does not come from the exercise of power over another individual, it doesn’t come from standing on the mountain top and beating our chests. Rather might comes from our ability to “bring under control” and “draw from below” the power of the evil inclination to “endow the “good drive” with more power.”

Living into Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom above, we acknowledge the pull of the evil inclination, we engage in a practice of prayer, meditation, study to recognize the deception of society in ‘rewarding’ power for its own sake, for ‘winning’ through hatred, authoritarianism, fundamentalism, and to examine our own self-deceptions that our egos and minds bombard us with. We then are able to use the power of our both inclinations to subdue/“bring under control” our negative inclination and use it for good. We are not being told to kill it, we are not being told to live in some fantasy nirvana, we are not being taught to deny our urges, we are being given a path to living in joy knowing we are bringing our disparate parts of our inner life closer togethers. When we are able to be mighty, when we use our inner strength to engage our negative/earthly inclination to do the next right thing, to serve one another, to speak truth to power,  we are living into joy. It is not impossible, it is not too tall of an order, it is a discipline we engage in through a slow and steady process. We have the sight, the insight, we have to need to engage with this part of our being a little more each day and we will find the joy Rabbi Heschel is speaking of.

Being “happy with what we have” is not about the material wealth or lack thereof in our lives, it is not about settling for less than we are, it is not about not growing and learning; it is teaching us, I believe, to actually and truthfully see who we are, what our talents are, what our gifts are, how we can serve self, God and the world around us. It is a dive into our inner life, a coming together of our two inclinations to serve our spirits, our souls calling. It is a path to enjoying who we are, no longer apologizing for being alive, not being imprisoned by the mendacity of society, no longer subjecting ourselves to the abuse because we are ‘different’. Rather we wear our ‘differences’, our uniqueness openly and proudly. The Talmud teaches that we all have infinite dignity and worth, no one is more  or less dignified nor worthy than anyone else, and each of us is a unique individual-similar and unlike anyone else. Reb Zuysa taught: “On judgement day if they ask me “why were you not more like Moses” I will be unafraid. If they ask me, “why were you not more like Zuysa, I will have no answer.” It is our duty to be more of who we are created to be, it is a path to true joy while not always being happy. It is a hard life that is in opposition to societal norms, mores. Just as Rabbi Heschel’s teaching above goes against “conventional wisdom”, so too do we have to let go of our inclination to follow the crowd, go along to get along; we have to stand for who we truly are, we have to find and live into our authenticity, our true selves. This leads us to joy, to “bringing under control’ our negative urges and is a daily discipline.

In recovery, we are taught that our recovery from our addictive ways is based on our daily spiritual condition. We need to continue to grow our surrender to truth, our letting go of the lies of our egos, rational mind, no longer seeing ourselves as ‘better than/less than’ ‘net worth=self worth’, etc. We get to nurture our “good drive” and live into the joy of using our “evil inclination” to endow our goodness with even more power, more strength, more wisdom, more acceptance, more truth, more love. This is “God-consciousness”, a “spiritual awakening/experience” that those of us in recovery get to and need to experience each day.

I live into these teachings, I do ‘bring under control’ my evil inclination for the most part, I transform it to serve the “good drive” a little more each day-not perfectly, I still allow it to control me at times. And, I am happy with who I am, I accept all of me and I see the truth of who I am and each day live a little more authentically than the day before. It isn’t pretty most of the time and it is me. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Comment

Comment

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 243

“We must learn how to endow “the good drive” with more power, how to lend beauty to sacred deeds. The power of evil can be consumed in the flames of joy.” (God in Search of Man pg. 385)

“The power of evil can be consumed in the flames of joy” is a fascinating thought to me. We are, as we always been, witnesses to the the power of evil being joyous to those who engage in it, and this teaching of Rabbi Heschel’s takes this experience and turns it on its head. I hear Rabbi Heschel calling to us to delve into where joy comes from and having an authentic experience of joy. Joy comes from trust and faith in the goodness of the universe, according to some spiritual definitions, it is, I believe and in my experience is defined in Ethics of our Ancestors, a tractate in the Talmud, Chapter 4 Mishnah 1: Who is Wise? One who learns from everyone. Who is Mighty? One who subdues their evil inclination. Who is honored? One who honors everyone. Who is Rich? One who is happy with his beingness.(my interpretations).

The joy that comes from learning from everyone; is our ability to remain teachable, to stay right-sized, to be open-minded and to be humble. Since evil is the opposite of these ways of being, it is crucial to unpack and live into them in order to overcome “the evil drive”. When we are open-minded and teachable, we continue to deepen our inner knowledge of what the next right action is in each and every experience of living. We are unafraid to ask for help, to get advice, to bounce our thinking off of a trusted friend, guide. We seek out mentors and become mentors to another(s), we are aware of what we know and, just as important, what we don’t know. We let go of our need for certainty and realize the only certainty is being uncertain, we come to realize if we are 100% sure, we must be missing something.

Staying right-sized is the basis of our being humble. Being humble is not being lowly, it is not being ‘less than’, it is not being a doormat. Being humble, according to the Bible, as I understand it, is recognizing our inherent worth, embracing our unique talents and gifts and living out God’s call to us, living into the “divine need” we are created for and being a “divine reminder” for everyone we encounter, as Rabbi Heschel speaks about in his interview with Carl Stern. “Moses was the most humble of humans” we learn in the Torah and he was not a shrinking violet. Jesus taught “the meek shall inherit the earth” not because being meek is the same as timid, just as humble is not the same as denying who we are. Both of these descriptors remind us that being teachable, open-minded, right-sized and humble represent our surrender to God, our joining with the power of the universe in moving our world to being a more perfect place for everyone. These two descriptors bring us into the paradigm of joy, a way of being alert, aware, and responsive to the call of the Ineffable One, the call of our souls, the sublimation of our “evil drive” to enhance and move our “good drive” forward. The paradigm of joy doesn’t eliminate our “evil drive”, it consumes it, I believe, into the promotion of the “good drive”.

The challenge for all of us is to integrate our thirst for certainty with our acceptance of always being a learner and never ‘knowing it all’. We are so used to misunderstanding words and notions, going along with the ‘usual’ ways words are used, we miss the authentic experiences of joy that comes from living an integrated life, of living a life where joy consumes our false need for power, where joy consumes our mendacious need for control, where joy consumes our self-deceptions and desires to deceive another(s). Being wise, as defined above is a first step, it is a surrender to something greater than ourselves, be it God, Higher Consciousness, the force of the Cosmos, however you define this power. We move along the continuum of joy, from being ‘joyous’ for our evil actions/our ‘wins’ at the expense of another(s) towards our merging our will with God’s will, our egos with our souls, our rationalizations with what is for the greater good of self and everyone else when we begin and continue to move ourselves towards being wise.

Recovery is a very important path to becoming wise because it requires the surrender I write about above, it causes the “power of evil can be consumed in the flames of joy” to become a reality, at moments. And the more into recovery we are, the more these moments happen. It is not nirvana nor utopia, it is the daily slog of using our spiritual and religious texts and teachings to enhance our ability to be teachable, it is constantly learning new lessons, new insights from the texts we hold to be important and life changing, be it the Bible, the Big Book, Rabbi Heschel’s writings, St. Francis’ prayers and writings, etc. We all need to be in recovery to being wise. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Comment

Comment

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 242

“We must learn how to endow “the good drive” with more power, how to lend beauty to sacred deeds. The power of evil can be consumed in the flames of joy.” (God in Search of Man pg. 385)

“To endow “the good drive” with more power” begins with immersing ourselves in our inner life and wrestling with the seemingly opposing forces of our intuitive mind and our rational mind, our soul and our rationalizations/calculations. The teaching above comes from the chapter titled: How to deal with the Neutral and I hear Rabbi Heschel calling to us to stop deceiving ourselves that we can be neutral about anything. While, “I don’t have a dog in this fight” is a common statement, Rabbi Heschel is asking us to look deeper inside and see how ‘neutral’ is harming us and those around us. The sentence attributed to Edmund Burke: “evil flourishes when good people do nothing” is playing loud and clear in our world right now, whether in the Ukrainian War started by Russia for no good reason and called a “territorial dispute” by Ron DeSantis, the “culture wars” the Republican Party is waging on voting rights, civil rights, “all men(people) are created equal and endowed with certain unalienable rights…, their attachment to racism/racist ideology and/or thinkers, their uncompromising certainty that they are right and that white is right.

All of the wars that are being fought in our political arenas, on the world stage, can be traced, I believe by living into Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom above, to our inability, unwillingness to engage in the inner battle to endow our “good drive” with more power.” Instead of seeking to “lend beauty to sacred deeds” we are calling the ugliness of conflict, the spewing of vile homophobic words and actions, the anti-semitic actions of painting swastikas, wearing swastikas, denying the Holocaust, calling ‘walking while black, driving while black’ a crime punishable by possible death, shooting people because they walk up to the wrong address, etc sacred deeds! This is how distorted we have become because rather than engage in the wrestling with our seemingly opposing forces we deceive ourselves that the bad is good, that hatred is love, that prejudice cures the “cancer of the soul” and makes our “eye disease” healthy. We see this lack of engagement in the actions of people who are on the other side of the spectrum, standing up for “the right causes” and then going along to get along with their neighbors, their ‘country club’ friends, etc. Some of the same people who stand up for the marginalized are members of exclusive clubs and blackball  anyone they don’t like/think is inferior to them and/or keep the fee structure so high most people can’t join; all the while patting themselves on their backs and one another’s back for helping ‘those poor people’.

Engaging in the internal battle is helped by prayer when we use prayer, as Rabbi Heschel teaches, to raise up our inner life, to feed and mature our soul. We “endow “the good drive” with more power” when we engage in study of our Spiritual texts in order to better understand the ways our “evil drive” infiltrates even our best thinking, the ways our “evil drive” seems so logical, etc. We engage in prayer, study, meditation so we can learn how to hear our higher consciousness, our soul’s calling, our intuitive knowing better and stronger. We need to look at ourselves as we go about our day, from the moment of awakening with gratitude for being alive, being able to serve God, serve humanity, to meditating on the gifts and talents we have making a commitment to use them for good today a little more, making the corrections we need to for yesterday’s errors as well as amends to those we have harmed. We welcome the stranger, help the needy, feed the poor inside of ourselves as well as the people we encounter. We see our neediness not as weakness, rather as an opportunity to connect with a power greater than ourselves and with another human being who can help, we see the poverty of the spirit as well as the material and raise up our own spiritual poverty with community, we see the ways we have been unwelcoming to the parts of our self that we see as strange, how we try to hide from it and hide it from everyone else and we, instead, see how our ‘inner stranger’ is actually a gift from God that is our unique image of the divine and has a sacred purpose and beauty.

I am a grateful recovering Alcoholic and recovering criminal with a pure soul, as Rabbi Twerski taught me to say. I am grateful because without these addictions, I might never have engaged in the inner wrestling that has changed my life and continues to change it. I had the inner war forever, that’s one of the reasons I turned to alcohol for relief, I just didn’t have a way to resolve it, to deal with it, to “endow “the good drive” with more power” than the “evil drive”. Through living Jewishly and in recovery, I do with all my imperfections. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Comment

Comment

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 241

“We must learn how to endow “the good drive” with more power, how to lend beauty to sacred deeds. The power of evil can be consumed in the flames of joy.” (God in Search of Man pg. 385)

On this July 4, 2023 as we celebrate 247 years since we left being subjugated to the King of England, since we declared “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.” Although the signers were themselves holding people captive as slaves and unable to see their incongruences, this is an imperfect example of Rabbi Heschel’s teaching above, I believe. They endowed “the good drive” with the power to know what is true and right in the God’s world, in the Spirit of the universe. They lent “beauty to” the “sacred deeds” of freedom, of liberation from tyranny, of the lies of false hierarchy. The writers and signers of the Declaration of Independence differed on different parts of it and what we have here is the compromise that could get passed and signed by the Continental Congress. It is an example of how to work together to begin a process since freedom is a journey and, while we call July 4, Independence Day, it is, actually Liberation Day. We liberated ourselves from King George and England, we were not yet (nor are we, unfortunately, now) free.

I am using the Declaration of Independence as an example because of the words and sentiments expressed by these words. “All men are created equal” was an outrageous term 247 years ago, as it is now for many people who are authoritarians and those who worship these modern-day King Georges. While they forgot they were treated black people as less than, they forgot that women were their equal as well, they endowed “the good drive” with enough “power” to not fight one another and acknowledge the truth that “all men(people) are created equal” by God, not by some fiat of humans. God endows us with “certain unalienable rights” and this statement, while not followed up with actions towards all, is how they moved their “good drive” forward enough to see truth, to state truth even though, as is the case with all of us, they couldn’t act on these truths for the good of all people.

We are still an “imperfect union”, we are still not moving the needle forward enough, we are still not endowing our “good drive with more power” to transform our “evil drive”. We are still deceiving ourselves and one another with the mendacious words ‘this is what Christ taught’, this is the will of God’, as we watch people in power use their power to subjugate anyone who is not ‘like them’. A twice impeached, twice indicted ex-president is leading the Republican Party polls for the nomination in 2024! Supreme Court Justice, Clarence Thomas, bases his rulings on “getting the libs”/revenge, another, Samuel Alito, thinks hanging with rich people who have cases coming up to the Court is cool and he doesn’t need to recuse himself even though he would reprimand a lower court judge for doing this, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Barrett all forgot their pledges under oath to not overturn precedents because of their religious/political bias’ and use their ‘understanding’ of the thoughts of the Founding Fathers to give the “evil drive” more power and call it “the good drive”. We are witnessing prejudice against LGBTQ+, black people, Jews, minorities and poor people from leadership in our government and, tragically under the guise of the Rule of Law! What is amazing is the amount of people who are being adversely affected by these charlatans, these authoritarians, these idolators who support them, who clap like trained seals at everything they do, who empower them to be more and more despicable; they are like the Egyptians who followed Pharaoh into the sea, the Germans who followed Hitler to death, etc.

Being in recovery is living into Rabbi Heschel’s words above, it is truly living into the words of the Declaration of Independence. Our recovery is “one day at a time” for the rest of our lives, I believe. It is steeped in learning how to “endow “the good drive” with more power” and “how to lend beauty to sacred acts”. The first “sacred act” for me and many of us in recovery is our gratitude for being alive today, which causes us to commit to “endow “the good drive” with more power” to do the next right thing, to live a life of decency, service, love, kindness, letting go of resentments, allowing the hurts, the betrayals, the errors we commit to serve as teaching moments instead of anger producing ones. We have committed to asking God for help, asking for and taking the advice of another(s) and being grateful for each and every day. We are committed to being one grain of sand freer each day through living the spiritual principles of recovery, of religion, of God and moving from a moment of liberation to the paradigm of freedom-no matter how shaky it may seem. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Comment

Comment

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 240

“We believe that the ego can become converted to a friend of the spirit. “The evil drive” may become the helpmate of “the good drive.” But such conversion does not come about in moments of despair, or by accepting our moral bankruptcy, but rather through the realization of our ability to answer God’s question.”(God in Search of Man pg. 384/5)

“The realization of our ability to answer God’s question” occurs when we truly immerse ourselves in God’s words to us through our religious/spiritual texts and quests. Using the last three commandments, we find the questions and “our ability to answer” them.

The 8th commandment asks us to look at ourselves and find the areas of living where we steal. While most people see do not see themselves as thieves, it is essential to ask ourselves when do we steal from ourselves. We steal from ourselves through not giving ourselves credit for who we are, for not living our unique talents and gifts in everyday life. We steal from ourselves when we ‘settle’, when we go along to get along, when we deny our inner truths in favor of our rationalizations, when we continue to live in the mental cliches and notions that society, family, and ourselves find ‘easy’ and ‘normal’. We steal from ourselves when we are so immersed in our ideologies/‘clubs’ we are unable to see life from any other perspective, we are unable to learn new and different ways, we are afraid to be inclusive and we live in the physical, emotional, mental prisons of our own making.  We steal from another(s) in many of the same ways, we steal from another(s) by being lazy, by not sharing our truths, by not confronting evil and making evil seem good, by being exclusive and shutting people out, by forgetting the good another(s) has done and judging people by their last bad action.

The 9th commandment demands we stop “bearing false witness” against ourselves and another(s). It is a call to stop lying to ourselves, stop lying about ourselves, stop lying to and about another(s). We “bear false witness” when we deny our strengths and our weaknesses, when we blame another for our errors (as Adam did in the Garden of Eden story), when we refuse to admit our errors and call them good-using the “evil drive” to overpower our “good drive”. We “bear false witness” when we accuse another(s) of that which we are guilty of-the Goebbels style of living. We “bear false witness” whenever we are jealous of someone else and complain about our ‘bad luck’ or their ‘good luck’. We “bear false witness” when we engage in “senseless hatred” of one another and cause the destruction of freedom for someone ‘not like us’. While this term is usually used in racial/ethnic terms, we also participate in “senseless hatred” every time we ‘need a bad guy’ and when we practice exclusion of another(s) in our clubs, our identity politics, etc. We “bear false witness” when we bastardize the word of God for our own needs, desires, gains.

The 10th Commandment calls for us to remediate our errors of the previous commandments by acknowledging what we have and who we really are. It calls for us to stop coveting and start realizing, enjoying and living the life we have rather than the one we want. We respond to God’s call of this commandment when we lay down our defenses, when we join with one another to make our corner of the world better, when we no longer need to blame and shame another, when we are grateful in deed and word for the gifts we have received, when we bless rather than curse our neighbors and friends, when we make peace where there is strife, when we engage in conversation rather than warfare, when we stop “keeping those people out” and start inviting everyone in-when we acknowledge our “big table” as John Pavlovitz teaches, when we open our “big tent” as Craig Taubman does at Pico-Union Project, when we “erase the margins” as Father Greg Boyle has done at Homeboy Industries.

Ultimately, “the realization of our ability to answer God’s question” is what recovery is steeped in. We are recovering our realization and our ability to respond to what God wants rather than what we think we want/need. We “turn our lives over to the care of God” as an acknowledgement of our “realization of our ability” and we “practice these principles in all our affairs” is our action of responding rather than reacting. I, like everyone else, am imperfect in the actual responses and I, like so many of us in recovery, seek progress rather than perfection. It is painful when I am fail “to answer God’s question” because of my awareness of my ability and doing T’Shuvah-whether I am forgiven or not-allows me to grow and be one grain of sand better today than yesterday. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Comment

Comment

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 239

“We believe that the ego can become converted to a friend of the spirit. “The evil drive” may become the helpmate of “the good drive.” But such conversion does not come about in moments of despair, or by accepting our moral bankruptcy, but rather through the realization of our ability to answer God’s question.”(God in Search of Man pg. 384/5)

Throughout history, humanity as denied it’s “moral bankruptcy” which makes Rabbi Heschel’s teachings so important. We are in the throes of “moral bankruptcy” today in our country and in the world. We are still suffering “moments of despair” from the pandemic, its aftereffects, because of our political turmoil, family turmoil, and our inability “to answer God’s question.”

“Where are you”, the first question God asks in the Bible, still resounds in the universe, is still being asked by God and we humans are still hiding! Like Adam and Eve, we use our knowledge of good and evil to shame another(s), blame another(s), unwelcome the stranger, ignore the poor and the needy, mistreat anyone who is ‘different’ than we are. Rather than realizing and accepting “our ability to answer God’s question”, we deceive ourselves and one another as to what God’s questions are!

Immersing ourselves in the last 5 of the 10 Commandments and taking/making them personal, we hear God’s call and questions to us: How are we murdering our souls and the souls of another(s)? What are we doing to uplift our spiritual life, how are we honoring our spiritual knowledge and the spiritual knowledge of those who we see as “not like us”? We have an opportunity to engage the energy of our “evil drive” in the pursuit of living well, of helping another(s), of mastering the negativity as God taught Cain. Rather than emulate Cain, isn’t it time for us to emulate Moses? Isn’t it time to accept our ability to rise above our pettiness and pride, our need to conquer and destroy the spirit, the ‘will’, the lives of those who are different than us by divine design? Isn’t it time to accept and live into our “ability to answer God’s question” by curing the “cancer of the soul” we suffer because of our prejudices, our fears, our need for certainty and our need to win?

The 6th Commandment tells us not to commit adultery, not to prostitute ourselves. Prostitute comes from the Latin meaning “offer up for sale”, in the Book of Numbers, we are told not to commit adultery/prostitute ourselves by “scouting out after our heart and our eyes which we will whore after.” God’s call question here, I believe, is to not “offer ourselves up for sale” anymore because of expediency, in order to “get ahead”, “be accepted”, gain power/gain access to powerful people, etc. Rather than act as the Priests of Israel and Judea did prior to their destruction, we have to ask ourselves how we are ‘selling out to the highest bidder’. We get to ask ourselves how we are so selfish and self-centered that we are willing to dig ourselves deeper into the well of despair, continue to engage in moral bankruptcy all the while deceiving ourselves and another(s) that we are answering God’s question, that our manipulation of spiritual truths is ‘for the greater good’ and ‘for god’. The small “g” I use here is to denote that selling of ourselves for some idolized version of God we have created to feel good about ourselves.

The 11th step of AA commits us to living a life of constant growth in our awareness of God’s question, consistently growing in “knowledge of God’s will”. God is not parochial, God is not the possession of any one spiritual discipline and/or religion. God cries when the Egyptians are drowning because, as the midrash teaches, God says: “My children are dying, my children are dying”! “Continued to seek through prayer and meditation” is the beginning of the 11th step and commits us to grow along spiritual lines, to increase our capacity  to realize our “ability to answer God’s question” and stop our self-deception. Our recovery is steeped in “the realization of our ability to answer God’s question” and our need to continue our search for new ways to do this.

I have been guilty of almost murdering my soul and the souls of another(s). I have been cast as the “outsider”, “the other”, “the chaos maker”, etc. I have been vilified for being me so someone else can be their false self! I have also helped to save my soul, the souls of many, I have answered God’s question to me: “Where are you, by saying Hineni, here I am-and when I have been wrong, “promptly admitted it”. I have, for the most part, not sold out, not given in to despair, not manipulated the spiritual truths and wisdom nor deceived another(s) for my sake, in my recovery. I continue to grow my “ability to answer God’s question” through this blog, my prayers and my actions. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Comment

Comment

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 238

“We believe that the ego can become converted to a friend of the spirit. “The evil drive” may become the helpmate of “the good drive.” But such conversion does not come about in moments of despair, or by accepting our moral bankruptcy, but rather through the realization of our ability to answer God’s question.”(God in Search of Man pg. 384/5)

The last sentence above describes a basic truth that we have known forever, yet, most people forget and/or are willfully blind to. While “moments of despair” and “accepting our moral bankruptcy” are very important experiences in our spiritual journeys, they are not the moments of conversion. They are the moments of awareness of our need to make the conversion that Rabbi Heschel is calling us to and they don’t make the conversion happen. These “moments of despair” and “accepting our moral bankruptcy” can and should make us aware of seeking “to answer God’s question” and they are not the answer nor are they our “realization of our ability to answer God’s question.”

Affirmative Action is, I believe, a remedial response to the racism, the exclusion of black people from our institutions of higher learning. It is and has produced more equity and equality in the admissions process of our Colleges and Universities. It has educated white people about the effects of our exclusionary past, it has changed attitudes as well as attitudes of many who were willfully blind to the ways exclusion has ravaged our morality, our spirits and our progress towards living well. It is a ridiculous statement from these ‘good christian folk’ to say we have or should have a “colorblind” society. Since God created us in so many different colors with a myriad of spiritual paths, not recognizing our differences and celebrating them, not learning from and with black, asian, hispanic, Jew, Christian, Muslim, Buddhists, etc is an affront to God and ignoring one of “God’s question”: Ayecha, where are you and MiHu, who are you. Does this decision also end “legacy” admissions, does it end “paying to get in with large donations”? Will it end Brown v Board of Education? Will it pave the way to teach the rewritten history of white men as Ron DeSantis is doing in Florida? Will any religion be allowed or only Christianity since these same people believe America is and should be a “Christian Nation”?

We are in desperate need of the “realization of our ability to answer God’s question” today as we have always been. The decisions by the Supreme Court in overturning precedents, in promoting a way of being that harkens back to our darker days of history, all point out our moral bankruptcy, our ignoring history, causing more “moments of despair” for people who are not White Anglo Saxon Protestants(Christians). These decisions and the actions of those in Congress who believe Trumps statement about “good people” who chant “Jews will not replace us”, who spout the ‘party line’ that Jan.6 was a peaceful demonstration of patriotic Americans, are all “moments of despair” and examples of “our moral bankruptcy”. These are not political decisions, these are not about adhering to some religious tenet, these are decisions and actions that go against our spiritual nature, that feed our “evil drive” and make “our ability to answer God’s question” almost impossible to achieve. We are in the throes of leadership who are co-opting people to follow them through feeding their “evil drive” and promoting “the evil drive” as the “good drive”-the most mendacious and deceptive activity of humankind. While their mendacity is ‘understandable’ what We, the People, have to do is end our self-deception and stop allowing our “good drive” to “be a helpmate” of our “evil drive.”

In recovery, after our “moment of despair”, our acknowledgment of powerlessness, then we “come to believe that a power greater than ourselves can restore us to sanity.” Once we realize that we need help and seek that help from the Spirit of the Universe, we turn our lives over to this Spirit to guide us and direct us, we travel into the depths of our being and clean out the schmutz and reveal the beauty and bright shiny light of our souls. For the rest of our lives, once we are in recovery, we are constantly seeking and responding to “God’s questions” through prayer, meditation, action and service.

“The realization of our ability to respond to God’s question” has been with me since the end of 1986 when I surrendered to God’s will rather than my own ego. It was not in despair that this happened, it was in a “moment of clarity”. I have been responding “to God’s question” to the best of my ability and I know there have been times when I misheard “God’s question” and was blind to what was needed from me by another(s). I continue to hone my “ability to respond” to the call of people and God that call to me daily. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark   

Comment