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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 137

“We live in an age when most of us have ceased to be shocked by the increasing breakdown in moral inhibitions. The decay of conscience fills the air with a pungent smell. Good and evil, which were once as distinguishable as day and night, have become a blurred mist. But that mist is man-made. God is not silent. He has been silenced.” (Essential Writings pg. 90)

Speaking the words of the second sentence above:”the decay of conscience fills the air with a pungent smell” engages two senses; hearing and smelling. By saying these words and hearing them we have an opportunity to smell “the air” and take in the “pungent smell” of our decay of conscience in order to end our self-deception of believing we are “stopping and smelling the roses”! We have fooled ourselves for so long, we have bought into the deceptions of another, of society that our morality has grown and, even though we are going against the teachings of the Bible, even though we are ignoring the words of the prophet, we are morally superior to any other generation! Remembering these words were published in 1951, some 73 years ago, should give us pause as to the mendacity we are living in, the self-deception we have fallen into and the loss of our sense of smell, sense of hearing, sense of seeing we have suffered.

The world stinks! We have polluted our air with more than chemicals, the O-Zone layer of conscience has holes drilled into it and we are ignoring this “pungent smell”. Mendacity has altered our senses, our conscience in such a way that we disbelieve the wisdom of Rabbi Heschel, we disbelieve the actions of Rev. Martin Luther King, we hear denials of the Holocaust, we watch as people emulate Nazi Germany and Hitler believing these charlatans want what is best for us. We are so lost we don’t even know what is up and what is down, we are so confused we have forgotten that the 2nd Temple was destroyed because of Sinat Hinam” - senseless hatred, we ignore the teachings of the Rabbis that the 1st Temple was destroyed because of the mistreatment of the widows, the orphans, the poor, the needy, we treat the stranger the same way as they did in Sodom and Gemorrah and believe we are right! We seek to imprison different groups of people in subtle and not-so-subtle ways and deny our acting like Pharaoh, who did not know Abraham Lincoln, do not know of the Civil War, etc.

We keep spraying perfume to cover up the “pungent smell” of the air around us and we fail to fix the wholes in our conscience and the conscience of the world. We wrap ourselves in our “identity politics”, in our so-called faith, in our adherence to tradition which belies what the Bible say, makes a mockery of Jesus’ words, seeks to undo the progress we have made in fulfilling the words “all men are created equal”. We lie, cheat, steal, commit plagiarism, bastardize truth, spout “alternative facts”, worship at the feet of dictators, ignore and dishonor the people who have created places of holiness, houses of help, and pound our chests with how we are the only ‘ones who know’ what is good and what is true, we are the keepers of The Word, all the while practicing idolatry, deception, mendacity.

We, the people, have to do a spring cleaning. We, the people, have to take stock of what is and separate the “wheat from the chaff”. We, the people, have to smash the perfume bottles that have covered up the “decay of conscience” the “pungent smell” that has been in our world for far too long. We, the people, are being called by Rabbi Heschel’s words, by the actions of the prophet, the ways of Christ to rid our Temples, our Churches, our Mosques, our governments of these ‘money-changers’, these liars, these destroyers. We don’t have to wait for a messiah, we have to take action right here and right now. Rabbi Heschel, Rev. King, the Berrigan Brothers, Rabbi Joachim Prinz, Bobby Kennedy, Rev. Barber, et al, teach us, as Rabbi Prinz says in his March on Washington Speech in 1963:

The most urgent, the most disgraceful, the most shameful, the most tragic problem is silence.” Rabbi Heschel refuses to stay silent, even today more than 50 years since his death, he calls out to We, the people, with a demand and a disturbance, with awakening thunder and unwavering hope and belief in the goodness of humanity. We have to stop patting ourselves on the back, we have to stop lulling ourselves into false beliefs and clean out our nostrils and smell the “decay of conscience”, we have to see the smog covering our decency, our humanity, our inner life so we can repair the damage of so many years of decay-we are not rotten to the core, yet.

I hear Rabbi Heschel call us to recover our humanity, recover our conscience, which is exactly the goal of the recovery movement. It is the reason God put T’Shuvah into the world-not because, as some believe, we are supposed to be perfect-rather because God knew/knows we lose our way, our senses become dull and we need a way back, we need a path of recovering our humanity and repairing the damages we have wrought. Along this path of repair, change and hope, we are commanded to forgive another person and to forgive ourselves. Immersing ourselves in being human does not mean being perfect, it means we strive to be “one grain of sand better” each day. It means we make a 2% shift from 49% wanting to and knowing how to repair the “decay of conscience (that) fills the air” to 51% taking the actions we know will make the necessary repairs and changes to the ways we live so the “air” is filled with the sweetness of being human, our conscience and the  conscience of the world is repaired and we can change our way of living to meet the hopes and dreams of God, of goodness, of decency, of freedom for all. We see this happening throughout the country and we need to enlarge the ways people are doing this instead of making everything corporate, worrying about “advice of counsel”, getting even through lies. 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 136

“We live in an age when most of us have ceased to be shocked by the increasing breakdown in moral inhibitions. The decay of conscience fills the air with a pungent smell. God and evil, which were once as distinguishable as day and night, have become a blurred mist. But that mist is man-made. God is not silent. He has been silenced.” (Essential Writings pg. 90)

Rabbi Heschel writes these words in the 1950’s and rather than heeding his call, rather than hearing his prophetic vision and words, we have sunk deeper and deeper into “the increasing breakdown in moral inhibitions”. Against the backdrop of the victory of World War II, during the “baby boomer” generation, the people who Tom Brokaw calls “the greatest generation” believed they were above the evil and the immorality of Nazi Germany. Yet, Rabbi Heschel is seeing behind the curtain of the facade people put up, he is seeing the racism, the anti-semitism, the self-deception of people and calling it out.

What will it take for us “to be shocked by the increasing breakdown in moral inhibitions”? We are so far down the rabbit hole that we hear conservatives blame music, the arts, the way women dress, ‘the libs’ for this “breakdown”, all the while remaining oblivious and/or willfully blind to their cruelty towards anyone not like them, engaging in denying the right to vote to ‘those people’, legislating against good health care, criminalizing poverty, unwelcoming the stranger, all in the name of ‘religion’. We are witnesses to this “breakdown” as well as participants! Yet, we seem incapable of responding to the wisdom of Rabbi Heschel above, we seem unwilling to take a stand for what is right and what is moral, blaming God, society, another group, anyone but ourselves.

The “sexual revolution” is blamed for “the increasing breakdown”, rock and roll music and Elvis Presley were blamed for it, rap music, the civil rights movement, the ending of quotas on Jews, and so many more advances in society are being blamed for this “breakdown in moral inhibitions” when the truth is that greed and power are at the core it. Authoritarianism, dictatorship, legislative power, the power of the purse are the rot that has allowed this “breakdown in moral inhibitions”. The idea: “the one with the gold rules” can be traced to antiquity and, instead of heeding the words of the Bible, instead of acting like Jesus, people throughout the millennia have abused these words and deeds for their own gain, for their own power, to enrich themselves and blamed everyone else for the ills of society. We are seeing this happen again, only on steroids by the “good christian, religious Jews, devout muslims’!

Blame the victim is the battle cry of our generation, it is the drug addicts fault that he/she dies of an overdose of Fentanyl, it is the poor person’s fault that he steals a loaf of bread, it is the person’s fault they get cancer from asbestos, it is …. We are incapable of being shocked by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and, some in our country believe Ukraine should just surrender and become a satellite of Russia again-forgoing their freedom, welcoming the people who have raped and pillaged their country, killed their citizens, kidnapped their children. There are those who believe Hamas cares about freedom for the Gazans, who think what they did on October 7 was just and right, they are freedom fighters who gave Israel what it deserved! There are demonstrations across the world and especially in our country that are hailed by ‘the progressives’ as good, making Jews unsafe in their dorm rooms, in their homes, their houses of worship is a good thing for these ‘progressives’ who ask for money for Jews to fund their drive for education, for health care, to fight against the oppression of women, people of color, etc. These ‘progressives’ have decided that they are the paragons of morality, they are the last defense before the total “breakdown of all moral inhibitions” all the while being morally corrupt, supporting these ‘freedom fighters of Hamas’ who kill their own people, who discriminate against LGBTQ+, who have stolen all the money given to build Gaza up so they can attack Israel, annihilate the Jews, and, of course, built lavish places for their leaders to live in both in Gaza and Qatar.

Our inability “to be shocked at the increasing breakdown of moral inhibitions” is bringing us dangerously close to totalitarianism, to believing ‘only I can save you’. Our inability has caused a large portion of our country to deny truth, to follow a madman who only wants power and who’s drive is deny freedom to the masses and share power with other authoritarians and dictators. Our ability to have true friendships where we speak truth to one another, to be able to rebuke one another when we are screwing up, when we are adding to the moral decay, our taking of our own inventory and making amends dwindles more each and every day. We get angry with the people who point out truth to us, we adopt a ‘who do you think you are’ attitude when called out on our bullshit and lies, we seek to crush anyone and everyone who tries to make us look in the mirror and see truth.

I am hearing Rabbi Heschel calling us to the task of ending our “breakdown of moral inhibitions”, I hear him calling us to “recover the questions” which is the first subchapter of his book God in Search of Man. I hear Rabbi Heschel demanding we live into recovering our humanity, our sobriety of living, recovering our connection with God, with the Ineffable One, and recovering a sense of community and purpose that the Bible teaches us to have. I hear him echoing the words of the Torah, “care for the poor, the needy, orphan, and the widow; welcome the stranger, you shall have one law for the citizen and the stranger alike, etc.” We can recover our humanity, our morality, our decency-the question before is are we willing? 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 135

“The major folly of this view seems to lie in its shifting the responsibility for man’s plight from man to God, in accusing the Invisible though the iniquity is ours. Rather than admit our own guilt, we seek, like Adam, to shift the blame upon someone else. For generations we have been investing life with ugliness and now we wonder why we do not succeed. God was thought of as a watchman hired to prevent us from using our loaded guns. Having failed us in this, He is now thought of as the ultimate scapegoat.” (Essential Writings pg. 90)

Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom above describes the inner turmoil that happens to every human being. “We have been investing life with ugliness and now we wonder why we do not succeed” roils through our inner lives and our minds. We, humans, continue to do the same thing over and over again and wonder why life is not better-we are following Einstein’s definition of insanity and calling it sane. What makes this all the worse, in my opinion, is that many of our clergy are leading the way into the ugliness we witness and experience!

Believing that there is only one way to serve God and that one way is my way gives many so-called ‘religious’ people a surefire path to ugliness as we have witnessed throughout the millennia-from antiquity through today. Yet, we continue to find new and more inventive ways to promote and invest in ugliness through anti-semitism, anti-muslim, anti-christian, anti-catholic, anti-eastern philosophy. These anti’s are fueled by both the secular and the ‘religious’ leaders seeking absolute power over their ‘flock’. They spread mendacity and deception, they call their blind followers to action through hatred of “the other”, they promote fear of anyone ‘not like us’ and promote all manners of destructive behavior, including participating in Jan.6th, denying aid to Ukraine, calling Hamas ‘freedom fighters’, extolling Putin and Russia, welcoming Orban, promoting fascism, etc. When they ‘lose’ they seek to blame “stolen election”, the Jews, the Blacks, the Latinos, every different “the other” they can and their followers believe them!

Politics and religion have combined to create the exact state of affairs that the founding fathers of America were concerned about and the Supreme Court, the Congress, some State Legislatures falsely claim they are “strict constitutionalists”! They imbue the air with ugliness, we have confused good and evil to such an extent that we are unaware of the ugliness even those of us who are not under the ether of these charlatans get confused. The shifting of blame has reached such a crescendo, that the deceivers, the ‘good christian folk’, the ‘religious Jews’, the ‘devout muslims’ have convinced their followers that God wants them to be ugly, God wants them to be evil, God wants them to poison the souls of people and the world! What an ingenious way to shift the blame for their ugliness onto God, onto anyone and everyone else but them. This lack of responsibility, this denial of truth is crushing the soul of freedom, murdering the spirit of being human.

We, the people, have to deal with our inner turmoil in healthier ways. We see people practicing Yoga as a way to clear their mind, they go to Zen, to Church, to the Mosque, to Synagogue to find ways to deal with their inner turmoil only to be sent to therapy. The inner turmoil most of us suffer from is not pathological, it is spiritual in nature. We are seeking to find a way to freedom from the inner pharaoh we all have, we are seeking an experience like crossing the Red Sea, we are seeking enlightenment like we received at Sinai. What we are getting from our institutions is, instead, dogma, blame, finger pointing, falseness and being told that God doesn’t love us because we are not rich, not pretty, not famous, etc. We are getting that welcoming the stranger doesn’t apply here, caring for the poor and the needy is not what we think it is, women are inferior beings who have to be managed by men, LGBTQ+ is anathema to God, we are not all created in the Image of God nor are we all created equal! “How does this make you feel” is a normative response from therapists-These lies, this shifting of blame to God, to another human, to another group, MAKES many of us ANGRY, CRAZY, and MAKES US WANT TO SHOUT FROM THE MOUNTAIN TOP- LIAR LIAR. Yet, doing this only makes me more vulnerable, doing this allows people to discount the truth of our words. We are in a conundrum, some of us are experiencing the experience of the prophets, speaking truth to power and being shunned because of it, watching the inner turmoil of each person and the whole community turn to rot from the inside out and cause the destruction of freedom, of their holy soul, of their service to God.

Blaming God for this is the easy way out. “This must be God’s will” is an easy answer to the ills and the Oys of life, just as it is an easy answer as to why the bad seems to flourish and the bad things happen to good people. Believing that everything that happens in God’s world is for our own good is a nice statement-it doesn’t take into account that we are living in a world created by us humans! We have the Bible, we have the history books, we have the experiences passed down by our ancestors of hatred, of pogroms, of concentration camps, of sneak attacks, of broken covenants, and we forget that God doesn’t want us to lie, cheat, steal, make false images of God nor ourselves, that God doesn’t want us to murder our souls, to steal from ourselves nor anyone else, doesn’t want us to bear false witness, to whore ourselves nor covet what another person has. God wants us to “want what we have” and then grow what we have, God wants us to fulfill our divine calling, to live with purpose and passion, with truth and love, to remember “You will be Holy” - not as a future deal, but as something to engage in right here, right now. Lets us all end the blame game, the lying game and the ugliness we have created. Lets clean up our acts and 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 134

“The major folly of this view seems to lie in its shifting the responsibility for man’s plight from man to God, in accusing the Invisible though the iniquity is ours. Rather than admit our own guilt, we seek, like Adam, to shift the blame upon someone else. For generations we have been investing life with ugliness and now we wonder why we do not succeed. God was thought of as a watchman hired to prevent us from using our loaded guns. Having failed us in this, He is now thought of as the ultimate scapegoat.” (Essential Writings pg. 90)

Rabbi Heschel’s teaching above calls all of us to account. We are witnesses and participants in our lack of responsibility, we are guilty of this crime of blame and denial in a myriad of ways. When something bad/wrong happens, we ask God “why is this happening” instead of asking ourselves the same question. When we denigrate the humanity of another, when we deny agency to women, to minorities, to the masses, we use God as our excuse. We constantly engage in “shift the blame upon someone else” and never admit our responsibility nor our guilt.

This way of being results in “making a false image of God” in direct disobedience of the 2nd Commandment and it is done by ‘the faithful’, by ‘spiritual leaders’ by the idolators and charlatans who are running our religious institutions and our governments! It also results in people moving farther and farther away from God’s will, denying the existence of God and having many believe that reliance on our ‘humanity’ is enough. It is laughable to witness the words of the people who believe we don’t need a higher power, that God, being invisible, is just a “crutch” for ‘the weak’, when we are witnesses to the incredible paths of “man’s inhumanity to man” throughout the millennia. To validate our bad behavior, to validate our false image of God, we use the name of God - how ironic, how sad, how dangerous.

We are living in the “major folly” more today than when Rabbi Heschel wrote these words. He wrote them in the shadow of the Shoah, in the shadow of Nazi Germany which, in the 1930’s was considered the height of learning, society, etc. Today, we have dictators like Putin, Orban, MBS, along with the terrorists like Hamas, Iran, Hezbollah, the White Supremacists, who use God to validate their bad behavior and claim their behaviors are holy, just, merciful, etc! They are incapable of taking responsibility for their bad actions towards the people of their country nor towards the rest of the world, they are incapable of admitting guilt because they have bought their own bullshit and believe they are doing the will of God by oppressing their own people, spreading disinformation and lies about other people, fomenting war and dissent in democracies and working together to ‘take over the world’. We here in America are not immune to this way of being. Just as in the 1930’s when Father Coughlin was extolling Nazi Germany and trying to foment a move towards Fascism in our country, just as in the 1950’s and 60’s clergy were opposed to Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights movement, just as today when there are elected officials and clergy seeking to spread their prejudice towards LGBTQ+, people of color, Jews, anyone not like them, we hear their call that ‘god tells them to do this’ and rather than call them out for their lies, their deceptions, their lack of responsibility, their guilt in the deaths of so many, we ignore, we shrug our shoulders, we stay silent. This is the crime many people commit-silence when God is blamed, used to promote authoritarianism, prejudice, when God is blamed for the cancer of the soul of humanity that is spreading and metastasizing throughout humankind.

We have the power to end this folly, we have the inner strength to stop our shifting of blame, we are capable of seeing our responsibility and changing our course of living. Being created in the Image of God, we have within us the spirit of God, the call of our Yetzer Tov to control and manage our Yetzer Hara-both of which are necessary parts of being human. We have the duty and our very existence as free people depend on our standing up against the dictators, the authoritarians, the charlatans, the idolators and standing up for the “Invisible” One. We, the people, have to take to the streets, like we did during the civil rights movement, and march against the oppression of irresponsibility, we have to protest the lies and the narrow view of God, of humans, of identity politics, of ‘christian nation’, of the supremacy of any race, creed, religion, over another. We have made ourselves into Pharaohs who “do not know Joseph” and do “not know God”. Instead we set ourselves up to be god, to claim only we know the will of god, all the while it is Avodah Zarah, idol worship that we are participating in.

This change has to begin within each individual. We have to “do the work” and relive the moments of crossing the Red Sea, of standing at Sinai and once again proclaim “we will do and then we will understand”. We have to recommit to the covenant with God to take the actions even though we do not understand the ‘reasoning’, we surrender to a truth that is greater than we can comprehend, a way of being that goes against some aspects of our nature and our intellect. We are exercising our spiritual knowledge and growing our inner power to override the call to veto God’s will in favor of our own. Three times a day we commit to “not follow our hearts and our eyes to whore after them”. This is the recovery movement everyone needs to join. None of us are immune to the “folly” Rabbi Heschel is describing-from the ‘greatest’ to the lowest, from the rich to the poor, from the leaders to the workers/followers. This is the reason it is so crucial for the hierarchy of institutions, especially religious ones, to live the principles upon which Moses, Jesus, Mohammed taught. 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 133

“At no time has the earth been so soaked with blood. Fellowmen have turned out to be evil spirits, monstrous and weird. Does not history look like a stage for the dance of might and evil-with man’s wits too feeble to separate the two and God either directing the play or indifferent to it?” (Essential Writings pg. 89)

These words, published in 1951, and speaking after the Second World War, are as prevalent today as they were then. Rabbi Heschel is calling us to look at ourselves, at our world, at our faith. Given the wars being fought externally-between nations, between nations and terrorists, we also have to look at the wars being fought internally-within a human being and within countries. Our earth is as soaked with blood today as it has ever been and, unfortunately, we hear the call of ‘religious’ people saying it is God’s will, it is God’s “wake-up call” to the faithful.

Rather than seek healing, rather than finding a just solution to the ills of humanity, we hear the people at the extremes screaming that their way is God’s will and their way is the only way. Armed with this belief, these ‘faithful’ people “have turned out to be evil spirits, monstrous and weird”. Yet, too many people sit idly by, either wringing their hands or watching to see who ‘wins’. What is it that drives human beings to be such evil spirits when we are created in the Image of God? Have we become so immune to the suffering of another that we justify the taking of life as God’s will? Have we become so deaf as to not hear the cries of the poor, the needy, the stranger, the widow, the orphan? Have we become so blind that we are unable to see how our actions and inactions, our directing and our indifference gives aid and comfort to the oppressor-both externally and the Pharaoh inside of us?

Rabbi Heschel’s words above disturb me greatly, they depict a way of being that has persisted through out history-indifference, blame, mendacity. We do not have “to be evil spirits”, we do not have dance the “dance of might and evil”, our “wits” are not “too feeble to separate the two”. It is that we have “become fat and kicked”, we “have become thick”, “covered with fatness” and we “have forsook God”, making true Moses’ prophecy in Deut. 32:15. Just as in the 1950’s when everyone thought we were so advanced and Rabbi Heschel reminded us then we were still living in an “earth..so stoked with blood”, so too today in 2024, we are living in an “earth…so soaked with blood” and have come to regard this as normal. How sad, how scary, how mendacious!

We do not have to continue in this vein, we have the power within us to rise above the evil in our hearts, we have the power to override the rumblings of our mind and heart with the truth in our souls. We have the power for our Yetzer Tov to tame and use our Yetzer Hara for service rather than power and greed, for caring rather than callousness and bloodshed. We have the choice each and every day: do we use feeble wits and go along with the lies of the ‘religious’ that this is God directing this “play” and our response is to kill another in the name of God? Do we continue to believe the lies of the progressives that God is indifferent and it is up to us to punish ‘those people’ and win the day?

This paragraph is the opening to a large discussion about “the Hiding God” and, as I originally quoted it, I did not realize the full impact it is having on me. We are witnesses to the lies of the Republican Party as it is constituted today with so many decent and true Republicans who stand for, or used to stand for, the principles that George W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, Abraham Lincoln espoused, being silent, being indifferent to the crassness, the attack on democracy that abounds today in their Party. Listening to the ‘religious right’ which is a false characterization of the people associated with this ‘wing of the party’, one could believe that the actions taken today by their leader and the people who support him are messianic actions, that they are sanctioned by God to make people less free, to make authoritarianism a right of some people so they can enslave and abuse most people! Listening to the progressive faction, which seeks progress for the underdog of the moment rather than progress towards God’s vision, the prophet’s vision of what the world can be, one could believe that there is no God, that God is silent and hiding and indifferent to what happens to humanity. Both of these idolatrous are lies, are deceptions for the sake of power-not for the sake of humankind.

We are in our current turmoil because we did not listen and heed Rabbi Heschel’s words in the 1950’s up till now. Israel’s government is a horror show, Hamas and their supporters in the Middle East, in Europe, in America are propagandists and terrorists who wrap themselves in the flag of victimhood, hence the embrace of the progressives who say nothing about Oct. 7th, who say nothing about the Hostages that go against the Geneva Convention-yet Hamas, the UN workers who helped and supported the terrorist attack are not held accountable by these progressives. We are in our current turmoil, our current “earth.. so soaked with blood” because we have allowed fundamentalists of all kinds to spout the evil and hatred that is in their hearts and too many people joined in the evil and far too many people remained indifferent.

We need to look inside of ourselves as individuals and as communities and recover our basic goodness of being. We have to recover the spirit that overwhelmed us at Sinai, at the Red Sea, we have to recover the words of the prophets that live in our hearts, our mouths, our souls. We have to, as Moses exhorts us to, CHOOSE LIFE! 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 132

“There are no proofs for the existence of the God of Abraham. There are only witnesses. The greatness of the prophet lies not only in the ideas he expressed, but also in the moments he experienced. The prophet is a witness, and his words a testimony to His power and judgement, to His justice and mercy.”(Essential Writings pg. 64)

Thinking about the last phrase above, I hear Rabbi Heschel calling out to us to end our belief that the “justice” and “mercy” we practice is the same as “His justice and mercy”. The prophet came as a gift from the Ineffable One to help us re-align our human practice of justice and mercy with “His justice and mercy.” We have failed to heed the demand of the prophet and the hope of God throughout the millennia. Yet, by hearing “his words a testimony” we can re-align our practice of justice and mercy with the practice of “His justice and mercy.”

To do this we have to, first, let go of our hubris and our deep-seated belief that we know what is just and what is merciful on our own thinking, with our own prejudices. This belief is based, in large part, on our spiritual bankruptcy, the lack of spiritual knowledge, spiritual maturity, living by our spiritual experiences. This belief, also in large part, is based on our reliance on our intellect, on our emotions, on our need to hold power over another. We have to surrender our reliance on our intellect alone, realize our intellect is only a part of us, be grateful for the gift of our intellect, and make it subservient to our “intuitive mind” as Einstein calls our “gut instinct’, that teachers and spiritual leaders like Dr. King, Thomas Merton, Rabbi Heschel, etc call our soul’s knowledge.

God’s “justice and mercy” is based on teaching, on helping people return to their rightful place, live a life of kindness, concern, love and truth, compassion and service. Throughout the Bible, God doesn’t want ‘bad’ things to happen to people, God calls out to us on numerous occasions to return, God gives us prophecy through Moses and the prophets as to what will happen if we “stay fat” and forget who we are, who we serve, and what our purpose is. While many people call ‘the god of the old testament’ an angry god, they are only practicing Avodah Zarah, idolatry. Labelling God, limiting God is the worst sin, I believe. It is the sin of believing one can be better than God, it is the sin of believing one can control God, it is the sin of believing that God will take care of them only, that their cause, their way is the only right way, and this makes these people authoritarians, dictators, theocrats, etc, to the ruination of “His justice and mercy.”

Throughout “his words a testimony”, the prophet calls for us to return, to let go of our false beliefs, selfish ideals, harmful treatment of the widow, the stranger, the orphan, the needy, the poor, one another. The prophet reminds us of our covenant with God, that God is God and we are not. The prophet is a witness to a power greater than ourselves which most people, including the Priesthood and the Royalty who are named servants by and of God, ignore, denigrate, believe they are not bound by the same rules because they “the chosen”. We are still spreading this deceit today; in our political world, in our business world, in our personal world-to the defeat of democracy, to the ending of freedom for all.

God’s mercy is so great, as the prophet testifies to, that all we, the people, have to do is return, admit our errors, sincerely be remorseful, ask for forgiveness, and make a plan not to commit the exact same error in the same manner again. Yet, we, the people, seem incapable of allowing God’s mercy to overwhelm us, we seem to disbelieve the testimony of the prophet, we denigrate what he is a witness to and we discard his call to us. Again, at our own peril, we complain about God’s strict justice instead of hearing the command to engage in “righteous justice”, to temper justice with mercy, to be quick to forgive. We, the people, seem to relish in our resentments, we continually find what is wrong with another, be judgmental and call it justice, be unwilling to believe ‘a leopard can change its spots’, and live a ‘holier than thou’ existence. What rubbish, what hubris, to believe we can go down the same path as our ancestors from Antiquity and not experience the same result.

There is a solution- “His justice and mercy” is found in the principle of T’Shuvah! Each day, we are taught by Rabbi Eliezer, we should do T’Shuvah- take an inventory of what we have done well,, where we have missed the mark, make a plan to not repeat our errors, make our sincere amends to those we have harmed, make a plan to enhance what we do well and be grateful for the spiritual growth we make from being aware of both our misses and our hits. Each year we are supposed to do this with God on Yom Kippur, yet most people only give lip service to this holiest of days. God’s “justice and mercy” is so great, as the prophet witnesses, that even knowing most confessions, most vows made on Yom Kippur are not done wholeheartedly, God accepts them because of the belief that, one day we will circumcise the foreskins of our hearts forever. God is slow to anger and quick to forgive, abundant in lovingkindness, in need of our return from our self-imposed exile.

Isn’t it time for us to return? The recovery movement is based in God’s loving mercy and justice, God’s forgiveness and desire for our return. My recovery began in prison because Rabbi Mel Silverman, z”l, taught us about T’Shuvah and gave us a path back to decency, to family, to community, to God. I find it sad that many people who ‘think they are normal’ and in charge of institutions that are supposed to be spiritual, don’t believe in this basic tenet of spirituality; the “Spirituality of Imperfection” as the book is called. 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 131

“There are no proofs for the existence of the God of Abraham. There are only witnesses. The greatness of the prophet lies not only in the ideas he expressed, but also in the moments he experienced. The prophet is a witness, and his words a testimony to His power and judgement, to His justice and mercy.”(Essential Writings pg. 64)

Humanity seems to ignore the teaching and wisdom of Rabbi Heschel above, and truth be told throughout his writings, in favor of following the false witnesses of the false gods power and judgment, the idols false promises of justice and mercy. When the Israelites and the other slaves who left Egypt crossed the Red Sea, they proclaimed: “This is my God, there is no God like Adonai”  yet throughout our history we seem to run to believe the isolators, the deceivers, the people who tell us what we think we want to hear rather than hear, take in, and believe the testimony of the the prophet.

It is so ridiculous to ignore the prophet’s “words a testimony to His power and judgement”. Yet we do at our own peril and at the cost to everyone around us, we continue to deny what “the prophet is a witness” to with our refusal to hear his testimony as truth and follow through on “his words”. Rather, we find a myriad of ways to make what some in Jewish learning call “a midrashic move”, taking the words of the prophet slightly or broadly out of context to make the point they want to make rather than see what the prophet saw, respond to the inequities of human behaviors and justice as the prophet does and also testify to “His power and His judgement”.

And we continue to fall short of their testimony, we continue to bastardize their words so much, people have come to believe that Donald Trump is sent by god, because they are idol worshipers and being led by clergy who are false witnesses. We are so far from hearing “a testimony to His power and His judgement” when we can believe that Nikki Haley is woman who cares about people while knowing she is being backed by the same people who have come up with the 2025 project, the same White Christian Nationalists that support Trump, there is no difference in how either one of these administrations would treat the widow, the stranger, the poor, the orphan, the needy, etc while accusing all illegal immigrants of bringing Fentynal across the border while winking at the wealthy donors who have exploited the crisis through their price gouging of medications, their making recovery a business rather than a mission, lying, cheating and denying responsibility for their crimes while paying massive fines.

These fine ‘good-Christian’ folk like Mike Johnson who denies the testimony of the very prophets that Jesus quotes and learned from, Lindsey Graham, Jim Jordan, Ted Cruz, et al all claim to ‘love the Bible’, ‘I listen to a higher authority’ speech’s while denying the power and judgement of God that the prophet testifies to; the power of forgiveness, the judgement to “heal their backsliding”, the power to impact the soul of an individual, to fill one’s heart with remorse and regret in order to return to His covenant, in order to forgive oneself for our errors rather than blame another for our mistakes. Rather than falsely proclaim what the Bible says, maybe these ‘leaders’, these charlatans, these power-hungry lackeys should actually read the Bible, immerse themselves in the “testimony” of the prophet, witness the world through the eyes of the prophet and approach the sacred task of leadership with a little more humility.

We are witnessing the same bastardization and false testimony by the right wing in Israel. Ben-G’Vir, Smoetrich, Netanyahu and their allies, the settlers, the Ultra Orthodox Rabbis and their students who, since the day of the Oslo Accords, have denigrated the vision and testimony of the prophet, who have called for the death of Yitzhak Rabin because he sought a path to peace, who continue to make these ‘midrashic moves’ so they can advance an agenda that does not adhere to a testimony where “his words a testimony to His power and His judgement”. Rather, as the prophet says: “On that day God will be One and God’s name One”, should be what we strive for-but authoritarians never want harmony, they never want democracy, they call for an end to messiness, they call for an end to freedom for the masses and only for themselves.

The prophet calls to us with his testimony to recover our ability to seek forgiveness, to accept God’s power to forgive, to recover our ability to see clearly enough to judge ourselves truthfully-not harshly nor softly. When we recover the words and power of the prophet, we in recovery experience life as he did; with wonder, awe, consternation, sadness, joy and truthfulness. We are recovering our humanity which is what God’s power is all about, I believe, tapping into the divine power and dignity we are created with so we can be more human each and every day-our recovery is from our inability to be human for a time and now we are repeating and living into the testimony of the prophet because we know “no human power could have saved us”.

I think about the power and judgement of God with wonder and awe. I am a recipient of this power to change and the judgement to see truth and be accepted back into the fold because of my T’Shuvah and be a witness to the T’Shuvah of tens of thousands people over the years. The prophet, while abrasive and single-minded, comes to testify that change is possible, forgiveness is attainable and we can recover our dignity, our humanity and our connection. I have experienced these ‘promises’ and continue to be a witness to the truth of his testimony. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 130

“There are no proofs for the existence of the God of Abraham. There are only witnesses. The greatness of the prophet lies not only in the ideas he expressed, but also in the moments he experienced. The prophet is a witness, and his words a testimony to His power and judgement, to His justice and mercy.”(Essential Writings pg. 64)

Imbuing Rabbi Heschel’s description of “the greatness of the prophet” should cause us to ponder both their words and their experiences. The prophet comes to us with a power and a ferocity borne from his experience of his encounter with God, fueled by the decency, kindness, caring he has for the human condition, and the vision of a path out of mendacity and duplicity. Yet, up to today, we continue to disbelieve them, discount their “ideas” and deny their experiences.

When a the chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court can say: “human life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without the wrath of a holy God” while allowing innocent people to be put to death, while continuing racist policies, while dehumanizing women and making them subservient to men, etc is in direct opposition to the “holy God” he speaks about if we are to believe the prophet, if we are to accept the truth of their ideas and their experiences. Yet, he sees no contradictions between his words and his actions. Herein lies the challenge for all of us.

We read the prophet’s words, at some of us do, we quote them and we use them to validate our ways of living while denying their ideas and their experiences with our actions. Much like the people of Ancient Israel and Ancient Judea, we proclaim our loyalty and fealty to “the God of Abraham” while our actions and our words deny the “greatness of the prophet”…the ideas he expressed” and “the moments he experienced”. We deny the truth of his encounter with God, his being empowered by God to help us return to living in God’s ways, in being truly human, and instead we seek to use them to puff ourselves up, to offer phony words of praise and understanding to bolster our power and make our own names great.

Be it in the political realm, the religious realm, the social realm, what is happening across the spectrum of each of these realms is “Hillul HaShem”, the desecration of God’s Name, not the sanctification of God’s Name as these deceivers proclaim. When a business is more concerned about their shareholders and their dividends, their profits and covering up their mistakes, when “the buyer beware” instead of full disclosure of the flaws,  etc are the ‘rules of business, we are ignoring both the ideas and the experiences of the prophet. When we continue to imprison the ideas of the prophets and decry their descendants, we do so at our own peril. When we use lies and deceptions to denigrate decency, freedom, the dignity and worth of certain individuals and groups so we can hold onto and/or gain/regain power, we are denying the “greatness of the prophet” and his ideas and experiences. When we hear spiritual leaders use their words as a call to action against their ideas and experiences, we are in danger of losing our ability to make “free will moral choices” as Rabbi Abraham Twerski teaches us is an essential ingredient of being human.

“The greatness of the prophet” is the central idea that I hear from him: the purpose of human life is to serve something greater than itself. We are called by the prophet to rise above our pettiness and pride, our envy and enmity, our prejudices and fears to live into the beauty, the glory, the joy, the freedom of serving the ideas, the will of God. The prophet’s experience is one of connection with God and human beings. The prophet’s ideas and experience are to have a “powerful dissent, a painful rebuke, a deep love and unwavering hope” as Rabbi Heschel says in his interview with Carl Stern. These experiences and ideas are gifted to us by the prophet so we can emulate them, we can live into them, we can engage with them and make our corner of the world a little better. In Leviticus we are told to “proclaim freedom throughout the land to all its inhabitants thereof”, this is inscribed on the Liberty Bell as well. Yet, rather than walk in the footsteps of the prophet, we walk instead in the footsteps of the deceivers, rather than walk the “freedom trail” we walk the slave route, rather than live the truth that “all people(sic) are created equal”, we still live into the lie of white superiority. Rather than stand up for the people, for truth, for freedom, for God, many are standing with Putin, authoritarianism, Christian Nationalism, and other ways of denigrating the human spirit, the image of God we all are created in and calling this religion, swearing they are the ‘true inheritors’ of the prophets so they can deceive their followers.

We are in desperate need of recovery from our societal mendacity. We are in desperate need all of us to join the recovery movement that promotes a spiritual literacy drawn from the ideas and experiences of the prophet. Bill Wilson’s experience of his spiritual awakening is similar to the experience of the prophet’s experience with God. Every spiritual awakening, be it ecstatic or the ‘educational variety’ mirrors the experience of the prophet and through this experience, we become imbued with his ideas and the path to carry them out. In recovery, we don’t need a hierarchy to tell us what to do, we need to listen to our higher consciousness, our soul, and use the ideas and experiences of the prophet to propel ourselves to greater heights, to our proper actions, to fulfilling the words on the Liberty Bell and we live together in freedom, with respect and rejoice in our differences and learn from one another-rather than continue to deny the humanity of another for our own gain. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 129

“There are no proofs for the existence of the God of Abraham. There are only witnesses. The greatness of the prophet lies not only in the ideas he expressed, but also in the moments he experienced. The prophet is a witness, and his words a testimony to His power and judgement, to His justice and mercy.”(Essential Writings pg. 64)

Rabbi Heschel’s teaching in the first two sentences above are a challenge to all of us. Since the time of the Greeks of antiquity humanity has adopted a belief of believing only what we can see and prove. Rather than accept the words of witnesses, we have come to demand proof “for the existence of the God of Abraham”. Rather than accept the wisdom of the Bible, rather than accept the Bible as testimony “for the existence of the God of Abraham”, we want to prove God’s existence. In our search for proof, we then twist ourselves into a pretzel to validate the testimony of the Bible, we seek to explain the Bible rather than accept the eternal truth and wisdom of it. Some of us seek to ignore it all together because we don’t believe the witnesses, we dismiss the testimony as hearsay and rely solely on scientific proofs.

We are so reliant on “proofs” that we come to question what we see with our own eyes at times, we challenge the people who “know in their bones” what is real and call out the deceivers. Yet, because the deceivers are so clever, they can offer false proofs of their claims, human beings are more willing to believe the proofs offered with the deceiver’s words than what they are actually seeing. We have come to disbelieve what we ourselves witness with our own eyes, what we experience with our souls to the ruination of our being human.

Whether it is in the political realm, the business realm, the social realm, the religious realm, we are more apt to believe the lies because they can be ‘proven’ by the liars than the truth that we know in our inner lives. We have become so spiritually bankrupt that we question what we know in our hearts because we our minds come to overrule what we know in our guts. This is the tragedy of human existence, in my opinion. When the founding fathers went along with the idea that Black men only counted as 3/5’s of a person even though they witnesses with their own eyes the human being in front of them, they denied their own truth. When they proclaimed to be “God-fearing” men and decided to go against the testimony of the Bible, that all human beings are created in the image of God, they decided to go against the truth of their own Declaration of Independence, our founding fathers gave into mendacity and made a political decision, going against their own eyes, uprooting the testimony of the Bible and their own experience.

When we allow corporations to be treated like individuals for the purpose of political contributions and not hold them responsible for their criminal acts, instead allowing them to pay fines without admitting guilt, we are denying the testimony of our experiences and our eyes. When we go along with the lunatics who proclaim that ‘the sky is falling’ when we are experiencing economic and societal conditions that honor the dignity of all people, we are denying what we see with our own eyes. When we denigrate people who have helped us, when we deny the truth of a situation because it doesn’t fit into our ‘plans’ or does not go along with what is expedient to and for us, we are denying what we witness.

When the tabloids, when the gossip, when the stories told deny what the whole picture of a situation, what the entirety of a person is, we are denying the truth of what is. Human beings have denied what they witness and the testimony of another(s) forever. We have a deep-seated tendency to want to have “rule” over one another rather than accept the proof of the Bible, the call of God to live together in harmony and peace. Rather than be grateful for what we have, rather than accept we owe a debt to God, we owe a debt to the myriad of people who help us on a daily basis, rather than surrender to the truth of “the existence of the God of Abraham” and all of the responsibilities this entails, we deny these responsibilities when they are inconvenient for us. We forget, denigrate those who have helped us because we don’t want to admit our debt, we don’t want to seem ‘weak’ for needing help, so we make those who helped us disappear.

Denial is not just a river in Egypt, as we say in recovery! Each day we remind ourselves not to whore after our heart and our eyes because we see something that is shinier and we want it. In recovery, we see the ‘proofs’ we used to continue to deny the truth of our existence. We commit to let go of these lies, to put on “a new pair of glasses” and see what is. We listen to the testimony of the another(s) who tell their stories of degradation and deception prior to their recovering the truth of their existence, prior to recovering their dignity, our humanity. We promote these stories to our children and their friends so they can hear the “proof for the existence of the God of Abraham” and how to live into God’s will, God’s ways and let go of the innate selfishness of human beings.

I give testimony of God’s existence daily-to myself, to another(s) in order to make life better for me and for them. Part of my testimony is what not to do, my actions teach me and another(s) how not to be because of false ego and false pride. Most of my testimony is how to take the next right action and no matter what ‘they’ say, I am proud of my growing my humanity. I know the truth of the existence of God because I am a recipient and witness to God’s grace and love. My T’Shuvah, my recovery, my learning and growing into being human are my testimony “for the existence of the God of Abraham”. 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 128

“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)

The last sentence above seems to elude most people. While we read the prophet, quote the prophet, misuse his words to validate whatever position one wants to take, we fail to allow “the Presence his words reveal” to penetrate our inner life, our souls. Because of our reliance on our intellect, on the dictates of societal norms, we water down the revelation of God in the message of the prophet, we shield our self from the full impact of “the Presence his words reveal” and we do so at our own peril.

The prophet is radical, abrasive, unyielding, relentless in his mission of holding a mirror up to us which reflects how far we have gone from “the Presence” that brought us out of Egypt, that gives us a way of living together without the senseless hatred, without the incessant need for power, for blame, for being irresponsible in the ways we act. His words reveal the call of the Ineffable One for us to return, the call of love, the call of compassion and concern, the call of forgiveness, the call to truth. He is not revealing anger at the people even though his words sound angry, rather he is revealing the anguish he experiences and that “the Presence” experiences at our running away from the call of the covenant, the deal we made at Sinai, the love of humanity that “the Presence” has.

The prophet reveals the mendacity of those who proclaim dogma uber alles, he reveals the deception of those who claim perfection and/or our need to be perfect, he reveals the lies of making our minds, our wealth, our possessions the new Golden Calf. The prophet reveals “the Presence” in voice and in direction while we, the people, bastardize his words to fit our selfish needs. We hear people proclaim that God should stay out of our politics when the prophet’s words are used to uncover the lies and deceptions of ‘the religious’ people, when their words are used to unmask the mendacity of ‘the humanists’. Just as in the 1960’s ‘god-fearing’ people thought that Rabbi Heschel, Rev. King, the Berrigan Brothers should not be involved in politics because they should stay in their houses of worship, today we see many of the ‘religious’ people proclaiming that putting ‘god’ into our politics takes us back to the ‘good old days’ of white power, of racism, of support of fascism, anti-semitism, anti-LGBTQ+, etc. “The Presence his words reveal” are ignored because these ‘religious’ and ‘humanistic’ conservatives and progressives are unwilling to look in the mirror and see what the words of the prophets reveal about themselves.

We have to immerse ourselves in the words of the prophet, we have to re-experience “the Presence his words reveal” every day, every week, every year because not doing so leads us to the same actions that destroyed the kingdoms of Israel and Judea. What the prophet’s words reveal is the inner rot of the societies, the decay of the inner life of the individuals both in charge and their followers. “The Presence” is calling to us to change, to return through the words of the prophet and without experiencing their words anew, we will continue to slide into the same rot and decay. Some would say we are there and have never left-which may be true and makes the need to experience, to see what his words reveal all the more important.

To do this, we have to take off our dark glasses, we have to unmask ourselves and our communities, we have to end our incessant “need to be right” and “on advice of counsel”, on our deceptive practice of “this is for the good of society” and “only I can solve this/only you understand me” bullshit. We have to ask ourselves the questions that the prophet’s words are the answer for; we have to recognize the myriad of ways our prayers and acts of charity are self-serving rather than serving “the Presence”, the slight of hand we continue to play when we proclaim loyalty and fealty to ‘scripture’ while really proclaiming loyalty and fealty to our selfishness, our hunger for power, to those who join with us or we join with to achieve power and control. The prophet reveals our falseness, our inauthentic natures, the masks we wear and the make-up we put on. The prophet’s words reveal the lipstick we are putting on a pig and calling it kosher and we continue to hide from their revelations because of our unwillingness to look in the mirrors the prophet holds up to us, we are afraid to face “the Presence he reveals in his words”.

“The Presence he reveals in his words” is the foundation of recovery, not all of us have the same ‘definition’ or ‘understanding’ of “the Presence” and we all share the values and the new norms the words of the prophet reveal. We are not perfect and we also argue about dogma and spirit, about the path of recovery not being the same for everyone and how everyone should just follow the steps and life will be good. Yet, we all agree on our need to connect to something greater than ourselves so we can have a psychic shift from our “stinking thinking” to a higher/God consciousness. We all know without living our spiritual values out loud, we will return to the despair, degradation, and insanity of our former ways of  life. 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 127

“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)

Society conveys thoughts and ideas through words and we use our minds to ‘conquer’ our problems. We think we ‘know’ what the Bible says, we think can figure every thing out with our rational thinking, in fact, what doesn’t make sense, we tend to discard. Rabbi Heschel is reminding us that not everything is conveyable in language, our minds cannot comprehend, apprehend, nor convey all that is happening within us and in the world. The prophet comes to us with language that is, in ways, inadequate to express the ideas, the power, the path of living well and the path of return we desperately need to adopt and adapt to.

If we only read the prophet’s words, we can ignore the meaning and the power of them just like the Ancient Israelites and people of Ancient Judea did, just as people throughout the millennia have. Rabbi Heschel’s teaching above: “the thought he has to convey is more than language can contain” demands  we allow the words of the prophet to penetrate our souls, our inner lives. Yet, we continue to brace ourselves from allowing them into the core of being.

While there are many who ‘believe’ in God, who quote the prophet’s words, who maintain they are ‘religious’ and follow the dogma, these same people pray the words of prayers, read the words of scripture without letting them penetrate their inner life, without allowing them to change their thinking. We have become so enamored with our rational minds, we have forgotten the teaching of the Kotzker Rebbe: “Where do you find God…Wherever/whenever you let God in.” While there are many who proclaim to be ‘following the letter of the law’ in jurisprudence and in their religious life, these same people seem oblivious to the “divine power” that “bursts in his words” when reading, quoting, using the prophet’s words to prover their way is the only way. We are in desperate need of rearranging our ways of understanding the prophet’s words, the words of our Scriptures, the call of the people around us, and the cry of our inner life.

Rabbi Heschel is, once again, calling us to account in the nicest of ways, he is rebuking us for studying the prophet’s words for our own misuse of them. I hear him demand that we repair the errors of our ancestors and hear the prophet’s words without trying to think of how to abuse them for our own good and, instead, hear them with the “divine power” and use them to repair the spiritual maladies we suffer from and the ones we face each and every day. Rabbi Heschel is giving  us a path for return and repair through experiencing the words of the prophet rather than thinking we can fully understand them with our mind, that we can take in all they convey through language.

We need to return to the moments after crossing the Red Sea, the moments at Sinai, the moments of spiritual awakening, the moments of clarity/serenity we experience and turn them into stepping stones to a “richer and more meaningful life”. We, the people, have to throw off the yoke of Napoleon Hill’s: “what the mind can conceive, man can achieve”, we have to stop living as Descartes says: “I think, therefore I am”. We have to return to the words of the prophet and hear them through our inner life, through our souls. We have to be overwhelmed with the “divine power” that “bursts In his words” and use this power to overcome our rational minds automatic rejection of the prophet’s words, our rational minds automatic habit of reshaping the prophet’s words to fit its own scheme of things, to hear the words of the prophet and twist them to validate the dogma they want to follow and/or they want to use to have power over another(s). Our world is in desperate need of heeding the words of the prophet as well as appreciating the myriad of seconds, moments of spiritual awakening we have that we dismiss. Even people who acknowledge a moment of spiritual awakening often fail to realize the necessity to grow those moments, to engage in a spiritual discipline that causes the seeds planted in these moments to flourish through our nurturing of them, our engagement with them, our surrender to them.

These moments of spiritual awakening are the beginning of recovery for most of us, even those who say their conversion was not of an ecstatic nature. Every moment of clarity is a moment of spiritual awakening, a moment where our minds take second place to what our inner life is telling us. In recovery, we continue to “grow along spiritual lines” because we know that nothing else will help us recover our authentic self and repair the damage we have done internally and externally with our “stinking thinking”.

I continue to return to and grow these moments of spiritual awakening each day. One of the ways I do this is through studying and writing my awakenings of Rabbi Heschel’s teaching. Another way I do this is to constantly forgive those who have harmed me and ask for forgiveness from those I have harmed. Letting go of resentments and seeing the “divine power” in what transpires in my life gives me more freedom and joy each day. I continue to repair my errors, I continue to return to the words of the prophet so I can experience each day anew, each person I know anew, and have my rational mind be subservient to my “intuitive mind”, as Einstein teaches. 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 126

“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)

“He does not prove or argue” is such a beautiful description of the prophet by Rabbi Heschel and it goes against most of Western dialogue. Experiencing this truth calls us to appreciate the prophet as one of the great orators in history. There is no need for him to offer proof of his words, there is no reason to argue with the people as he comes to give us direction, he is sent to help us return to a primordial state of being connected to something greater than ourselves, to come home to satisfy our deepest need; connection to God, connection to our authentic self. Yet, even up to today, we argue with the words of the prophet, we continue to seek proof that he existed, that there is God, that we can actually live and thrive when following his words, his call, his demand. Be it the Rabbis, the Priests, the Ministers, the Imams, the secularists, all use the prophet’s words to validate some bastardization of the Bible that they believe serves them, rather than live into the prophet’s warnings, the prophet’s exhortations to us for our return. The acceptance of truth seems to be the hardest stats of humanity today and forever in our history, the changing of our ways, the repentance needed so we can humble ourselves before the words of the prophet and before God seem to constantly elude us because we want to prove ourselves right, argue against the eternal truth of the prophet’s words and call for our return.

We are engaged in a great battle in our society, we are repeating the days of Ancient Israel and Ancient Judea once again. We have despots who rule countries, want-to-be authoritarians seeking to take control of democracies, wealthy people who want to gain more and more power, and a large portion of the people in these democracies who, through their own fear of being irrelevant, go against their own interests to support these deceivers and liars. Listen to the news, read a paper, magazine, hear the dialogue between people and arguing for or against the words of the prophet, the call of God, is rampant. Yet, even many of those who argue for the words of the prophet do so for their own selfish desire for power, for control rather than for the sake of Heaven and humanity. It is so sad and distressing to witness the uplifting of Fox News, the shouts of the ‘progressives’, the splintering of people into “identity politics”, the twisting of the words of the prophet and the Bible itself by ‘spiritual leaders’ who have their own agenda-keep the masses coming to church, temple, the mosque; keep them paying for the upkeep of the clergy; and hold onto to control of and shape the narrative they are being paid for,  in either money or fame, keeping the people in line. Rather than heeding the words of the prophet, rather than staying ‘in line with the divine’ the leaders of the battle against the simplicity and truth of the prophet want us to follow the leader to our ruin.

Not needing to argue or prove is anathema to most of us. It is hard to live in acceptance of the truth of the words of the prophet. We want to find the loopholes, we want to bend their words to fit our needs rather than bend our selves to fit the needs of God as they speak the divine message to us. The difficulty, I believe, comes from our fear of saying we are wrong, we have made mistakes, we must change our ways. These admissions, we falsely believe, make us weak and vulnerable so we argue with the prophet, we argue with their descendants like Rabbi Heschel, Dr. King, et al, or we ignore them completely. “Oops, I made a mistake” are the 5 hardest words to put in one sentence for most of us, even when we say them, we come up with excuses, arguments, reasons why it wasn’t completely our fault. Rather than live into the words of the prophet, rather than not argue or need proof of the truth and validity of his words, we find ways to soothe ourselves by calling him “abrasive, difficult, out of touch with reality, unyielding, not accepting our half-truths, etc”. We run away from the words of the prophet, possibly, precisely because he offers no proof nor countenances any arguments-something we engage in constantly so we can feel better than, we can find the ‘reason’ we are right. It just seems to hard to repent, return, and have new responses to the words of the prophet, to the call of God.

The recovery movement is based in the acceptance of truth, a new/different way of translating the words of the prophet into action. We “come to believe that power greater than ourselves can return us to sanity” and we “turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understand God”. Having first admitted our powerlessness over people, places and things, we begin to become responsible to God for both our deeds and our misdeeds. Because of being in recovery, many of us experience the words of the prophets more personally, with greater hope that return is possible, that we ‘leopards’ can and will change our spots, we will be forgiven, and we can live differently. Everything the prophet demands of us, we in the recovery movement adhere to. While many in recovery protest against ‘religion’, upon closer examination, we all become willing to a greater or lessor degree to follow the spiritual path of the prophet, the values and principles of the Bible. Only through acceptance of the truth of the prophet, not needing to argue or seek proof that a path of recovery improves our life immeasurably, can we find a peace and a way of living that is compatible with being a partner of God. 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 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