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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 125

“The words the prophet utters are not offered as souvenirs. His speech to the people is not a reminiscence, a report, hearsay. The prophet not only conveys, he reveals. He almost does unto others what God does unto him. In speaking, the prophet reveals God. This is the marvel of the prophet’s work: in his words, the invisible God becomes audible. He does not prove or argue. The thought he has to convey is more than language can contain. Divine power bursts in his words. The authenticity of the prophet is in the Presence his words reveal.” (Essential Writings pg. 64)

There is a story told about the Hasidic Rebbe, Reb Zuysa, that each time during the study of the Bible where it says “God spoke”, he would scream and cry, and over and over again would say ‘God speaks, God speaks’. Rabbi Heschel’s teaching about “the marvel of the prophet’s work” reminds me of this story and of the lack of enthusiasm the people then and we, now, have for this marvel! Rather than be awed and overwhelmed with joy, fear, trembling at the experience of “the invisible God becomes audible”, we look to find the flaws, the interesting ‘facts’, we argue against the teachings and we have come to emulate the people the prophet speaks against, the priestly class, the ruling class and the wealthy class all who care for nothing outside of their selfish interests and, when convenient, one another.

Because the prophet rails against these ‘special interest group’ in the name of God and all the people, he was shunned then and is shunned now. While we give nice lip service to the prophet’s words and actions, very few of us are willing to stand with them and continue their battle, continue to live into their teachings and turn up the volume so “the invisible God becomes audible” to more and more people. The prophet was ‘one who knows’ just like Moses, Joshua, Samuel, Joseph, Judah, David, Solomon, etc and he kept screaming out to those who were ‘seeking to know’ and to unplug the ears of those who were so lost, so deaf they were sure they were right, they knew and they could do what they wanted in the ‘name of God’ and get away with it. We, the people today also fall into these three categories and, like in the Bible, those in the third category seem to dominate societal ways, dominate ‘the ways of the world’ and, what is so frightening, they have lied to themselves so well, they believe they are doing good, on ‘the right side’ of things, dominating and using the tactics of bullies in such ‘sweet’ ways, etc. When the prophet’s words reach out to them, they kill, defame, denigrate both the message and the messenger, otherwise they would actually have to do an accounting of their soul and and learn the truth-which is too scary and painful for the people in this category. An amazing ‘fact’ is that the people in this category come from all walks of life, all economic status and, seemingly even have completely opposite viewpoints and yet, they use the same tactics, have the same lies and deceptions and spew the same mendacious reasoning for their actions!

When we immerse ourselves in the words of Hosea, when we are truly able to see how we have “whored after our heart and our eyes” rather than stayed faithful to God, when we can admit our adultery, seek forgiveness and have a new path to follow so we can and will stay faithful, then we are hearing and living into the words of the prophet. Then, we will live into “in his words the invisible God becomes audible”. This teaching brings into clarity for me one reason the prophet is such an important figure in religious and spiritual growing and maturing; the prophet not only makes God “audible”, because the Torah does this as well, the prophet is relentless in making “audible” the entire teachings of God and the raison d’être of humanity=“love your neighbor as you love yourself”, “care for the widow, the orphan, the stranger, the poor, the needy”, etc. The prophet reminds us each day, each moment that God is calling, God needs us to do better, we have to stand with those in need and we have to rebuke the people who are unable to follow the words of God as spoken through the prophet. We need to say NO and rebuke  those who use the words of the prophet to silence the voices of the “ones who know” and the “ones who seek”, we have to say NO and rebuke those who seek to enslave the people with lies, with deceptions and with ‘harsh labor’. We have to say NO and rebuke those who continue to ‘speak for the Lord’ while speaking for themselves, the ruling class, and the wealthy. This is how we help the prophet fulfill “the marvel of his work”!!

We recover our integrity in recovery, we recover the truth, we uncover the deceptions and mendacities we have bought into and sold. We recover the ability to hear the words of the prophet, we recover the ability to listen and understand “the invisible God” who now “becomes audible” because we have “taken the cotton out of our ears”. While the prophet isn’t mentioned in the Big Book, the teachings of the prophet are replete within it as a solution to the myriad of addictions we suffer from and, I believe the number one addiction, the first one is believing the lies we tell ourselves and the lies society tells us. When we recover our hearing and we listen to the call of God, as we understand God, follow this call, we are also continuing the work of the prophet, continuing to make audible “the invisible God”.

I spend my days recovering the voice, the sounds, the words of the prophet within me, within everyone I encounter. I love the prophet because he speaks in a language I can understand and believe in. In his words I hear God loud and clear, I know the “fire in the belly” of Jeremiah, the pain of Hosea at the unfaithfulness of the woman he loves, the call of Isaiah and Amos and Micah to return, to stop living in mendacity. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 124

“The words the prophet utters are not offered as souvenirs. His speech to the people is not a reminiscence, a report, hearsay. The prophet not only conveys, he reveals. He almost does unto others what God does unto him. In speaking, the prophet reveals God. This is the marvel of the prophet’s work: in his words, the invisible God becomes audible. He does not prove or argue. The thought he has to convey is more than language can contain. Divine power bursts in his words. The authenticity of the prophet is in the Presence his words reveal.” (Essential Writings pg. 64)

Rabbi Heschel defines the problem most people have with the prophet: “He almost does unto others what God does unto him. In speaking the prophet reveals God.” While many people purport and deceive themselves into believing they agree with and adhere to the golden rule: “do unto others as you have them do unto you” or as Rabbi Hillel the elder says: “what is hateful to you do not do to another”; the exact opposite seems to be true. The prophet goes even further in his actions as Rabbi Heschel teaches us, he embarks on a mission of connecting with us, the people, in similar ways as God connects with him. For most of us this experience, like the one at Sinai, is too overwhelming, too fearful, too awesome, too…

Humanity, for all of our talk, has over the millennia been unwilling to delve into the prophet’s love for all of us. Living into Rabbi Heschel’s teaching of the prophet’s doing “unto others what God does unto him” fills most of us with dread rather than trembling awe. We have, as history proves and modern day practices show, tired to make a source of comfort, a whitewash of our foibles, a weapon to use against those we consider enemies. The prophet is doing to us what the Bible does: speak truth, look inside of ourselves, change our actions so our spirits can heal, grow, and mature. Yet, most people reject this message, resist the ways of the prophet, even the Rabbis are afraid of the prophet because he is too abrasive, too obstinate, too unrelenting in his Godly actions towards his people, towards humanity. The prophet cannot allow the slightest mendacity, the ‘white lie’ to prevail because God doesn’t allow him this luxury. As we see with Jonah, even when the prophet tries to run away from his mission, exile himself from God, he is found, he is forced by his ‘better angels’ return to his purpose and, interestingly enough, Jonah is the only prophet who ‘succeeds’ in his mission- the people of Nineveh repent and God forgives, welcomes them back and does not fulfill God’s original decree. Why is it that the people of Nineveh, who were so evil, are the ones who hear and heed the prophet’s experience? Maybe what Jonah did to them was what God did to Jonah-make them return to their spiritual life, make them see the error of their ways and repent so they return to God, to one another and find ways to co-exist with humanity.

We seem to be too scared, as the Israelites in the desert were, to have God revealed completely, to come face to face with the divine. The prophet reveals the divinity in all of  us, the possibility and charge to be Godly. He reveals God’s desire for justice and mercy, kindness and compassion, forgiveness and return, healing and wholeness. He also reveals God’s belief that we are capable of achieving these ways of being and it is only our hubris, our facades, our self-deceptions that keep us from connecting to and living into the Covenant we made with God at Sinai and we recommit to each day. Prayer, confession, t’shuvah, forgiveness, fighting for justice rather than seeking special treatment, not buying into the smarmy lies of people, no longer shunning the truth seekers and truth speakers of our age and of all ages is the call of the prophet echoing God’s call to him, to all of us. The prophet is God’s microphone, God’s spokesman because, on our own we seem incapable of engaging in truth and justice for all, unwilling to see the divine in every human being and ensure everyone’s freedom and calling to be who God created us to be. The prophet wants us to return to our uniqueness and recognize the uniqueness of every human being, the prophet is revealing God’s desire for all of us to “walk in God’s ways”, to “judge people on the content of their character” and help everyone mature their character to reflect the divine need we each fulfill.

The prophet’s revelation of God, his doing “unto others as God has done unto him” is the gold standard. Unfortunately, many ‘religious’, ‘pious’ people, many spiritual leaders and public servants, claim to know God’s will for the rest of us that their mendacity is so strong they believe prejudice is good, racism is the way of God, God loves people who are rich and the rest of us are unloved by God, anti-semitism, islamaphobia, anti-LGBTQ+, human beings are less human than they-white folk who should be running the world. God is not the authoritarian these charlatans make God out to be. The prophet reveals and hammers at us to end our senseless hatred, stop mistreating the widow and the orphan, end our unwelcoming of the stranger, cease and desist in making the poor and the needy into criminals. The prophet reveals God’s reflection that we are all poor and needy, we are all estranged from our authentic self, we all have orphaned ourselves from the source of being, the Ineffable One.

The prophet is, in many ways, our eskimo: the one who leads us to recovery of self, recovery of purpose and passion that is in concert with our soul, recovery of our relationship with God, with humanity. The prophet helps us recover our dignity and value, truth and goodness, love for self and one another. This is what the prophet “does unto others as God has done unto him”, this is the great reveal of God through the words and deeds of the prophet- we all need to be in recovery!! God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

IMMERSING OURSELVES IN RABBI HESCHEL'S WISDOM - A DAILY SPIRITUAL PATH FOR LIVING WELL

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 123

“The words the prophet utters are not offered as souvenirs. His speech to the people is not a reminiscence, a report, hearsay. The prophet not only conveys, he reveals. He almost does unto others what God does unto him. In speaking, the prophet reveals God. This is the marvel of the prophet’s work: in his words, the invisible God becomes audible. He does not prove or argue. The thought he has to convey is more than language can contain. Divine power bursts in his words. The authenticity of the prophet in in the Presence his words reveal.” (Essential Writings pg. 64)

While the studying of the prophets is, I believe, supremely important for living a life of meaning and purpose, the studying of them has to lead to acting in ways that are in concert with their words. As Rabbi Heschel teaches us in the first two sentences above, the prophet is giving us “souvenirs” nor “a reminiscence, a report, hearsay”. Rather than seek to bring us to ‘the good old days’, rather than give us ‘that old time religion’, the prophet is giving us a vision of our misguided and/or wrong actions and a vision of what life is when we return to God, we allow ourselves to be guided by principles of decency, kindness, truth, forgiveness, justice, mercy, etc.

The days of the prophet were not good. They were days of great peril for the Kingdoms of Israel and Judea, they were days of destruction of the foundation of Judaism at that time, they were days of trembling fear in the people because of the upcoming assault of Assyria and Babylonia. The prophet comes to remind the people there fear should not be of the outside enemy, the fear should be of the enemy within each individual and within the kingdoms themselves. The prophet gives us an inside view of the rot and decay that the people seemingly are blind to, the willful leaving the principles and values that they accepted at Sinai have become so sullied and forgotten, the people are, like Nadav and Avihu, Aaron’s sons, dying from the inside out.

“The words the prophet utters”, as Rabbi Heschel continues to remind, teach us, convey the thoughts, the desires, the will of God and they also reveal God’s presence, God’s voice to all of us. Yet, as I experience Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom above, I believe their words also reveal our own imperfections, our own inside rot and to not understand and imbue their words as meanings, warnings, calls to action for each of us today is to encase the prophet’s words as “souvenirs”, as ‘a reminiscence, a report, hearsay”. We are doing this at our own peril, at our own descent into internal and external degradation.

The calls against aid to our allies, against the “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”, against hatred of ‘the other’, are outward indications, signs of the decay, the rot, the desecration of our inner life that we are experiencing, that we are hiding from. What the prophet reveals is as imminent and present as when his words were uttered. What the prophet sees has not gone away, the call of God from Sinai has stopped calling to us, the words and deeds of Rabbi Heschel, the Baal Shem Tov, Rev. King, Thomas Merton, have not been overturned nor forgotten. What is happening today, as it did 2+ millennia ago, is our unwillingness to see, to hear, to accept, to turn and return. What is missing is our unwillingness allow the mirror to reflect the truth of our inner decay to us, rather, like the Queen in Sleeping Beauty, we only see the reflection we want to see, we are using false glasses that turn ugly into beauty, hate into love, selfishness into service. Oh what a state of being we are in.

While it is easy to blame the politicians, “the man”, anyone other than ourselves, it is time for us to delve into the “the words the prophet utters” as if he is speaking to us, it is time for us to “lift up our eyes and see” as Abraham was told to do by God, it is time for us to surrender our hubris and take the actions that serving another human being, serving God promote. It is time for each of us to accept our responsibility for what was, what is, and what can be. We, the people, have to see what is being revealed to us not to argue against, not to defend our bad actions, rather to see where we are, the fork in the road that we are at each and every day, and make a decision to stop going down the path of perdition, stop our descent into lawlessness while making laws that promote our unlawfulness. We, the people, have to pick up on and carry on the revolution of the prophet, the rebellion against societal ‘status quo’ and take up the sling shot of young David to slay the Goliath that has overtaken our inner and outer living.

Recovery is, in essence, using the words of the prophet to reveal to us what truly is, it is using his revelations and conveyances to accept the truth of where we are and how we can steer our life back onto the course it was originally set on. While we got off course because of the storm of living inauthentically, we are able to heed the words and see the ways the prophet reveals to us so we can once again serve God, serve another and be on a path of wholeness within us.

The prophet continues to convey and reveal truth and ways of living to me. I have not always followed these revelations and through their vision and revelations I have been able to course correct these past 35+ years. I continue to become angry at injustice and impudence while at times committing both, I continue to be upset at the lack of mercy given and responsibility taken by leaders of countries, governments, and, of course, by spiritual leaders-and I am guilty of doing the same. I don’t blame another for my errors and I hear the prophet speaking and revealing truth to me each and every day-especially when I don’t want to hear it! God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

immersing ourselves in Rabbi Heschel's wisdom - A daily Spiritual Path for living well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 122

“People need exhortations to courage, endurance, confidence, fighting spirit, but Jeremiah proclaims: You are about to die if you do not have a change of heart and cease being callous to the word of God. He sends shudders over the whole city at a time when the will to fight is most important.” (Essential Writings pg.63)

I am hearing Rabbi Heschel’s teaching above as a call to all of us right here, right now. The prophet was debased in his own time because he was not helping with “the will to fight”, he was not understood as giving “exhortations to courage, endurance, confidence, fighting spirit”. Yet, he was and is exhorting all of us to return to the authentic desires of our hearts; a return to hearing and doing “the word of God.” This is the great conundrum of studying and living into the prophetic vision, the prophetic experience.

We are willing to fight for what we want if and when it serves our selfish need, the prophet is fighting with us to serve the needs and will of God, to care for one another, to pierce the hard-skin we have covered our hearts and souls with in order to block out doing the next right thing. The prophet comes to disturb us, as Rabbi Heschel says elsewhere, he comes to wake us up to truth, to authenticity, to healing our spiritual maladies and the people want to fight the enemy, not realizing “the enemy is us”, as Walt Kelly’s comic strip character Pogo teaches us. We are our own worst enemy because we fail to recognize, consider, deal with the spiritual maladies that are keep us “callous to the word of God.” We are our own worst enemy because we fail to recognize our spiritual maladies that are slowly killing us, that allow us to slowly kill another(s), that keep us in “everlasting ignorance” as Herbert Spencer writes in the Big Book of AA.

The prophet’s predictions of disaster and destruction is not to deny the “fighting spirit” of the people, I believe, it is to focus this “fighting spirit” to defeat the enemy that we have become to ourselves and to our communities. We are the ones who are the cause of the ills of the world we live in because we have not had “a change of heart”, because we are unwilling to “cease being callous to the word of God.” This is self-evident to those of us who are willing to remove the cataracts over our eyes and see what truly is, it is as clear as glass to those of us who are willing to “circumcise the foreskin of our hearts”. And, as in the time of the prophets, the majority seems to be unwilling to do either!

We live in a world of illusion and facades, exactly what the prophet warned us against and exhorted us to leave. We live in a world where we seek medical advice for our spiritual maladies and take the latest ‘miracle’ pill, the latest fad in clothing, politics, the latest guru to follow, etc to cover over the psychic, spiritual pain we are in. We use power to fool ourselves into believing we are okay, we use money, fame, proxies to make ourselves believe ___will save us(fill in the blank). We have done this throughout history and the prophet confronts our mendacity and we shun the truth. We quote them, we ‘extol’ them and we do not heed them. Listening to the myriad of ways clergy, spiritual gurus, and philosophers bastardize their words causes some of us great pain, anguish and, for some of us we erupt with the same abrasiveness as the prophet. Our capacity to engage in self-deception is endless it seems and the prophet’s capacity to witness it without saying something, without ‘pulling our covers’ is zero!

Yet, many wonder, how can we live in this world without our facades, without our “mental make-up”, how can we embrace the word of God as the prophet is telling us? We believe we will suffer at the hands of these who proclaim their loyalty to God, to Jesus, to Mohammed, to Buddha, etc while their loyalty is only to themselves, their gang of thugs seeking/holding power. This belief and fear causes many of us to be like the Marranos in Spain after the Inquisition. We worship God in secret and our outer actions go along with the societal norms and, just as the Marranos stopped practicing Judaism, so too do we end an authentic worship of God. We are in desperate need of immersing ourselves in the words of the prophet, we are in the throes of a spiritual malady that is trying hard to kill us and, as we see in the political world, in the war to be free, the battle for the soul of democracy, it seems to be winning. When the whims of those in charge are more important to serve than “the word of God”, when the concern for ‘optics’ is more important than truth and reconciliation, when the pendulum swings from one extreme to another without any middle ground, when we witness the degradation of kindness as weakness, when we believe in “alternative facts”, when we are willing to turn a blind eye to those who have helped us, saved us, fought along side of us because it is the expedient thing to do, because of “on advice of counsel”, we are in desperate need of Jeremiah’s exhortation!

The prophet’s call is a call to return, to recover our connection to our spirits, to God, to one another. It is abrasive to those who do not want to let go of their false selves, who are afraid of who they are without their mendacity, without their shining armor, without their self-deception. In my recovery, I have been bombastic, difficult, abrasive, loud, forceful, in my denunciation of these paths so we can recover our authenticity, we can recover the “word of God” that is within each of us and make our corner of the world one grain of sand better each day. I make mistakes and do t’shuvah, I learn and grow, I get extolled and exiled because the prophet, Rabbi Heschel live with me and continue to disturb me, continue to exhort me to “have a change of heart and cease being callous to the word of God”! I refuse to be a Marrano, I refuse to be silent, I refuse to go back into hiding, I accept the consequences of my refusal and I can live with me. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 120

“It is embarrassing to be a prophet. There are so many pretenders, predicting peace and prosperity, offering cheerful words, adding strength to self-reliance, while the prophet predicts disaster, pestilence, agony, and destruction.” (Essential Writings pg. 63)

“Pretenders” are the bane of our existence as human beings! Rabbi Heschel’s teaching above is vital for all of us who desire to be human. We have let go of the exhortations of true prophecy for the “cheerful words” of the false prophets. We continue to extol “strength” and “self-reliance”, seek “prosperity” and the illusion of “peace” at the altar of pretending and buying the lies and deceptions of another(s). These ways of being are exactly what the prophet is warning us about. We live in self-deception and mendacity while “disaster, pestilence, agony and destruction” are happening all around us.

We have witnessed the truth of the words of the prophet throughout history and in our own time as well. Yet, we continue to buy into the lies of the “pretenders” because it makes us ‘feel good’. It doesn’t take courage to go along with the lies and mendacity, it takes courage to hear and act on the words of the prophet. The prophet has been described as angry, obstinate, unrelenting, difficult, etc and they are! They are all these things and more because they see and have been shown the result of following the “pretenders”-death, destruction, despair, “disaster”. Human beings are capable of so much more than we achieve, we have within us a desire, a longing to re-unite with the divine, to connect with the Ineffable One. And we seem to be afraid to fully engage with our deepest desires, to be connected to something greater than ourselves, to relinquish ourselves from the prison of pretense and pretending.

The “pretenders” who preach to us be it politically, socially, morally, spiritually are so ‘sincere’ that we believe them! Or at least we go along with them because we are afraid to follow the predictions of the prophet less we be shunned from our community, our family, lose our elected office, lose our job, etc. The whistleblower laws were enacted, in part, to protect the people who can no longer buy the lies of the companies they work for and are compelled to speak truth to power-following the examples of the prophets. The protests affirming the dignity of all people are examples of hearing and acting on the words of the prophets. Yet even these paths get contaminated with mendacity and deceptions when some people are not deemed ‘worthy’ of compassion and equality, when some people ‘blow the whistle’ to line their own pockets.

All of us are susceptible to being “pretenders” and we have to be constantly on guard against the mendacity, self-deception that is part of being human. We are witnesses to the lies of Trump and the Republican Party that they care about the United States of America with their MAGA bullshit. They care about themselves, their power, their wealth and they have convinced at least 1/3rd of the country that they care about them! The promise “peace and prosperity” if we elect them to be dictators and authoritarians over us. We have history to show us how well dictators and authoritarians treat the people over whom they have power. They are the ones who cause  “disaster, pestilence, agony, and destruction” and we help them by not heeding the words of the prophets. We have become so used to living the lies of the pretenders who claim “follow me and you will have “peace and prosperity”” with their “cheerful words” of false prophecy and showing you their “strength to self-reliance”. The same bullshit is being given to us by those of the far-left, the ‘progressives’ who seek to blame the ills of society on the few, who claim no responsibility for their part in where we are, who are incapable of seeing their own hypocrisy. It is easy to point their fingers at everyone else, call for the destruction of everything they deem as ‘bad and wrong’, promoting hatred against ‘their enemies’ which is everyone who doesn’t drink their Kool-aid. They are not heeding the words of the prophets either and they are hell-bent on destruction of anything and everything that is not the “underdog” of the month.

We witness people threatening people with lawsuits and public shaming so they can achieve ‘peace and prosperity’, they offer “cheerful words” about their own courage and encourage others to bring this type of pressure on anyone and everyone who they want revenge against. We see this bastardization in the myriad of times the excuse “on advice of counsel” or the infamous “non-disclosure” clauses are invoked. The prophets spoke truth out loud, they confronted the ruling class and the people-no one was exempt from their predictions of ‘change or else’. We think of them as abrasive and unrelenting, too harsh for polite society, so we either ignore them or find ways to silence them, the assassination of Rev King being a prime example. Rather than hear the words of the prophet in today’s language, we fire these ‘rabble-rousers’, we do what we can to ‘erase their memory’ from our family life, our organizational life, etc, because we cannot seem to bear the reflection of our pretending and pretense.

Recovery is about being in truth. It is a way of being that heeds the prophets by speaking truth to the power of our minds and our going along to get along in society. We drop our pretenses, slowly and quickly, seeking to peel back the layers of our own self-deceptions and see the glorious truth of beauty and spirit that lives within us. We travel the road of “happy destiny” knowing we can and will “live life on life’s terms.” God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

immersing ourselves in Rabbi Heschel's wisdom - A Daily Path to Spiritual Health

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 120

“It is embarrassing to be a prophet. There are so many pretenders, predicting peace and prosperity, offering cheerful words, adding strength to self-reliance, while the prophet predicts disaster, pestilence, agony, and destruction.” (Essential Writings pg. 63)

Embarrass means “cause someone to feel awkward, self-conscious,” it also means “to hamper or impede/make difficult”. Using these definitions, the prophet is a person who is self-conscious about his mission, he is a man who feels awkward in his role as God’s mouthpiece. Yet, these feelings do not “hamper or impede” his purpose nor his passion for God’s message and his call to deliver it. The prophet is also a person who makes the people around him experience self-consciousness, awkwardness and he does the best he can to hamper and impede the spiritual and moral decay the people around him are suffering, even though the people around him are willfully and unwittingly blind to their spiritual maladies.

Rabbi Heschel describes the prophet, in his interview with Carl Stern, “the prophet is a man who is able to hold God and man in one thought, at one time, at all times…The kind of men who combine a very deep love, a very powerful dissent, a painful rebuke, with unwavering hope.” These descriptions give us a glimpse into the life of the prophet; no one asks to be a prophet, prophecy is thrust upon certain people for the benefit of all. The prophet is a humble person who cannot contain the words of God that he is given nor can he run from his mission. His ability to “hold God and man in one thought, at one time, at all times”  causes his experiences of self-consciousness and awkwardness, I believe. His way of experiencing life jettisons him to rise above the myriad of ways people in power seek to impede and hamper him in his mission.

In reading the prophets and Rabbi Heschel’s book on the prophets as well as his use of the prophetic experience throughout his writings, we experience the inner life of the prophet. When we “combine a very deep love, a powerful dissent, a painful rebuke, with unwavering hope”, we are able to see far beyond what our eyes tell us, know much more than our minds can process and awkwardly and self-consciously speak the truth as the Ineffable One demands of us. I hear Rabbi Heschel call out to us to learn from the ways of the prophets, even though “it is embarrassing to be a prophet”, they did not shrink from their mission, they did not allow their awkwardness nor their self-consciousness to hamper or impede their work. They came to the people in their time and demanded the people turn back to God so they could heal their spiritual maladies. They continued to recount the faith God has in people, the faith they had in people.

The prophets of old are speaking to us today, just as their disciples like Rabbi Heschel, Rev. King, et al speak to us right now. We are still being called back to our spiritual origins, to a path of wholeness and holiness, a way of being that is compatible with being a partner of God. The faith of the prophets is in the description Rabbi Heschel gives to us. The prophet would not have been sent unless God loved us deeply, says NO so powerfully we can no longer turn a deaf ear to God’s dissent, it pains God, the prophet, and us to receive the rebuke for our negative actions that we have been blind to, and, finally, only because of unwavering hope in our ability to turn/return would the prophets have been sent. While many of us experience these actions as ‘put downs’, as ‘not nice’, seen in the light of the prophets, the “painful rebuke” and “powerful dissent” can only been experienced  as a love call, a deep sense of faith in our ability to rise above our current status to be human rather than less than human.

We are in deep need of hearing the words of the prophets and allowing ourselves to let go of the hubris that has overtaken so many of our leaders and their followers. Rather than deny truth and offer “alternative facts”, rather than ‘bite the hand that feeds us’, rather than continue to blame someone else for our bad actions, rather than seek escapes from reality through mendacity, addiction, money, power, it is time for us to hear the words of the prophets anew and take the next right action. It is imperative for us to learn from the people of antiquity who refused to turn back to being human and were conquered and almost destroyed because of their hubris, their deafness, their deceptions of another(s) and their self-deception.

A little embarrassment is a good thing, as I am hearing and experiencing Rabbi Heschel’s words. When we are able to have our baser instincts hampered and impeded, when we can stop ourselves or be stopped from ‘going along to get along’, when we no longer deceive ourselves into believing ‘this is going to hurt me more than it hurts you’; we are able to put on “a new pair of glasses” as Chuck C teaches us in recovery. We are able to recover our humanity and have a revelation of the infinite dignity of every human being, recover the truth that every human being is a child of God, all of us are in need of and deserving of returning, we no longer have to be afraid of the “painful rebuke” and “powerful dissent” of the prophets, rather we welcome them as a sign that God has not forsaken us, God has not forgotten us, God’s love and hope is the light and the spirit calling us back home, back to being in partnership and fulfilling our unique purpose. This is the path of recovery, this is the message of recovery, this is the action of recovery. The only question left for all of us: are we willing to deal with being embarrassed as a sign of growth and connection to/with the prophets so we can return to our sense of wholeness within? God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 119

“The prophet faces a coalition of callousness and established authority and undertakes to stop a mighty stream with mere words. Had the purpose been to express great ideas, prophecy would have had to be acclaimed a triumph. Yet the purpose of prophecy is to conquer callousness, to change the inner man as well as to revolutionize history.” (Essential Writings pg. 63)

Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom above, hopefully, takes our breath away, stops us in our tracks and gives us a jumpstart on changing our inner lives. He is giving us a new way of looking at “triumph”, a different take on the way we celebrate ideas and look the other way at our actions. Immersing ourselves in Rabbi Heschel’s words and thoughts cause us to either revere and follow the prophets or to ignore them and continue to celebrate great ideas and bad actions. Prophecy, as described above by Rabbi Heschel, is not about great oration, erudite ideas, heavenly thoughts. Rather it is about bringing a message of change by speaking truth, a message of hope that we can and should investigate our actions, improve our inner life and end our march of conquering people, obtaining power through our callousness.

In our world, our everyday living, we continually accuse and indict another human being of being callous, of being “hard-skinned” which is the Latin root of the word callous. We are constantly pointing fingers outward, continually accusing another of that which we are guilty of, and ignoring our own “callousness”. The prophet points out to all of us, if we are willing to see, the truth of our actions, the subtle and not-so-subtle ways we engage in “callousness” and demands we end our evil ways. We seem to be unable to hear the prophet’s call to examine our ways, to let go of our indifference, our self-deceptions, our ignoring of our inner life. The prophet’s call to us is to return to God, turn to a life of caring and concern for everyone, turn to repair and heal our inner wounds internally rather than attempting to fix our inner life by being callous and hurtful in our outer lives.

“Callousness” is practiced by all of us, sometimes it comes from the scabs that have formed over our hurts and our inner wounds, sometimes it comes from the armor we have learned to put on every time we face the world, the day. Yet, even the most ‘pious’ people have a tendency to become callous. We witness and participate in the very ways the prophets railed against in our zealotry for our ideas, for our ways of being without hearing, considering another point of view. We have callous in the ways we seek to be #1 in all our affairs, to have the most money, the most fame, the most talent, the most…. As well as never being satisfied with what we have, always needing more and more. We are callous when we forget the people who have helped us succeed and instead step on people on our ‘way up the ladder’ never seeing our part, forgetting the kindness’ shown to us, vilifying and denigrating people for ‘harming us’ which many times is just hurting our feelings by telling us the truth! We have become so enamored with ‘how it makes us feel’ that we have forgotten that a rebuke from another is a sign of great faith that ‘we can do better’. The prophets re-iterated the “great ideas” of the Bible and their purpose was to help us turn back to the actions associated with these “great ideas”-not to debate them. When the prophet Nathan calls out King David, he is not doing it to “express great ideas”, he is doing it to hold him responsible, to make him “the inner life” of King David. I believe King David is an example for all people in power, this story reminds us and teaches us a “great idea” of the Bible: just because we can does not mean we should!

The prophets’ are still waiting to see if their mission can “be acclaimed a triumph”, to experience the surrender the hard-skinned human beings have worn for the millennia and heal their inner lives. Changing our ways is their triumph, letting go of our need to abuse another to satisfy our selfishness, our insatiable hunger for more, our need to cover the mirror so we don’t see our actions, don’t have to change our inner lives. We, the people, have the power within us to make prophecy triumphant, we, the people, can choose to engage our with our inner lives and heal our callousness by seeking out “physicians of the soul” as Maimonidies suggests in his book Eight Chapters. We, the people, can, and I will add, must stop seeking the “quick fix” of a pill, a new ‘notch in our belt’, a new partner, a new toy, etc to “fix” us and instead engage in the difficult work of repairing and changing our inner lives. We are needed by the world to show up in our authenticity rather than in our callousness-will you accept this truth, will you help prophecy triumph?

This question is the one we respond to affirmatively in recovery. We engage in exercising our inner lives and exorcising our callousness. We tame our “earthly/evil inclination” to serve our “good/divine inclination”. Each day we seek to find what we do well and where we miss the mark-enhancing the former and repairing the latter. We let go of the resentments and hurts done by another as we realize these no longer serve us nor anyone else. We can forgive people for their callousness and extend “rachmones”, compassionate pity towards the very people we resented and who hurt us.

I am continually changing my inner life-I feel sad for people who are so stuck they have to betray those who have helped them, who have to hold on to their ‘rightness’ rather than own their own part, who have to trash the good name of people who helped them and called them out for their errors in order to wake them up rather than to put them down. I am deeply remorseful for the times I have been callous and am committed to being less so each and every day. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 118

“The prophet faces a coalition of callousness and established authority and undertakes to stop a mighty stream with mere words. Had the purpose been to express great ideas, prophecy would have had to be acclaimed a triumph. Yet the purpose of prophecy is to conquer callousness, to change the inner man as well as to revolutionize history.” (Essential Writings pg. 63)

Humanity, we have a problem! 2 Millennia before Apollo 13, the prophets came to the world, stood up to the men in charge and, in a myriad of ways, told us this news. There words have not only stood the test of time, they are as ignored today as they were at the times the prophets spoke.

The “coalition of callousness and established authority” may be greater now than it was in their times. Rather than, as Rabbi Heschel demands, study the prophets, learn from the prophets, heed the prophets words, we have come to regard them with contempt, behaving as if they spoke words of folly rather than words of truth, words of warning, words of God. While we hear and see ‘pious people’ all around us, they exhibit a false piety, they practice “callousness” rather than mercy, they are more interested in establishing their authority than in living as humble servants of God. Yet, just as in the days of the prophets, the masses tend to go along with these idolators, we continue to be deaf, dumb and blind to the truth around us, to the callousness that we either participate in or accede to. At the same time wondering “where is God”, using our failings as proof that God doesn’t exist or worse, using our callousness to prove God loves the callous and the “established authority” better than the poor, the needy, the stranger, etc!

I find it interesting, sad, etc that the “mere words” of “callousness and established authority” are strong enough to hurtle the train of humanity on a path of self-destruction, of destroying the command to “love your neighbor as yourself” while, seemingly, not being strong enough to hear and follow the “mere words” of the prophets who were imbued with the force of God’s directions. We are created in the Image of God and we have the ability to hear and learn from the divine, from history, from our holy texts and we allow the “mere words” of “callousness and established authority” to override what we know to be true, what we know to be the ‘next right action’. Our collective egos have grown so out of proper measure that we believe the lies of “established authority”, we have adopted our self-deceptions as facts, we have become so blind and deaf that we see, hear  and participate in callousness believing it is kindness. We go along with authoritarians believing they care about us, we are unwelcoming of the stranger for fear they are going to ‘get ours’ rather than knowing there is enough for all. The problem is not “mere words”, I believe, the problem is we are engaging with the “mighty stream” in order to be ‘a part of’. While “established authority” is something greater than ourselves, it is not the entity that will recognize us, the authoritarians don’t care about anything except how much “callousness” they have to exert in order for everyone to ‘fall in line’ and accept their authority.

“Mere words” can stop the “mighty stream” of “callousness and established authority” when we choose to hear, heed, and take action on the words, ways and ideas of the prophets. They came to the people in their time and they come to us in the Bible for our benefit, to call out Humanity, we have a problem and only we humans can fix it. While many people of faith claim to be waiting for the 2nd Coming of the Messiah and others are waiting for the Messiah to come for the first time, these people of faith have missed the messianic messages of the prophets: clean up your ways, stop your backsliding, end your prostituting at the altars of idolatry, “callousness”, and mendacity. We, the people, have to prepare ourselves to meet and hear the message of the prophets before we are ready and able to meet the Messiah. We, the people, have to study and implement the “mere words” of the prophets, of the Bible, of the New Testament, of the Koran, etc prior to being able to hear and experience the messiah and a messianic era. We do not need to wait for Armageddon, it is happening right here, right now-we seem to be incapable of enlisting in and fighting with the “mere words” of the prophets and instead we go along the “mighty stream” of “callousness and established authority”.

It is time for all of us to go AWOL from the armies of “established authority” and “callousness”, it is time for us to dam up the “mighty stream” of mendacity and hatred. It is time for all of us to be in recovery. We recover our Integrity, we become integrated human beings, we no longer need to buy into the lies we have told ourselves prior to recovery, we no longer have to be afraid of “established authority” harming us. We get to leave the “callousness” of needing to be right, the “callousness” of making another bad so we can be good. We no longer engage in “where’s mine” and instead seek to give to our neighbors and strangers. We recover the lost parts of ourselves that we freely gave over to “callousness and established authority” foolishly believing this would make us ‘feel good’ and/or ‘be happy’. We end the blame game and engage in the ‘I am responsible for my actions’ way of living. In recovery, we don’t have “identity politics”, we don’t have “MAGA” followers, we have people rowing together against these mighty streams, we have people working together for the good of all to dam up and stop the “mighty stream” of “callousness and established authority” that has as its goal the destruction of the human spirit. In recovery, we take up the mantle of the prophets, we face “a coalition of callousness and established authority” in our time and, because of our dedication to spiritual principles and values, we can at least hold them at bay. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 117

“The prophet’s word is a scream in the night. While the world is at ease and asleep, the prophet feels the blast from heaven.” (Essential Writings pg. 63)

Rabbi Heschel says in his interview with Carl Stern that we have forgotten the prophets, we don’t study the prophets, and, I would say, that we don’t experience the prophets in our world today. The power of the prophet’s word is that it is still screaming at us and has been screaming at us throughout the millennia. Yet, we seem incapable of hearing their scream, we are too “asleep” to respond to their scream.

For some of us, the scream is ear shattering, it is cuts through us as a knife cuts through butter. We continue to responding our own ways and we are aware of the inadequacy of our response, we encounter the stubbornness of most people who plug their ears to the scream and instead hear the call of their egos and of their desires towards self-aggrandizement. This battle has been raging since the time of the prophets and continues to engulf those of us who feel the “blast from heaven” each and every day. This is, I believe, the war spoken about in the words of the prophets; not a day of destruction as many have interpreted their words, rather a war for the sake of heaven and earth, a war between those who hear the “scream” and those who are “at ease and asleep”.

I do not hear Rabbi Heschel teaching us  that “the world is at ease and asleep” is a literal experience, rather he is calling to us to WAKE UP! Of course there is anxiety and awareness of the ills of the world by most people and they are still “at ease and asleep” to the fact that “the prophet’s word is a scream in the night”. The words of the prophets are not giving them nightmares, rather they are using them for weapons against their ‘enemies’, against all who do hear and respond to this “scream” which gives us nightmares and calls us to action. When we go to our respective corners of progressive, conservative, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, etc and block out all other conversations, when we are xenophobic, authoritarian, when we seek power for the sake of power, when we seek to uplift ourselves over everyone else, we are “at ease and asleep” and unable to experience “the blast from heaven” even though we can quote scriptures, we can wrap ourselves in our particular faith, we are unable to hear the “scream”!

The prophet cannot help himself(yes the prophets were men), because of feeling “the blast from heaven” he is unable to contain himself, he forces us to choose sides, either we are “at ease and asleep” or we hear the “scream” and take action. While I am not a big proponent of either/or; there are times when we have to make a choice and I hear Rabbi Heschel calling us to make such a decision: are we going to immerse ourselves in the words and “screams” of the prophets or not? Are we going to stand up and speak truth to power, are we going to stop using prayer to comfort us as the Israelites and Judean priests used sacrifices to feel “at ease and asleep”? Are we going to welcome the stranger, help the poor and the needy, care for the widow and the orphan? Are we going to “proclaim freedom throughout the land and to all its inhabitants therein or continue to subtly and not so subtly continue to use people for our selfish good?

These questions and more arise from hearing “the prophet’s word is a scream”. It is time for all of us to get our hearing checked, attune our hearing to the decibel the prophet’s spoke at and join in their horror at ‘the way things are’. It is time for all of us to wake up with the trembling awe and horror of our actions that have ignored “the blast from heaven”. It is time for us to end our being “at ease and asleep” through our actions of false piety. We have to have a “dark night of the soul” as individuals and as a global community if we are to move toward the light of the universe instead of continually hiding from it. Just as God continues to call to us to HEAR each day from Mount Sinai, so too do the words of the prophet continue to “scream” at us, continue to awaken us to “the blast from heaven”. It is our job to wake up and hear, listen and understand-this is the call, the demand, the essence of the Hebrew word Shema which is also the beginning of a central prayer in the Jewish tradition.

Recovery occurs when one finally hears the “scream” of the prophets, when one finally experiences “the blast from heaven” and we can no longer deny either. Both hearing the “scream” and experiencing “the blast from heaven” become undeniable and we have to respond to them with a new way of being. This spiritual awakening is so overwhelming we become able to return to our basic goodness of being, we learn/re-learn how to be a decent human being, and we commit to living our lives in service to the teachings of the prophets and the call of “the blast from heaven”.

I have awoken many a night because I hear the “scream” of the prophet’s word and realize how I have ignored it. I have night terrors from the experience of “the blast from heaven” which I have missed. These experiences have not led me to despair, rather they have led me to resilience and to action. I know many of my imperfections and learn more through these ‘nightmares’ caused by the “scream” and “the blast”. I am elated that I have not blocked my ears from them and I am never “at ease and asleep” for too long. In my recovery, I do not seek ‘inner peace’, I seek progress in fulfill the call of the prophets and allowing the “blast from heaven” to propel me to new insights and new discoveries of how to be one grain of sand better each day. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 116

“The prophet disdains those for whom God’s presence is comfort and security; to him it is a challenge, an incessant demand. God is compassion, not compromise; justice, though not inclemency. The prophet’s predictions can always be proved wrong by a change in man’s conduct, but never the certainty that God is full of compassion.” (Essential Writings pg. 63)

Thinking and experiencing the last sentence above brings the story of Jonah to mind. God gave Jonah a prophecy to take to Nineveh and, Jonah knowing of God’s compassion, had an inkling that God would not follow through on the destruction of that “great city”. While Jonah was angry and upset that God spared Nineveh, he forgot to take into account how well he delivered the prophecy. The people of Nineveh from the King to the water carrier repented for their deeds and were spared. It was “a change in man’s conduct” that caused the prophecy to not be fulfilled, it was the power with which Jonah delivered the message that caused the change, which is proof of Rabbi Heschel’s teaching above.

The issue humanity faces today is whether to take the words of the prophets seriously, whether to experience the prophets words, teachings, demands in our time or continue to think of them as only applying to “those people”. We are facing the same issues that Ancient Israel and Ancient Judea faced, we are facing the same issues the Romans and the Greeks, the Assyrians and the Babylonians faced: will we continue to thrive as a civilization or will we self-destruct from our own hubris. It seems as if hubris is winning!

When the zealots run a country, when the people go along with the ‘strongmen’ because they want certainty and they are willing and ready to be deceived, we find ourselves shunning the call of the prophets, dismissing their words and their demands we repent and return to Godly ways of being and to the call of our inner lives. We are witnessing this happen around the globe, we are watching people lose their freedom because they lack the courage to stand up for what the prophets called us to do-care for the stranger, the widow, the poor, the orphan and the needy, allow God to heal our backsliding and accept the love and compassion God gives us. What is so confusing to many is these zealots and ‘strongmen’ invoke religion, use the Bible, the Koran, the New Testament to validate their deceptions, their mendacity, and their grab for power!

Be it ‘good christian’, ‘religious jews’, ‘devoted muslims’ all of these charlatans promote the same lie; God loves them best and only they know God’s will; follow me and I will lead you to the promised land no matter how many of you have to die, you are dying for the sake of God. Bullshit! These liars seek power and prestige, wealth and fame for their own sake, They do not heed the words of the prophets though they quote them. Be it Mike Johnson, Rashida Tliab, Sinwar, Netanyahu, Ben G’Vir, Donald Trump, et al all have only one goal-their survival and their power grab. Rather than show the compassion that God has for all, they use the vulnerabilities of their followers and their enemies to promote lies and subterfuge. We have to say NO to them and their ilk if we are to survive as free people.

This is the goal of the prophets after studying them through Rabbi Heschel-to call us back to a path of freedom, to demand we end our self-deception and return to God so we can strengthen our free will and serve something higher than ourselves-compassion, truth, kindness, giving power to the powerless and voice to the voiceless. This is one of the experiences the prophet brings to those of us who still have some agency over ourselves and have not “drank the kool-aid” of the deceivers. We have the gift of the prophets from Amos to Micah and can use their words and their deeds to redeem ourselves, our neighbors, our countries, our people. Yet, we have to engage in these words, we have to exemplify the actions of Nineveh, not Israel or Judea when hearing the prophets’ words. It is time for us: a) to put on sackcloth, b) to recognize our similarities with all humans, c) to submit our souls to the cleansing they yearn for so we can override our false egos and let go of our false pride and return to God so God can heal us!

In recovery, we experience “the certainty that God is full of compassion”. Without God’s compassion, we would not have the strength to surrender to truth: we are addicted to______(fill in the bland) and we falsely believed _____ would save us, would help us ignore/escape the pain of being human. Whatever substance or process gets us into recovery, the root of our dis-ease is our misguided belief that we can be spared the horror of being human, we can escape the reality of  the uncertainty of life, etc. Yet, in recovery, we heed the words of the prophets, we heed the teachings of a myriad of spiritual texts and we experience the compassion of God and we are restored to sanity, to wholeness and to life.

I am able to write and have been able to live a life of relative freedom because “God is full of compassion”! An ex-con turned Rabbi, a thief who becomes CEO of an organization, an empty shell who is brought back to life by the teachings of Torah, of the Bible, of the prophets, of so many Rabbis-especially Rabbi Heschel, a man who continues to make mistakes, do T’Shuvah and be reconnected with many of the people I have harmed; all are examples of God’s compassion because we know humans say “a leopard doesn’t change its spots”. Yet, my return has been accepted, God has healed my backsliding and taken me back in love. This grace that God continues to bestow upon me continues to inspire me and many others, this grace is the basic ingredient of my freedom and my desire to strengthen my free-will moral choices so I am more human each day. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 115

“The prophet disdains those for whom God’s presence is comfort and security; to him it is a challenge, an incessant demand. God is compassion, not compromise; justice, though not inclemency. The prophet’s predictions can always be proved wrong by a change in man’s conduct, but never the certainty that God is full of compassion.” (Essential Writings pg. 63)

In the second sentence above, Rabbi Heschel is describing not only God’s attributes, he is teaching us how to be human, how to be in order to “live a life that is compatible with being a partner of God’s.” Compassion comes from the Latin meaning “to suffer with” and Rabbi Heschel is reminding us that God “suffers with” human beings. While many of us feel alone in our suffering, Rabbi Heschel and the prophets call out to us that we are not alone, that God is with us in our suffering as well as with us in our joy. Living a life with God as our partner doesn’t mean we will not have suffering as I am understanding Rabbi Heschel today, it means we never suffer alone. God also doesn’t compromise which is a jarring statement at first blush. I hear Rabbi Heschel calling out to us to never “accept standards that are less than desirable”, as one definition of compromise states. Having “compassion” and no “compromise” gives human beings a great challenge. How can we “suffer with” one another and not “accept standards that are less than desirable”?

The pathway to living in this ‘both/and’ is difficult, it means we have to look inside of ourselves and see how, when, and where we compromise our morality, our spiritual values, where we give up ourselves and put on the masks and facades that society wants. Once we do this inventory, once we determine the self-deceptions and obliviousness we have engaged in, we are able to engage our emotions and intellect to “suffer with” our soul’s angst. Turning away from our false compromises, turning to God, we join together to know we are not alone in our suffering, we do not have to turn to despair. We are able to rise above our current state of affairs through the forgiving hand of God, through the knowledge we are not alone, and we always have a way out of our suffering and back to being compassionate and kind, holding ourselves to the standard of being human, with our imperfections and our uniqueness.

We witness our own compromises and the compromises of society daily. Yet, rather than live into God’s call for “compassion, not compromise”, people are compassionate for the compromises they make and the groups they belong to make. Accepting Hamas as ‘freedom fighters’ is one example of people living in “compromise” not “compassion”. While many talk of compassion for the Palestinian people, few are able to have the same compassion for Israelis! While many people want Israel to accept “standards that are less than desirable”, they do not believe the Palestinians should. While there is not any doubt of the horror that Hamas perpetrated upon innocents in Israel, people compromise their own humanity when extolling Hamas’ efforts. Another example of compromise not compassion is the way the House Republicans are treating Ukraine, Israel, our border issues as a political wedge rather than as a humanitarian issue. Rather than “suffer with” the Ukrainians, the Israelis, the border states and the people seeking a better life, the Republican Party seems to favor cruelty and harshness towards their fellow human beings all the while extolling their ‘christian values’! Rather than live into Christ’s words and ways, these ‘good christians’ “accept standards that are less than desirable” for their political and power-seeking selfishness, not to uphold Christ’s teachings, not to be more Godly, more holy!

We, the people, have to call an end to this way of being. We, the people, have to engage in the battle for our own souls and for the soul of our society. For far too long, we have allowed the liars and deceivers to tell us what God wants, what it is to be human. Rabbi Heschel and the prophets are demanding we return to a way of being that the Bible calls for, that the New Testament, the Koran, the Eastern Philosophies demand of us instead of the “compromise” we have allowed ourselves to become mired in. We, the people, are called each day to “Hear” the voice of God that is within us and all around us and is calling on us to end our ‘rugged individual’, our aloneness attitudes, our self-seeking way of being and allow God’s compassion to overwhelm us, to join us in our suffering and help us rise above the “compromise” we have made. Receiving “compassion” from God is a gift and we have to use this gift to raise our own standards back to the standards of God, we have to raise our awareness of how capable we are to meet God’s standards and we have to let go of our false sufferings, our mendacity and our selfishness. We do this by joining with one another and recognizing our common “suffering” and we “suffer with” one another so we all rise above our “less than desirable standards” and be human a little more each day.

“God is compassion, not compromise” is a constant theme of recovery. We “turn our lives over” to a power greater than ourselves; so that we can once again, or for the first time, engage in living decently, living with love for one another, love for oneself. We greet one another with a ‘knowing’ of their “suffering” and we “suffer with” one another in life’s hardships. We reach out and help one another through our sufferings not as experts but as fellow travelers on the path of being human. In recovery, we accept the standards that God has given us, we know we will never be perfect and we learn how to live with “compassion” for self and another(s) while never “compromising” the standards of kindness, truth, love, caring, decency. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Immersing ourselves in rabbi heschel’s wisdom - a daily path for living well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 114

“The prophet disdains those for whom God’s presence is comfort and security; to him it is a challenge, an incessant demand. God is compassion, not compromise; justice, though not inclemency. The prophet’s predictions can always be proved wrong by a change in man’s conduct, but never the certainty that God is full of compassion.” (Essential Writings pg. 63)

The first sentence above is a theme found throughout Rabbi Heschel’s writings. It is not just a historical observance by him, though, this sentence encases the theme of his life, the way he lived-always responding to “a challenge, an incessant demand” he experiences from God, from living as “a descendant of the prophets”. We hear a lot of people proclaim; “follow ____(fill in the bland) and you will find inner peace” yet Rabbi Heschel is teaching us that ‘inner peace’ is not necessarily the goal of being human. Hearing Rabbi Heschel in my mind and in my soul this morning, I know my attempts at ‘inner peace’ are selfish and self-serving; how can I be at peace when innocent people are dying all over the world, when racism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, Gender bias, and a myriad of other discriminatory paths are so prevalent in our society? How can anyone believe that God is happy when God’s children are at war over land, property, prestige? How can anyone believe God is comforted by the ‘false’ prayers, tithes, bastardizations that so many ‘religious’ people perpetuate?

We have been given the gift of the books of the prophets for a reason. What is the question this gift is the answer for? I believe the question is: How are we truly living into God’s will, how are we letting go of the facades, falsehoods, mendacities and deceptions we have employed to make ourselves feel good, important, in charge, are but two of many. Yet, most people don’t ask themselves the right questions, we succumb to the conventional notions of society and go along to get along. We spend billions on “self-help” books that preach spirituality and give up before the miracle happens, just like our New Year’s resolutions, our latest diet attempt/fad, etc. We give up, I believe, because we are unwilling to immerse ourselves in the teachings, the guidance of the prophets, of spiritual guides and masters like Rabbi Heschel, Dr. King, Thomas Merton, Parker Palmer, the Baal Shem Tov, etc. We are a society that, as Moses predicted, “grew fat and kicked” God out of our lives, relegated God to a Temple, Mosque, Church and believed the people who are Clergy and Spiritual ‘Gurus’ are the true emissaries while they preach hatred and separation, forgetting to care for the poor and the needy in material as well as spiritual ways, succumbing to allure of the money the rich can donate and giving them ‘special dispensation’ because of their wealth and power. Just as many clergy hid themselves when the Civil Rights movement was beginning with Dr. King, they are hiding from the truth, from the demand, from the challenge that God through the prophets give to all of us.

God’s comfort comes when we respond to God’s challenge, God’s “incessant demand”. It is only when we are engaged in the work the prophets proposed to us can we find comfort and ‘inner peace’, ‘inner peace’ I am defining as the relief one experiences when one knows they are doing the next right thing. It is a fleeting experience because the demands are ongoing, there is no “one and done” when we respond to the answers the prophets provide us with. There is only a respite knowing we are on the path God has called us to, on a path of wholeness and fulfillment of meaning and purpose, living passionately for the sake of heaven instead of for our own selfish desires. We become a people that recognizes our authentic needs and seeks to fulfill them rather than constantly deflecting from authenticity to chase the newest and best ‘shiny object’. Our lives are spent seeking truth and giving no quarter to falseness, no longer supporting the lies and liars like Trump, Bibi, Orban, Putin, the MAGA and religious zealots who preach war, hatred, fascism, etc.

We are in desperate need of our clergy, our elected officials, our business leaders, our parents and children learning the way of the prophets. We need to rededicate ourselves to the truths they speak, the ways they teach and the comfort they offer. We need to turn back to God not for comfort but for truth and guidance, for our ‘marching orders’ on how to be human and how to fulfill the divine need we are created for. It is time for our spiritual leaders to call out the lawlessness of ‘law-abiding’ citizens who still seek to engage in prejudice, who continue to act as if the Golden Rule is: ‘the one with the gold rules’. We are in desperate need of a renaissance of prophetic teaching, of learning how to live Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom, Rev. King’s wisdom, the wisdom of the Dalai Lama, etc. We have the teachers like Rabbi Ed Feinstein, Rev William Barber, John Pavlovitz, etc -it is we, the people, who seem to be too fat to seek them out and learn from them!

Recovery is based in the wisdom of the prophets, we surrender our “self-will run riot” by “turning our lives over to the care of God as we understand God”. We are constantly seeking to find ways to serve rather than be served, we seek serenity/clarity as to what we can change and what we can’t, we know we need to be able to discern the truth and let go of the false self, the deceptions of another and be connected with a community of seekers.

This has been and continues to be my quest. I am not perfect and I see the progress in how I live into the words and ways of the prophets and Rabbi Heschel. I am grateful for his wisdom that is a guiding light for living well. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark.

immersing ourselves in rabbi heschel’s wisdom - A daily spiritual path for living well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 113

“The prophet hates the approximate; he shuns the middle of the road. Man must live on the summit to avoid the abyss. There is nothing to hold to except God. Carried away by the challenge, the demand to straighten out man’s ways, the prophet is strange, one-sided, an unbearable extremist.” (Essential Writings pg.62/63)

These words of Rabbi Heschel inspire me, many people. His love of the prophets, his being “disturbed” by the prophets, have changed many lives and was so important in his activism. This description of the prophet is the reason Rabbis have always been afraid of them. While Rabbinic Judaism seeks the middle often, except where some have decided the extreme is the ‘right’ way, they are afraid of the power of the prophets to lead people to an overthrow of their authority, I believe. The prophets railed against the priests and those in power, both royalty and wealthy. The prophets have the job of getting humanity to return to God’s ways, to seek forgiveness and change the paths we are following. The prophets are challenged over and over again by their sense of calling and knowing they have to answer to a power greater than themselves; God.

While people believe in ‘trying’, the prophets believe in doing-as I read them and Rabbi Heschel’s teachings on the prophets. While people look for ‘things to hold onto’, the prophets make a mockery of the power, prestige, material things that give people solace and they use for comfort. The misbelief that one can settle for status quo, ‘this is the way we have always done it’, etc is belied by the prophets’ words and actions. They are not willing to settle nor are they willing to let the people settle for anything other than doing the best they can to repent, to return, to have new responses to old issues and problems. For the prophets’, in my understanding of them and Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom above, if one is not willing to attach oneself to God, one is attaching oneself to evil, there is no middle ground, there is no ‘trying’ there is a surrender to God’s will and doing God’s will or there is nothing.

The prophets are speaking to us today, right now. They are in the words and teachings of Rabbi Heschel, Dr. King, Thomas Merton, Parker Palmer, Rabbi Schulweis, and so many others. We, the people, have to stand up to the charlatans that speak the words of the Priests of old, hear and pay heed to the desires of the powerful  and the wealthy, while abandoning God, God’s will and the people they are supposed to serve. The prophets call to speak truth to power is needed desperately right now, as it always is. It seems a little more necessary now with ‘alternative facts’, media lies, the fact that 68% of Republicans and up to 48% of Independents still believe the ‘stolen election’ lies of Trump world is a sign that the prophets are needed at least as much if not more than in Ancient Israel.

Yet, even those that quote the prophets do so for their own gain, they bastardize the prophets’ words just as the “prosperity gospel” bastardizes Jesus’ words and radical Islamists bastardize the teachings of Mohammed. This is why the prophets and their authentic descendants seem to strange to people, this is why Rabbi Heschel’s teachings and words were so unsettling to people, this is why the quotations of the prophets, the quotations of Rabbi Heschel go unheeded and used as subterfuge. Without marching  and doing everything one can for the poor, the needy, the stranger, the widow, the voiceless and the powerless, we are just giving lip service not only to the prophets, but to God’s calls and God’s will. The worst actions taken by ‘people of faith’ are to abuse the trust of the people they are supposed to serve by committing the same acts as the priests of Ancient Israel at the time of the prophets.

When one is called by God, when one has a spiritual awakening, spiritual encounters one is changed forever. Even for the people who dismiss these experiences, they are changed. In recovery, we all have these experiences, be they ecstatic or “the educational variety”. This makes us, like the prophets, strange to people, we seem one-sided in our refusal to relapse into old behaviors of unkindness, of selfishness, of mendacity, of meanness, of needing to be right, etc. We seem like an “unbearable extremist” with our commitment to God and God’s ways, we are called a cult because we refuse to be seduced by power, prestige, fame to the ruin of our  spiritual connections. In recovery, we are hearing the prophets call as a Shofar that calls us back to Sinai, back to our covenant with God, and gives us the pathway to “a richer and more meaningful life.”

I am “strange, one-sided, an unbearable extremist” to many people. I am unable to tolerate hiding, by me and/or by you, by anyone. I cannot “go along to get along”, I am loud, abrasive, open to learning and doing life differently, being part of a team, and demanding 100% of whatever someone has to add to our effort to live well, to be in recovery from the lies and shading of the truth, the hiding and the bullshit of living a facade. I am strange in my ways, I believe if I see you standing on a cliff, yelling to get you to turn away is a sign of love and caring. I believe holding you and me to the loyalty we pledge upon entering into a relationship which entails helping and speaking truth is holy. I believe erasing someone from one’s life, especially those that have helped us, is insane and wrong. I believe forgiving someone who has harmed you and letting it as well as them go is holy. I believe in searching for God and Godliness, we have to open our eyes, our hearts and our souls to the words of the prophets and take actions on their teachings, on God’s will. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Immersing ourselves in rabbi heschel’s wisdom - A daily spiritual path for living well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 112

“Above all, the prophets remind us of the moral state of a people: Few are guilty but all are responsible. If we admit that the individual is in some measure conditioned or affected by the spirit of society, an individual’s crime discloses society’s corruption. In a community not indifferent to suffering, uncompromisingly impatient with cruelty and falsehood, continually concerned for God and every man, crime would be infrequent rather than common. (Essential Writings pg. 62)

The more I sit with these words and this wisdom, the more I realize how society has failed the people it is supposed to serve. Rather than society serving its members, we have made its members serve it. Who gets to set what society is about? In our time celebrities, Religious Charlatans, Mendacious Elected Officials, Authoritarians, and the rest of that ilk. We, the people, we, the faithful, we, the true humanists, are shut out from any way of influencing “the spirit of society”, we are not included because then the voices of the prophets, of the wise people of faith and philosophy, of the arts, etc would have power and influence. Rather, “the spirit of society” has been ruled by the powerful, the power-hungry, the idolators and the deceivers almost non-stop since humankind came into being.

People of faith believe that God brought the human into being, Evolutionists believe humanity evolved from Apes and both have created a society that is corrupt and evil at times. Our society has become one of indifference to poverty, indifference to suffering, punishing the poor for their crimes while extolling the rich for theirs! We worship at the brilliance of the Robber Barons who, like the people who were building the Tower of Babel, cared nothing for the workers who died laying the tracks for the trains, died while working in the mines, the steel mills, the sweatshops, etc. We are in awe of the talent of celebrities and follow their lead to addiction, to anti-semitism, to hatred of ‘the man’, all the while not noticing that they too are ‘the man’ and acting in the same ways! Clergy are not exempt either, think of the myriad of clergy who preached hatred of the Jews in the last century and in this one, the myriad of clergy who did not join Rev. King in his quest for the rights of Black people to be the same as for white people. Listen to the Clergy that blame LGBtQ+ for the ills of our society all the while they spread hatred and calumny throughout the land instead of liberty for all as the Bible teaches us.

The solution is for all of us, or at least reach the tipping point of people who are “continually concerned for God and every man” so we can change our society into what it is meant to be; a safe haven for those in need, a charged atmosphere of learning and creating, a world where each person is recognized, welcomed, embraced for their unique talents, where they are valued as much as every other human being and everyone earns at least a living wage, while there will be rich and there will be disparities, there won’t be the ones we have now, we will not have people living in their cars across the street from opulent mansions because the people cannot earn a living wage.

This disparity, the amount of people imprisoned in the United States speaks so badly about our “liberty and justice for all” slogans, about our “give me your tired, your poor…”, about our being ‘ a christian nation’. The disparity in our society, the crimes we see, the people in prison point to the moral decay of our country, this decay has been brought about by Democrats and Republicans, Christians and Jews, Conservatives and Progressives, by all of us. Look at the history of fascism in our country, Lindbergh, Ford, Father Coughlin, the KKK, the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society, the McCarthy Hearings and Blacklists, the torturing of Alan Turing, the anti-semitism and racism that has always been present and we see how this rot has undermined the promises and the dreams of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. We can see how both here and across the globe religion has been used to separate rather than have be “continually concerned for God and every man”.

This society has to be toppled! The path to do this is through faith and spirit. Recovery is the revolution that can topple society’s hatred and uplift its spirit. In recovery we learn how to enjoy what is, to help one another, to be concerned with God’s will and turn our will over to something greater than us. We are constantly seeking to “grow along spiritual lines” and to listen to the call of our spirits rather than the falseness of our egos. Some of us are rich and some of us are not, yet we all have equal says in what goes on in our meetings and in AA. We don’t live from a hierarchy, rather we see one another as equals in spirit and in love, in kindness and in wisdom, and we work with one another to fill in the gaps we have and we fill in the gaps another has.

I helped to build an institution where every one had a say, just not necessarily a deciding say. The first time I put up to the community if someone should remain in the recovery facility we were running, the staff was aghast and the community was shocked. We spent two hours talking through the consequences of either decision and at the end, we had agreement as to what the next right thing to do was. What was most important is that we lived the wisdom of Rabbi Heschel above, we were more “concerned with God and every man” than we were with doing what society dictated. We continually engaged the community and we cared for each and every person as an individual. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

IMMERSING OURSELVES IN RABBI HESCHEL'S WISDOM - A DAILY PATH FOR LIVING WELL

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 111

“Above all, the prophets remind us of the moral state of a people: Few are guilty but all are responsible. If we admit that the individual is in some measure conditioned or affected by the spirit of society, an individual’s crime discloses society’s corruption. In a community not indifferent to suffering, uncompromisingly impatient with cruelty and falsehood, continually concerned for God and every man, crime would be infrequent rather than common. (Essential Writings pg. 62)

Rabbi Heschel’s voice is the voice of the prophet, he is not only relaying the prophetic message, he is speaking about what has happened throughout history, what was happening some 62 years ago when his book The Prophets was published and he prophesied what would happen in our time; unless we changed our ways. In the last sentence above, Rabbi Heschel gives us the path to change, he is calling out to us, as the prophets did in their time, how to live into his words in the first sentence: “few are guilty but all are responsible”.

We are living in a society that is “indifferent to suffering”, that is not “impatient with cruelty and falsehood” and is not “concerned for God and man”. While we hear from people who claim to be religious, who claim God is their guide, the actions of many of these people belie their words. We are living in a time where suffering is accepted as ‘the norm’ for ‘those people’. Suffering is the result of the actions of the sufferers according to some, the victim is being blamed for their plight in many cases and we have seen the phenomenon of the victim becoming the victimizer as well. All of these stems from a spiritual malady.

Our indifference to suffering goes hand in hand with our acceptance of cruelty and falsehood. In our political arena politicians make grand promises and they keep very few, unless the promise is to cause more suffering. When our Congress will not find nor even seek compassionate solutions to immigration, legal and illegal, because they can ‘run’ on the issue we are witnessing cruelty and experiencing falsehood. Yet, we, the people, seem to accept this cruelty as ‘just the way things are’. When our prisons are overcrowded and used for punishment only, when guards treat prisoners as less than human, we witness cruelty. When we watch in silence as the Congress continues to seek to hold spectacles of lying and deception so they can puff out their chests and show how ‘tough’ they are, we are witnesses to cruelty. When we watch as people suffer because they cannot earn a living wage and the minimum wage is so low people have to work two jobs to eke out enough to pay rent and for basic necessities, we are part of the cruelty. When we “stand idly by the bloods of our brothers” we belie the ‘faith’, the ‘religiosity’, the ‘humanism’ the ‘morality’ we proclaim we have. We, the people, cannot blame the politicians, the government, the prison system, the big corporations, etc in order to shirk our responsibility. We, the people, are responsible irrespective of whether we are the perpetrators.

Breaking our indifference is the solution. We have to wake up and stand up, we have to take God, truth, kindness, caring out of the hands of the idolators and deceivers, out of the mouths of the liars and the mendacity of the ‘powerful’. We have to listen to the words of the prophets, we have to act on their words as they, Rabbi Heschel, Dr. King, and so many others guide us to. We have to say NO to the ‘religious liars’, we have to say NO to the politicians that seek to divide us into red and blue, we have to say NO to the progressives who only care about the ‘underdog of the month’ and not everyone who suffers. We have to stop blaming everyone but ourselves for our current state of affairs. We have to work together to heal our society, to care for the poor, the needy, welcome the stranger, act Godly whether we believe in God or not.

We can only do this when, as we say in AA, “our own house is in order”. We have to regain our spiritual health, we have to seek out physicians of the soul to heal our inner lives, our inner wounds. We need help to hear the call of our intuition, our spirit and the power to carry out this call within us. We need to engage in a societal change from dogma to spiritual consciousness; be it God-consciousness, Higher consciousness, however one wants to call a raising of oneself above their base needs. We, the people, have to return to using our intuitive minds as a gift and using our rational minds to serve our gift as Einstein says rather than give into what our rational, narcissistic minds tell us and forgetting to hear and heed the call of our intuitive minds, our spirits. This is the way of the Bible, this is the message of the prophets: return to God, to Godliness, to higher consciousness, to your intuitive mind, however you want to understand what makes us human. We can do this, we can live into the prophetic voices, we can live into the Biblical teachings, when we appreciate our ability to understand anew the directions and stories, when we end our need to be right and instead seek to do right.

This way of being is central to recovery. We are recovering our integrity, our essence, our path back to something greater than ourselves. I seek out a new way of understanding and applying the wisdom of the prophets and the Bible each and every day. I make errors, I am imperfect and I have to make my amends and move on-whether someone wants to forgive me or not is up to them-my job is to do T’Shuvah. Each day I begin with prayer, meditation, and this writing so I begin my day with a plan and a path. I pray you all do the same and then at night we see how well we have done and what harms we have brought so we can make amends the next day. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

IMMERSING OURSELVES IN RABBI HESCHEL'S WISDOM - A DAILY SPIRITUAL PATH FOR LIVING BETTER

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 110

“Above all, the prophets remind us of the moral state of a people: Few are guilty but all are responsible. If we admit that the individual is in some measure conditioned or affected by the spirit of society, an individual’s crime discloses society’s corruption. In a community not indifferent to suffering, uncompromisingly impatient with cruelty and falsehood, continually concerned for God and every man, crime would be infrequent rather than common. (Essential Writings pg. 62)

Sitting with these words of wisdom and rebuke for an hour, a day, a week could and must change the ways we see ourselves, we see one another and we see our society. That every individual “is in some measure conditioned or affected by the spirit of society” goes without saying and has been proved over and over again. Be it the Greeks, the Romans, the Jews, the Assyrians, the Persians, the English, the Germans, the French, the Americans, the Japanese, the Palestinians, the Saudis, the Chinese, the Russians, etc there is a spirit of each society that “conditions” of affects each individual within it, as well as individuals and countries throughout the globe. Each invention, each discovery, every painting, musical composition, etc impacts the nature of the individuals and the societies they live in.

If we look at the crimes being committed today, what does it say about our societies, here and abroad? Robberies, burglaries, petty thefts show the belief of a society that “if I can take it from you, then it was meant to be mine”. It is showing us a society that believes in “getting mine” without regard to the impact and effect “getting mine” has on anyone else. A society that has a lot of these types of crimes along with identity theft crimes gives us a picture of a society that no longer views another person as having dignity, rights, value except in relationship to it. We are such a society, we have moved from the colonial spirit of “liberty and justice for all” to a spirit of mistrust and mendacity. In 1863, Abraham Lincoln carried on the colonial spirit of the leaders of the Revolutionary War by freeing slaves, by making slavery no longer legal. Yet, even the people of his own party betrayed this bold and evolutionary move by instituting Jim Crow Laws, by allowing the KKK to flourish, etc. Our society that has so much crime-yes it may be less one year- that attacks the very fabric of personal safety like those mentioned above, shows us how little the society cares for the individual and how much it caters to the rich, powerful, people at the ‘head’ of it. We are living in a society that is more concerned with its “adjustment to conventional notions and mental cliches” than with the dignity and worth of the 90% how don’t have as much as the top 10%!

The more I sit with Rabbi Heschel’s demand and wisdom, his brilliance and his clear-eyed vision of what was, what is, the more I realize how far we have to climb as a society. We are a corrupt society, we are see this in the lies people believe from the mouth of Donals Trump, from the mouth of Bibi Netanyahu, from the mouth of Vladimir Putin, from the mouths of the Republicans in office and from the mouths of the Squad, of Democrats who fail to see the both/and of a situation and call for changes that care only for the current group that is there ‘identity group’. We are a society that has come to worship the liar and shun the truth sayer! We are a society that will hail and bow down to terrorists societies like Hamas and Iran who mistreat their people so badly that in almost 20 years the people of Gaza were in poverty still while the heads of Hamas live well in Qatar, in Gaza and across the globe. We are a society that will believe the lies of ‘the poor Palestinians’ who did nothing to stop the horror of Oct. 7th, who have allowed Hamas to brutalize them, to kill LGBTQ+ people in their midst, to make women 2nd class citizens. Yet the progressive wing of the Democratic Party salutes them as freedom fighters!!

Believing that Joe Biden is a crook and Donald Trump is sent by Jesus, believing that Bibi and his right-wing, so-called ‘religious’ right care about anything but their own power and their own ability to be dictators, believing that what happens in Ukraine doesn’t matter to us, believing that Putin, Kim Jung Un, Xi, Orban are good men, etc, says everything about the society that we are in and the one we have allowed to be created. I am old enough to remember “the Great Society” and “ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country”, the Peace Corps, the energy of the ’60’s for peace, for civil rights and civil discourse. I also remember the murders of Medger Evers, JFK, Martin and Bobby, Malcolm X, and a society that never really cared to be responsible for the climate and the attitude of hatred that was so prevalent at those times. WE, the PEOPLE have to stand up and change this pervasive attitude of being able to lie about people to make ourselves wealthy, to make ourselves electable, to make ourselves feel good about ourselves. I watch in horror at the people who ‘jump on the bandwagon’ of the latest ways to ‘get theirs’ through frivolous “draft lawsuits” that are actually extorting money from people, business’ and even non-profit social service institutions, knowing the publicity is worse than paying. We are a sick society and we need to heal!

Healing can be found in the recovery movement, through the AA model, through the model the Bible gives us, through the humanistic model, through the model of Eastern Philosophies. All of these paths give us principles to live into and live by, ways of being human and decent. More on this tomorrow. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

IMMERSING OURSELVES IN RABBI HESCHEL'S WISDOM- A DAILY SPIRITUAL PATH FOR LIVING WELL

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 109

“Above all, the prophets remind us of the moral state of a people: Few are guilty but all are responsible. If we admit that the individual is in some measure conditioned or affected by the spirit of society, an individual’s crime discloses society’s corruption. In a community not indifferent to suffering, uncompromisingly impatient with cruelty and falsehood, continually concerned for God and every man, crime would be infrequent rather than common. (Essential Writings pg. 62)

The eternal gift of the prophets is the mirror they hold up to us, their words, their actions look at us with questions, comments, rebuke and hope. Rabbi Heschel’s words above come to remind us of their teachings and he is imparting to us a call to action. What is the moral state of our country, of our world, of our communities, of our families, of our selves? The call of the prophets is to return, to turn away from our selfishness, from our mendacity, from our deception of another(s) and deception of ourselves. They call to us to remember the demands and call to connect with God, with our higher selves, to practice the principles of decency, love, compassion, truth. Yet, for time immemorial, we turn a deaf ear to their call, to the wisdom of Rabbi Heschel, to God’s call from Mount Sinai to Shema-Hear.

Reflecting on “the moral state of a people” in the United States, it is apparent that we are, like Jonah, running away from the call of God, from the words of the prophets and, like the people of Ancient Israel and Judea, we believe we are impervious to the dangers our running away bring. Listening to the lies of politicians and the mendacity of Mike Johnson and his crew of deceivers who use Jesus as their source of meanness, blaming the democrats for the ills of our nation, we can discover the rot, the subterfuge, the twisting of what is good and right into a grab for power and domination. Rather than seek to help the poor, care for the needy, welcome the stranger, some ‘leaders’ of our American society seek to criminalize poverty, need and those seeking refuge. Rather than living up to the words on the Statue of Liberty, a large portion of our population have forgotten their ancestors came here with little, came to America seeking refuge from their native lands and needed help to “breath free”. The progressives also show the rot of our “moral state” when there is no discernment between ‘the poor underdog’ and their acts of terrorism-giving aid and comfort to enemies of freedom, enemies of LGBTQ+, abandoning their allies for the sake of ‘the cause’.

“Few are guilty but all are responsible” is ringing in our ears, is being called out from Mount Sinai each and every day. This phrase conveys to us what it means to be human, what it means to live life as the prophets have laid out for us, what it means to be a person of faith, a humanist, to live a life compatible with being a partner of God. Yet, we continually ignore Rabbi Heschel’s words and the teachings of the prophets for our own selfish desires. We are all responsible for what goes on in our families, in our communities, in our faith, in our countries. We  are being called upon to stand up and say NO to the injustices of our leaders, our laws, our courts, our policies and our selves. We are being called to stop blaming “the other” and take responsibility and action to ensure justice and liberty for all. We are all responsible for ensuring our actions and laws are in concert with: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal that they are endowed with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”. While the “founding fathers” were not able to actualize these words completely, they wrote them into our Declaration of Independence as a guide for future generations. All of us are created equal, all of us are endowed with unalienable rights to life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, justice, love, truth, kindness, care and concern. Ergo; we are all responsible to ensure the same for every human being in our society and, I would add, the world.

We are all separate souls, we are all individuals with our own unique gifts, talents and purposes, and we are all responsible for the society within which we live. We are all responsible for the actions of the government, we are all responsible for the hatred and violence perpetrated in our cities and communities. We are all responsible for “equal justice under the law”, we are all responsible to integrate the immigrants coming into our land so they can become part of the fabric of our society and we share customs, laws, ways of being human with one another. We are all responsible to stand up to bullies and authoritarians, stand up to meanness and hatred, blaming and shaming of another human being/group of human beings. We are all responsible to seek peace and to end the humiliation of those we disagree with, we are all responsible to find compromises that fulfill the words of the prophets, that are in concert with the spiritual values and principles our society is founded on. We are all responsible for the deaths of innocents, for the imprisonment of innocent people, for the crimes against the soul of our nation and the souls of individuals that is rampant in our country today.

The mirror the prophets hold up to us is what we in recovery use to live into our daily inventory, our yearly look back at our ‘past life’. We seek to find our part in the problem, we take responsibility for our part in every interaction, positive or negative. We do not blame someone else for what we have wrought nor do we take on the weight of a situation that is not ours to carry. We use each interaction to improve our moral state, to rise above the selfishness of our emotions, the ‘dog eat dog’ mentality we see practiced in our world, we know we have to continue to “grow along spiritual lines” and “practice these principles in all our affairs”. We are also aware of our imperfections and we use them to grow, to be unique and to live one grain of sand better each day. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

IMMERSING OURSELVES IN RABBI HESCHEL'S WISDOM - A DAILY SPIRITUAL PATH FOR LIVING WELL

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 108

“The prophet is a man who feels fiercely. God has thrust a burden on his soul, and he is bowed and stunned at man’s fierce greed. Frightful is the agony of man, no human voice can convey its full terror. Prophecy is the voice God has lent to the silent agony, a voice to the plundered poor, to the profound riches of the world. It is a form of living, a crossing point of God and man. God is raging in the prophet’s words…” (Essential Writings pg. 62)

The last two sentences above say it all. We, the People, make a decision each day to hear God “raging in the prophet’s words” or not. We get to choose a “form of living” each day. We are at a crossroad, a fork in the road each day-do we choose to live in God’s words, in the ways the prophets teach us or not. This is our daily conundrum and, as we can see from current events, we often fail to heed the way of the prophets, we ignore the “terror” of “the silent agony”, we abuse “the plundered poor” and we bow down to “the profound riches” that the powerful have.

We have ignored the terrorism of Iran and its proxies for far too long. We have ignored the terrorism of the extremists in Israel, in America, in Russia, throughout the world, foolishly thinking they would go away, it seems. People of ‘faith’ have ignored and misused the words of the Bible, the teachings of the prophets, the “raging” of God for our own brand of terrorism-winning at any and all costs. There is no moral equivalent between Hamas and the war in Gaza-full stop! The loss of any life is tragic-full stop! The war in Gaza is not of Israel’s making, however-it is a response to the terrorism of Oct. 7th 2023! I do not know of anyone who would gleefully live next door to a group of people who want to annihilate them, yet many people in America think that this is a good idea! We are witnessing a grand failure of humanity to hear and follow the words and deeds of the prophets, we are witnessing a grand failure to act in accordance with God’s “form of living”. Yet, we continually deceive ourselves into proclaiming we are living, speaking, and acting in God’s name, in the name of Allah, in the name of Jesus, etc. These self-deceptions, this buying into the deceptions of another increases “the silent agony” of “the plundered poor”, it adds power to the misguided responses to the terror and it gives strength to the “fierce greed” of humankind.

There is a better way for humanity to live, a nobler way for society to attain; live into the “crossing point of God and man.” This is not as difficult as it seems at first blush. It begins with a deep reading of the prophets’ words and actions. We get to relive the ways the people in power abused their power. We, like the prophets, can be “stunned at man’s/our fierce greed” and make a decision to change. Instead of terrorizing one another more with our lies, with our false accusations, we have the wherewithal to turn to truth, we have a pathway to repentance and redemption. We are capable of meeting God “face to face” in our prayers, in our studies, in our actions when we no longer seek excuses for our bad behaviors through using God, using false interpretations of the Bible, by blaming the victims, etc.

Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom and teaching above sends shivers up and down my spine, they pierce the armor that covers one’s soul and come as a welcome reminder of who we are as human beings. We can live in “a crossing point of God and man”, we are capable of hearing the rage in the prophets words as a rebuke, as a call to return to God and Godly ways. We can end the terrorism that we participate in and we can find refuge from the terrorism that is being perpetrated upon us. We can give voice to “the silent agony” and deal it rather than hide from it. We can be “stunned” into leaving our “fierce greed” and rejoice in what we have-God’s love, God’s belief in us, the care and concern of the prophets and our humanity, our dignity. The prophet came to us and “God is raging in the prophet’s words” not to terrorize us, rather to call us back. The prophets’ continually remind us that God wants our return, God accepts us back with love, God is willing to “heal our backsliding”, God knows our imperfections well and accepts us with them. The issue is our willingness to acknowledge our imperfections, our letting go of our “fierce greed”, our helping “the plundered poor”, no longer using “the profound riches of the world” for our selfish desires. Unfortunately, the way of the prophets, the “crossing point of God and man” is a “road less travelled” and we need to use the guidance of the prophets, of Rabbi Heschel, of Thomas Merton, C.S. Lewis, Rev. King, Martin Buber, the Baal Shem Tov, the Bible itself to find it, of Rev. Barber, Rabbi Shmuly Yanklowitz, John Pavlovitz, Rev Cecil Murray, and all of their disciples to walk it and to be supported on this journey. The questions before us each and every day-which fork in the road are we going to take, what choices will we make at this “crossing point”?

Just as Jacob had a “dark night of the soul” as coined by St. John of the Cross, so too do each of us have at least one during our lifetime. It is a moment of surrender to the divine voice and a new awareness of purpose and passion. I had this for the first time in 1986 and have had many of these “nights” since then. Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom helps me navigate these blissful moments that allow me to live into the trembling awe of being human. I have failed to use the words of the prophets at times in these past 37+years and I have heeded them more often than not. I am unafraid to show my imperfections, I am willing to ‘be wrong’, I make my amends and I hear the prophets words pulsating within me. I have been accused of raging at times and some of these accusations are correct; what was unnoticed is that I did not rage for myself, rather I raged for people who were unable to hear the call of God, unwilling to face their own “dark night of the soul” and too terrified to let go of their acts of terrorism. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 107

“The prophet is a man who feels fiercely. God has thrust a burden on his soul, and he is bowed and stunned at man’s fierce greed. Frightful is the agony of man, no human voice can convey its full terror. Prophecy is the voice God has lent to the silent agony, a voice to the plundered poor, to the profound riches of the world. It is a form of living, a crossing point of God and man.” (Essential Writings pg. 62)

Rabbi Heschel published The Prophets in 1962 and the words above are as relevant today as they were 62 years ago, maybe even more relevant. “The voice of God” is calling out to all of us today regarding “the silent agony” we all experience. “The plundered poor” strain to hear “a voice” and the prophets’ words are ringing out throughout the world and we still fail to heed their words, hear “the voice” and ignore the call of God to us. It is infuriating, it is sad, it is criminal and it is devastating. Our inability to hear, heed, and act on “prophecy” our unwillingness to live into Rabbi Heschel’s teachings calling to us to change, to sharpen our hearing, to take different actions is a sign of our decay as a society.

We, human beings, seem to be incapable of realizing that each time we engage in plundering the poor, stealing from them their dignity, their work efforts, turning them into property rather than seeing their humanity, their worth, their divine image, we put ourselves deeper into “silent agony”, we demean our selves, tarnish our souls and imprison our humanity over and over again. Watching the movie, “Zone of Interest” about the Nazi commander of Aushwitz and his life outside the camp, the ‘normalcy’ his family experienced while smoke came out of the ovens, bullets were being fired, people were crying out just over the wall of their ‘home’ brings home to me the lunacy of hiding from and ignoring the words of the prophets, “the voice God has lent to the silent agony” of the human soul. It is infuriating and one can only imagine the experience of Rabbi Heschel, the prophets, Rev. King, Jesus, Moses, and all of the other prophetic voices throughout the millennia knowing and speaking the words of the prophets, teaching us all how to live these words, attempting to heal “the silent agony”, caring for “the plundered poor” and trying to minister to those who held/hold “the profound riches of the world”.

Throughout time immemorial there have been people, seemingly ‘good’ people, seemingly ‘religious’ people who have added to “the silent agony” rather than alleviated it through their bastardization of the prophetic tradition. While a Mike Johnson and his ilk may quote Isaiah to prove that Jesus was the messiah, they all fail to aid “the plundered poor”, in fact, they increase “the silent agony” of the “plundered poor” by continuing to ravage them, continuing to violently (physically and spiritually) abuse them, seek to ignore their humanity and turn them into chattel for their own use. Every time we think of, call, treat another human being as “vermin”, every time we engage in actions which will “purify the blood of our country”, separate ourselves from another group, see anyone who is different from us as “the other”, we are failing to heed “the voice God has lent to the silent agony, a voice to the plundered poor”. Yet, so many of the “spiritual leaders” of our time and throughout time have led the charge against God, against the words and meanings of prophecy. We are in desperate need of a renewal of studying, hearing, and acting on the words of the prophets, the call of God, and introspection into ourselves.

We have fallen into the same ways of being as Ancient Israel and Ancient Judea did. We are so enamored with “the profound riches of the world” and seek to “get our share” that we deny these riches to another(s) because of the color of their skin, the faith and/or non-faith they practice, because they ‘are not like us’. When Davos is hailed, when human rights is called for one people and ignored towards another, when terrorism is hailed as freedom fighting, when “from the river to the sea” calls for extermination of a group of people based on there religion, ethnicity, when Elon Musk is celebrated because he is rich and he spews hatred that people take as gospel truth, when women are denied the right to choose what happens to their bodies, when they are left to die rather than receive life-saving abortions, when the fetus is more important than the mother, when the borders are so porous as there is no control over who enters and so rigid as to deny any one of a ‘certain’ color entry, we are increasing “the silent agony” of another(s) and re-enforcing the agony of our own souls. We have the opportunity to “share the wealth”, to end our plundering of the poor, stop stealing the intellectual property of another(s), get a “new pair of glasses” so we can see the divinity in each and every person, live into the words of the prophets so we can heal our souls, help another human being to live better and repair the world.

In recovery, we hear “the silent agony” of another human being and we give voice to our own agony. We take action to help “the plundered poor” and we ned our need to ‘have it all’. We are students of spiritual growth and health, we are active participants in being of service, we pray: “My creator, I am now willing you should have all of me, good and bad which stands in the way of my usefulness to you and my fellows…”

I grew up in a family that helped “the plundered poor”, even in my alcoholism I found ways to help at times. In my recovery, I have railed against selfishness, pettiness, etc. I have given voice to “the silent agony” people in recovery experience and, to the best of my ability in the moment, I have lived into Rabbi Heschel’s teachings and the ways of the prophets. I continue to give voice to my “silent agony” and I use the richness of life to help another live well. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 106

“The prophet is a man who feels fiercely. God has thrust a burden on his soul, and he is bowed and stunned at man’s fierce greed. Frightful is the agony of man, no human voice can convey its full terror. Prophecy is the voice God has lent to the silent agony, a voice to the plundered poor, to the profound riches of the world. It is a form of living, a crossing point of God and man.” (Essential Writings pg. 62)

In the third sentence above, Rabbi Heschel is using three words, “frightful”, “agony” and “terror” to convey the state of fear he witness’ human beings live in. It is also what most people run away from through a myriad of ways. We humans have developed a tremendous fear of facing the agony of being human, the terror of death, of life, and our fear is palpable, yet we continue to mire ourselves in thoughts and actions that belie this truth. Delving into Rabbi Heschel’s teaching can help us face what is and find the respites we need and the ways to deal with our situation through spiritual values and actions, rather than hide from them through seeking money, power, prestige, mendacity and self-deception.

One of the ways some people deal with Rabbi Heschel’s statements of truth is to cause fear, agony and terror to another human being, another group of human beings so they can feel superior and protected. We see this in our politics where what is good for the country, what is right for our allies, have no particular sway when our elected officials are more interested in their ‘special interest’ groups and in their own re-election. Public service is seen as foolish when you can make so much more in the private sector and you will be ‘insulated’ against the “agony” and the “terror” of living as a human being. Rather than secure our borders, rather than help our allies, rather than seek a solution to the terrorism of Iran and Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis, rather than stand up to Putin and Erdogan, these political animals go along with the strongman Trump, cater to and celebrate Hamas’ terrorism, feed the anti-semitism, Islamaphobia, and racism that has been a part of this country since the beginning! These power grabs, these seemingly altruistic ends belie the fear and the terror that people of the lie experience.

The prophets railed against these behaviors not just because of the injustice of them, I realize from immersing myself in Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom. I believe they also were calling to the people to stop going along with the politics of the day, face their own fears and engage with the spiritual energy of the Universe, the gift of connection with God, the Ineffable One, a power greater than oneself. Donald Trump and the rest of the authoritarians are not the issue of our time, the issue is our unwillingness to deal with “frightful is the agony of man, no human voice can convey its full terror”. The prophets, the Bible, the New Testament, the Koran, the Eastern philosophies give us paths to dealing with our fears, using them to motivate us to see a path through our fears, yet like addicts and alcoholics, most people just want to escape from the agony and the terror of being human.

I believe the greatest terror and what causes most people the most agony is, at least, two-fold: uncertainty and death. Judaism gives us God as abstract, God is everywhere or nowhere, God is everything or nothing, there is nowhere where God doesn’t dwell. We are told to make ourselves holy so God can dwell among us, we are created in the image of God, etc. This leads many to question God’s existence, to blame God for the ills of the world. Rather than face our responsibility to make our corner of the world a little better than we found it, we seek to hide from the call to do this, we shirk our responsibilities in the name of faith, in the name of ‘conservative’, in the name of ‘progressive’ in the name of anything we can deceive ourselves into believing. It is time for us to face some of the truths of being human: we will all die, there is no certainty except that we will all die, what we do with our lives can be driven by the fear and terror at our backs to propel us to goodness or in our faces which serves to make hiding and deception the best choice. It is time for us, as a friend of mine once told me, to put the fear, the agony, the terror of our uncertainty and eventual death at our backs and use the energy to find solutions for what ails us as individuals, families, communities and the world. It is time for us to heed the words of the prophets and Rabbi Heschel to experience all human beings as divine reminders, not as punching bags or doormats.

Recovery is a pathway to facing our fears and reconnecting with our spiritual values and spiritual lives. We are constantly seeking to “grow along spiritual lines” and no longer hide in the bottle, the drug, the casino, the food, the power, the job, the sex, etc. We come face to face with our fears and, in doing so, we come face to face with the divine, we come face to face with our own goodness of being and engage in living the content of our character out loud and are constantly refining it each day. We know we will die, we live with the uncertainty of life with faith that whatever is happening, good or bad; “this too shall pass”.

I am aware of the “frightful” “agony” and “terror” that my voice cannot fully convey. I am also aware of using my voice to help hear my terror and acknowledge the agony and fear of people who have sought my assistance in dealing with their own uncertainty and fear of death. I loudly proclaim the terror and a myriad of solutions for dealing with this “frightful” “agony”. It is through spirit, through connection, through living in the both/and of faith and fear, surety of spirit and uncertainty of life, the joy of living well and the uncertainty of when I will die that gives me hope, motivation to continue and wonder at what is. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark