Immersing Ourselves in Rabbi Heschel's Wisdom- A Daily Spiritual Path to Living Well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 84

“The vigor and veracity its ideas are perceptible under the rust and batter of two millennia of debate and dogma; it does not fade in spite of theology nor collapse under abuse. The Bible is the perpetual motion of the spirit, its waves beating against man’s abrupt and steep shortcomings, its echo reaching into the blind alleys of his wrestling with despair.” (God in Search of Man pgs. 241-242).

Vigor comes from the Latin meaning “be lively” and the English definition is “effort, energy, enthusiasm” and veracity comes from the Latin meaning “speaking truly” and the English definition is “habitual truthfulness”. I am in awe of Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom above. On this first day of 2024, I am thinking about the “rust and batter” I have added to the “debate and dogma” when studying, thinking about, engaging with another(s), in the words of the Bible, their meaning for us today and how to carry out the wisdom, the path, the spiritual principles of the Bible without adding to the “rust and batter”.

Our challenge today is not the veracity of dogma, it is not the debate over minutia, it is to recover the “vigor and veracity” of the Bible, it is to live into the wisdom, the ways, the call and the demand that the Bible puts upon each one of us. Rather than continuing to engage in who’s dogma is correct, who is the better debater, who’s theology is more in line with the divine, who can twist it better to suit their needs; we are in desperate need of scraping off “the rust and batter” of the Bible so we can, once again, hear the beauty and the wisdom, the call and response between humans and the Ineffable One.

Rabbi Heschel’s words give us comfort to know that our struggle to accept and engage in “the vigor and veracity” of the Bible is not new, it has been going on for “two millennia” and will continue. While the Messiah has not yet arrived, or come back depending on one’s belief, we have the records of the Prophets, of Moses, of the Psalmist, to live into and lean back on. We have the stories of Noah, of Adam and Eve, of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel and Leah to study and immerse ourselves in how people “came to believe” and accepted the covenant of God. We have the redemption story of Passover, the lessons of the Judges and the Kings, both good and not so good, all for our benefit to experience anew, each year, each day, the “vigor and the veracity” of the Bible and commit anew each day to the principles, the spirit and the ways of “walking with God” it enumerates to us.

And, we have to scrape off the false pride and false ego we hold onto so dearly so we can lift ourselves up from the “rust and batter” we have become buried in. We have to change our ways and goals of debate from proving we are right to understanding the myriad of ways the Bible is “speaking truly” to us and adapt ourselves to the “habitual truthfulness” instead of trying to adapt the “veracity” of the Bible to suit our whims and desires, our overreach for power and prestige, our unrealistic need for certainty through the dogmas we perpetuate. We, the People, have to end our incessant need to prove our “theology” is right and the only right way to understand God, our “theology” contains the only right religious beliefs and systems. We, the People have to reject the abuses done in the name of the Bible, the incessant deceptions perpetrated upon all of us by the ‘wise ones’, even by our ancestors and elders!

As I write today’s blog, I am reminded of Rabbi Heschel’s words in his interview with Carl Stern, “we have to immerse ourselves in the thoughts of the Bible”. I hear him calling out to us to let go of our dogmas and debate for the sake of being right, to stop our abuse of the truthfulness of the Bible and seek to be one with the Bible. Just as prayer may make us worthy of being saved, as Rabbi Heschel also teaches us in the same interview, so too will immersing ourselves in the “vigor and veracity” of the Bible make needing to be saved a mute point, because we will be saving ourselves already along with everyone we touch. Once we immerse ourselves and live into the “vigor and veracity” of the Bible we become infused with its “vigor and veracity”, we experience a new strength and a new way of seeing and hearing the world, one another, our own soul and the ‘voice’ of God. Our debates change from needing to be right to needing to learn, we argue for the sake of heaven, not the sake of self, we seek truth rather than mendacity and we find the ways to walk together in the light, with the strength, and with “the vigor and veracity” of the Bible.

Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom is not yet universally accepted! It is lived by those of us in recovery-imperfectly. We continue to be imbued with “the vigor and veracity” of the spiritual principles of the Bible, whether we attribute the spiritual principles of recovery to the Bible or not. We continue to seek more truth and be more active in our recovery, in our being of service and in all of our affairs. We no longer seek to make excuses, we speak the truth as we know it, we admit our errors and we make our amends so we can “walk together in the light of the spirit”. The longer we are in recovery, the more “rust and batter” we remove and the less we have to debate, dogma falls away in favor of connection, in the light of truth.

Writing this today allows me to see the ways I have made myself small by engaging in senseless debate for my own sake. It illuminates for me the areas where I have “rust and batter” still blinding me. It also allows me to know that my  actions which some call obnoxious, abrasive, etc are my expressions of the “vigor and veracity” I imbue from the Bible. This is not a clean-up, just a fact. Because of my years of lying prior to recovery-truth has become a necessity for me, otherwise, I fear returning to mendacity and deception of self and you. God Bless us all in 2024 with more safety, and more “vigor and veracity”, Rabbi Mark

Immersing Ourselves in Rabbi Heschel's Wisdom - A Daily Path of Spiritual Growth

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 83

“The omnipotence of God is not always perceptible, but the omnipotence of the Bible is the great miracle of history. Like God, it is often misused and distorted by unclean minds, yet its capacity to withstand the most vicious attacks is boundless. (God in Search of Man pg.241)

Living into Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom above gives us the opportunity to examine ourselves and those around us for our “unclean minds”. The Bible is the revelation of an encounter between God and humans. It is a guide and a roadmap for spiritual growth. As I immerse myself in it more each day and year, as I immerse myself in Rabbi Heschel’s teachings, the wisdom thoughts and teaching of our ancestors, we can all realize that our souls are supposed to be the arbiter of our minds and emotions rather than our minds be our arbiter!

Study of and immersion in the thoughts and wisdom of the Bible are two of the best ways to ‘wash’ our “unclean minds”. We are, and have always been, subjected to an onslaught of ‘dirty’ thoughts, an onslaught of resentments, a war with one another over competition and comparison, a fierce battle for power and prestige. We seek to find an enemy and make ‘them’ the cause of everything that is wrong with our lives, with our country, with our world. We stereotype groups of people in order to hide from our selves, hide from our own flaws, try and keep secret our “unclean minds”. Yet, through it all, the Bible continues to have power, the Bible keeps calling to our souls and to our “better angels”, it keeps giving us the hope and the power to truly be free of our “unclean minds”. While it is true that some people, maybe a lot of people, use the Bible as a cudgel, they distort it, take it out of context, wrap themselves in their interpretation of it, Rabbi Heschel’s words above come to remind us that the Bible has withstood these “vicious attacks” in the past, as it does now and will in the future.

The challenge of Rabbi Heschel’s teaching above is for us to end our “vicious attacks” on the Bible, for us to stop our misuse and distortion of the Bible to satisfy our “unclean minds”. We can only do this by experiencing the Bible in our inner lives, by opening our souls up to the teachings, the guidance and the spirit of the Bible. It is, after all, a compendium of spiritual wisdom and spiritual principles. We, the People, have to wrestle with our ‘lower angels’ and our “unclean minds”, we need to restore our souls to their proper place in our living-as the arbiter of our minds, as the power of our bodies, as the controller of our emotions. This is very difficult, it is counter-intuitive, it is a maladjustment to “conventional notions and mental cliches”. While we may never have totally clean minds, we can ‘wash’ them each day and night, we can continue to monitor our thoughts and actions and ask ourselves “is this in line with the teachings of the Bible?” When we realize we are a “contemporary of God” as Rabbi Heschel teaches us, we can catapult ourselves to the spiritual level we are meant to live in. Not the level of pettiness and pride, not the level of enmity and hatred, not the level of making someone else bad so I can feel good, rather living into the wisdom of Ben Zoma, “who is rich, one who rejoices in what one has”. This is the plane of existence where we want what we have rather than continuing to seek more and more to ‘be happy’. When we want what we have, we are not settling, we are rejoicing in what is in the moment, we are present in our lives, and we no longer have to make excuses, blames, start wars, be envious, be miserable, seek certainty, treat another(s) poorly to feel better about ourselves. We already feel good about ourselves by rejoicing in what we have.

The Bible is our “Big Book” of recovery from the human condition of “unclean minds” according to Harriet Rossetto. When we immerse ourselves in it, when we use it to look at our daily actions, when we heed the words of the prophets and the psalmist, the wisdom we glean from each chapter, we are moving away from our “unclean minds” and towards the dream/promise of the Bible, “nation shall not lift up sword against nation neither shall men learn war anymore”(Isaiah 2:4). We, the People, have the opportunity to imbibe Rabbi Heschel’s brilliance and use it to look within our inner life and see how we have allowed our “unclean minds” deceive us, how we have been seduced by the “unclean minds” of the charlatans and idolators who claim to ‘know’ the Bible. We are, once again, in a world where “unclean minds” are launching “vicious attacks” against the Bible, against humanity, against the dignity of anyone not ‘with’ them, against the inherent value of humans they want to conquer, destroy, eliminate. We witnessed this in WWII, we witnessed this throughout history. Now is our opportunity to stand up for and with the Bible to defeat these “vicious attacks” and purge the “unclean minds” from power.

While recovery is a spiritual discipline, it doesn’t promote one faith over another, it doesn’t require people to ‘believe’, and it doesn’t ‘define’ God. And it is a path of spiritual principles, a path that has grown out of the teachings and wisdom of the Bible. It is a path that acknowledges our “unclean minds” got us here, it is a path that has us look at the “vicious attacks” we have led and participated in against decency, truth, love, kindness, compassion, mercy, justice, etc. It is a path that has us do our own inventory of our “unclean minds”, root out our resentments and our self-deceptions. It is a path that has us constantly be on-guard for the subtle ways our minds retreat back into unclean thoughts and the ways  we drift into unclean actions. It is hard, we are not perfect nor are we expected to be according to recovery and the Bible. Yet, we can and must seek spiritual progress away from our “unclean minds” and its power so we can end our “vicious attacks” on truth, on love, on one another.

Happy New Year, stay safe and God Bless, Rabbi Mark

Immersing Ourselves in Rabbi Heschel's Wisdom - A Daily Path of Spiritual Growth

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 82

“The omnipotence of God is not always perceptible, but the omnipotence of the Bible is the great miracle of history. Like God, it is often misused and distorted by unclean minds, yet its capacity to withstand the most vicious attacks is boundless. (God in Search of Man pg.241)

In a weekly Shabbat morning study that has been ongoing for over 20 years, a few weeks ago we studied these words above. We were all struck by the power of them, the truth of them and they made/make us look within ourselves to experience this power, this “omnipotence of the Bible in the ways we are living today. Omnipotence comes from the Latin meaning “all-powerful” and while some human beings seem to believe they are omnipotent, Rabbi Heschel is reminding us of the fallacy of such belief, the ridiculousness of such thinking and the danger of acting in such a manner. Yet, some people still do with their lies, their deceptions and their actions. It is a “great miracle” that the Bible has withstood the assault on it, the bastardization of its teachings that have been “the most vicious attacks” on it. We are witnessing today, as we have in every generation, these “vicious attacks” by those who proclaim to believe in it the most, by those who claim their indecent, unkind, criminal actions are in accordance with the teachings and values of the Bible!

Whether these so-called ‘adherents to the Bible’ are radical Muslims, Evangelical Christians, Catholics who don’t adhere to Vatican II, Jews who are right-wing fanatics, or the secular “nones”, all have the same thing in common: they assault the “omnipotence of the Bible” with everything they have, with a verve and a vigor that makes unsuspecting people, uncertain people believe them and allow themselves to think these storm troopers against the Bible may be correct. This belief, this wearing down of the spirit and the minds of ‘the masses’ has allowed these terrorists to capture the minds of so many who become willing to go along with these ‘people who have all the answers from the Bible’. The power of the Bible is so great that people can bastardize it and seem legitimate, seem ‘holy’, seem ‘to know’.

That Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom above was published in 1955 is another sign of his prophetic nature and abilities. While he was describing what has occurred throughout the millennia, he also is describing what is happening today! The Bible “is often misused and distorted by unclean minds” today as much if not more than it was in the days of the prophets, in the days of Middle Ages, etc. Whether it is Ben-Gvir, the Rabbis in the West Bank who use the Bible to promote their desires for power and control by bastardizing the Biblical teachings or it is Mike Johnson, Mike Huckabee, Franklin Graham, et al who use the Bible to distort the clean minds of so many people, these vicious attacks will not change the Bible, will not change the teachings and the Biblical way of being, the truth of the Bible will win out as it has over the millennia.

While many people despair over these “vicious attacks”, while many people are convinced by these “vicious attacks”, Rabbi Heschel’s words come to comfort those of us who believe in the Truth of the Bible, who adhere to its “omnipotence”. Rabbi Heschel is calling to us to not become impotent in the face of these vicious attacks, to not try and “fight fire with fire” because we cannot win in the direct confrontation with mendacity. What we can do is be assured that the Bible’s ability “to withstand the most vicious attacks is boundless”. While Mike Johnson may say the Bible wants white men to have power, while he may truly believe a woman has no agency in a man’s world, while his actions may reflect the opposite of welcoming the stranger, caring for the poor, helping the needy, the truth of the Bible will prevail, the “omnipotence of the Bible” will win out, it just may take a little longer than most of us want it to! No matter what the Rabbis of the West Bank and their colleagues may preach and distort, no matter how much Ben-Gvir and his band of thugs including Netanyahu attempt to ‘take control’ of Israel, Rabbi Heschel’s words bring us to the realization that these attempts are not new, they are not even better than the previous attempts by so-called religious people to make the Bible theirs, rather than making themselves more like the Bible calls us to be. Finally, for today, Rabbi Heschel’s teaching above calls to those of us who truly believe in “the omnipotence of the Bible” to stand up for it, to respond to those who’s “vicious attacks” on it are killing innocent people in Ukraine, in Russia, in Gaza, in Israel, in the United States, in Sudan, with truth, with power, with strength that just as the Bible has “withstood” the attacks on it, we can also withstand the attacks on decency, democracy, love, truth, kindness, justice and mercy.

Recovery is an essential path for us who believe in spirituality, who believe that there is a “power greater than us” in the world and who believe in the eternal wisdom, truth, love of the Bible, of the myriad of other spiritual texts that are at the foundation of every spiritual discipline. We have to recover the meaning of these words of wisdom and truth for ourselves in this moment, we get to discover the brilliance of the Bible, the awesomeness of other Holy Texts and how these timeless lessons help us to withstand the assault on our dignity from outsiders and from within our own being. In recovery, we surrender our need to be right at all costs and we learn, re-learn, how to do right, how to be teachable, how to admit our errors and not be won over by our desire for certainty, our insatiable thirst for ‘winning’ and how to withstand the assault of our negative impulses. This is how we continue to grow in recovery, this is how we continue to believe in the power of our souls to withstand the “vicious assaults”  of our “hearts and eyes” to “whore after them”, as we say each day after the Shema prayer. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Immersing Ourselves in Rabbi Heschel's Wisdom- A Daily Path of Spiritual Growth

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 80

“God is presented to us as a comfort, not a challenge, a rumor, as if it is nice to have Him around. But God means defiance, rejection as well as affirmation. We have relinquished our roles as educators. We surrender, we abandon, we desert, and we forget.” (Essential Writings pg. 87)

How is it possible that we have abandoned, deserted and forgotten what God means, what God has commanded us? When we read the surveys about how religion has lost so many adherents, when “none” has risen in numbers so greatly, it seems as if Rabbi Heschel’s words and wisdom are, again, prophetic. Yet, we hear so much from the “religious right”, we hear how abortion is against Christian doctrine, though it is not mentioned in Scriptures as a prohibition, we hear about “those people” who are “invading our country” “poisoning the blood of our people”, etc from these ‘religious’ people. “We abandon, we desert, and we forget” when we use God as comfort only, when we seek to find a word, a phrase taken out of context to prove the points we want to make for our own self-interest. When the “nones” want to denigrate and deny the existence of God, using a phrase or the mendacious ramblings of these so-called ‘religious’ people, it makes rational sense to “abandon, desert, and forget” the true meaning of God, of faith, of religion.

We people of faith have, as Rabbi Heschel says in his book God in Search of Man, made religion ineffective. We have perpetrated the downfall of religion through making it “irrelevant, dull, oppressive, insipid(God in Search of Man pg.3). The “religious behaviorism” that Rabbi Heschel rails against is oh so prevalent today. The “religious” people have hidden behind God’s defiance of indecency, God’s rejection of injustice and bastardized both of these ways of being. They are not rejecting injustice, rather they are promulgating it! They are not defiance of indecency, they are promoting it, all under the banner of religion, under the flag of piety and purity. Bullshit!

We, the people, all of us, those of us who are people of faith, the “nones”, have to stop the “desecration of God’s Name” by these infidels, by these idolators. Rather than becoming “nones”, we have to double and triple our efforts to overcome the deceptions of the Mike Johnsons, the Ben-Gvirs, the Ayatollahs, the far right and far left media who seek to spread lies by telling only one part of the story, the passivity of people who are unwilling to stand up to these idolators. We have to be engaged in the war against the mendacity of Netanyahu, Putin, Trump, the Heritage Foundation, et al. We have to be in “defiance” of the rhetoric of the Rabbis, Imams, Priests, and Ministers who spew hatred and prejudice. We have to stand up against the stereotyping of groups, of individuals by these ‘holier than thou’ charlatans. While these liars continue to promote perfect adherence to some doctrine that human beings have discerned from our Holy books to aid in their search for absolute power, we, the people, have to say NO, we have to end our abandonment, our desertion of God, of the prophets, of truth.

“Never Forget” is a phrase that has special meaning for Jews and Armenians because be it the Turks, the Holocaust deniers, there will always be people who want to blame the victims. I think we have to also use this phrase for all of us to “Never Forget” the ways God is calling upon us to live-“do justly, love mercy, walk humbly with God”- as well as not forgetting that caring for the stranger, the poor, the needy, the widow and the orphan” is spoken 36 times in the Torah, it is the basis upon which the prophets railed against the priests, the royalty, the wealthy. We have to not forget what our ancestors went through to come to America, to give us a life in “the land of the free and the home of the brave”. It is our duty to not forget our obligation to make America a little more free and to be a little more brave each and every day in order to honor the sacrifice our ancestors made to come here, to fight for our country’s safety and the principles of democracy. As I was taught by my 9th grade Civics Teacher, Ed Roach, all of our freedoms come with the responsibility to use them well, to not take advantage just because we can. We cannot “forget, abandon, desert” God, humanity, our soul’s call anymore! We have to be Godly in our “defiance, rejection as well as affirmation” of mendacity, fake religious people and false doctrines that these idolators claim God is calling us to do. We can no longer afford to abandon the prophetic tradition, we can no longer afford to desert the pathways of Godliness, we can no longer afford to forget to hear and respond to the call of the universe, the call of our souls.

In recovery meetings, I say “my name is Mark and I am a grateful recovering alcoholic” not to shame myself, rather to never forget how far down the rabbit hole of mendacity I fell as well as to remind myself of how grateful I am to God, to the people who love me, to the people who have helped me-they are not always the same- to stay the course of recovery. It is not a linear course, and one that I am compelled to never abandon this path and to never desert the spiritual principles of recovery, of Judaism, of Godliness. Introducing ourselves in the above manner, is an act of “defiance”, it is telling ourselves and those around us we do not have to fall into the lies of “conventional wisdom”, we are in “rejection” of the stigma society has placed on those of us who have erred and returned. We are in “affirmation” of the healing power of God, the ways God ‘opens God’s arms” and welcomes back the stranger, the ‘sinner’, the children who have been in exile. We have a choice to make and we have to make is soon-live Godly or give in to the mendacity of ‘pious’ people. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Immersing Ourselves in Rabbi Heschel's Wisdom- A Daily Path of Spiritual Growth

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 80

“God is presented to us as a comfort, not a challenge, a rumor, as if it is nice to have Him around. But God means defiance, rejection as well as affirmation. We have relinquished our roles as educators. We surrender, we abandon, we desert, and we forget.” (Essential Writings pg. 87)

The last two sentences above send chills up and down my spine! While we pat ourselves on the back as parents, teachers, mentors, and guides, most of us fail to ask ourselves the questions that Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom demands of us. How have we “relinquished our roles as educators? How are we failing to “teach our children” to “love God with all our heart, all our soul, all our everything”? How are we letting go of our job to “speak of them in our house, when we walk on the way, when we lie down and when we rise up”? How have we “relinquished our roles as educators” by not living the principles/commandments/instructions of God, of decency, of kindness, of love, of truth, etc? When we see what is happening in schools(religious and secular), colleges, universities, to truth, to telling the whole story to developing the ability to discern and mature our minds and our souls, we know the truth of Rabbi Herschel’s words. When we forget to tell the whole story of the United States with our conquering of the Native American People, our trading in Slave Labor, our forgetting the words of the Declaration of Independence “all men are created equal”, we are “have relinquished our roles as educators”. When we teach that “Black people benefited from slavery because it taught them useful skills”, when we forget to teach about the Holocaust, when we forget the lynchings, when we fail to tell the story of Billie Holiday who was persecuted because of her song “Strange Fruit”, we “have relinquished our roles as educators”. When we do not teach the importance of “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” found on the Statue of Liberty and the terrible treatment of people at Ellis Island, we “have relinquished our roles as educators”. When we fail to speak to the souls of our children, the spirits of our peers and the inner life of our elders, we “have relinquished our roles as educators.”

In relinquishing “our roles as educators”, we have abandoned the principles upon which the humanity was created: to be “a contemporary of God”, to be “a divine need”, to be a “divine reminder” as Rabbi Heschel reminds us in his interview with Carl Stern. We have abandoned the care of the poor, the uplift of the needy, the embrace of the stranger for our own selfish desires, our own ‘need’ for power and glory. We are witnessing this abandonment in the Halls of Congress, Social Media, the Ukraine, Israel and Gaza, the Middle East in general, the UN, and across the globe-all done by ‘religious people’ as well as by non-religious people as well. We are witnessing a coming together of the charlatans, the authoritarians, the ‘god-fearing’ and the God-denying to further their own aims, their own goals, their own desires by abandoning the principles of Christ, Moses, Mohammed, who taught us the values of Godliness, the words of the Prophets to return to God, to stop our backsliding, to repent in order to be restored to our humanity.

We hear a lot of lip service to God, to religious and moral ethics and values while witnessing the exact opposite. We are hearing a lot of anger, a lot of hatred, a lot of blaming, a lot of bullshit that ‘religious’ people attribute to ‘god’s will’ while it is actually their will and their need for power, certainty, control. When ‘people of faith’ proclaim the ‘sins’ of another group loudly and falsely in the ‘name of god’, they are really proclaiming their surrender to ego, their surrender to mendacity, their surrender to deception. It is happening all over the globe and it is happening right here in our country, in our schools, in our Churches, our Temples, our Mosques. We keep surrendering to the “conventional notions and mental cliches” of society and are afraid to stand up for what is true and right. This surrender is devastating our society, it is killing the spirit and the passion of so many, it is causing wars, it impedes the command to help one another, to “love our neighbor as we love ourself”, it denies the command to “not stand idly by the blood of our brother/sister”, and it uplifts greed, bribery, injustice instead. We speak about “never surrender”, yet we continue to belie our own surrender to self-deception and lies.

We have the ability, however, to “surrender” to the Will of God, to the words and teachings of God we have received from Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha, etc and the wisdom of the wrestlings to understand and apply these values to our lives today, to our situations today, to grow our understanding and use of God’s will for us through our immersion in both the words and the spirit of God’s teachings. This surrender is not a ‘giving up’ or a ‘losing’, it is actually an admission that we are not the smartest person in the room, we are in need of learning and we are teachable. This is the Recovery Revolution! We surrender to truth, to our powerlessness, to our acceptance of being “a contemporary of God”, to our awareness of our strengths and weakness’ as well as what we have done well and how we have harmed. In recovery, we teach our children and one another a different way of being: one that “practices these principles in all our affairs”. We take back our “roles as educators” and we surrender to truth rather than mendacity!

This has been my life’s work in my recovery. I have fought against my own mendacity and self-deception and, while not always winning, I have won more often than not:) I refuse to surrender to the whim of people nor to the political correctness that governs our world, on the right and left. I have heard God’s call to me and I do the best I can to help people educate their souls and grow their inner lives. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Immersing Ourselves in Rabbi Heschel's Wisdom - A Daily Journey in Spiritual Enlightenment

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 79

“God is presented to us as a comfort, not a challenge, a rumor, as if it is nice to have Him around. But God means defiance, rejection as well as affirmation. We have relinquished our roles as educators. We surrender, we abandon, we desert, and we forget.” (Essential Writings pg. 87)

The more I live into with the second sentence above, the more disturbed I become. We are witnessing the bastardization of Rabbi Heschel’s teaching in our business affairs and in our personal lives. In our both areas, we believe “all is fair in love and war” and practice questionable ethics. Business’ are guilty of so many ethics violations and, when caught, will pay a fine and never admit guilt. Fox’s settlement with Dominion Voting Machines is one of the latest examples. Business’  and Political Action Committees won the Citizen’s United case in front of the Supreme Court making “dark money” available to political campaigns that serve the interests of both business’ questionable actions as well as the desires of wealthy to make sure they stay untouchable, in control, and promote right-wing policies that seek to keep the ‘riff raff’ under their thumbs. The same people who flourished in a free society and open markets want to make sure they gain and keep control of the country and not let anyone who isn’t ‘their crowd’ have a seat at the table. Be it the Dobbs decision, the decision to end affirmative action, the decision against Student Loan forgiveness, and any of the myriad of cases that Leonard Leo and his gang of merry men support they all have the same theme: keep ‘those people” down on the farm. And, of course, they do this under the guise of ‘good christian values’! Yet, God is shouting to us from Mount Sinai, God is demanding from us “defiance, rejection” and we seem to be deaf to these calls, these demands. Not only are we deaf, our hearing is so distorted many people hear God’s affirmation of these questionable actions, many people believe deeply that making scapegoats, pointing fingers at the downtrodden and poor, the needy and the stranger are what God is affirming! This is how far we have fallen away from Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom, from God’s teaching in the Bible, from God’s call to us on Mount Sinai and at the Red Sea.

Of course, none of this happens in our business dealings without our personal lives being in shambles. We are seeing a rejection of spirituality, a rejection of religious values, in favor of religious behaviorism, in favor of self-determination. I am hearing Rabbi Heschel remind us, call to us, and teach us that God is not hear to comfort us when we are making errors, when we are bastardizing God’s will and the teachings of Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha, etc. We have come to believe that freedom allows us to ‘get ours’, to do what we want, to scapegoat, ignore, enslave, deny rights to anyone who we deem ‘less than’. We seem to find what is wrong with the world, with people and use these vulnerabilities against them and for ourselves. We are witnessing family life disintegrating because of these traits, we are witnessing communal life fall apart as we live behind the gates of our communities and our homes. We see our cities fill up with homeless people, with people seeking refuge from their native countries because of the violence and rape they are assaulted with. Yet, we remain impervious to God’s demand to be defiant in the face of injustice, we remain impervious to God’s call to reject selfishness, self-centeredness, in the face of the cries of the innocents.

Unfortunately, this move away from God’s call for us to be defiant and rejecting of these behaviors is, in a large part, promoted by ‘religious people’. Be it the far-right settlers in Israel, the ultra-orthodox Jews across the globe who support Bibi and his gang of thugs, the Evangelicals and far right Christian Nationalists who support Trump and his gang of thugs, the Heritage Foundation who promote the 2025 project to put Government Agencies under the rule of the “prosperity gospel” and authoritarian rule, Iran and the radical Muslim Imams who promote hatred, anti-semitism, jihad and Shariah Law; all of these so-called ‘religious’ people are deaf to God meaning “defiance, rejection as well as affirmation.” They have led us to a time where young and old people reject religious values because of their duplicity and mendacity; to a time where religion has once again become insipid, dull, oblivious, and out of touch to the majority of people. They have led us to a time where people reject the “baby with the bathwater”.

We, the People, have to take back what being spiritual, what being religious has always meant: defiance of mendacity, rejection of hatred, stereotyping, gaslighting, affirmation of the inherent dignity of every human being, affirmation of and recognition of the divine image in every one of us. We can only do this when we join the Recovery Revolution! Rabbi Heschel is calling upon us to recover the concern of God, recover the challenge of God, recover the teachings of Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha, etc. He is demanding we let go of our old ideas and immerse ourselves in the teachings, the guidance of God in this moment, to see every moment as new and full of possibilities, to not give into despair. He is reminding us we have the choice to put on a “new pair of glasses” and see today as new, not be pulled down by the errors of our past, rather learn from them to make today a better day than yesterday. I hear him teaching and demanding we let go of our old ideas and view today with wonder and radical amazement, the maladjustment to conventional notions and mental cliches. Rabbi Heschel is a rebel, a prophet, a teacher and a guide. Will you join him in recovering the true nature of God?

I have joined him in ways that permeate my being. I view the world through the prism he offers to us and this allows me, when I am not sleep walking in life, to have defiance and rejection of what is not right, what is not Godly, and affirm the right of all people to “not learn war anymore”. I affirm the dignity and divinity of all. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Immersing Ourselves in Rabbi Heschel's Wisdom- A daily path of spiritual enlightenment

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 78

“God is presented to us as a comfort, not a challenge, a rumor, as if it is nice to have Him around. But God means defiance, rejection as well as affirmation. We have relinquished our roles as educators. We surrender, we abandon, we desert, and we forget.” (Essential Writings pg. 87)

Merry Christmas! Immersing ourselves in the second sentence above and thinking about the stories about Christ, knowing that the entire Torah relates to us God’s will and God’s words of rejection of indecency, defiance of the outsized false ego and false pride of kings, priests, false prophets, etc, we can know that Rabbi Heschel’s teaching of God meanings “defiance, rejection as well as affirmation” are at the foundation of our faith, at the foundation of our being human. Yet, too many people want to deny this truth, too many people have decided that “deep affection”, a definition of love, doesn’t include “defiance”, “rejection”.

When we immerse ourselves in the thoughts of the Bible, as Rabbi Heschel teaches us to do, we can see that God’s love is expressed through both the stories of connection with our ancestors and rejection of their bad actions! We can hear the defiance of God in relationship to the “conventional notions and mental cliches” of societal norms. The Torah, the Bible are, in my experience, stories and instruction manuals for defying the “ways of the world”, for rejecting “the status quo” and affirming spiritual truths that are the foundation of being human, that speak to our souls so we have the same experience as the Israelites at Mount Sinai, at the Red Sea. The more Rabbi Heschel’s teaching reverberates in my soul, the more I am certain of it’s truth and it’s importance.

Whether we are talking about our political realm, our religious realm, our business ethics, our personal relationships, Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom in the second sentence above has to enter into our equations if we are to be human in all of our affairs. If we are to “do justly, love mercy, walk humbly with God” in our living, we cannot ignore what God calls us to be defiant of, what God demands we reject and what God tells us to affirm. We have to honor the protestors in Israel who are living “defiance” with their feet, who are telling Bibi and his band of thugs: NO. They are engaged in actions of rejection of Bibi’s status quo, of the lies of the far-right, so called ‘religious groups’. They are affirming one of the truths of the Book of Genesis, we are all related, Jews and Arabs are cousins, it is time to end the feud and find ways to live in peace with one another. We have to stand in “defiance, rejection” of the protestors who are promoting the false claims of Hamas, who are ‘standing up’ for the Palestinians who have rejected peace deals in the past, who go along with Hamas, with other terrorists in claiming Jews should be driven into the sea. These ‘protestors’ are not caring about truth, they are not seeing the nuances of the situation, they are not forcing Hamas and the other terrorists to return the hostages NOW, they are not even going along with the latest Ceasefire proposal! These ‘freedom fighters’ and their allies are not being Godly, they are not in “defiance” of lies, nor are they in “rejection” of mendacity, they are in “affirmation” of the same prejudices, the same hatred they are accusing Jews and Israel of! Sound familiar-“accuse others of that which you are guilty of” Josef Goebbels. The political far left and far right, the religious far right and far left seem to be incapable of living Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom because of their adherence to ideology rather than Truth, their adherence to what gives them comfort rather than what and when we ought to be in “defiance, rejection” of comfort and ideology, ask religious behaviorism. Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, the other members of the Jan 6th committee, Charlie Sykes, the Lincoln Project, and so many more are heroes for their “defiance” of the mendacious lies of Trump and his gang of thugs. Tomorrow I will write more on the ramifications of living into this wisdom from Rabbi Heschel in our business ethics and personal life.

In recovery, we begin with the spiritual principles of acceptance, hope and faith. We affirm these three every day. Living in acceptance of what is true and right forces us to live in “defiance” of the lies we used to tell ourselves and another(s) as well as the lies that creep into our consciousness in our recovery. Acceptance is a “rejection” of our false egos that want to convince us and another(s) as to what is ‘really going on’ and what should be going on. Acceptance is an “affirmation” of truth, of clearer vision, of taking action on what the next right action is. The spiritual principle of hope affirms our ability to defy societal norms, to reject the deceptions of another(s), to defy our urge to “scout out after our heart and eyes which causes us to whore after them”. The spiritual principle of faith is the affirmation that there is a higher wisdom and logic than our ‘rational minds’. It is a “defiance” of conventional wisdom and mental cliches that, while ‘logical’, are not true nor valid. It is a surrender of ‘our best thinking’ to the will of God, a rejection of our self-deceptions.

My actions of T’Shuvah help me live into the spiritual principles of recovery. I have lived a life of “defiance, rejection” and “affirmation”. For the first 35+ years I rejected God’s will more often than not, I defied truth, and affirmed mendacity. In these 35+ years of recovery, I live in defiance of “political correctness”, of being ‘nice’, of ‘accepting as valid the lies of another(s). I live in rejection of the lies I tell myself and seek to root out the ones I hide from myself. I am loud, abrasive, in your face in my “defiance, rejection” and I am just as loud, abrasive, in your face in my “affirmation” of what is good, what is true, what is holy, and of everyone’s ability to change, I accept what is, hope for the strength and wisdom to change me and the faith that all of us can live into what God’s will for us is. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 77

“God is presented to us as a comfort, not a challenge, a rumor, as if it is nice to have Him around. But God means defiance, rejection as well as affirmation. We have relinquished our roles as educators. We surrender, we abandon, we desert, and we forget.” (Essential Writings pg. 87)

Today is Christmas Eve 2023, immersing ourselves in Rabbi Heschel’s words above, hopefully makes us shudder with trembling awe. Christ ministered to the poor, the needy, the outcasts, the stranger and today we find so many ‘good christians, Muslims and Jews’ calling for the immigrants to go home, locking up the outcasts, decrying the homeless, seeking to end the governmental helping of the poor and the needy! We hear about God being love, which I believe is true and that God will comfort us, which I also believe is true, and yet, not as a challenge, not as calling to us to do better at being human.

While turning our lives over to the care of God is a tenet of all spiritual disciplines, this doesn’t mean that we are free to desist from doing the work that God calls us to do. God is always challenging us to be human, to stop our selfish actions, to end our disdain for anyone ‘not like us’, to cease and desist in our blaming another human being, another group for the ills of our world. I am hearing Rabbi Heschel call us to account, remind us of our puropose and recapture the meaning of being alive: “do justly, love mercy, walk humbly with God” as both the prophets and Moses teach us.

Yet, relating to God “as a comfort" only, as “a rumor, as if it is nice to have Him around” goes against the foundations of all spiritual disciplines, certainly Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. All of these western religions, all of these western spiritual disciplines call for their adherents to be involved, to be helping make our corner of the world a little better. All of these have, at their core, spiritual principles that we are called to live into, to enact in our daily lives, to celebrate and engage in the challenges that God, that life puts in front of us. These challenges are not God-made, they are human made. God gave us the Garden of Eden and we screwed it up, God gave us “the Promised Land” and we abused it, God gave us The Temple and the rich, powerful, famous, priests used it for their own advantage. God gave us free-will and we use it to do what we want, to puff ourselves up and then call ourselves ‘god-fearing people’.

As long as we continue to ‘see’ God as “comfort”, we will not respond to God’s challenge. We are witnessing this phenomenon with all of the fundamentalists who are claiming God for them and only them. We watch, some of us in horror, as fundamentalists in America seek to control women’s bodies, seek to hold onto ‘white power’, engage in actions which demand the poor and the needy, while claiming they are following Christ, Moses, Mohammed! I am hearing Rabbi Heschel call these people out, I am hearing Rabbi Heschel call the rest of us to task for not standing up for Godly actions, for letting this minority run and ruin the lives of so many, bastardize what freedom is, deny the poem on the Statue of Liberty, re-write the Declaration of Independence and the Declaration of the State of Israel.

Of course we also have among us those who believe God is “a rumor” so there is no need to hear the call of God, to accept and respond to the “challenge” of God. They are so arrogant as to believe their ‘morality’ is based on their humanism, on their own sense of what is right and wrong. They seem to agree with Karl Marx that religion is the opiate of the masses. While they might not be afraid to burn in hell, they seem to be actively helping to make our living today a hell on earth-in that they have allied with the fundamentalists to make war not peace, to denigrate the human, to allow for the rise of fascism as we have seen throughout history. Whether we present God “as a comfort” “a rumor as if it is nice to have Him around” both of these presentations allow people to bastardize the words of the prophets, twist the teachings of Jesus, and use God as a weapon against their own enemies, all the while being the real enemies of Godliness, of holiness, of truth, justice, kindness, mercy, humility.

In recovery, we believe God is love, God is joy, God comforts us AND, God challenges us to be one grain of sand better each day. We ask for God’s help to be a little more human each and every day. We know that we need to seek God’s wisdom and God’s will for us and for another, we acknowledge we are imperfect and that doesn’t preclude God’s love for us, God’s love of us. We live in constant “trembling awe” of God’s challenge to us: care for the stranger, the poor, the needy, the widow, the orphan around us and in everyone. The recovery revolution has opened people up to seeing the similarities among all people, it gives us the opportunity to cure our prejudices, remove the cancer of prejudice from our souls, give us a “new pair of glasses” to correct the “eye disease” of prejudice and blame, hatred and self-righteousness. We are constantly living into the 11th Step of AA: “sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.”

As Rabbi Heschel says in his Yiddish Poem, “God follows me everywhere”. This was true even before I knew it and, in my recovery, this truth haunts me daily. I am constantly hearing the challenge of God as I go about my daily life, I am worried that I am not responding to this challenge well enough and I don’t know how to do better right now. My challenge from God is to be me, as Reb Zusya teaches and I do the best I can each day, and each evening I find comfort in God’s love for my efforts. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 76

“Man is what he thinks. Man dwells where his mind dwells. What is intellectually irrelevant is imprisoned in Temples and has no access to our minds. We repeat cliches; we remember platitudes.” (Essential Writings pg. 87)

In his book, Man is Not Alone, Rabbi Heschel teaches us: “the greatest hinderance to knowledge is our adjustment to conventional notions and mental cliches” and the last sentence above affirms this truth. We have dumbed down our thinking, our discourse, our way of being so much that “cliches” and “platitudes” have become commonplace. I hear Rabbi Heschel calling us to end our mendacity and self-deceptions, end our hiding behind falseness and these “cliches”, the “platitudes” we have come to rely on.

“Cliches” comes from the French meaning “to stereotype” and “platitudes” comes from the French meaning “dullness and/or banality”. Considering Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom, he is railing against us stereotyping ourselves, one another, even religion and God. He is reminding us that without daily spiritual growth, we will sink into dullness and banality. When we repeat the “cliches” and use “platitudes” in our daily living, when we are so lazy that our minds recall them rather than delve into what really is happening, when we slough off the difficult work of seeking truth, when we go follow and adore people who tell us what we want to hear we are denigrating our humanness. We are turning our backs on Godliness, we are imprisoning our souls to the 7th circle of hell. I am hearing Rabbi Heschel demand more of us, I am hearing him call upon all of us to be human!

“From the river to the sea”, “poisoning the blood of Americans”, “Jews will not replace us”, and so many other cliches are becoming part of the American  and world political and social culture, with many of the people who repeat these false “cliches” having no idea what they mean or where they come from. Yet, they have become part of our discourse and they are both dangerous and demeaning, lies and spreading like wildfire. Rather than follow the examples of the Rabbis who kept Judaism alive and thriving, who understood the dynamic nature of Torah, we have come to rely “cliches” and “platitudes” rather than delve into the truth of what is right here, right now.

Not knowing when Rabbi Heschel wrote these words, it seems to me as if he could be writing them for our situation today. Be it Bibi Netanyahu and his gang of thugs, Putin and his gang of thugs, Orban and his gang of thugs, Trump and his gang of thugs, Hamas and it’s gang of thugs, the UN and their gang of thugs, the extreme left ‘progressives’, the extreme right ‘conservatives’, all use stereotyping, dullness and banality to ‘rile up their base’. Yet, their ‘base’ have no idea they are being lied to, no clue as to how much worse their lives will be under these authoritarians, these purists, and, as our history teaches us, we will all suffer from the lack of originality, the dullness, the “cliches” and the “platitudes” so many people want to live by. President Lyndon Johnson said: “John F. Kennedy was the victim of the hate that was a part of our country. It is a disease that occupies the minds of the few but brings danger to the many.” We are witnessing this hate on steroids, President Johnson was expressing some wishful thinking when he said: “was a part of our country” because that hatred has not left us, it has been here since our founding, from the Tories who supported the British and tried hard to undermine the first Continental Congress, to the Confederacy to the Carpetbaggers in the South, to the Klan, to the America First and Christian Nationalists before and during the 2nd World War to today’s incarnation of Gingrich, the Tea Party, the Maga Republicans and the Anti-Semites on the left. Using “cliches” and “platitudes” allow us to stay dumb! They allow us to convince people to go along with someone who purposefully wants to have power and control over us, wants us to destroy our moral compass, and imprison our spiritual power as well as deafen us to the call of God, the words of the prophets, the teachings of the great spiritual leaders from Moses to Jesus, from Mohammed to Buddha, from Thomas Merton to Rabbi Heschel, from Buber to Thich Nhat Hanh, from Rev King to Rabbi Harold Shulweis.

The solution  to the banality and the stereotyping, the unoriginal thinking and dullness of our world is to join the Recovery Revolution. We have to hear and use the teachings of the people who enhance our spiritual nature, who blow air and conviction into our souls, like the people mentioned above, like Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob Smith, the founders of AA, like John Pavlovitz, Rabbi Tova Leibovic-Douglas, like Rabbi Igael Gurin Malous, like Rabbi Ed Feinstein, like Rev. Najuma Smith-Pollard, like Rev. Mark E Whitlock, like Father Greg Boyle, etc. We have to return to our essence, return to the teachings of the Bible, return to the spiritual teachings of whatever spiritual discipline speaks to us. We get to find a new sense of self, a renewed connection with truth, with the universe, with holiness. We find ourselves interesting, we engage with interesting people and continue to grow our souls and our minds, our intellect and our “knowing”.

I joined the recovery revolution 36 years ago, in a prison yard, before I stopped drinking a year later. In these 35/36 years of being part of this revolution, I have experienced joy, sorrow, loss and gain, a coming into being more authentic and real, a seeker of truth and I have no patience with banality, with dullness and with stereotyping. I fight “going along to get along”, I am, at times, inappropriate and troublesome. Yet, I am never dull, I work hard to not be boring and I am excited to awaken each morning, I am grateful for Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom which challenges me each day and I am grateful for the love I experience from Harriet, Heather, Miles, my siblings and my family as well as from all of you. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Living Rabbi Heschel's Wisdom - A Daily Spiritual Path for Living Well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day75

“Man is what he thinks. Man dwells where his mind dwells. What is intellectually irrelevant is imprisoned in Temples and has no access to our minds. We repeat cliches; we remember platitudes.” (Essential Writings pg. 87)

We have ‘improved’ on Rabbi Heschel’s words above, we have decided that truth is “intellectually irrelevant” if it doesn’t fit our ideology, if it doesn’t fit into our false memories, if it doesn’t go along with how we want to see the world, etc. We have become enamored with “alternative facts” and we shut our minds and our souls off to what is true and what is real. Hence, we have shut our minds and our beings off to the calls and demands of God, the call of decency, kindness, mercy, justice, love. All of these have become ‘contextual’, as evidenced by the upsurge in anti-semitism, Islamaphobia, racism, and other prejudices that are so prevalent in society today.

Even our religious institutions, our institutions of higher learning have “imprisoned in Temples” what is “intellectually irrelevant” to them. Rather than immersing ourselves in the words and teachings of the Bible, the Koran, the New Testament, we take words and phrases out of context and make them intellectually relevant to the bias’ we have. Rather than delve into “what is the next right action”, rather than “walk humbly with God”, rather than “do justly and love mercy”, we go about our business of competition, comparison, with bastardizations of these truths. Rather than seeing the “both/and” of life we live in an “either/or” state which we use to ‘win at all costs’, even when the cost is to our spiritual health and well-being.

Our fascination with ‘intellectually relevant’ has become an obsession to be right. We are so afraid of uncertainty we lie to ourselves and to everyone else in some fantasy that we outsmart death, outsmart one another in order to prove certainty exists. Our “Temples” have become prisons of this phenomena as well. So many religious leaders and religious institutions are more concerned with their longevity than they are with the truth. So many therapists, life coaches and spiritual counselors, are so concerned with making a living they continue to help people stay in their care rather than helping them to deal with the truth of uncertainty, rather than helping them discern truth, justice, mercy, love, kindness, and connection to a “power greater than themselves”. Too many people and institutions have made a decision that they are greater than, or should be greater than, any other power in the universe.

Society has harmed us greatly by it’s command to become adjusted to “conventional notions and mental cliches”. The demand to “go along to get along” is not just prevalent in one area of society, it is even prevalent in the supposed  rebellions against these “conventional notions and mental cliches”. We are witness’ to how the women who were raped and killed in Israel on Oct. 7th and raped and treated so poorly in captivity by Hamas have not been championed by the woman’s movement, by the Un, by ‘the progressives’; rather they have been ignored, blamed, and vilified for being oppressors! Because it is “intellectually irrelevant” to some ‘progressives’, Israel, all Israelis, all Jews are ‘the oppressors’ and so whatever happens to them, even at the hands of terrorists, is coming to them and ‘the progressives’ cheer the torture, the murders, the rape, the hostage-taking by the terrorists organization Hamas as ‘righteous’ and the terrorists have become ‘freedom fighters’.

It is “intellectually irrelevant” to many people that Donald Trump and his MAGA cronies who want absolute power like the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society, CPAC, the Evangelicals who want a Christian Nation, the America First people, Steve Bannon, Mike Johnson, Lindsey Graham lie, cheat, try to steal an election, want the demise of our democracy. It is “intellectually irrelevant” to most of the other candidates for the Republican Presidential nomination as well. It is “intellectually irrelevant” to many democrats that Joe Biden has helped our country, cares about democracy, stands with allies, fights against tyranny, seeks bi-partisan compromises, cares for the poor, the needy, the stranger, the widow and the orphan as the Bible demands of us. It is “intellectually irrelevant” to people that vaccines work, they save lives, they are developed by people to whom God has given the talent and the spirit to work to prevent unnecessary deaths.

In recovery, we unlock the “Temples” which have imprisoned our minds, our souls. We are in the daily exercise of allowing what is called “intellectually irrelevant” and is, in actuality, truth and wisdom, prophecy and demands from God, to fill our beings and we are letting go of our “old ideas” which we thought helped us and in reality failed us. We are constantly seeking to know God’s will better, to be better human beings, to live lives of service and truth, justice and mercy, responsibility and forgiveness. We see the wreckage of our past from imprisoning our souls, from locking up truth, from shutting down learning and we commit to not repeat these patterns. We aer committed to truth, to learning, to progress, and to live life on life’s terms-not the terms we want to dictate. This is the recovery revolution.

Living without bullshit, living responsibly, has its costs, seeking truth and calling out the lies that have become imprisoned in our “Temples” is dangerous and it is the only way I can live and ‘face’ God, face you each day. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Living Rabbi Heschel's Wisdom - A Daily Spiritual Guide to Living Well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day74

“Man is what he thinks. Man dwells where his mind dwells. What is intellectually irrelevant is imprisoned in Temples and has no access to our minds. We repeat cliches; we remember platitudes.” (Essential Writings pg. 87)

I sit here amazed, awed, and saddened by Rabbi Heschel’s words above. HIs knowledge of the human condition is so broad and smart, so exacting and eviscerating at the same time. I am, as always, disturbed by his demands, his teachings, his truthfulness, his ability to go to the heart of the challenge before us, as he says, “to be human”! His words evoke Einstein’s quote: “the intuitive mind is a gift, the rational mind a servant, we have forgotten the gift and worship the servant.” Another Einstein quote also comes to mind: “great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.”

Both Rabbi Heschel and Albert Einstein know the limitations of the mind in human beings as well as the way we have come to worship the mind since at least the time of the Greeks of antiquity. We have so identified with our minds, as I am understanding Rabbi Heschel’s words above and Einstein’s quotes, that we identify ourselves in a very narrow way, we have come to believe that our thinking defines us and we work hard to push away ‘alien thoughts’. While “alien thoughts’ can be and are, at times, dangerous, the ‘alien thoughts’ I am hearing Rabbi Heschel and Albert Einstein speak of are the thoughts for which our rational/logical thinking cannot handle. Rabbi Heschel is also speaking to us about our inability to have our minds opened and changed once we ‘settle’ on a place to put them. “Just put your mind to it” is a common refrain when someone says “I can’t do this”, It is not my place, my way”, etc. Rather than go beyond the limitations of our minds, the rut of the neural pathways that have galvanized our thinking around an idea, a concept, a person, anything, we stay stuck in the space our minds tell us to be in, we are committed to defend our thinking no matter what evidence is shown to change it. In the political world we accuse people of ‘flip-flopping’ when they change their position based on new information.

I am a little stuck in Rabbi Heschel’s teaching above and the words of Einstein this morning because they give me wings, they validate my experience, and they demand a response from me/us. How narrow is our living? How narrow is our thinking when we limit ourselves to “the servant’s” demands rather than use “the servant” to enhance and carry out the ideas, the thoughts, the vision of our “intuitive mind”? How desperate is our way of living when we define ourself and another(s) by what they/we are thinking, how boring is it to never travel anywhere new because our mind is so comfortable in where it is dwelling now? Yet, humanity seems to have trouble going beyond the rational, the logical, and we witness the “violent opposition” to “great spirits” “from mediocre minds”. Rabbi Heschel was opposed and by much of the Jewish Intellectual world for much of his time at JTS as the stories go, he was vilified by people for his involvement in the Anti-Vietnam protests, for his civil rights work, because they thought he should just ‘stay in his place/stay in his lane”. Rev King and John Lewis come to mind regarding “violent opposition from mediocre minds” as well as Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney-the three young men killed in Mississippi because they were signing people up to vote. We witness it today with Bibi, with Trump, with Putin, with the far right and the far left, this violent opposition to new ideas, new ways of seeing things. Once they have become entrenched in an idea, ie “stolen election”, “Trump is the real president”, “Jews are oppressors”, “from the river to the sea”, “Hamas are freedom fighters”, etc-they hold on to their thinking and defend it with everything they have and nothing is going to change their minds nor change where there minds are comfortable dwelling.

We have to hear the demands of Rabbi Heschel, of Albert Einstein, of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., of the Prophets, of the Bible, and begin to respond to them with open minds and with open souls, hearts. We have to become more interested in seeking truth, going on a treasure hunt to find more of the picture, be in radical amazement and wonder rather than gibe in the mediocre minds of another and even of our selves. We are blessed with the capability to hear the call of our souls, to use our intuitive minds for good, for exploration, for apprehending the mystery of the universe, and we have to grow this capability, we have to engage with it, not repudiate it in the manner Einstein tells us we are doing.

The war in Israel is a war that needs to fought after Oct. 7th and it does not need to be fought the way Bibi and the Far Right coalition running the government are fighting it. They are stuck in their thinking and is causing great immorality in the West Bank and in Gaza. They are putting on lies and deceptions because that is the way their minds think, they lie about what the Torah teaches and they use God as weapon and justification, all the while knowing that God commands us to ‘treat the stranger well” and “love your neighbor as you love yourself”. God doesn’t issue these commands because this way of being comes naturally, it is exactly because God, the Torah, knows how “men think” that we have to be commanded to do the opposite. This is why it is imperative to join the Recovery Revolution. While most people associate recovery with drugs and alcohol, it actually began with the Torah, with the Bible and has continued to be promoted through different ‘holy’ texts since including the Big Book of AA! Bill Wilson’s stories, Einstein’s words, Rabbi Heschel’s teachings are all continuations and variations of the Bible’s call, God’s demand for us to be human and that means going beyond our thoughts and the narrow paths of our minds. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 73

“Man’s sense of injustice is a poor analogy to God’s sense of injustice. The exploitation of the poor is to us a misdemeanor; to God, it is a disaster. Our reaction is disapproval, God’s reaction is something no language can convey.” (Essential Writings pgs 86-87)

Again, Rabbi Heschel’s words in the last sentence above should make us question ourselves. In today’s world, in today’s political, social, religious climate, we seem to have no reaction to nor any “sense of injustice”. We have let go of truth as our barometer, we have decided to jettison facts and we seem to have decided to go along with whatever “alternative facts” that meet the narrative we have created. Be it the ways we treat the poor, seeking to cut off the programs that help lift them up, the criminalization of homelessness by arresting the unhoused, putting people seeking entry into the United States by knocking at our borders into detention, we make up stories that ‘those’ people are threats to us and we do it under the ‘cover’ of “law and order”.

In an article in the LA Times yesterday by George Skelton, a survey showed that only 37% of the people in California  believed we have a responsibility to do anything about the fighting in Israel, 20% of young Americans believe the Holocaust was a myth and another 30% are not sure whether it is a myth or not! How is this possible? How has our educational system failed us so badly? How has the lies of Holocaust deniers online, through social media overtaken truth and facts so boldly and so corruptly? Where is the outrage about terrorism, where is the outrage regarding “ethnic cleansing”? We can’t even register “disapproval” in today’s world when injustice occurs. Yet, many of these deniers, many of these liars claim to be ‘people of faith’, people ‘who stand for truth’.

Be it Rudy Guiliani, Alex Jones, Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, Roger Stone, Mike Flynn, Donald Trump, they all promote these lies and so many others. They are a cancer on our country, they are a cancer in our system, they are a cancer that spreads and is metastaticizing throughout the body politic, the body religious, the body social in the United States and beyond. Yet, so many people are blasé about this fact, so many people laugh off the calls for authoritarianism, even welcome them and they are people of faith, people of conscience, Jews, Christians, Muslims, Blacks, Latinos, LGBTQ+; so many of the people who will be adversely affected by these charlatans, by these authoritarians!

Rabbi Heschel’s teaching above is so crucial for us right now. We have to change our attitudes, change our belief in the lies we tell ourselves, the deceptions we buy into and end our reliance on mendacity, on the masks we wear, on the false ‘facts’ that are being spread like wildfire. When 50% of young Americans either are not sure the Holocaust happened or sure it didn’t, we are in trouble. When so many people believe that Hamas is an organization that cares about the people of Gaza and/or the Palestinian people while taking the billions of dollars in aid given to them and spending it on weapons, tunnels and to fuel an opulent lifestyle in Qatar, Turkey, etc, we are in trouble. When people believe that Trump, Netanyahu, Orban, Putin, Abbas, et al care about them and want to take care of them, we are in trouble. “God’s reaction is something no language can convey” and we keep ignoring “God’s reaction”. Our ignorance is not in favor of disapproval, rather we seem to be approving of the injustice being done in our name and this is tragic.

Isn’t it time for our elected officials to hear the call from Sinai-“Justice, Justice, your shall pursue” or in another translation, “Righteousness, Righteousness you shall pursue”? Isn’t it time for the Supreme Court to heed this call and stop taking gifts from wealthy people because “bribes blind the eyes of the righteous/wise”? Isn’t it time for Thomas and Alito to leave the Supreme Court because their ‘justice’ is just another name for “exploitation of the poor”? When one has an agenda that has to be served above all facts, all truth, all arguments, one has lost all sense of right and wrong, one has lost all connection “to God’s sense of injustice” and one has lost the qualifications to sit in judgement, I believe. When we, as a country, have so poorly educated our youth so that 50% believe or may believe the Holocaust is a myth, when people are calling terrorists ‘freedom fighters’, when people are unable to see the deaths in Gaza as tragedies, we are in grave danger of losing our ability to be human.

The recovery revolution is antithetical to these lies, to these perversions of truth and facts. It is a way of being that seeks to hear “God’s reaction… that no language can convey”. We seek to hear it with our soul, we listen to the call of God, the call of decency, the call of justice, the call of righteousness with the ears of our souls, of our inner lives. We begin to see the world clearer and better with the help of our “third eye”, the “eyes” of our souls. We are deeply committed to seeing our part in all aspects of life, we seek to “practice these principles in all our affairs” and we are willing to admit our shortcomings, our ‘missing the mark’, and repair the damage so we can change. We are not stuck in some misguided dogma, some artificial facade anymore. We are taking off all of our masks, we are shedding the clothing of mendacity and deception we were living in and we seek truth and stand for righteousness, justice and love.

In these past 35 years, with the help of many teachers and loved ones, I have come to hear God’s cry in a way “that no language can convey” and have often responded with my own cries, my own ‘anger’, my own distress. I refuse to dumb life down, I continue to seek the Both/And of each situation along with the nuances. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Living Rabbi Heschel's Wisdom - A Daily Spiritual Path for Living Well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 72

“Man’s sense of injustice is a poor analogy to God’s sense of injustice. The exploitation of the poor is to us a misdemeanor; to God, it is a disaster. Our reaction is disapproval, God’s reaction is something no language can convey.” (Essential Writings pgs 86-87)

Immersing ourselves in the second sentence above, hopefully, causes us to look at the ways we are living. While Rabbi Heschel’s words above are in themselves an indictment of humanity, I am not certain that “the exploitation of the poor is to us a misdemeanor” at all. Throughout history we have witnessed this “exploitation” and most of us have done nothing about it! Watching and hearing the different debates going on in the Congress about “entitlement” programs and the constant onslaught against the rights of women, people of color, the ways we are treating “the stranger, the needy, the poor” in light of Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom, should cause us to review our actions, change our thinking and act in accordance with God’s will-not the will the idolators and charlatans, the will of the ‘humanists’.

We have acted unjustly towards the poor because we can, we have exploited minorities because we can, we have turned “a misdemeanor” into felonies and disasters all the while extolling our allegiance to God, claiming to do this in the name of Jesus, because of the teachings of Moses, in accordance with Mohammed’s words. This is the disaster we have created, it is not God doing anything mean to us, it is not God’s wrath that caused 9/11, it is not the call of Allah that made Oct.7th into another “Day of Infamy”. These disasters are the logical consequences of our not taking seriously what is just and what is right in ‘the eyes’ of God. It is us not using the teachings, the wisdom, the experiences of our ancestors to learn, to grow, to repair, to “do justly, love mercy and walk humbly with God”.

We are, once again, watching as people in power, elected officials wrap themselves in the warped understandings and bastardizations of the Torah, the New Testament, the Koran to satisfy and defend their actions of injustice. Be it the Holy Roman Empire and the Spanish Inquisition, the progroms of Eastern Europe, the killing of Indigenous People in North America, the enslavement of Black people from Africa, the killing of priests and ministers because they spoke out against the kings off their country; we know from our history of our desire to act unjustly and make excuses and spread mendacities to make it seem like we “do justly”.

This is a prime example of the war within, the battle between what our soul knows and our mind says, what our heart desires and our inner life calls out to us. Be it Mike Johnson or Mark Borovitz, this war is constantly being waged inside and the true “people of faith” are the ones who follow the call of their souls, who seek to grow and mature their inner lives so they can overcome the urge to “scout out after our heart and our eyes and whore after them” as it says in the 3rd prayer after the Shema in Jewish daily prayers. In Judaism, prayer is not petitionary, it is a look inside of ourselves, it is to discern what is happening in our inner life, it is, in Rabbi Heschel’s words, “to praise, to sing, to chant. Because the essence of prayer is a song and man cannot live without a song”(Interview with Carl Stern). We each get the opportunity to sing our unique, particular song-the one God has placed in us- each and every day. Yet, so many people use prayer, use ‘faith’, misuse the words of God to stifle the song of another human being, to crush the windpipe of another group, to deny even the God-given, necessary song of justice of another human being. This is, perhaps, the greatest “misdemeanor” we commit towards one another as it leads to a belief that we can do injustice to one another with impunity.

In recovery, we revolt against the ‘status quo’ of injustice. We are so attuned to our own acts of injustice because of our doing a “thorough and fearless moral inventory”, we have reversed our way of being desensitized to injustice. We have changed courses, we go against the grain of societal norms which tell us it is okay to ‘cheat on our taxes’ to ‘let the buyer beware’, etc. Instead, we return to a way of being that is promoted in the Bible-the seller is responsible to disclose defects, cheating anyone is cheating everyone, injustice towards one is injustice towards all. Rev Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech describes the change that occurs in recovery: (my children) “will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” In recovery, we seek to improve “the content of our character” and grow our commitment to “do justly”, our review of our day each evening, keeps us current and allows us to spot the beginnings of injustice, the beginnings of prejudice, the beginnings of immoral actions.

Rabbi Heschel’s teachings over these past 35 years have caused me great disturbance, they upset me each and every day-in a good way. I am sorry for the times I have acted like the people I describe above-not doing justly and trying to make like I was. I am sorry for the moments when I didn’t call out injustice louder and demand different actions from a place of fear of losing support/funding for Beit T’Shuvah. I am sorry for not hearing the rebukes of people who were trying to help me sing my song better and encourage another to sing theirs stronger. I am grateful for the myriad of people whom I helped to learn and sing their own songs, I am grateful for Rabbi Heschel constantly being in my ear and my soul to push me to “do the next right thing”. I am grateful that injustice is a disaster to me, not just a “misdemeanor”. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Living Rabbi Heschel's Wisdom- A Daily Spiritual Discipline for Personal Growth

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 71

“Man’s sense of injustice is a poor analogy to God’s sense of injustice. The exploitation of the poor is to us a misdemeanor; to God, it is a disaster. Our reaction is disapproval, God’s reaction is something no language can convey.” (Essential Writings pgs 86-87)

Rabbi Heschel’s first sentence above shatters the sense of ‘righteousness’, our sense of ‘holier than thou’, our sense of ‘being faithful’ that so many people wrap themselves in because of their attendance at a house of worship, their ‘adherence’ to the commandments, their ‘pious’ way of being and their ‘using' the Bible as the basis of their way of living. I put these words in quotes because the people who claim to be so ‘god-fearing’, so ‘pious’, actually believe they are equal to God or Christ, Moses or Mohammed, in the ways they mistreat the poor, the myriad of ways they promote injustice, the use of their power to close the door on the stranger, ignore the needy and make being poor a crime rather than an opportunity to aid and to serve.

We are witnessing the loss of “man’s sense of injustice”, we are watching, some of us in horror, as our inhumanity towards one another is creeping up to the standards of Nazi Germany, Mussolini’s Italy, and the evil of the Axis powers. Yet, we make excuses for these old ways of being that we have freshened up with perfume and new make-up. When aid to Ukraine and Israel, who are in fights for their existence, is held up by Mike Johnson’s sense of ‘biblical justice’, his belief he is ‘doing what God wants’, we are seeing injustice. When 6 Supreme Court Justices with no oversight, no recourse, can decide that a woman’s health is to be decided by the State instead of the woman herself, a blow to the woman’s personal freedom, and use the Bible that never speaks of abortion, this injustice is considered just by the majority of the Court and the Anti-Abortion faction. Yet, when the government decided to give relief to the poor students in the form of forgiveness of their Student Loans, this same Court ruled in unjust! How insane is this, the Anti-Abortion who are ‘pro-life’ believe a person who, after their trial is adjudicated, and new evidence points to their innocence, should still be put to death, because as the late Justice Scalia said, he had due process and his innocence has no bearing on the punishment!!

The injustice of Oct. 7th seems to have been forgotten by so many, in fact on Oct.8th, the demonstrations were calling the savagery, the rape, the killing of children and women, the parachuting into a music festival celebrating peace and love, all were done by ‘freedom fighters’, by martyrs and heroes of the ‘Palestinian people’. Since then, the deaths from the war that Hamas declared upon Israel on Oct.7th are horrific, they are so sad-the innocent ones because the totals given by the ‘most truthful’ Hamas health Authority, don’t differentiate between Hamas terrorists and innocent Palestinians. Yet, the world doesn’t seem to accept the injustice of Hamas, the injustice of Iran, the injustice of Hezbollah, the injustice of the Houthis in Yemen. Rather, they focus on the injustice of war, the injustice of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, which to be truthful, Bibi and his gang have been unjust towards our cousins, the Palestinians. The Israeli government has not followed the commands of the Torah that the far-right religious zealots claim to adhere to. I ask the people who chant “from the river to the sea” how is this justice for Israelis?

We are in grave danger of losing our “sense of injustice” and it worries me. We have come up with so many ‘clean-ups’ for our actions, so many defenses for our ‘bad behavior’, so many delays in ‘doing the next right thing’, so many distractions from holding the perpetrators of injustice accountable, it is scary and it is dangerous. What we continue to call God’s wrath, what we continue to say is “the angry God of the Old Testament” is, in actuality, “God’s sense of injustice” being revealed, I believe. Moses breaks the tablets, Jesus points the finger at those who belittle the lepers and the poor he breaks bread with, Mohammed speaks of the infidel, could all be manifestations of God’s trying to get us to pay attention to the injustice we commit, the injustice we ignore and the injustice we are indifferent to. Isn’t it time for us to actually live into the principles of justice? Isn’t it time for us to be a nation that acts on the phrase “Liberty and Justice for all”?

Acting in ways that are just, that are decent, that are caring is the only way most of us are able to stay in sobriety and the only way to be in recovery! We regain our sense of right and wrong, we “turn our lives over to the care of God”, we seek to discern God’s will for us and we know that any and every act of injustice is another affront to our souls, to our recovery and to God. Hence we do an inventory each day, a 10th step, so we can be aware sooner of our unjust actions, repair the damage before it becomes overwhelming and change our ways and our thinking that took us down the path of injustice. Service, caring for the needy and the poor, welcoming the stranger are crucial to our recovery and invaluable in our climb out of being unjust to a new sense of what justice truly is.

After 20+ years of being unjust, these past 35 years have been dedicated to acting in ways that are just, that are compatible with being a partner of God, and I haven’t always gotten it right. My grandparents had a ‘spidey sense’ of injustice-probably because of their experiences in Ukraine and Poland, my father was loud and argumentative with anyone he perceived as being unjust, my brothers and sister have stood for the poor, the needy and the stranger all their lives and, for the past 35 years, I have done the same. Today is 35 years of continuous recovery and I am grateful for the sense of justice and injustice I have been imbued with. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 70

“God is always concerned. He is personally affected by what man does to man. He is a God of pathos. This is one of the meanings of the anger of God: the end of indifference!” (Essential Writings pg. 86)

The word “pathos” comes from the Latin meaning “suffering, grief” and the English definition is “something that evokes pity, sadness”. As I immerse myself in the last two sentences above, I hear Rabbi Heschel calling out to us to live into the suffering and grief God experiences from our actions towards one another. I hear him demand from us an end to our indifference, an end to our inability to treat one another as Divine Needs, Divine Reminders!

Our indifference to the ways people are treated, the ways we seek to ‘win’ at all costs, our indulgence in mendacity and deceptions, our inability to have rachmones, compassionate pity, for one another provokes “the anger of God”. Not an anger that is like ours, where we want to ‘get even’, not an anger that blinds us to what is, rather an anger that gets our attention, an anger that comes from a deep love of humanity, a righteous anger. Just as the “prophet’s angry words cry”, so too is God’s anger a cry out to us to change, to care, to be concerned, to end our indifference, end our attraction and engagement in the “evil of indifference”.

How do we bring about “the end of indifference”? This is the question that has haunted humankind forever. How do we end our misbelief that we are not our brother’s keeper? How do end our love of deception and enslavement of another person, people? How do we cure the deafness of the call of those in need, the people who feel like “strangers in a strange land”? The solution begins with prayer, with T’Shuvah, with a serious look in the mirror.

I have been studying the Morning Blessings with Rabbi J.B.Sacks for the past several months. We have yet to finish the 15 prayers we say each morning and I believe in these verses, in these prayers is a solution to “the anger of God”! The first prayer is gratitude for the rooster being able to discern the difference between day and night. This discernment is also granted to us, yet we seem to lack the ability to apply discernment to our daily lives. We continue to mix up what is good and what is not good, we continue to mix up what is holy with what is profane, we continue to mix up what is concern and what is indifference, we continue to mix up what is Godlike and what isn’t. We mix these things up because we refuse to take our proper place in life, we forget that we are divine needs, we are here to make our corner of the world a little better than when we found it, we are not here to puff ourselves up, we are not here to lord over another, we are not here to control and dominate another human being. We are not here to call evil good, destruction creation, being off-key harmony, ignoring the poor, the needy, the stranger as Godly! These and so many other ways we take are paths of indifference and this provokes God’s care, God’s love and God’s concern.

When God’s care, love and concern are provoked by our actions, “the anger of God” is not to punish as I hear Rabbi Heschel this morning, rather it is to wake us up! It is God’s call to us for us to participate in “the end of indifference!” This “anger of God” is a call of love for us to return to the call of our soul, to end our total reliance on our mind’s rationalizations, to stop our buying into the ‘logic’ of societal norms, to look inside of ourselves and heal the “evil of indifference” that has overtaken our inner lives. One of the greatest experiences of love is being able to say NO, to ask ‘are you aware of what you are doing’, to demand that one lives decently and kindly. These questions, our ability to say NO, comes from love even though they are delivered, at times, in anger. This anger is not personal, rather it is an anger that comes from love, from fear of another person losing their humanity, maybe even losing their lives.

The solution to our indifference and to God’s anger is to hear the call of our souls, to heed the call of God, to end our need to be #1 and to accept our proper place in the world. We need to end our search for Nirvana, for Utopia and live lives that are meaningful, that are helpful, lives which exude gratitude for being alive as the Modeh Ani prayer expresses, lives wherein we continue to take our own inventory and see where we have done well and not done well each and every day, make our amends where needed, end our reliance on false status and stature, return to the words of the prophets, the words of Torah, the words of Bible expressed in the stories of how our archetypes did well and where and when they screwed up. The solution is to join the Recovery Revolution! In recovery, we are not recovering sobriety, we are recovering our essential humanity. We welcome the stranger, we help the needy, we feed the poor, we extend dignity to all. In recovery, we imperfectly live by spiritual principles and seek to discern God’s will for us and not give into our selfish desires. We embrace one another with love, we embrace humanity with concern, with truth, with kindness, with justice. We know we are neither better nor worse than any other human being and we “suffer” with those who are still stuck in old ways and we have compassion and concern for them.

My anger, as I have said, over the years of my recovery, has not been selfish for the most part. My anger was/is not about my needs it is about the indifference of human beings towards one another and towards truth. I can’t “stand idly by” and I have expressed my anger in ways that put off a lot of people-because of my fears, my rage at indifference, at evil. For the inappropriate ways, I am sorry-I am not sorry for not being indifferent. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Living Rabbi Heschel's Wisdom - A Daily Spiritual Path for Living

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 69

“God is always concerned. He is personally affected by what man does to man. He is a God of pathos. This is one of the meanings of the anger of God: the end of indifference!” (Essential Writings pg. 86)

Rabbi Heschel’s teaching, in the second sentence above shatters the protective shield we all put on to hide from the cruelties we perpetrate upon one another. “He is personally affected by what man does to man” is the theme of the entire Bible, from Adam hiding, to Cain lying, to Jacob deceiving, to the Pharaoh’s hard-heartedness, to the stubbornness and ingratitude of the Israelites. The prophets never came to complain about the sacrifices that were not done ‘properly’, rather they came to rail against the way the rich, the powerful, the priests and the kings treated the people. Jesus didn’t worry about the rituals in the Temple, he cared about the widow, the orphan, the stranger, the poor, the needy, the lost. King David’s military victories were like nothing when he was selfish and sent Uriah to be killed because King David did wrong and had to make himself ‘feel’ better. Nathan the Priest called him out for this behavior and, to his credit, King David admitted his sin, repented and did not lash out at Nathan for telling the truth.

Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom, teaching above is him being our Nathan the prophet, Nathan the advisor, Nathan the truth teller. Yet, most people choose to ignore this truth, choose to re-enforce their protective shields and armor with lies, with rationalizations, with purposeful misinterpretations of Holy Texts, etc. We seem to be afraid to confront the truth and wisdom of Rabbi Heschel above because it would lead to us having to change our ways. Just as the Israelites, the people of Judea refused to take in and truly hear the words of Isaiah, Amos, Hosea, Jeremiah and the rest of the prophets, we also refuse to listen to the wisdom and truth of Rabbi Heschel, Rev. King, and other spiritual leaders who are calling on us to repent!

We have come to be a species that buys into, what I call, the lower logic of “survival of the fittest” and “might makes right”. On this 7th day of Hanukkah, while the story of the Maccabees winning the war is celebrated, the theme of Hanukkah is about light, it is about increasing the light in the world, it is increasing the light in our own souls, it is about increasing our spiritual strength and resolve in order to not give into the reasoning of our lower logic and, instead, rise to meet the aspirations, the call of our higher logic, our spiritual knowing. To do this, we have to allow the words of Rabbi Heschel, the teachings of the Bible, of Jesus, of Mohammed, of the myriad of spiritual warriors who have preceded us and those who are in our midst today to shatter the walls we have built up, to hear the call of the Shofar and, instead of trying to make the walls of Jericho, come down, allow the walls and the armor surrounding our souls, surrounding our higher logic to fall and be able to truly see what we are doing to one another and hear God’s concern and respond to it, rather than hold onto to the armor in fear of being naked in front of God and one another.

The religious zealots, who are constantly bastardizing God’s words and God’s will, the non-believers who are sure we should just “eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we shall die” are two sides of the same coin. Probably nothing I write will penetrate their armor. My words, my goal in living Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom and teachings is to help the rest of us summon the courage of the prophets, the heroism of Rabbi Heschel, Rev King and their contemporaries to stand for Godliness, to stand for spiritual principles, to stand against hatred, senseless and indiscriminate death, deception and mendacity. We can do this, we can learn from our ancestors, we can summon the courage and the strength to honor their gift of life in America, life in a free country. This means we have to stand up for the rights of everyone, stand against the fascists, the Christian Nationalists, the haters, the deceivers, the mendacious ones in our Congress, in our Media, in our homes and communities. We have to have discussions based on facts, on truth, not on “alternative facts” nor untruths. Having different points of view, arguing for a way of being that is different from one another, all of these are hallmarks of the gift God gives us-our own experience of God, of Torah, of the Bible-we just can’t use the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, the Bible as a foundation to lie, cheat, steal, exert selfish power over one another, buy the Judges (Clarence Thomas, Sam Alito), or destroy our ‘enemies’. We can change our ways, we can take off the armor, we can march in truth, in unity, in justice, in love, in mercy and, just like the walls of Jericho, the walls will come down-if and only if, we immerse ourselves in the way of God and be “personally affected by what man does to man”!

The first 35 years of my life I was “personally affected” at times and it did not help me take off the armor because I knew I was different than most people, it did not help me put down the shield I put up after my father’s death and my abject loneliness. God awakened me to the truth of my existence in 1986, around this very date, and my old life was shattered, the walls were non-existent, they were a rubble at my feet and I got the opportunity to build a new life without the walls, without a shield to ‘protect’ me. Instead, I have worn the shield of God’s love, I am embedded inside the “fence of Torah”, I am surrounded by the walls of the Recovery Revolution! I am affected by what I do to another, what is done to me by another, and what “man does to man”. Each morning I am grateful for life, each day I do the best I can to make life better for the people I love, the people I know and “the stranger who dwells in our midst”. I take to heart that God is affected and this means my love and my gratitude is expressed by how much I care, how much I do to help another human being. Never perfect and always progress-God Bless and stay safe, Happy Hanukkah, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 68

“God is always concerned. He is personally affected by what man does to man. He is a God of pathos. This is one of the meanings of the anger of God: the end of indifference!” (Essential Writings pg. 86)

There is much discussion as to the validity of the first sentence above! Many people believe that God is too distant, too ‘busy’ to be concerned. Many people believe God is so hidden that God has ‘washed His hands of us’. Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom above comes to refute these lies. In 1968, in his introduction of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to the Rabbinical Assembly of Conservative Judaism, Rabbi Heschel said: “Martin Luther King is a sign that God has not forsaken the United States of America. God has sent him to us.” I believe Rabbi Heschel and his teachings, brilliance is also a sign that God hasn’t forsaken us as well. Rev. King, Rabbi Heschel, the prophets, all of the disciples and students of these people and so many others before and after them are the proof that “God is always concerned.”

Yet, it is not enough to just acknowledge God’s concern, many charlatans, many idolators do this as well. When Donald J. Trump is hailed as the messenger of Christ, of God, we witness the bastardization of Rabbi Heschel’s teaching. When the name of God is used to oppress the poor, unwelcome the stranger, imprison the needy, control women, enslave people of color, engage in Islamaphobia, chant “Jews will not replace us”, support, defend, celebrate terrorists who rape, kill, take hostage, innocent men, women, children at a concert, in their homes, just because they live in Israel, just because they live in Ukraine, this is the antithesis of Rabbi Heschel’s teaching. When people who support white supremacy, use anti-semitism as an excuse to debase people and we applaud them, we are falling into the trap of the idolator, the web of the deceiver, the well of mendacity. We have to call out the deceivers, the idolators and never go along with “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”, as Bibi Netanyahu did with Hamas because they were against the Palestinian Authority!

We learn that God cries when the Egyptians were drowning in the Red Sea, saying “My children are dying, My children are dying”. We learn that God cries every night because “My children are in exile”. In the Bible, we learn often that God cares about the widow, the orphan, the stranger, the poor, the needy. God considers each person as important, as holy, as worthy; so much so that God promises God’s wrath upon those who take unfair advantage of them. God teaches us to ransom the captive, to redeem our own people, to care for one another, to treat the women we take captive in war with concern and care. God teaches us to care for the corner of the garden that we are privileged to tend. The entire Bible is God’s book of love, care, concern, and desire to be in relationship, in a covenantal relationship with humankind. Yet, we use it as a club instead of a love story, we use it to have rule and dominion over one another, to set up a hierarchy of people so we can ‘have our own way’. There is nothing in the extremes that is Godly, there is nothing in the far right nor far left agenda which mirrors “God is always concerned.”

How have we gotten here, one may ask. We have forgotten the wisdom and teaching of Rev. King, Rabbi Heschel, Elie Weisel, Martin Buber, the Rabbis, the Desert Fathers, Christ, Moses, Mohammed! We have not only forgotten their wisdom, we have bastardized their teachings to suit our selfish, narcissistic desire for power. This happens because people are lazy, we don’t study the Holy Books, we don’t study the myriad of literature that speaks to our need to be concerned about truth, justice, mercy, kindness, love, etc. We have forgotten the words of the prophets for the sake of the words of Tik Tok! We believe the words of Putin, of Iran, of Orban, of Trump over the words and thoughts of the US Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, Biden, Kennedy, Bush, Reagan!

We are susceptible to the deceivers because we have not let go of our own self-deception. We are willing to go along with “on advice of counsel” rather than speak truth, rather than act with compassion, rather than see the nuances and grey of any and every experience. We are willing to be told to follow, to believe the liars, rather than think for ourselves because thinking for ourselves, going against the majority could leave us stranded, alone and without people of courage to ‘have our back’. We witness this with Liz Cheney and, yet, she is sought after as a speaker, as a teacher, as a true patriot. While most of the people she speaks with in the media are diametrically opposed politically, all of us are in awe of her willingness to stand up for democracy, for freedom, for the rule of law. Liz Cheney’s example is not too far from the rest of us, we have to have the same courage, the same dedication to truth, to justice, to mercy, to love so we can overcome our willingness to believe the idolators, the charlatans, the mendacious ones.

This is one of the principles of the Recovery Revolution! God is concerned so we have to be. God is calling out to us so we have to respond. In recovery, we realize we suffer from a “soul sickness” and the only way to heal is to see a physician of the soul, a person who wants to know our soul and can reflect it back to us. We know we can heal because others before us have and we lean on their wisdom, the suggestions to help us begin to heal our “soul sickness”. We are constantly seeking to be more responsible, more helpful, more receptive to the needs of another(s), let go of our self-deceptions and end our buying into the mendacity of another. Integrity, acceptance, clarity, grace, truth, love are some of the pillars of our healing self and we live them gusto and dedication. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Living Rabbi Heschel's Wisdom - A Daily Spiritual Path towards Living Well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 67

“The prophet is a person who suffers the harm done to others. Whenever a crime is committed, it is as if the prophet were the victim and the prey. The prophet’s angry words cry. The wrath of God is a Lamentation. All prophecy is one great exclamation. God is not indifferent to evil!”(Essential Writings pg.86)

The last two sentences above hold an idea that has perplexed human beings forever. People who want to deny the existence of God claim that God is indifferent to evil, they point to the myriad of atrocities that have occurred over the millennia and ask “where was/is God”. Yet, people of faith claim that God is in the salvation, God is in the redemption of the oppressed, God responds when we call out to God, God sends prophets to remind us of what the solution is as we learn in the different Psalms. Rabbi Heschel is calling out to us to not give in to despair, not give in to the lies of those who want to defeat us, those who want to deny our faithfulness. They know there is strength in our faith, strength in our adherence to the words of the prophets, and they want to render us weak as the Philistines did with Samson.

Our situation today is even more perilous than in earlier times. People of false-faith, charlatans who use the worlds of the Bible, the words of the prophets, the words of Christ, Mohammed, Moses to lure unsuspecting people who want to believe to believe in lies, practice idolatry, become “indifferent to evil”. This is in direct contradiction to Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom above, in direct violation to the words of the prophets, and, unfortunately, very believable to so many people who willingly go into the slavery of idolatry and lose their freedom, their goodness, their ability to discern truth from lies, fact from fiction.

During Hanukah, we say a prayer, “Blessed are You, Adonai our God, Sovereign of all, who performed wondrous deeds for our ancestors in days of old at this season.” This prayer is to remind us that the deeds performed for our ancestors, the miraculous defeat of the Greeks, the miracle of the “oil”, were not one-time events. I believe we celebrate Hanukkah, we celebrate Passover, we continue to receive Torah on Shavuot, we sleep in the Sukkah, we rejoice on the Day of Atonement, in order to recapture the faith, the spirit, the energy God imbues us with to carry on, to live decently, to leave our indifference and be involved in the world, bring goodness, stand up against evil, and be worthy of being descendants of the prophets.

It is time for us to, once again, to live into the miracle of Hanukkah-the victory over the idolators, the victory over the Jews who remained indifferent to the words of the prophets and the calls of God. In Jewish lore, the first Temple was destroyed because of the people not treating the widows and orphans, the poor, the needy and the strangers well. The Second Temple was destroyed because of senseless hatred between people. We are experiencing both of these phenomena today in the United States and across the globe. Yet, we are remaining indifferent, we are standing idly by the bloods of our brothers and sisters, we are saying that God is indifferent to the calls of the captives, the cries of the poor and the stranger, the tearing of the garments of those whose loved ones have died from war, famine, et. LIES, LIES, LIES, these are all lies said by the people who have their own agenda-be it those who are willing to “die in hell” like Ron Reagan, or those who twist the words of the prophets and of God like Mike Johnson, the Ayatollah, Hamas, Ben-Gvir, Smotrich, et al.

God has imbued all of us with the knowledge of good and evil, God has imbued all of us with the discernment to ferret our the lies we tell ourselves and the ability to rise above our self-deceptions and the deceptions of another. God has given us the command to never be indifferent, God continues to send prophets and teachers to us, which I believe Rabbi Heschel is both! He is not teaching us something we do not know, he is reminding us of what is in our soul, in our hearts, in our mouths which we have willingly chosen to forget, willingly chosen to remain blind to.

The fate of the world is too precarious to leave to the control of those who believe God is indifferent to evil, that they can say one thing and do another, they can deceive us forever. We, the people, have to use the words of God, the call of the prophets, the teachings of our spiritual traditions, the wisdom of Rabbi Heschel and Rev. King, the Dalai Lama and Thich Nhat Hanh, Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob Smith, Martin Buber and Harold Shulweis, Father Greg Boyle and John Pavlovitz to name a few. The Recovery Revolution is a spiritual revolution, a spiritual path that honors the words of the prophets and of God. It is a path upon which we honor the last sentence above: “God is not indifferent to evil”. We know the evil that God is not indifferent to because we have practiced it, we are repentants, we are redeemed by God’s love, care, kindness, wisdom and by God opening our eyes to see truth, to see the future, to see what is good and how to achieve it. The recovery revolution is based in spiritual principles, that begins with our surrender to a higher truth, God wants us, God needs us, we are better than our worst actions and we can no longer remain indifferent to the evil we have done nor the evil we see around us. We are recovering our humanity through cleaving to the teachings of the prophets, God, the wisdom of teachers who give us paths to travel down in our own way. The teachers above, and so many more, all have one thing in common: they are “not indifferent to evil” as they live into the call to be “Imitatio Dei”, Godlike. Lets all root out the evil in us, leave the comfort of deception-self and another(s)- and join with God in lifting up the oppressed. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Living Rabbi Heschel's Wisdom - A Daily Path to Spiritual Growth

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 66

“The prophet is a person who suffers the harm done to others. Whenever a crime is committed, it is as if the prophet were the victim and the prey. The prophet’s angry words cry. The wrath of God is a Lamentation. All prophecy is one great exclamation. God is not indifferent to evil!”(Essential Writings pg.86)

Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom and teaching above is crucial for our understanding and imbuing the Bible, the prophets, and God. Lament comes from the Latin meaning “weeping, wailing”. “The prophets angry words cry” gives us a new and different understanding of the importance of their words, the importance of their actions and a deeper understanding of what it means to witness the bastardization of God’s will, the unraveling of good in the world by twisting the words, the will and the intention of God’s direction, and the pain it causes one to see the destruction of spiritual norms, spiritual wisdom, and morality.

We are in need of more prophets, or descendants of the prophets as Rabbi Heschel defines us. We are in need of being a “reminder of God”, we need to dedicate ourselves this Hanukkah to fulfilling the “divine need” we are created for a little more. Yet, until we can have the angry “cry” of the prophets, we will continue to stand idly by while the charlatans, the terrorists debase the word of God, the teachings of Christ, the way of Mohammed, the spiritual program of Eastern Philosophies, etc. The prophets are wailing and weeping as they scream at us to stop being indifferent to the suffering of any and all people. Their cry is louder than the cry of those being harmed because their wailing is powered by a divine voice, their weeping comes from the “fire in the belly” that defines their compassion, their clear-sighted vision of what is right and good as well as their seeing the wrong and the evil.

This is the greatness of Rabbi Heschel, he is a descendant of the prophets, he is, in my estimation, a prophet himself. Just as he described Martin Luther King Jr. as proof that God had not abandoned the United States of America, Rabbi Heschel is proof that God has not abandoned the Jewish people. Along with so many people, Jewish and not Jewish, who claim Rabbi Heschel to be ‘their Rabbi’, he inspires us to raise our voices, pray with our feet, our actions, and cry as the prophets did. These cries, while they come from weeping and wailing, are not cries of helplessness. These are cries that call for action, that call for repentance, that call for change, for kindness, for truth, for love. Yet, we hear that the Old Testament is a book that depicts an “angry God” and “angry prophets”. How sad that people buy into these lies for the sake of being sheep that live in indifference.

Listening to the cries of the people of Gaza, listening to the cries of the people of Israel, listening to the cries of the families of the hostages, listening to the cries of Jewish students on Campus, listening the the cries of people who are constantly put down, used and abused, listening to the cries of farmworkers, should make us all respond with “the prophet’s angry words cry”. We need to seek solutions and, in reality, it is the same solution for all. Rather than criticize Joe Biden for vetoing the Ceasefire resolution in the UN, which is historically anti-semitic since 1967 like Ocasio-Cortez is doing, we should be calling on Qatar to stop funding the terrorists, to hand over the leaders of Hamas who live in luxury in their land. We should be demanding that Hamas leave Gaza, that they stop their torture of both the people of Gaza, the hostages, and the people of Israel. We should be crying angry words to Netanyahu for his betrayal of the Jewish people, the Israeli people. We should be crying angry words to the leaders of College campus’ across the nation who are not educating our young to see the whole picture, who are pushing an agenda (conservative/progressive) that is one-sided. We should be crying angry words to our Congress that seems incapable of finding solutions to the problems we face in America today-gun violence, anti-semitism, racism, voter suppression, mendacity in the highest echelons of government.

Listening to the cries of people who have been shunned for speaking truth, listening to the cries of people who stand up and speak truth to power and are ostracized for it, listening to the myriad of people who take up “the prophet’s angry words cry” way of being and being exiled for it, has to make the rest of us angry and cry out at the injustice we witness and participate in. When we have more people in jail and prison than any other nation, when our criminal justice system as well as our civil justice system is so heavily weighted by racism and money, we have to wail and weep over our betrayal of the Biblical dictate to judge each case on its own merits. We have to speak out and speak loudly because it is apparent the people in power have turned a blind eye and a deaf ear to the call of the prophets, to the will of God, no matter what Mike Johnson and his ilk proclaim. There is no honor in going along to get along, there is no trust in selling out like Kevin McCarthy.

Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob Smith’s program of recovery is prophetic in spirit and nature, it is, like the Bible, like Rabbi Heschel’s teachings and writings, a program of action based on the wailing and weeping of marginalized people-addicts, alcoholics, gamblers, people who don’t ‘fit in’. Being responsible to God, being responsible to another human being, being responsible for our actions without a lot of lawyer talk, is what the prophets called for and what people in the Recovery Revolution live. We weep over our callousness, we wail about our acts of injustice and mendacity, we cry for the souls of those who are in need of recovery and cannot face the truth, be they alcoholics or just people with the “ism” of alcoholism! God Bless, Happy Hanukkah, stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Living Rabbi Heschel's Wisdom - A Daily Path to Spiritual Growth

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 65

“The prophet is a person who suffers the harm done to others. Whenever a crime is committed, it is as if the prophet were the victim and the prey. The prophet’s angry words cry. The wrath of God is a Lamentation. All prophecy is one great exclamation. God is not indifferent to evil!”

As we continue to celebrate/observe the holiday of Hanukkah this year, and in every year, these words hopefully are resonating within our souls. We are all descendants of the prophets, we are all imbued with the same sensitivities as the prophets, yet we seem to have become inured to the evil, the harms, the crimes being committed in our name, in God’s name!

Hanukkah translates to mean “dedication”. Each year, at the winter solstice, we are being called to dedicate ourselves to the freedom, to decency, to justice, to goodness, to fighting for God’s will to be front and center in all of our actions. Yet, as Rabbi Heschel reminds us, we cannot do this as long as we turn a blind eye to the crimes committed against another, as long as we continue to commit crimes against our own souls. We are all guilty of being perpetrators in the crimes of our times through our silence, through our going along to get along, through our mendacity and our self-deceptions. In each moment we are able to dedicate ourselves to being more like the prophets and less like the Greeks, the Romans, less like Putin, Hamas, Trump, et al. We are called by the prophets, we are called by God to “suffer the harms done to others” rather than commit these harms. Rabbi Heschel is teaching us, again and again, to stand with the prophets instead of being the people they called out, the people they railed against. And, we continue to be deaf to their call, we continue to believe we are right, we continue to be inured to the evil, the violence, the terror we perpetrate upon another human being and upon ourselves.

While some portray God and the prophet as angry in the Hebrew Bible, Rabbi Heschel is opening us up to a different reality, the spiritual reality of God’s cry, of the prophet’s cry over what we are doing to the gift of life, the gift of creation we have received. The only remedy for us, the only way we can begin to redeem ourselves, dedicate ourselves to God’s will, to God’s call, to the wisdom of the prophets, is to end our criminal behaviors. As we can see in the world today and throughout history, very few of the criminals are ‘put away’, are brought to justice, rather they seem to be running the world today as they have in the past. We, the people, have a wondrous opportunity to dedicate ourselves to dealing with the evil inside of us, to end our self-deception of ‘rightness’, of believing the lies we tell ourselves, of participating in the crimes of nations, communities, of clergy, and of our own indifference to the crimes that happen on a daily basis. We have to stand up to the people who believe that Palestinians are less human than Jews, we have to stand up to the people who believe Hamas are ‘freedom fighters’, we have to stand up to the people who believe the hostages should not be seen by the International Red Cross and they deserved to be taken hostage. We have to stand up to the fundamentalists who believe the United States is or should be a ‘christian nation’, we have to stand up to the people who look down upon the homeless population, seek to blame the stranger for the ills of society, engage in Anti-Semitism, Islamaphobia, anti-LGBTQ+ behaviors.

Most of all, we have to stand up to the evil inclination in all of us. We are given the tools by the prophets, by God, by our spiritual traditions to harness our evil inclination in the service of good, yet we seem to enjoy indulging in negativity. Be it the impugning of reputations because of our imperfections, be it the cries for the extermination of the Jews and of Israel, be it the denigration of the dignity and value of any human being, we have to say NO to ourselves, we have to rise above the internal fray and hear the call of our souls, the call of the prophets, and suffer the harms we have done to another, suffer the harms that are done in our name by another, and stand up against the people who enjoy their criminal behaviors and validate these behaviors by wrapping themselves in the flag of their country or their misinterpretation of God’s will, no matter who it is.

Those of us who are part of the recovery revolution observe and celebrate Hanukkah each day. As my Rabbi, Rabbi Ed Feinstein teaches, the most important day of any holiday is the day after the holiday: “how has it changed you”, he asks. We, who are engaged in our own recovery ask and answer this question each day-no matter which holiday we have just celebrated. We are constantly seeking to spread the message to people who are still suffering from their inability to see the crimes they are committing, hear the words of the prophets and heed them. We are dedicated to self-improvement, to spiritual growth, to service and to truth.

I live in self-deception less and less each day. I am dedicated to growing and I suffer whenever I see crimes committed against anyone. I also have committed crimes against another and am dedicated to not repeating them. Rabbi Feinstein says I am more a prophet than a rabbi and my prophet self sounds angry when in reality, I am crying out to people to hear me, to hear the call of their own souls, to change, to not reject me, not reject their spiritual life, not reject the words of the prophets nor the teachings of the Bible. My cries have sounded angry because I see mendacity and deception as the root of the “7 deadly sins”. I have indulged the anger at times, I have been unable to control myself and this has led to harms as well. I am sorry for these harms and I am sad that I have been misunderstood by people as well. I am responsible and I re-dedicate myself to goodness each day. Happy Hanukkah and God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark.