Ways of Living Well from Rabbi Heschel - A Daily Path of Spiritual Growth

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 272

“Is it not possible that there are idols in our homes, in our minds, in our temples? Religion finds itself in a continuous battle with idolatry. It is bound to reject as vulgar and destructive certain values that our own people cherish and worship!” (Insecurity of Freedom pg. 54)

How much have we learned since these words were spoken in 1962? I am afraid not too much! The “idols in our homes, in our minds, in our temples” seem to have multiplied with the progress of technology, not diminished, they seem to grow each day on Social Media, on Cable TV, on the various ‘news’ channels that are nothing more than money-making machines for the companies who own them and their shareholders.

In our homes, there is a trend to ‘worship’ the father or mother; obeying their every word and ‘command’. Seeing them as ‘god’s’ representatives and ‘knowing what is best for their child’ without ever peering into their soul. This trend is a more fundamentalist trend, be it religious or philosophical, urban or rural. While the people who are adhering to this idolatry claim, at times, to be ‘god-fearing’ people, they are actually just carrying on a tradition of misogyny, idolatry, through the very “vulgar and destructive” “values” that religion “is bound to reject”. The saddest part of their experience is they are totally oblivious to their hypocrisy and their idolatry, they are willing to destroy democracy, cause and participate in a civil war to hold on to their idols, follow the dictates of their authoritarian leadership in order to hold on to the lies they tell themselves and the idols they hold dear. It is a reminder of Rachel, Jacob’s wife, holding on to the idols of her father that she stole when confronted. Many of the sages try and clean this idolatry up by saying ‘she was trying to stop her father from worshiping them’ when in reality, she had not let go of them for herself, and, rather than be truthful, she lied to everyone including her husband who proclaimed death to anyone who stole them and, by extension, worshiped them. Jacob’s proclamation was the death sentence for the wife he ‘loved’ so much without him knowing it. This is an example of the “Values that our own people cherish and worship” that religion “is bound to reject as vulgar and destructive.”

We have become more oblivious to what these idols in our minds have created through these past 60+ years. We have raised and are raising generations of people who learn that “those people” anyone not like ‘us’, are less than human. When the Governor of Florida proclaims that Black people were able to learn trades while they were slaves and it was good for them, we are witnessing the idolatry of the mind. When the Republican Party can nominate 3 times a serial philanderer, a convicted felon, someone found liable for sexual assault and rape, someone found guilt for cheating the government and the banks out of billions of tax and interest dollars, we are witnessing idolatry. When so many people in America can buy into the undemocratic platform of Project 2025, when the lies about Democrats from 8 years ago are being recycled and hailed as true, we witness the idolatry of the mind bringing to us “vulgar and destructive” “values” that we need religion to “reject”, yet some practitioners of ‘religion’ proclaim

these lies, these idols as holy, as Jesus’ words and deeds. This is how far down the rabbit hole we have fallen. We are truly at the “Mad Hatters” party!

I am sad to report that idols abound in our temples, churches, mosques as well. When Rabbis in Israel and in America can celebrate the destruction of the people of Gaza and proclaim that Oct. 7th was ‘approved by god’ because we hadn’t destroyed the Palestinian people, we are hearing the words of idolators. When these ‘religious’ people are willing to send only some Israelis to fight this war because their sons and daughters have to study Torah so these same lies can be perpetuated and the new forms of idolatry can be raised and flourish, we are witnesses to “idols in our temples”. When Jews are ostracized because of their faith and because we support Israel while disagreeing with the government, when there are bomb threats and protests against Jews and Jewish students on campus’, we are witnessing idolatry in the mosques. When ‘god-fearing, white christians’ march and proclaim: “Jews will not replace us” and they are called “good people” we are witnessing idolatry in our churches.

Society is so infused with idols, be it money, fame, power, hatred, the idolatry of optics, of kissing ass to raise money, of betraying the values that religion and decency stand on, betraying the very ideals democracy is founded on from the Bible, it seems like an impossible task to rid ourselves of them. Yet, this is when/where monotheistic religion entered the world before and where/when it can/must enter today! We have to return to Mt. Sinai, we have to hear the sound of the Shofar and the call of Shema-Hear, Listen, Understand. We have to return to the values that were not practiced in Egypt and in Canaan, we have to “Proclaim Freedom throughout the land and to all its inhabitants therein”, we have to remember and honor that all people are created in the image of God, we have to create a space and a way of being that honors the stories found in the Bible building on the moments of kindness and grace, truth and love, repentance and return to make them more common than rare. We have to hold our secular as well as religious leaders accountable for helping us break the hold the “idols in our homes, in our minds, in our temples” have upon us as individuals and as a society. We have the path, we have the stories of how “certain values that are destructive and vulgar that our people cherish” lead us to exile, to homelessness, to wandering. Let’s put down the proper roots that lead to building a good foundation for freedom, love, kindness, co-existence.

Through writing and studying, through my recovery, I have grown into a way of being that recognizes the idols of my mind so much quicker. I apologize to those who were harmed by my lack of awareness and deafness to these idols. I hear them come into my mind and, I let them pass through me instead of holding on to them as I used to. I do this by acknowledging them and thanking them for their opinion and letting them know they can go back in their closet. I know they will never completely leave me and I know I can “reject” them. Harriet and I rid our home daily of the idols that want to live with us and we have rejected Jewish communities whom enjoy displaying their idols as representations of God! Living without idols makes life a lot harder, it makes it impossible to buy into the ‘way things are’, it makes staying silent almost impossible and it makes life a lot lonelier. It also makes life richer and more meaningful, keeps us in closer contact with God and one another as well other non-idolators. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Learning from Rabbi Heschel's Teachings - A Daily Path for Spiritual Growth

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 271

“”Love thy neighbor as thyself” is, according to Rabbi Akiba, the essence or epitome of the Torah. However, according to Rabbi Ishmael, the epitome and the design of the Torah is the design to keep our people away from idolatry. Rabbi Akiba’s view is known to all of us; Rabbi Ishmael’s view is forgotten.” (Insecurity of Freedom pg. 543)

Are we so arrogant as to not heed Rabbi Ishmael’s view? I think we have been for a long time, as his “view is forgotten”! We continue to promote the positive aspect of the “Love thy neighbor” which is critically important and holy, while we forget to see how even this commandment has, within it, the possibility of being evil. As I quoted yesterday from the Ramban, in his commentary on the verse “You shall be holy because, I, God, am holy” which comes prior to “Love thy neighbor…” that it is possible to be evil within the boundaries of Torah. “Love thy neighbor” can result in making someone into a celebrity and ‘worshiping’ them, it can lead one to follow them into a descent into hell, to forget all that one knows to be true and buy into the lies of authoritarianism, buy into the self-deception that going along to get along will allow one to ‘fit in’, etc.

There is nothing wrong with “love thy neighbor”, in fact it is at the end of following the holiness code in Lev.19, that we reach this way of being. Yet, as I think about the teaching above, I realize more and more that to reach this state of being, we first have to look at the myriad of ways we practice idolatry and call it love, the myriad of things we  use to push away what we ‘know in our soul’ to be true and buy into the falsehoods, deceptions, cliches, conventional wisdom of societal norms. It is too hard for most of us to truly look at ourselves and, therefore, we hide from the different idolatrous practices that we have acquired over the millennia. We do not want to know Rabbi Ishmael’s view precisely because we would have to let go of and give up on habits and ways that have become established norms. We would no longer be able to lie with impunity, there would be no way for us to tolerate hatred, racism, slavery of any kind. We would no longer have a two-tiered system of justice, we could not make women into second-class citizens anymore. There would be no using the Bible as a weapon, there would be not be any path to deny the dignity and worth of another human being. We would find solutions to extreme poverty, malnutrition, end the incessant wars for the sake of power and learn to live together in some type of coexistence.

We would no longer allow the Church to hate on Jews and Muslims, we would no longer go along with the Rabbis who preach hatred towards Arabs and “Goyim”, we would no longer permit the Imams to preach suicide bombings and “death to the infidel”. It would be impossible for us to misrepresent God in the myriad of ways we do now. Governments would not be able to oppress those who disagree with them, everyone would have the promises from Exodus 6:6-8 we all will be taken out of from under the harsh labors of the taskmasters who rule us, we will be set free from the inner taskmaster that lies to us in such believable ways, we will be redeemed and know we are worthy of being alive and we will be pointed to our rightful place and know we belong. We will be pursuers of righteousness and justice, kindness and love, truth and goodness and we will reject the evil thoughts that arise within us and those of the people around us-we will not stop them from coming we will be able to not act on them, finally.

Idolatry takes so many forms, it is so insidious, and yet, we ignore it so often. We have people in our government who claim to be ‘god-fearing’ people who go against the very principles and examples of Jesus, of Moses. We have people in government who are so tied to their ideology they are unable to discern the nuances of situations and just spout rhetoric that hurts good people. The Rabbis who are preaching ‘death to the Palestinians” are idolators, they are using the Bible to validate their evil- they are the epitome of the Ramban’s teaching- they use the Bible to do evil rather than heed Rabbi Ishmael’s warning about idolatry. The Christian Clergy who are preaching the ‘prosperity gospel’ are calling millions of their followers to worship the “Golden Calf” they have made of money, themselves, the rich, the powerful, etc. The Muslim Clergy who are promoting hatred and “Death to America, Death to Israel”, who cheered at 9/11 and Oct. 7th, are idolators as well leading people away from Allah to themselves. All of these ‘clergy’, ‘people of God’ are nothing more than idol worshipers and the people who follow them are also guilty of idolatry. We are given two brains, one in our head and the other in our gut-the one in the brain can be convinced to go along with idolatry. The one in our gut, ie our intuition, our soul, can’t and is what we have to engage along with the brain in our heads in order to have understanding, wisdom and knowledge in every situation. Yet, we continue to ignore what our ‘second brain’ tells us in order to satisfy what we can rationalize and what we fervently believe is in our best interest. It is only when we are back in Egypt do we realize the folly of our thinking and then cry out for freedom.

In looking both backward and forward, I realize the ways I set up idols for myself. I believed my own press, I acted, at times, with impunity and a lack of grace. I sought out people to worship and my worship was always rewarded with rejection at some point, because once my usefulness was over, these ‘gods’ didn’t need me anymore. Hence the power of T’Shuvah and recovery came into my life and I have been plugged into this power ever since Dec. of 1986 and the current surges and recedes and it never stops. I have stayed connected to God and continue to examine the ways I have engaged in “Avodah Zarah” strange worship/idolatry over these past 35+ years. I am aware of how this practice has led me to deep sorrow and deeper pain, how bereft I felt whenever I moved from the space where God dwells within me into the space of letting someone/something else control me-especially when it was my out of proper measure ego that took over. I have learned, through the different trials and tribulations, that I can’t go down the path of idolatry at all, as soon as I step in that direction, I fall into the abyss and it never works out. I also know that my way of being is not everyone’s “cup of tea”, hence I am not always welcomed into ‘polite society’, which truth be told, I don’t want to be in anyway. What it takes for me to “fit in” is another form of idolatry for me and I can’t practice idolatry in any form. My daily writing has taught me this and I am constantly seeing my errors and my foibles in Rabbi Heschel’s teachings. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Leaning into the Teachings of Rabbi Heschel - A Daily Path of Spiritual Growing

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 270

“Another malady is the intellectual irrelevance of tradition to the person, the collapse of communication between personal problems of the individual and the message of our heritage.” (Insecurity of Freedom pg. 53)

I am continuing to write on this essay of Rabbi Heschel because of the relevance it has to our situation today and as we approach Tisha B’Av, the day we commemorate the myriad of destructions that have befallen the Jewish people because of our errors, our not living into the ways of the Bible rather than living according to the Rabbis, I believe our lack of spiritual education and the sad state of Jewish education as well as the worship of “Idols in the Temples”, which is the title of this essay, has to come to a halt for all of us to flourish and thrive. This Tisha B’Av, this Elul, this High HolyDay Season let us all take up the mantra of “We are not going back”!

Rabbi Heschel is describing the situation we are still facing, in the first sentence above. We are still so engaged in either saying “these are the words of God written by the finger of God” or “ this is a nice myth and who cares” that we continue to miss the intellectual, the spiritual relevance of the Bible, of our tradition to an individual human being. When we continue to say it is about the “People Israel”, or “the Christian Nation” or “the Muslim Nation” etc we fail to recognize the individual, we are melding the personal with the global, the individual is no longer important, what is important is “the group”, “the heritage the way I want it to be”, in other words, when there is intellectual irrelevance the opening for authoritarianism is greater. When Judaism is no longer engaged in what is good for the individual human being, when we are not recognizing the infinite worth and honoring the dignity of another person created in the Image of the Divine, it becomes fertile ground for the ‘I can solve it all’ strongman leader and we all know where that leads to-destruction and devastation, the fall of the Temple twice, the loss of our homeland for almost 1900 years, the growth of an industry called anti-semitism or ‘blame the Jews’.

The Bible is a road map for how to live well and the myriad of ways we fail to do this. The Bible is replete with the errors of human beings, the jealousy of Cain that is still alive and well today, like the “Age of Grievance” by Frank Bruni discusses. We have seen since the beginning of humanity the “personal problems of the the individual” and how the Bible continues to deal with these issues. It begins with living in the Garden of Eden and that doesn’t work, then the first offering causes jealousy between siblings and the death of one brother and then the realization of the crime by Cain and his crying out for mercy. We see the “personal problems of the individual” continue to impair the connection to the soul of the individual as well as the connection to something greater than ourselves landing us in Egypt-the narrowest of places where we allow ourselves to become enslaved and subjected to the harsh labors of taskmasters. As I am writing this, I realize how our religious education is not helping us leave Egypt, it is sinking us more and more into the narrow places of either total obedience to what the ‘right-wing rabbis’ say or a reaction formation to what they say and throwing the baby out with the bath water.

We have the opportunity to use our heritage, the Bible to solve the “personal problems of the individual” by applying the lessons learned of how we sink into slavery, into egotistical actions, how we fail to connect to our souls, a higher power. We also have the paths to wholeness that the Bible gives us, “love your neighbor as yourself”, care for the stranger, the poor, the needy in your midst”, “do T’Shuvah every day”, be like King David who could admit his errors and repent and hear the truth from another person when he wanted to do something wrong, etc. We are given an inside look at how both Cain and Jacob wanted to kill the good within them, Cain did when he killed Hevel, mist, that surrounded him and Jacob ran away from the parts of him that he despised, goodness, simple truth, loyalty that Esau represents. We have so many examples of jealousy and hatred, we have so many examples like Jonathan and David of love and commitment, we have the warnings of Nachmonidies: “don’t be a scoundrel within the bounds of the Torah”. Yet, we continue to “dumb it down” in our religious schools and in our Synagogues, we want to give the people what they want rather than give them what they need. The Rabbis who are leading the revolution forward and helping the young and old grow their spiritual lives, deal with the “person problems of the individual”, are both hailed and fired! It is hard for the wealthy to admit they need to heal themselves because they have let their success cover their “personal problems” and when they are pointed out to them, they get so angry that they are seen for being less than perfect, they have to get rid of the one who peeks them.

We are in desperate need of recovering the lessons of the Bible that help the individual heal from within. We see what the different “personal problems of the individual” have wrought in our political, business, and personal lives. We are witnessing what happens when these problems are hidden from sight, not dealt with and then leak out into daily living. We see these leaks in our social media, we see them in people like Elon Musk and the MAGA crowd, we see them in AOC and her “squad”, we see them in the right and left wings of thinking, of politics, of religion. We have lost our way to the middle as Maimonidies suggests, we are suffering from a myriad of spiritual maladies and not seeking spiritual physicians. It is time for us to admit to the “personal problems of the individual” and use our heritage to heal them, it is time for Rabbis to re-assert themselves as spiritual physicians and stop sending people to therapists for their spiritual issues.

My rabbinate is one of spiritual healing for myself and for another. I have spent the last 35+ years preaching spiritual healing to people in the pews and to the Rabbis who lead them. I am grateful for the many people who learn with me, who teach me, who help me grow along spiritual lines. Recovering the lessons of our heritage in order to deal with the “personal problems of the individual” has been the message of my life’s work and I have been called a “niche Rabbi” because of this. Till today, I bristled at hearing this and writing this makes me cry that more colleagues are not joining me in my “niche”. I am grateful to my teachers who keep helping me see how to use our heritage to grow my spiritual health! God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Living into Rabbi Heschel's Teachings - A Daily Path for Spiritual Growth

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 269

“What young people need is not religious tranquilizers, religion as a diversion, religion as entertainment, but spiritual audacity, intellectual guts, power of defiance.” (Insecurity of Freedom pg. 53)

While Rabbi Heschel was very focused on the young, the same is true for all of us. We, the young he was talking about in 1962, have not changed the very things that turned us off on religion so long ago! We have continued in the tradition of “religious tranquilizers”, we go to Synagogue because we ‘have’ to - there are many “three-day a year Jews” in the world, showing up ‘late’ on Rosh Hashanah, and Yom Kippur; sitting through absolutely boring services, standing and sitting on cue all because of some superstition we might get struck dead if we don’t, or some guilt that was put upon us by our parents, grandparents, etc. We are torturing our children and grandchildren in the same ways we were tortured and don’t even realize it or just say “we had to do it also”

We, the young he was speaking about are now the adults he was admonishing. We, the young he was talking about are now the Rabbis he was yelling at (figuratively yelling). Yet, we continue in the tradition of the people Rabbi Heschel was railing against, the tradition of “religious tranquilizers”. While Rabbis are trying to get more congregants, keep their jobs, by making their services hip and cool, whitewash the difficult parts of the Bible, ‘stand with Israel’, etc, doing whatever it takes to make the Board and the members happy, my colleagues have forgotten what their calling is! We seem to forget that our careers are not jobs, they are not 9-5 and get a paycheck, they are not to have “strict boundaries”, we have been called to serve-full stop! Our service is as physicians of the soul, our service is to elucidate and argue with people over how to clear away the superfluous from the texts and see the foundational principles of what it means to be human. Our service is to be husbands and wives, fathers and mothers, knowing that we will always be split and letting our loved ones know we love them and we are here for them AND we have to be here for the congregation as well. It is a tremendous balancing act and living in proper measure in the moment we are in is what we need to be trained in as well as learning the texts in our Rabbinical Schools.

Rabbis today are in desperate need of the “power of defiance”. This power is being used to make sure that we have ‘work/life balance’ and we take ‘self-care’ time- both of which have importance and, I believe not the power Rabbi Heschel is speaking of. The power he is speaking of is the “power of defiance” towards the Boards of Directors who want to dictate how we speak, what we say, who hold our contracts and renewals over our heads. The power to defy the ‘conventional wisdom’ in favor of wonder and awe, the power to defy the ‘norms of the congregation’ in favor of serving the souls of the congregants. The power to defy the lies and subterfuge of ‘optics’, and the self-deception of the congregation. The power to defy the lies people tell themselves and the lies we tell ourselves. We are the  spiritual leaders and we have to defy the limitations that lay leaders put on the spiritual growth of the individual and on us as Rabbis.

We have to have the “intellectual guts” to argue with the text, argue with the Rabbis, argue with the tradition. We have to see the texts as literature as well as Eternal Truth and Wisdom. We have to use our intellect to discern the ways the sages lied to us for their own power and their belief that the lies were the only way to perpetuate Judaism. We have to have the “intellectual guts” to acknowledge the flaws of our Biblical heroes and be in awe of the myriad of times and ways they went beyond their flaws and self-interests to help another, to build a community and to shape Judaism and Israel. We have to have the “intellectual guts” extol King David for his ability to change when someone tells him he is doing the wrong thing, to be responsible for his deeds and his misdeeds! We have to stop saying ‘it is written in the Torah’ and ‘the Rabbis said’ as excuses for ridiculous ‘mitzvot’. Hillel the Elder said in Shabbat 31a, “what is hateful to you do not do to your neighbor, the rest is commentary, now go study”. We have to have the guts to say this to our congregants and lead them in how to live this way!

“Spiritual Audacity”, is something that Rabbi Heschel had in abundance! The word’s origin from the Latin is “bold” and in English we often use it as a negative, as in describing “rude or disrespectful behaviors”. How sad that a word as important as “audacity” has been bastardized for the sake of control and power. We, the Rabbis, need to be “bold” in our sermons,, we need to be “bold” in our approach to our congregants, we have to follow the lead of Moses, our teacher, in speaking truth to the people, those in power and those not in power. We have to have the “spiritual audacity” of the prophets to call bullshit whenever and wherever it exists. We need to remember that keeping a job at the cost of our “spiritual audacity, intellectual guts and power of defiance” is a sign of a deeper spiritual malady within us. Better to be fired by a Board of Directors than face oneself in guilt and shame and not be able to look at “the man in the glass” nor come face to face with God. This is the challenge of being a Rabbi, being called and knowing who one’s employer truly is-the Ineffable One.

I had a great clergy team growing up, they related to us and they spoke to us rather than at us. I had great teachers and role models for my Rabbinic studies as well. What each of them told me was to be me in all my affairs, to speak to people in ways they could hear and not give into the wants of the people I was serving, rather give them what they needed spiritually, intellectually, and morally, Being a loud-mouth, an in-your-face kind of person, I brought my winning(?) Personality to the text and to the people. While people would object to me calling Abraham a pimp, calling Jacob a liar, cheat and thief, I was willing to defy the power structure of the Rabbis and the Board of Directors to speak truth, to use the good and the not-so-good actions of the Biblical figures to help each of us learn about our humanity and the struggles we face are timeless and are the ‘right’ ones because our earliest ancestors dealt with them-sometimes well and sometimes not so well. I would not nor can I now go along to get along. I am unable to keep my mouth shut in the face of mendacity and deception and I do my own inventory daily. I have the audacity, guts and power to defy norms, argue with the conventional wisdom and be bold in my insights for myself and another. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Leaning into the Teachings of Rabbi Heschel - A Daily Path for Spiritual Growth

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 268

“General studies are taught on a high level of learning, while religious education is satisfied with cliches buttered with sentimentality. As a result, religious instruction acquired in childhood fades when exposed to the challenge and splendor of other intellectual powers in an age of scientific triumphs.” (Insecurity of Freedom pg. 53)

“Israel is always right”, “America, love it or leave it”, “Bibi is the strongman we need”, “MAGA is the American way” “It is written in the Torah”,  and other such B.S. comes to my mind after reading the quote above. Our religious education is so bad, our spiritual growth so stunted, we aer fail to hear, see and change the ways our religious education is taught. This is true in all denominations of Judaism-we have dumbed down religious education so badly that the main reason to go to Hebrew School is for the Bar/Bat Mitzvah money and party. In more ‘traditional’ circles it is to learn the ‘right’ way to perform deeds that have no inner meaning and ‘follow the rules’ as laid out by the Rabbis, both from the time of the Talmud to the Rabbis of their communities-all of whom paid/pay more attention to their holding power, adding to the ‘glory’ of the Mitzvah than they do to the inner life of the child, of the parent, of the individual Jew.

“You have to stay Jewish so Hitler doesn’t win” “Israel is our homeland and we can’t talk against it for fear of the non-Jews anti-semitism”, and other phrases like these were ones the “baby boomer” generation grew up with. Our fathers’ had served in World War II and seen or heard from people who were there the accounts of the Concentration Camps, we listened to and/or watched in horror the Eichmann trial and heard what the Nazis and their collaborators had done to Jews and non-Jews so being Jewish was a badge of honor rather than a stigma and when we went to Hebrew School and to Services-boredom and pap was served in vast quantities. The timing of this paper was at the time when I was getting ready to study for my Bar Mitzvah and I had been in Hebrew School for 4 years already, going over the same “cliches buttered with sentimentality”.

Rather than delve into the inner meaning and lives of  our Biblical figures, religious education is still content with serving up “sentimentality” and “cliches”. We see this in the current younger generation of Jews participating in the protests and calling for a world wide Intifada. We hear it in their condemnation of Israel-full stop. We see it in the myriad of addictive activities, substances, process’ they are engaging in and their need to blame someone else for their spiritual maladies. We all suffer from spiritual maladies and blaming someone else never helps. The problem is they go to therapists, alcohol, drugs, ‘medicine’ like psilocybin, to solve what are issues of meaning and purpose. The last place they would go is to a Rabbi, to a physician of the soul, because of the lack of “challenge and splendor” of their childhood religious education.

This brings about an even greater problem. Because of the lack of “challenge and splendor” of their childhood religious education, even those who continue to engage in Jewish pursuits live at the surface of Jewish thought and meaning for a long time. Because we do not teach our children how to use intellectual rigor in their Jewish education, because we fail to help our children see and wrestle with the spiritual insights of Torah and the Bible, we fail to teach them how to “Shema”, how to hear the voices inside of them clearly, how to deal with their “earthly desires” in ways that don’t harm them or another(s), how to grow from homo sapiens to being human. This is the greatest tragedy of the ridiculous and stupid practices that are being called “religious education”. Rabbi Heschel was railing about these practices 60+ years ago and the Rabbis didn’t listen and we have closed our ears and our souls even more since. My generation did not do what we said we are going to do and what we were/are called to do: “You shall teach them diligently to your children, shall talk of them when you sit in your house…”(Deuteronomy 6:7)! We talk about sports, the Olympics, the ‘news’, the election, etc and we fail to engage in the more difficult and nuanced conversations with our children, young and older, about how to live in a world that is neither black nor white, neither all good nor all bad, where there are no perfect answers only responses in the moment and the ‘wars’ that rage within our inner life-a voice calling for us to ‘get ours’, a voice calling for us to “help the poor and the needy’, a voice calling for ‘beating the crap out of our ‘enemies’ and a voice seeking to find a way to coexist without conflict, if not in peace.

The questions that are abounding now re: Israel, the U.S, the world are the same ones we have always faced. The responses are nuanced and there are no all good nor all bad-yet without good foundational religious education, we fluctuate to the extremes and call our enemies our friends and our friends, our enemies. Bibi’s refusal to hear President Biden’s warnings is Biblical. In the Book of Samuel 1, we learn the story of Naval, who was so mean, who could not care about anyone except himself and his needs, when his wife saved his life and told him about what almost happened to him and his household, “his heart died within him and he turned became as stone”, he died 10 days later. When our religious education is poor, when we don’t “teach our children” how to wrestle with opposing truths, when we fail to help them raise up their inner lives, we set them up to be as obtuse and as unfit for leadership as Bibi is now. King David, on the other hand, does “Shema”, he has an idea, an impulse and when someone, in the case above, the wife of Naval, Abigail, tells him the truth, he changes course and acknowledges her wisdom and is grateful for her interference. Isn’t it time for us to be more like King David and hear, listen and understand the workings of our inner life, heal our spiritual maladies with the help of our Rabbis and teachers? Isn’t it time for us to stop the pap and “cliches buttered with sentimentality” we give our children and prepare them for the rigors of being human by truly educating them spiritually?

I was unprepared for what life was to hand me and I went to ‘religious school’ through high school. I am still learning how to deal with “life on life’s terms” through my studies and learnings with another(s). It is always interesting to me that I still have the spiritual maladies that brought me to destroy the love my family had for me and today, because I have people who are “physicians of the soul” in my life, I can turn back from these maladies, know they are mostly healed and I don’t have to ‘pick the scab’ that has formed over them. Instead, because of the spiritual and religious education I have received from teachers, from other learners, from the Ineffable One, I keep growing and living better each day. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Teachings from Rabbi Heschel- A Spiritual Path for Living Better Each Day

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 267

“Without minimizing the corroding influence of the general social climate, I insist the vapidity and trivialization of religious instruction is the major cause of this failure.” (Insecurity of Freedom pg 53)

The “failure” Rabbi Heschel is speaking of is the “spiritual illiteracy, ignorance as well as idolatry of false values” that I wrote about yesterday. If the “general social climate” was corrosive in 1962, what would Rabbi Heschel call it today? If there was  a “vapidity and trivialization of religious instruction” then, what would he think of the ‘over-the-top’ Bar and Bat Mitzvah celebrations of today? What would he think of the numerous ‘religious’ schools who have cut down to once a week and believe it is okay for young people to attend soccer, baseball, flag football, etc rather than spend Shabbat in Temple, with family, etc? OY!!

Remember, Rabbi Heschel was speaking to his colleagues and students who were Rabbis and Spiritual leaders, teachers and Executive Directors of religious institutions. He was not speaking to parents or educators, he was speaking to the people most responsible for the “religious instruction” in their institutions. While we have siloed the role of Rabbi more and more since the 1960’s, it is still the Rabbi who should be overseeing and participating in the “religious instruction” of the children and their parents. It is the Rabbi who has to hold everyone in the Synagogue responsible to stop making excuses and easing the slippery slope of “vapidity and trivialization of religious instruction” -full stop! It is the Rabbis who have failed all of us, as I am hearing and understanding the words above, which is actually an indictment of the religious establishment some 60+ years ago that has only gotten worse.

Judaism, Christianity, Islam, are such rich spiritual traditions and disciplines and the myriad of attempts to trivialize them are, in my opinion, criminal. When Rabbis speak about God wanting war with ‘those people’, and point to one verse while ignoring the myriad of verses that speak about finding ways to “love your neighbor as yourself” which was the most important principle according to the sage Rabbi Akiva, when they make another people, their cousins actually, into Amalek, and call for their destruction and treat them as ‘not even human’, and forget the story of Cain and Abel in the Bible where Cain is told “your brothers’ bloods cry out to Me”, is mind-boggling. When they refuse to realize they are acting more like Pharaoh than like Moses, they contribute greatly to “this failure”, they make “the vapidity and trivialization of religious instruction” easier to accept and to promote. When the Rabbis refuse to take a stand on what is good and right, when they are afraid of ‘pissing off’ the major donors and/or congregants, when they act as employees of the institution instead of employees of the Tradition and/or God, “the vapidity and trivialization of religious instruction” is apparent to everyone.

When ‘good christian Clergy’ anoint Trump and his MAGA crowd as Jesus incarnate, when they preach that ‘those people’ are evil, and Jesus only loved the rich and powerful, their bastardization of Jesus’ principles as written about in the Gospels is over the top! When they speak of locking the stranger up in cages, when they speak of white power, when they see the Jew, the Muslim, a person of color as less than they are because they, the ‘good christian Clergy’ are white, how is anyone to believe the tenets of Christianity? How is anyone not going to see Christianity as Vapid and Trivial?

When Imams and Ayatollah’s preach “death to the Jews”, “Death to America” how can anyone take them seriously as people of God? When they help to cover up bombs and arsenals under and in their Mosques and then decry the explosions that happen because the intelligence points to their hiding weapons of destruction, how can anyone put their faith in the tenets of Islam? When they seek to kill their own adherents because they are not ‘religious enough’ is it difficult to understand how people experience “the vapidity and trivialization of religious instruction””?

There is “vapidity and trivialization” going on in all spiritual disciplines by the charlatans and the people ‘out to make a buck’. We, the People, have to demand more from our religious leaders, from our Rabbis, Imams, Priests and Ministers. We have to demand they speak to us about the beauty of “religious instruction”. We have to demand they stop “taking the spirit out of “ the spiritual disciplines that have, in many ways, held the world together for the millennia. We have to demand they end their incessant manner of making the stories and the lessons, the commandments and the ways of living “of little or no importance” in our daily living. We, the People, have to demand of our Spiritual Leaders that they be Spiritual Leaders! We, the People, have to demand from the Lay Leadership they no longer treat the Rabbi, Priest, Minister, Imam as employees of the institution and respect them as employees of our tradition and of God/Allah, etc and hold them accountable to live into the tradition and judge them on their willingness and ability to lead all of us to a higher standard of living, to a level of failing forward, helping us up the steps of imperfection so we can celebrate our own spirituality and helping us fulfill the mandate to grow in Holiness. This is the only way for things to change, it is the only way to restore meaning, importance, flavor, spirt and joy into “religious instruction” and, by extension, our daily lives.

I have been fighting this fight for a while and I have the battle scars to prove it:) I am also aware of what Rabbi Heschel’s words above mean in real time, in our time. For so many recovering people, being turned on to a Judaism that is meaningful, hip, fun, that touches their souls, was the catalyst for their recovery. Not all attend Temple, not all of them join religious institutions, and all of the people found meaning and purpose through study and engagement in “the religious instruction” they received at Beit T’Shuvah in those years. We wrestled with the Text and argued with one another in order to learn more and better how to live well. Cancel Culture, political correctness, optics are the current killers of meaning and purpose through religion, they are the instruments being used by ‘the powers that be’ to keep “the vapidity and trivialization of religious instruction” alive and well in today’s world. We are engaged in a war for the soul of America and for the soul of “religious instruction” and while separation of church and state is necessary in a democracy, is a prerequisite for freedom, without meaning in our “religious instruction”, there is no freedom nor democracy. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Learning from Rabbi Heschel's Teachings - A Daily Path for Spiritual Growth

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 266

“Few of our contemporaries have ever absorbed the challenge of the prophets or the grandeur of the Book of Genesis, though they have attended Sunday school and were thrilled with the confirmation ceremonies. What prevails in the field of religion is intellectual as well as spiritual illiteracy, ignorance as well as idolatry of false values. We are a generation devoid of learning as well as sensitivity.” (Insecurity of Freedom pg. 52)

In the last two sentences above, I hear Rabbi Heschel crying out to us to end our “intellectual as well as spiritual illiteracy”! In these past 60+ years since he spoke and wrote these words, made this appeal to us, taught a generation of Rabbis how to rise above their “intellectual as well as spiritual illiteracy”, it has gotten worse. Clergy no longer have the respect they used to have, their voices have diminished unless they follow the ‘party line’ of dogma and deception, unless their followers are fundamentalists who are afraid of uncertainty. For the majority of people who identify in one way or another, either as members or lapsed members of a faith tradition, Clergy have no relevance to their living because Clergy have been too afraid of losing their jobs to stand up to boards of directors, elders, etc. They have lost their prophetic voices and being a Clergy-person has gone from a calling to a career, Seminaries have gone from an absorption of “the challenge of the prophets” to a technical training school. We have fallen deeper and deeper into the abyss of “illiteracy” and our “ignorance” is so great we don’t even realize it! Rabbi Heschel’s words above are prophetic, not as if he were a seer rather that he embraces what is and speaks truth to power. He is speaking to the very people he is accusing of “intellectual as well as spiritual illiteracy, ignorance as well as idolatry of false values”, his contemporaries, the Rabbis of the Conservative Movement of Judaism in America.

When we are more afraid of losing our jobs than of speaking truth, we are living in the “idolatry of false values”. When we see what is and call it wonderful and holy, we are living in “ignorance”. When we hate our neighbors, when we treat the stranger as an enemy, when we fail to see the equal worth and dignity of another human being because they are a different color, different faith, different gender, different sexual orientation than we are, we have fallen down the abyss of spiritual illiteracy. When our Clergy promote “ignorance, idolatry of false values, spiritual illiteracy” we desperately need to call on the prophetic voice we each have. We have to fire the Board of Directors, the Elders who hire and keep such an abomination as the ‘spiritual leader’ of our congregation because their need to control him/her is greater than their need to serve the congregation by installing a woman/man who is spiritually literate, who shuns the “idolatry of false values”, who continues to learn so she/he will not fall into “ignorance”. It is time for We, the People, to stand up for ourselves, to stand with the true values of faith, to stand up for the spiritual principles that are the foundation of faith and stop going along like lambs to the slaughter, stop falling deeper and deeper into the abyss of “spiritual illiteracy” that will bring us back to Egypt, will make us slaves to the newest Pharaoh. I am calling out to Clergy to end their fear of losing a paycheck and be more afraid of losing their souls. Now is the time for all Clergy to come to the aid of their fellow human beings and I pray they will!

We have to return to learning- not studying for a grade or a job training, true learning. We are in desperate need of learning so we, the people who care about the prophets, who want to absorb and meet “the challenge of the prophets” can stand up to those ‘who claim to know god’s will’ with their hatred, with their prejudices, with their whitewashing sins because the sins and the sinners help them attain their goals. We have to take back religious education from the hands of those who love and live in “the idolatry of false values”, those who keep promoting these “false values” as real, who claim Jesus hated the poor and the needy, who teach that caring for the stranger, the poor, the needy, etc doesn’t apply to ‘those people’, et al. We, the people have to reclaim our spiritual heritage, our spiritual literacy so we can promote God’s vision of “make wholeness and peace” in heaven and on earth. We, the people, have to reclaim the truth that our spiritual legacy and life is not far away from us, it is in our hearts, in our mouths, and we have to access it. We, the people, have to realize we are all “standing here” this day and every day, on the precipice of moving into the “promised land” and or going back to the narrow places of “spiritual illiteracy” and “idolatry of false values”. We have to “Choose Life”!

The only way to do this is by being sensitive to the needs of another, learning more about our own spiritual needs and maladies and healing our maladies so we can promote our spiritual nature more. We have to learn how to be “sensitive” to the needs of another as well. We have to be “sensitive” to what is actually happening rather than buy the lies of ‘those in charge’. We have to be sensitive to the hearing God’s call, the call of our higher consciousness and respond to these calls rather than the calls of our lower selves, the calls of mendacity and deception. Just as the Haggadah says: if we hadn’t left Egypt then we would still be in there, the freedom of the next generation depends on it. We can do this, we must do this.

I engaged in the “idolatry of false values” for a long time. I am embarrassed and ashamed of the actions I took in those years, especially because my father and grandfathers taught us not to! Dad, Grandpas, I am sorry. In my recovery, I have engaged in spiritual literacy, beginning with Rabbi Mel Silverman, my prison Rabbi. I have been pigeoned-holed as only good for ‘those people’ who are in recovery and people would tell me how ‘undignified’ I was for extolling “the challenge of the prophets” for the masses and I should remember who I work for. I told these people I work for God, I work for the people I am serving and this made me both popular and unpopular with the different incarnations of the Board of Directors. I didn’t change when the culture changed, I have not “stood idly by” while people bastardized faith, recovery, life. I have not stayed silent when people could not, would not see themselves in the Bible and thought they were ‘above the law’. I have made many mistakes and learned much from them, I have fought for what I believe is true and right. I am not embarrassed anymore, I can go to the graves of my ancestors with pride and a sense of continuing their ways. I am still promoting spiritual literacy in the face of those who want to keep us illiterate and I ask you to join me. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Learning from Rabbi Heschel's Teachings - A Daily Path of Spiritual Growth

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 265

“Few of our contemporaries have ever absorbed the challenge of the prophets or the grandeur of the Book of Genesis, though they have attended Sunday school and were thrilled with the confirmation ceremonies. What prevails in the field of religion is intellectual as well as spiritual illiteracy, ignorance as well as idolatry of false values. We are a generation devoid of learning as well as sensitivity.” (Insecurity of Freedom pg. 52)

This paper was presented to Rabbis of the Conservative movement in 1962, 2 years before my Bar Mitzvah, and it had no lasting effect upon the Rabbis there, evidently. I say this because we still suffer from an “intellectual as well as spiritual illiteracy”, we are still living in both "ignorance as well as false values”. I cannot imagine the experience of Rabbi Heschel as there were many of his students at this convention and he was, it seems, once again speaking to people who could not, would not hear. Like many of my generation, “the challenge of the prophets or the grandeur of the Book of Genesis” was not really communicated well. We were taught how to ‘pray the prayers’ in flawless Hebrew never really concerned with what the prayers were saying and the Bible was not taught as a living, breathing document of eternal truth nor eternal wisdom. Religious education was not that great some 60 years ago and it has gone downhill ever since. At the risk of angering my contemporaries, many people came to Beit T’Shuvah and were amazed at how smart Judaism is, how it gives us a roadmap to heal the spiritual maladies that cause us angst, depression, addiction, and helps us deal with our physical illness’ as well and wondered why their Jewish Communities, their Rabbis didn’t offer these remedies with which to deal with life on life’s terms to them.

What does it mean to absorb “the challenge of the prophets or the grandeur of the Book of Genesis”? It is not what the religious zealots scream out that it means, it is not how to hate one another, how to make an enemy out of someone who has a different opinion than you. It is not that God is punishing and spiteful, demanding, etc. When one immerses oneself in the prophets, we experience God as calling us back home, calling us to be our authentic self, reminding us of what is important-service and truth, kindness and compassion, love and covenant. These are the main challenges of the prophets, along with acknowledging our imperfections and errors, we are called to return so “God can heal our backsliding”, we are not called to be perfect, we are not called to hide our flaws! Yet, people of all faiths and creeds, all denominations within the myriad of religious orders still try and portray themselves as ‘being right’. We are a people who have heard “the challenge of the prophets” and decided, like Adam in the 3rd Chapter of Genesis, chosen to hide from God, from ourselves and from those around us-all the while portraying our facade as authenticity and truth. We have numerous examples of how people do not and have not “absorbed the challenge of the prophets” and not too many of those who have and are responding to this challenge.

Treating anyone as a ‘second-class’ citizen is denying “the challenge of the prophets” so these ‘religious’ people who created and buy into Project 2025 are anything but religious-they are idolators and deceivers. Believing the color of one’s skin gives you privilege and/or means you are inferior is ridiculous for people who hear and absorb the words of the prophets. Going against God’s suggestions in the Bible by banning abortion seems to deny “the grandeur of the Book of Genesis” and the rest of the Torah. Accepting bribes as a Judge on the Supreme Court as Alito and Thomas have done goes against the teachings in Exodus and Deuteronomy on how to be a judge and seek righteous justice. Taking advantage of the poor, the widow, the orphan, the needy is in direct opposition to God’s will which is expressed 36 times in the first 5 Books of the Bible-yet these ‘good-christian religious’ adherents to Trumpism, believers in MAGA continue to go against God’s Will and the words of the prophets. We are told to welcome the stranger in the same breath as caring for the poor, orphan, widow, and needy, yet these ‘good-christian fellowships’ want to put the stranger in cages, they separate families, they accuse others of the things they are doing and have done, they do not take responsibility for any wrongdoings and they call themselves ‘god’s people’, ‘defenders of the faith’! What they  are liars, cheats, blasphemers, idolators.

We are in desperate need of our Clergy to stand up against the deceit and the subterfuge of these idolators, we are in need of our Clergy to teach the values and the principles  of our different faiths to our children and to our adults. We, the Clergy, need to stop pontificating and worrying about the small stuff and get to work Kashering the Souls of our congregations. We, the Clergy,  have to help them absorb “the challenge of the prophets” and not make excuses for ourselves nor them. We, the Clergy, have to admit our errors and seek forgiveness from the congregation for not helping them absorb these challenges. We, the Clergy, have to make prayer meaningful and learning accessible as well as necessary for the well-being of children and their parents, young adults as well as older adults. It is time for us, the Clergy, to go past our fears of losing our job and accept the “challenge of the prophets” to speak truth to power, stand with the poor, the needy, the stranger in each of our congregations, in each of our communities, and in each individual we encounter. We, the Clergy, have to engage in the work the prophets started and add our energies and skills to move the grand project of humanity forward; not finish the work and stop our incessant excuses not to engage in it.

As you might have noticed, this is a subject near and dear to me. I don’t know if my life would have been better, different if I had the education Rabbi Heschel is speaking of. I know I would have had clearer choices, I might have realized there wasn’t something defective within me and it wasn’t my fault that my father died so young, that I couldn’t save him and God wasn’t punishing him, me, my family. Absorbing “the challenge of the prophets” did not come to me until I was in prison the 2nd time because I was too stuck in my false self to absorb it the first time in prison. I am remorseful for the harm I caused my daughter, my family because I was so stuck in my own mendacity. Since then, I am totally absorbed in “the challenge of the prophets” and I keep seeking new ways to express and help another(s) engage in this challenge. While I don’t have a pulpit anymore, this blog has become my bully pulpit, the different groups I am a part of are my fellow learners and I continue to believe that there will be a tipping point of people who come to desire to absorb “the challenge of the prophets” and join me in moving their words and deeds forward. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Leaning into Rabbi Heschel's Teachings - A Daily Path of Spiritual Growth

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 264

“Contemporary general education, all strictures notwithstanding, must be credited with remarkable accomplishments in the teaching of science as well as in other subjects. In comparison, religious education must be regarded as having fallen short of its goals. It would be irresponsible to conceal what most of us acknowledge.” (Insecurity of Freedom pg. 52)

This essay/talk, “Idols in the Temples” was given in November of 1962 to a convention of the Rabbinical Assembly, the organization of Rabbis who belong to the Conservative Movement within Judaism. Oh, how I wish these words could have, would have been heard and heeded. While there are people who will argue about our general education accomplishments today, we have still done a good job at teaching the “3 R’s”, and we have made higher education and trade schools more available than ever before. While the bias of some colleges to the left and to the right is overshadowing the education at times, all in all, the teaching of science, math, reading, is still very good.

The main issue of this paper is, of course, the sad state of religious education! How far we have fallen in caring for the moral and spiritual needs of our young and ourselves. We have sent them to Churches, Temples, Mosques, etc and celebrated their lifecycles and then bastardized the very ways of religious life they are taught, that we were taught. We see no value in growing our spiritual life and we accept phony “ecstatic” moments as religious events, as religious education-they are not! We have spent the past centuries dumbing down religious education and not making it part of our everyday lives.

The ‘good christian values and people’ that Trump and the Republicans speak of, that the Heritage Foundation and Freedom Caucus proclaim as their guiding light are nothing more than bastardizations of Christ’s words and deeds. Their promoting racial hatred and Jim Crow laws, their support of white supremacists and the KKK are nothing more than hatred disguised as religious fervor. The ways they are dealing with the poor and the stranger, the widow, orphan and the needy are despicable according to what the Bible says and Jesus did! Yet, they proclaim that Jesus loves them because they are rich and powerful, the exact opposite of what Jesus said and did-yet they seem to be ‘getting away’ with their lies and deceptions.

Jews, here in America and in Israel, are not doing much better! The so-called ‘religious jews’ have vilified their own people by calling those who do not hold their same opinions and take the same actions ‘not really jews’ by asserting they are the ‘true jews’! They have made it a point to not care for the poor and the needy, the stranger and the widow/orphan unless they are in their ‘camp’. Their hatred of Arabs and Palestinians, our cousins by the way, is palpable and disgusting- going against the teachings of the Bible! Yet, they seem oblivious to any of these “Hillul Hashems”, Desecrations of God’s Name, they commit on a daily basis. Whether it is portraying Bibi as a great Prime Minister or Trump as a savior of Jews/good for Israel, these days ‘good jews’ go along with the hatred and deceptions that have come to be commonplace from both of these men and their ‘camps’.

Radical Islam has taken the Koran to depths that also have no relationship to the words and deeds of Mohammed. Islam means “submission to God” and, instead, these radical disbelievers want everyone to submit to them! They have been willing to kill people, innocent people, for a long time, in order to get their way-not Allah’s way- their selfish, power-hungry, wealth producing way. The royal families, the heads of Hezbollah, Hamas, all live very well while the masses live in squalor and poverty. The money spent on caves and weapons could have made Gaza a vacation paradise and put enormous pressure on Israel to find a two-state solution-yet these “good muslims” decided to make war, to submit to their deceptive and evil minds instead!

We are worse off in our religious education today than we were 62 years ago! Imagine if our religious schools would have been teaching spiritual principles and how to grow, mature, and nurture our spiritual health to both kids and their parents. Imagine if instead of dogma, the ways of the Bible were spoken about as ways to live with one another, if instead of the goal being confirmation, Bar/Bat Mitzvah, etc the goal of religious education would be to grow moral and spiritual adults who are never satisfied in either realm because we know we can and must grow at least one grain of sand better each day.

I have been teaching how to live Jewishly for over 35 years ever since I first learned this path in Prison from Rabbi Mel Silverman and Maimonidies, Buber, the Hasidic Rebbes, Rabbi Heschel, and then when I was released from Rabbi Omer-man, z”l, Rabbi Shulweis, z”l, Rabbi Feinstein, and many others. I learned early on that what the commentators say about the Bible or the Talmud is not as important as how I understand and say about the words and actions in them. I realized early on that our way of understanding and living into the words and deeds that we are taught about in our Holy Texts is what makes them Eternal in Truth and Wisdom. I realized there truly is “nothing new under the sun” and I was, at first, angry with the poor education I received while attending Hebrew School and realized they were responding to the wants of their congregants, not leading their congregations to what God wants and/or the needs and wants of the spiritual lives of their congregants. I have compassion for them as well as contempt. In leading the residents and congregants of Beit T’Shuvah for almost 30 years as their spiritual leader/Rabbi, I have been more concerned with the understanding of the text, with calling out our heroes when they were wrong and extolling their capacity to rise above their selfishness and do the next right thing. I am in awe of King David who, for all of his womanizing, depicts the war within so well-he is a poet and a psalmist as well as a warrior and selfish-a killer and a lover who, when confronted could admit both his wrongdoing and ask for forgiveness. He had compassion and strength-he was both the lion and the lamb. This is the religious education we need more of, not learning to hate, rather living into “love thy neighbor as thyself”. We need our religious education which never stops to speak to our spiritual needs and not be so concerned with the dogma of any and all denominations. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Leaning into the Teachings of Rabbi Heschel - A Daily Path for Growing Spiritually

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 263

“The effort to restore the dignity of old age will depend upon our ability to revive the equation of old age and wisdom. Wisdom is the substance upon which the inner security of the old will forever depend. But the attainment of wisdom is the work of a life time.”  (Insecurity of Freedom pg. 84)

“Wisdom comes from the Latin “sapienta” meaning “to know, to perceive, to taste, to discern” and Carl Linnaeus chose a variation of this word, sapiens, “for the Latin binomial for human beings”(Wikipedia). “Attainment comes from the Latin meaning “to touch, to arrive at, to manage, etc.” Hence, the last sentence above can be understood as “to arrive at/to touch knowing, discernment, is the work of a lifetime.” The question for all of us is: Is this the work we are engaged in?

Wisdom is not what everyone seems to be searching for, knowing what is right and what isn’t doesn’t seem as important to some as the need to ‘be right’. The need to have power and wealth, the need to control and dominate. By bastardizing and misinterpreting the words of every Spiritual Text, Spiritual discipline, we can find ways to seek everything but wisdom and, throughout history, society has engaged in this pursuit! We are seeing the fruits of this search for anything but wisdom, the arriving at a point where truth and facts don’t matter so much, where conspiracy theories are more relevant to people than what is real and authentic. In the 60+ years since these words were written and delivered, we seem to be losing our ability to “discern, to perceive” what is true and good from the lies and the evil being perpetrated by the ones who promote these conspiracies, like PizzaGate, like Trump being the Messiah, like White Men are supposed to rule, Christian Nationalism is what Christ preached, and other such poppycock. In Israel we are witnessing the lies of the UltraOrthodox taking the country into a hell that is antithetical to everything in the books they revere, Torah, Talmud, Tanakh! Yet, both the Christian Nationalists, the Radical Islamists, the Right-Wing Jews all seem to believe that they can declare what is wisdom and what isn’t. Only they know what God wants, what the spirit calls for us to do and other such lies-hence the inability of society to truly “attain wisdom” because the “work of a lifetime” for people who want control, wealth, power, is not “the attainment of wisdom” it is the attainment of control, wealth, power by any and all means possible.

Those of us “of a certain age” need to stand up for truth, we need to stop hiding and begin “touching” what we “know to be right and true”. We need to use our powers of discernment, our perceptions so we can fully live into being “homo sapiens”, human beings. Without the attainment and the exercise of our “wisdom”, what are we but human doings? Without practicing what we know to be right, what are we but liars and deceivers? This is the challenge of being human, this is the challenge of living to be older adults, this is the challenge of being bound to something greater than ourselves. We teach history to our children and we fail to learn from it ourselves! We promote ‘religion’ to our young children and then tell them, by our actions, that after reaching puberty one doesn’t need it so much because we ‘know’ what is right and wrong. Again, poppycock that we tell ourselves and another because we are more interested in power and control than “the attainment of wisdom”. We send our kids to college to get a job, not to discover themselves, we work hard to control our children so they will be ‘successful’ and we can take credit for their greatness, we have become so lost in our lies and self-deceptions that we have lost sight of what is “wisdom” and what is self-seeking what is “wisdom” and what is our need to be #1. We are suffering from this loss of “wisdom” today in ways that seemed unimaginable after World War II and the rise of authoritarianism is so subtle and strong, promoted by the baseless conspiracy theories of both the far right  and the far left, we need our “older adults” to promote the “attainment of wisdom” that our lifetimes have given and are giving us!

We, the older adults, have to take serious stock of our lives-full stop! We have to stop defending our choices, we have to stop proclaiming our innocence and ‘good intentions’. We have to end our need to control the narrative and speak of what was and what is truthfully. None of us are perfect nor are we supposed to be. Perfection and the shame attributed to making a mistake are societal controls to keep us in perpetual misinformation. They are the ways of the Greek society that crumbled in Antiquity, remember the only society to survive Antiquity intact was the Jewish society. It is now incumbent upon all of us, no matter what faith we practice or don’t practice, to stand up for what our experience has taught us about demagogues, about these authoritarians who proclaim their camaraderie with the ‘masses’ when they are elites who lie to gain control and power. We have to take stock of our errors and learn from them, we have to “proclaim freedom throughout the land and to all its inhabitants there in” especially to ourselves and our children. Being free means “the attainment of wisdom” from our experiences so far in life, it doesn’t mean being tied to the lies of the past, being tied to the bias’ of society, being tied to optics as opposed to truth! We, the “older adults” have to clean up our acts, we have to shout from the rooftops what we know to be true, we have to “touch” our humanity by “being human”. It is always important, as each generation has faced this choice in one way or another and when you are in it, as we are right now, it feels monumental. We have to remember we can rise above our fear of society’s pushback, the long-arm of the authoritarian, the chants of the conspiracy theorists and stand for what is true, what we ‘know in our bones’ and what life as taught us.

Each day that I write and live, I attain more and more wisdom. I have made mistakes, I have learned from them. I have admitted them and taken the abuse and abandonment that some of my errors have resulted in. I no longer am at odds within myself with anyone, there are people with whom I have no desire to interact with and because I know what hatred does, I know I can not hate anyone in my heart as the Bible teaches. I also know that I have an obligation to promote the wisdom I have “attained”-not because it is the end-all/be-all, rather because it is a part of the truth of life and can be used by people younger and older than me to make their lives and our world a little better-for the younger generation, maybe they won’t repeat my mistakes, making their own, and maybe when confronted with similar times and experiences, they will have a different response. I pray for those who dislike me, who have walked away and I reach out to those who feel I walked away from them. The greatest wisdom is to know “You Matter”! God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Living Rabbi Heschel's Teachings - A Daily Path of Spiritual Growing

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 262

“The effort to restore the dignity of old age will depend upon our ability to revive the equation of old age and wisdom. Wisdom is the substance upon which the inner security of the old will forever depend. But the attainment of wisdom is the work of a life time.”  (Insecurity of Freedom pg. 84)

“Wisdom is the substance upon which the inner security of the old will forever depend” strikes at the heart of the challenge of inter-generational dialogue, inter-generational respect and learning, inter-generational covenantal love. Many of us ‘love’ our older relatives as an obligatory action, not with the fervor and excitement to learn from them always. Many of us have felt like it is a burden to ‘visit the old folks’ especially when we could be doing so many cooler activities. Many of us have forced our kids to ‘visit your grandparents’ because our parents nag us to ‘see the grandchildren, they are my only joy in my old age’. Rabbi Heschel’s words above call these ‘obligations’ and these ‘joys’ out for what they are-excuses for and searches for “inner security”. Rather than appreciate the “wisdom” we have to impart, many of us ‘older adults’ are trying to be hip and cool, stuck in old ways and being ‘proper’. Rather than take in the “wisdom” the older generation has to impart to us, we of the ‘younger generation’ want to ‘do it our way, make our own mistakes, etc’; not realizing we are making the same mistakes that generations of people have made.

As we age, our bodies wear down and we don’t have the same stamina we used to have. We cannot do at 70 what we did at 30 and we can do things smarter and be more focused on what is truly important. In our younger years we experimented with all sorts of ideas and ways of being, in our 80’s, 90’s we have the wisdom of these experiences to impart and to hold on to. We want to share it with the younger folks for two reasons: 1) we don’t want them to make the same mistakes we did and suffer the same angst, self-recriminations we did and not perpetrate the same harms we did; and 2) We need to give away what we have so we can keep it and use it, so we can add more wisdom to our inner life and feel the worth and dignity that comes from reaching out and helping another human being.

We are well aware of the harms we have wrought by the time we reach ‘old age’ and our dignity depends on our realization, acknowledging and repairing the damage we have caused. It is a healing of our souls, a healing between us and the people we have harmed and love, it is a manifestation of covenantal love- a love that goes beyond our needs, that goes beyond a transactional experience- a love that is truly for the ages because the thought of this human being not in our lives is too much to take. We have to remember to make amends to our children and our spouses, our siblings and our parents, our friends and our enemies, etc. We do this to restore the dignity to those who’s dignity we stole by harming them and we do this to restore our own dignity and “inner security” by “cleaning our side of the street”. We also are better able to have a truthful and serious discussion with the next generations about behaviors, about things we don’t feel are important and how another human being experiences us, how to show our deep caring and our deep commitment to one another, how to avoid the pitfalls of egotism and narcissism, how to help the next generation think differently, how to help them see more of the picture and how to hale them plan their path to the goals they have. By being this transparent and authentic, we give the ‘young folk’ a new way of being that is “maladjusted to” societal norms and cliches. We are giving them a path to wholeness and being real while and achieving the goals they have set and the goal that the spiritual, universal world has for them: Be Human!

As we age, we are in need of “inner security” as much if not more than when we were younger. While our bodies may be tired and doctor visits are more frequent, what we have in our hearts, our minds, our souls is the only security we have! Knowing what we know and being unafraid to speak our minds, to reach out and help, to rebuke when necessary as a statement of faith that another human being wants to do the next right thing and is just a little stuck/blind to what it is are all ways of expressing our wisdom and feeling secure. This is not the same a “do it my way because I am the only one who knows” bullshit of authoritarians, rather it is our practicing what every spiritual discipline believes: learn from the elders, sit at the feet of the wise and make our homes meeting places for wisdom to flourish, reenacting the command to “Shema” that the young should “hear, listen, and understand” as well as engage in “arguing for the sake of a higher purpose, not to be right”. As we age and we are more in touch with our successes and our “failing forwards”, we have the benefit of not needing to ‘sell’ the younger generation on our wisdom, we have the knowing that we are giving out what we have to give, we gain more and more security as we engage with our younger peers and the security we experience from “knowing what we know” gives us courage and strength to weather the onslaught of arguments and pass on our wisdom without needing anyone else to use it. These are some of the reasons “wisdom is the substance upon with the inner security of the old will forever depend”!

Writing this today reminds me of Saturday afternoons spent at my Grandfather’s tailoring and dry cleaning store. I would take a bus after Temple and go down to his store, he would give me a dollar and I would get 50 cents worth of Corned Beef, a Kaiser Roll and a Cotton Club Cherry-Strawberry Soda and sit with him for the afternoon. He would talk about life and I would listen, we had a deal, 1/2 the time we listened to Opera, he loved Opera so much, and the other half we would listen to sports. To this day, when I hear Opera, I smile and remember those Saturday afternoons with Grandpa B. It also reminds me of my Aunt Nettie who was soft-spoken and didn’t need to yell to prove anything. She spoke and we listened, she asked and we responded, much like we did with my father, her brother. I hear my father’s voice each day reminding me to give away what I know, to not make all of life transactional, I hear his pride in his children and his tears at not being here to help us all grow. I hear my relatives words and I impart their wisdom to younger folks as a way of keeping the wisdom eternal and their lives and impact on me is always a blessing. I know that in this transitional time for me, my “inner wisdom” is “the substance” that gives me “security” and joy, strength, vision and love. God Bless, Rabbi Mark

Leaning into the Teachings of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel - A Daily Path for Spiritual Growth

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 261

“The effort to restore the dignity of old age will depend upon our ability to revive the equation of old age and wisdom. Wisdom is the substance upon which the inner security of the old will forever depend. But the attainment of wisdom is the work of a life time.”  (Insecurity of Freedom pg. 84)

The first sentence above, delivered 63 years ago is as true today as it was then and, possibly, more urgent now than it was in 1961. It was an interesting time to deliver this talk, January of 1961 before the inauguration of the youngest President ever, John F. Kennedy, especially as his inaugural speech was about the “passing of the torch” to a new generation. We heard these same words from President Joseph R. Biden Jr. who became the first sitting President to not stand for re-election after winning the nomination in the primaries. The oldest and the youngest Presidents both spoke about “passing the Torch” to a new generation and both know/knew the equation between age and wisdom. Barack Obama knew this equation as did George W. Bush-both of whom chose ‘older’ men as their VP’s. Both of whom had them as the last voice in the room before making decisions. Just as President Biden has kept his ‘younger’ counterpart as the last person in the room before he makes his decisions.

It is incumbent upon us older adults “to revive the equation between old age and wisdom”. It is our responsibility to not try and emulate the young, not try so hard to be hip, slick and cool -because most of us already are:)- it is our job to impart the wisdom of our experiences to the next generation. It is our job to give them the best data possible so they can make the most informed decisions possible. This is true as parents beginning when our children can understand more than “because I said so” and is true as employers, supervisors, employees, etc. We all have something to pass on to the next generation and it will only happen if we “revive the equation of old age and wisdom.” This doesn’t mean we have to be ‘old’ to “revive the equation”, it means we have to be open to this revival, we have to stop “throwing the baby out with the bathwater”, we have to realize we are where we are because we are standing on the shoulders of the generational wisdom of our ancestors that gives us a new and higher(hopefully) foundation upon which to build/rebuild our society. This is why “the good old days” is such a deceptive phrase. The “good old days” prior to Kennedy’s Inauguration were about Jim Crow, inequality, restricting the voting rights of non-white people, anti-semetic quotas, etc. - Is this what made America Great??

“To revive the equation of old age and wisdom” means to be in truth about our treatment of one another, it means to see how we have advanced the promise of Declaration of Independence, the promise of the God in the Bible, the promise of the ways of living that the prophets called upon us to live. We, the elders, have to end our self-deceptions, we have to be real about our own failures in advancing these promises, in being selfish and self-seeking in our endeavors and how these paths have led to the destruction of another’s dreams, another’s opportunities, another’s freedom as well as the harm these ways of being have brought to our inner life, to our spiritual being. We have to acknowledge the ways we have failed to be human and the ways we have achieved this goal. “To revive the equation of old age and wisdom” means listening to the younger generation and engaging with them rather than dismissing them or being afraid of them.

In dialoguing with the younger generation, we have the opportunity to use our history and the history of the world and society to impart the lessons we have learned at the “school of hard knocks”. Not everything can be solved by a mathematical equation, not everything can be transmitted electronically, not everything posted on the internet is truth and, as Mark Twain says: “a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes” and this was before the Internet!! Helping the younger generation discern between truth and lies, helping them live in the nuances of life can only come about when we, the elders, are more interested in helping than defending. When we, the elders, are more interested in making things right than in being right.

It also takes the younger generation to realize and accept that the older generation is doing the best it can, which was true at all times in their existence. No one does less than one can because of the myriad of forces that go into any and all decisions. We need to understand that parental guidance comes from the parenting we received and we all do a little better than our parents, I believe. All of the decisions made, even the ones we disagreed with, like Vietnam, were made with the best intentions of the people making them-no one sends their kids into a war lightly except despots. The majority of our founding fathers did not believe in slavery and knew they could not defeat the British without the Southern colonies so they made a compromise that Lincoln undid and then the “good old days” “good old boys” decided to undo in subtle and not so subtle ways. These errors are the ones we of the older generation have to atone for, because we have allowed these subtle and not so subtle ways of discrimination and non-freedoms prevail in our lifetimes as well. We need the younger generation to let go of their judgmental attitudes and engage in real dialogue without prejudice.

I am thinking of how much wisdom I missed because of the death of my father at such an early age. No matter who reached out to me, and there were many elders who did, I could not hear them through the grief and my desire to keep my father as “my guy”. What did any of them know about me, about my father’s ways when they were his siblings and his contemporaries-how foolish and ignorant of me. My recovery has been about seeking, using, engaging with the ‘older generation’ to learn from them, to argue with the “wisdom of the elders” not to be right, rather to understand. I love the tradition in Judaism of “arguing for the sake of heaven” rather than for the sake of being right. Now, as I am one of the elders, I continue to admit the errors I made and the errors of my generation, the highs and ‘victories’ of my generation as well so the next generations behind us can and will build on the foundation of repairs we made for our errors and the concrete progress we have made. “Old age and wisdom” have given me the vision to see everything in a new light-knowing that every good action I took had a twinge of bad and every bad action I took had a twinge of good- the truest example of both/and we live in. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Leaning into Rabbi Heschel's Teachings - A Daily Regimen for Spiritual Growing

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 260

“We must seek ways to overcome the traumatic fear of being old, the prejudice, the discrimination against those advanced in years. Being old is not necessarily the same as being stale.” (Insecurity of Freedom pg. 84)

Nearing the end of Rabbi Heschel’s “To Grow in Wisdom”, I am finding all of the ways we didn’t and haven’t paid heed to the issues, the solutions, he offers. “To overcome the traumatic fear of being old” is mostly ignored by both the young and the old! We have substituted “the golden years” for what is truly “being old”. We keep playing pickle ball, golf, taking trips, working out in the gym in order to prove to ourselves that we are not “being old”. We joke about “those old ladies/men” not wanting to see our reflection in them. We are afraid of “the prejudice, the discrimination against those advanced in years” happening to us. We want to keep up with our grandkids not necessarily lead them nor give them our wisdom.

Not being able to do the things that we did when we are younger is a traumatic event. It is fear-producing and people try to avoid facing these truths at all costs. We don’t speak about these traumas, we don’t speak about not being able to do what we used to do. We are afraid of someone “taking away the keys to the car” and being trapped, we are mortified we might need an Independent/Assisted Living situation, we are deathly afraid of being forgotten and tolerated. All of these fears are real, they happen to our next-door neighbor, our relatives, sometimes our own parents, not because we don’t love/like them, rather because we, the young, are in many cases afraid for the safety of our “older” relatives, maybe we don’t want to be bothered with taking care of them and tell ourselves that having them around people of their own age is better for them, etc. Older adults become afraid and insistent they can still take care of themselves, they can still drive, cook, etc not because they necessarily want to, rather so they do not have to face the trauma “of being old”. How sad we have grown these fears since Rabbi Heschel’s paper rather than mitigated them.

It has become more in vogue to hire older people in stores and for them to have forums to learn at like “Elder Hostels” like Road Scholar to keep our minds active, continually learning and experiencing places in the world as a citizen rather than a tourist. We watch the stores fill with ‘hip and cool’ clothes for the ‘elderly’ and then there is the dreaded Health System-Medicare Hell it is called by some. “What is your date of Birth” is the first or second question asked, sometimes before your name! As an older adult you are asked if you have been abused, if you have fallen, etc and while one can make a case for this, it should not be the first questions asked-in the medical system we have lost the fine art of seeing people, especially older adults, as people. People talk louder to older adults because they believe we are hard of hearing, we tell them we have hearing aids and they just nod. We do not have the stamina we had in our younger years-duh- and we don’t recognize the old man’s face that is staring at us in the mirror. All of this and, of course, the natural process of aging, the fear of getting sick, concern over how much we abused our bodies when we were younger, and so much more cause us to experience “the traumatic fear of being old”.

This fear also comes from the prejudice and the discrimination we experience. While spiritual traditions teach reverence for the old, they teach us how to mine those older than us for their wisdom and their guidance, societal norms continue to view old age as a disease! Rather than seeing those “advanced in age” as tremendous resources for how to live well and how to improve on the freedoms and choices we have and make, how to make our world a little better than what we inherited, we discriminate and have prejudice towards older adults because we no longer see their value, we no longer believe they can be productive, we believe they are “stale”! In the world today, as it has been for the millennia, if you can’t produce at the pace society needs, then you are worthless; this is true for younger people and especially true for older adults. Older adults contribute to this by their longing for the “good old days” which, of course, were not so good. In politics, every advance in promoting “proclaim freedom throughout the land and to all its inhabitants therein” is met with backlash and a desire to ‘make our country great again’ which is code for white christian men rule and everyone else is subservient. The predicament described above is the result of both the young and the old.

We need to get out of “being stale” as older adults, this doesn’t mean we have to be up on the latest fad, it means we have to continue to learn and grow spiritually, morally, mentally. We have to offer our wisdom to another(s) and find ways to listen and be heard. We have to end our incessant ‘need to stay young’ and live into the bodies we are becoming, the spirits we are growing and accept the place of “elder” in our families, communities and world. We do not have to shut up, we do not have to be an invalid, we do have to recognize what we can do and what we can’t, we do have to accept the people who no longer see our usefulness and not resent their failure to see our humanity, we have to live into what is and not what used to be and/or what we want it to be. Facing the “traumatic fear of being old” with curiosity, with eagerness for the ‘next chapter’, not allowing society to define us with its prejudicial attitudes and discriminatory ways is the solution to not “being stale”, to not being overcome with fear and self-loathing. We can do this, we must do this because the world is in need of wisdom, not wise-cracks, it is in need of maturing, not being dumbed down by the authoritarians, it is in need of equality, not slavery and those of us who have lived through the turbulent times we have know the difference and the path to helping the younger generation grow what is needed for all rather than what is wanted by the few.

I continue to see myself in these words and ideas. I am hearing Rabbi Heschel speak directly to me. This is the reason I keep writing, I keep speaking when asked and ask to speak even when rejected. It is an interesting phenomenon for me to not push myself into places I am not wanted and to seek places where I am. Rejection is not personal to me, because people who see me as old, as “the past” just have bad eyesight and I can have rachmones, compassionate pity, for them. I also refuse to be stale-full stop. I continue to seek ways to convey the wisdom I have gained and have more acceptance  of the results knowing they are out of my control.  God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark.

Learning for Rabbi Heschel's teachings - A Daily Path of Spiritual Growth

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 259

“In order to be a master, one must learn how to be an apprentice. Reverence for the old, dialogue between generations, is as important to the dignity of the young as it is for the well-being of the old. We deprive ourselves by disparaging the old.” (Insecurity of Freedom pg. 84)

“Reverence” comes from the Latin meaning “to stand in awe of” and “dignity” comes from the Latin meaning “worthy”. “Dialogue” comes from the Greek meaning “through word”, deprive comes from the Latin meaning “away completely”, and “disparage” comes from the Latin meaning” unequal rank”. I look the words up to better understand how, why, and the different ways Rabbi Heschel “dialogues” with us.

Reading the last two sentences above as “to stand in awe of the old, (relating) through words between generations, is as important to the worthy of the young as it is to the well-being of the old. We take away completely from ourselves by making the old unequal to us” is the way I am hearing Rabbi Heschel this morning. In the cultures that did not survive antiquity such as Assyrian, Greek, Egyptian, Roman, etc one of the things they had in common was  their irreverence for the old, their disparagement of the old, etc. Once one had ceased being able to ‘work’, your value was “disparaged” etc. This trend has continued up to today! The treatment of the “old” varies depending on the times, it has an ebb and flow, yet very few societies have had the “reverence for the old” that Japanese Culture is famous for, very few societies believe that regular “dialogue between generations” will lead to better wisdom and outcomes for the next generation. Very few cultures today realize that these will lead to the younger generation being more worthy to assume the mantle of leadership and will, in reality, change the trajectory of how we live. Very few cultures ‘know in their bones’ that they take away from themselves when they see the old as less worthy, of lesser rank than themselves.

Yet, for the millennia, we have been unable to sustain a way of living that has “reverence for the old” that promotes “dialogue between generations”. The old see the younger generation as trying to ‘usurp their power’, ‘take their place’, ‘sweep out their accomplishments’, etc. The young see the older generation as ‘standing in their way’, ‘trying to stop progress’, ‘not wanting to let go’, etc. Without coming together “through words” we will continue to defeat ourselves as a society, continue to make the same errors our ancestors made, deny the “unalienable” rights to another individual, group, race, religion, etc. We need to learn from our history, we need to see and emulate the cultures that have found the ‘sweet spot’ between doing the same things as the previous generation in exactly the same way, “make us great again” and jettisoning everything that has gone before us for a new way of being. Returning to a “slave” environment, a way of being that makes women second-class citizens agains is not a good idea-full stop. Continuing to engage in “identity” politics and deny the dignity and humanity of another group, as has happened to Jews throughout the modern era and to many other ethnic groups is also not the right way-full stop. We need to find the middle, respecting the individual needs of people and finding the best way for humanity to grow into “being human” which is the focal point of all of Rabbi Heschel’s teachings, I believe.

“Reverence for the old…dignity of the young” is found in most religious cultures as we can witness from the awe afforded our teachers, our clergy who have learned not just the religious doctrines but also which ones fit where and when, which ones have to be re-interpreted, which ones were mislabeled doctrines when they were examples of what not to do! In the Torah, it is mentioned 36 times to care for the needy, the poor, the stranger, etc. We are told to “honor” our elders, the judges were people who had the wisdom of age and experience. Rather than disparage the old, as we have seen throughout the history of this nation and others, we need to take a page from antiquity and not sit in the seat of our elders, not make them of unequal worthiness to us, no longer believe we have to write them out of the history of the company, country, institution, family we have taken the reins of.

When we have “dialogue between generations” people grow exponentially because the older generation is not engaged in being right, rather we are engaged in helping the younger generation not fall into the same traps as we did. We are the best cheerleaders and advisors for the young because we know ‘where the bodies are buried’, what the pitfalls are, how one’s ego gets in the way of what is the next right thing to do, etc. When we have these dialogues, the young are helping the older generation be fruitful and alive, engaged and aware of our dignity and our worth. When we “stand in awe” of the older generation, the older generation “stands in awe” of us as well. Both generations come together to admire the works of the previous one and the path of the current one. It is a coming together of ideas, of human beings, a blueprint for harmony and co-existence that can be used intra-generationally as well. Learning to not “disparage the old” gives us the understanding and necessity to not “disparage” anyone. It is time for us to realize that we all need to get along and what better path to learn this than inter-generationally!

I understand this teaching very well from both sides of the coin. I did always have “reverence for the old” and engaged my elders in “dialogue” because I knew how much I had/have to learn. I also knew that “there is nothing new under the sun” so the cons I wanted to run had been done before so I should learn what not to do. Sometimes it helped and sometimes it didn’t:)! In my recovery, I picked a sponsor that had more time and more experience in being in recovery than me so I could learn and grow. In my career, I became a student of Rabbis who were more experienced, more learned, than I and to this day use them as sounding boards and measuring sticks. I am experiencing being sidelined by people because not many people seek my advice nor engage in dialogue with me. I know they have reverence for my accomplishments and it is lonely not to be engaging in the inter-generational dialogue that I so enjoyed and benefited from with my elders and still do. I am grateful for the dialogues I have with people and the learnings we do together in this moment and I am grateful to all of you for reading and interacting with my daily blog. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Learning from the Teachings of Rabbi Heschel - A Daily Path for Growing our Inner Lives

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 258

“In order to be a master, one must learn how to be an apprentice. Reverence for the old, dialogue between generations, is as important to the dignity of the young as it is for the well-being of the old. We deprive ourselves by disparaging the old.” (Insecurity of Freedom pg. 84)

Thinking about the first sentence above, allowing it to overwhelm ourselves, reminds us of “the way things used to be”. Not all of our progress, technological advances, emphasis on College/University as a degree-giving, economic foundation building has been good. We are churning out people who truly believe they are masters at a myriad of jobs, careers, businesses, political strategies, etc before they have even gotten their hands dirty with the work. Modernity has deceived people, both young and old, that being an apprentice is the same as being a slave and, if you are that ‘uneducated, stuck, poor, then I guess enslaving yourself to someone is the only way forward for you’ seems to be a theme that has been around since the Baby Boomers generation. First generation American parents did not want their kids to ‘suffer’ as they had growing up so they groomed them to go to college and find a career. This has become the societal norm for the children of us boomers and allowing the first sentence above to overwhelm me, makes me question the wisdom of the ways we have acted.

Rabbi Heschel is giving us a huge clue as to how to grow in wisdom, in maturity and in living. As the Hasidic Master, R. Leib Sarah related, "I traveled to the Maggid not to hear Torah from him, but to see how he ties and unties his shoelaces.” We seem to have lost this art of learning by being an apprentice. It is an interesting to witness how many Vice-Presidents who have gone on to become President do not attribute their decisions to the President whom they served-many do and many don’t. It is interesting to note how many people who take over a company as the new CEO want to remake the staff and company ‘in their image’ not always knowing or caring what the history of the company has been. Being an apprentice seems to be “out of favor” in today’s world except in the skilled trade industries. It certainly is “out of favor” in many of the professions like being a Clergyperson, an accountant, a lawyer, etc. Lincoln didn’t go to Law School, yet we require people to jump through so many hoops to be considered a professional while the itinerant preacher, the traveling Rabbi, the doctor who learned from his doctor, the lawyer who learned from another lawyer all built this country into a great country. When the emphasis wasn't on Date of Birth and what Insurance you have, doctors were healers. When the emphasis wasn't on how great an orator you are, Rabbis, Priests, Ministers, Imams tended to the spiritual maladies of their flocks. When young people wanted to know how to be as a professional, as a human being, they learned from the older generation. Yet we seem to have lost this art and this way.

It is sad, when the young believe they do not need the wisdom and experience of the older generation. It is sadder when the older generation is too afraid of being irrelevant and obsolete that they don’t offer their wisdom to the younger generation. It is not the job of the older generation to hide and wait to be asked-it is our obligation to offer the experience and wisdom we have attained. If they youngsters don’t want to hear, that is their business and they do it at their own peril as well as the peril of the organization, business, living conditions they are engaged in. The younger generation seems to ‘know better’ always, hence Mark Twain’s quote: “When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around.But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years”. I wonder how we have been apprentices of our parents in the way we parent, whom have we learned from that nurtures and enhances our spiritual well-being? How have we learned to ignore our spiritual health, blame another for our shortcomings, and made money, power, celebrity our higher powers and our goals. When mendacity becomes the currency in which we deal, how little have we learned from history?

We can, however, remedy our current situation. Instead of denigrating the older generations, we can interview them, we can learn from them. Instead of the older generations go off to enjoy their “golden years”, they can be writing their ethical wills to us young-ups:) We all have something to give to those younger than us, we all have important battle scars to share with those who may not have to suffer the same fates as we have if they can learn from us. Watching how the older generation “ties and unties their shoelaces” is the way to learn what the next right action to take is and how to take this action. There are many people who teach the next generation the wrong ways to follow and heed the “word of God” with their ignoring the lessons from the destruction of the two Temples in Jerusalem and the exile of Jews from Israel for 1900 years, there are many people who want to bastardize the teachings of Jesus with their bullshit ‘prosperity gospel’, there are too many people teaching an Islam that rather than seek peace wants to make war, wants to send their young into certain death. We, the people, of a certain age, we, the people who are the descendants of the older generation have to reclaim our rightful place. We are obligated to call a halt to the lies, an end to the senseless hatred, sound the shofar which proclaims freedom and lead everyone we can across the Red Sea out of mendacity and greed, spiritual death and degrading the wisdom of our elders.

My recovery is based on being an apprentice and a journeyman. I am, by no stretch of the imagination, an expert and I am pretty good at learning. I learned how to be a thief and I learned how to be a decent human being. I have thought about the ways of my ancestors as examples of how to be in the world as a mensch. I have watched my teaches “tie their shoelaces” in order to know how to teach and preach, I have also taught many people how to find the ‘niggun’ of their soul and sing the melody, the words that are in the core of their being out loud and for all to hear and learn from. I have been engaged in learning with people for most of my life and in the past 35+ I have been learning good things. I am not needing to push myself on anyone and I don’t shrink from speaking truth to power. I have made the choice to continue being an apprentice and being a master in my area of living. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Living Rabbi Heschel's Teachings - A Daily Path of Spiritual Growing

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 257

“There is no human being who does not carry a treasure in his soul; a moment of insight, a memory of love, a dream of excellence, a call to worship.” (Insecurity of Freedom pg. 84).

Today, and everyday, we wake up to a new order, a new way of being, a new awareness because of our experiences of yesterday, because we are able to synthesize and incorporate our life’s experiences a little more each day. The decision by Joe Biden to “pass the torch” in the middle of an election season is one of the proofs of Rabbi Heschel’s words above. He had “a moment of insight, a call to worship” and found that it was time for him to let go and let God, as we say in the program of Alcoholics Anonymous. It is heroic to take the actions of our worship and our faith, our insights and our dreams and Joe Biden is a hero.

We all have the same heroic tendencies and calls within us, we are so gobsmacked by someone responding to “a call to worship” because it is done so rarely. We are so awed by people who follow through on “a moment of insight” that helps another human being without it being about them because it is such a rarity. We are angry and jealous when someone speaks from the “treasure in his soul” because we are so afraid to. All of these ways of being noted above are open and available to all of us-yet the vast majority of us refuse to take advantage of them, use them and, instead, go along with the societal norms and the deceptions of the selfish, narcissistic ‘leaders’ who want complete control and all the wealth.

While this way of being is ‘understandable’ in the young-after all “youth is wasted on the young” as the song says- for those of us in the older generation to continue to speak these lies to ourselves and teach them to our young is criminal! We people of experience and age, of having lived through the myriad of horrors that “societal norms” and deceptions by another(s) as well as self-deception have caused, have to be the ones who teach our children of the “treasure in his soul” that we ignored for so long, maybe even up to today. We, the ‘old folks’ are being called to share our “moment of insight” with our children and grandchildren, with the college students and the babies, with the inheritors of our businesses and positions, because we have the perspective they can never have. We have to see the younger generations as gifts and extenders of our work, our love, our insights, our treasures, not competitors.

To do this, to offer and give away the “treasure in his soul” that we all carry, we have to acknowledge our treasure to ourselves. All of us, young and old, have to accept that we are more than our deeds, more than our physical beings and rise up to meet the “treasure in his soul” and follow the path it leads us on. We are all needed, no matter what our age, race, gender, ethnicity, faith, etc. and the “treasure in his soul” is unique to each and every human being. We are being called upon to live our “treasure” out loud and, in certain times, very loudly. Rabbi Heschel lived the “treasure in his soul” very loudly both in his writings and his actions. So did Rev. King, LBJ, the Kennedy brothers, the Berrigan brothers and so many more of my youth. My father did as well, even though he didn’t make money off of “the treasure in his soul”, he shared it with his children, his family, his friends and all those around him. The “treasure in his soul” is, of course, the unique spark of the divine, the kernel of higher consciousness that is unique to an individual, and this is what we are being called to add to the world. Those of us of ‘a certain age’ have to share with the younger generations the pitfalls, the traps of living the “treasure” out loud-the scorn that Don Quixote sings about as well as the joy from knowing we are following our soul’s script and living authentically and in line with the divine/responding to the call of the universe.

“A call to worship” is essential to living well and to giving away what we know. We need to hear from our higher self, listen to our intuition, receive the strength from a higher power often in order to overcome the selfishness and greed that courses through the veins of human beings. We need to engage in “worship” so we are able to admit our errors to ourselves and another(s), so we can appreciate our ‘victories’ and not gloat about them, so we can hear the next right action to take for the betterment of our world, our community, our families and our self. Without engaging in “a call to worship” we will never recall “a memory of love” that has sustained us, we will not be able to appreciate and use the moments of solitude to meet God, engage with the self we are created to be and know we are loved by an the eternal love of the universe. Sharing this “memory of love” is crucial for the spiritual health and growth of the younger generations. We have the opportunity to not just pass down our material wealth, we have the opportunity and, I believe, the duty to pass down our spiritual wealth, our spiritual journeys, our spiritual growth. After all, only through our spiritual growth and having our souls direct our brains can we achieve even a part of our “dream of excellence”.

This teaching is what propels me to keep writing this blog, to keep passing on what I know and how to apply ‘ancient’ wisdom to today’s world. There is “nothing new under the sun” and our challenge is to apply the wisdom and the lessons of antiquity to mitigate the dangers, the horrors and the destructions that happened then and up to today. I know to some I sound like “chicken little” and to others “a broken record” and I am sad for this. I know my delivery is not for everyone and I work hard to “speak to people in the way he/she/they can understand”. Most of all, I love sharing the “treasure” in my soul with another human being. I love living in the “memory of love” each day because this memory is alive and well in my relationships with the people around me. I am humbled by the many times each day I experience a  “moment of insight” because I respond to “ a call to worship”. I am grateful beyond measure for the ability to “dream of excellence” and the power to carry at least of a part of it out. I am blessed beyond words, certainly beyond my deserving, and I know the only way to repay these gifts is to pay it forward. I hope you do also. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Living Into Rabbi Heschel's Teachings - A Daily Path of Spiritual Growth

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 256

“This, then is a most urgent problem: How to convey the inexpressible legacy, the moments of insight, how to invoke unconditional commitment to justice and compassion, a sensitivity to the stillness of the holy, attachment to sacred words.” (Insecurity of Freedom pls 83,84)

Continuing to engage in responding to “a most urgent problem”, before we seek the “how”, we have to first understand and accept what an “unconditional commitment to justice and compassion” and “the stillness of the holy, attachment to sacred words” are. “Unconditional” is defined as “not subject to any conditions” and synonyms are: “wholehearted, complete, unreserved, full, etc”. “Commitment”, as we have defined earlier comes from the Latin meaning to “join, entrust”, English defines it as a “pledge or undertaking” and Hebrew uses a word that also can mean obligated. Justice is defined  and demonstrated in the Bible in many different ways and compassion is demonstrated throughout the Bible, beginning with God’s compassion towards Cain after Cain killed his brother, or the better part of himself, as a friend and teacher taught me this week-depending on how one interprets this story and continues throughout the Bible. Caring for the stranger, the poor, the needy; making sure Judges are not blinded by bribes and carry out “righteous judgment” and we constantly are “pursuing righteousness” are foundational to our system of laws-biblically and in democratic countries. “Stillness” of course means “not moving or making a sound”, “deep silence and calm”, etc. “Invoke” comes from the Latin meaning “to call upon”, the Hebrew is to request” and the English is “to call for earnestly” among others.

Using the different definitions, now we can begin our search for “how to invoke…” We begin with asking ourselves to end our hidden agendas, we make a decision to be transparent with the people around us, we adopt a “what you see is what you get” modus operandi. We no longer talk in riddles and we call upon ourselves to live in truth and openness. We call upon those we love and show them our inner life, asking for their help to put our inner life into better shape, to know us in our core, and, of course, to see all of us and love us with our flaws and wholeness. The first step in the “how to” is to call upon ourselves in truth and call out to one another in truth and need.

The second step is rise above the societal bullshit of ‘everything is conditional’, ‘it depends’. In order to “how to…” we have to let go of our preconceived conditions, to release our fears of acceptance and follow the example of Abraham when he was told “Go to/for yourself, leave your land, your relatives and your father’s house to a land I will show you.”(Gen:12:1). We have to leave the expectations of ‘tit for tat’, of reward and punishment, we have to “let go completely” of our old ideas and be wholehearted in our calling upon our selves and one another to engage in the commitments that are the solution to the different “most urgent” problems facing us. We cannot be in any solution when we ‘hedge our bets’, we have to be “all in” with reckless abandon because the people who want to pervert justice, deny compassion are “all in” for their quest for power, for dominion, for rule and for themselves.

Rabbi Heschel is calling out to us to truly “join with” our Higher Consciousness, Power Greater than Ourselves, the Ineffable One, the Creative Energy of the Universe to bring about justice that is true and certain, that is not determined by the status or wealth of the defendant, that there truly is “one law for the stranger and the citizen alike” (Ex: 12:49). We have to rise above our baser nature for survival, for power, for wealth, for fitting in and make a decision to belong to the goodness of the Universe, to constantly rise above our more negative tendencies. The freedom of another and of ourselves depends on our standing for what is just, what is true, rather than standing with the liars and charlatans, with the corrupt priests and rulers/authoritarians. We can see throughout history what happens when the ‘religious’ become so criminal and deceptive, when the ‘ruling’ party is interested in their wealth and their power, countries collapse into chaos, the rule of law is forsaken, justice is laughed at, the Temple is destroyed (twice) and the ‘religious’ blame everyone else because they are incapable of being responsible.

The words above are meant for us to hear, see and understand our obligation. “This, then, is a most urgent problem” is for all of us to solve, all of us to find and be part of the solution otherwise we are part of the problem. It doesn’t matter if it is MAGA lies of Trump, the Council for National Policy, Ginni Thomas or Paul Weyrich, Ken Peters of Patriot Church- they are all rejoicing over the subjugation of women, the rising tide of “white power” being installed for good in our country, for the democratic norms to be replaced by the mendacity and bastardization of Christ’s words and deeds. We, the people have to rise up and join with Rev William Barber, Steve Schmidt, Russell Moore, Rabbi Sharon Brous, Jamie Raskin, Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, Gretchen Whitmer, et al who are doing everything they can to “invoke unconditional commitment to justice and compassion”. They need help and we must help them to ensure that our children enjoy the same freedoms we have, our grandchildren grow up without fear of being discriminated against because they are Jewish, Muslim, Asian, Latino, Black, LGBTQ, etc. We, the people, are being called upon to tell the stories of freedom and the fight to keep it and expand it that our ancestors went through and we have gone through so the younger generation doesn’t buy into the lies of the MAGA’s, the Trumps/Vances, etc.

I know what it is like to have an “unconditional commitment to justice and compassion” and what it is like to pretend to have one. I have lived both and, while the former is tougher to live, it doesn’t give me everything I desire and want-it is a far better way of living than the latter! My father, my aunts and uncles grew up with an “unconditional commitment…” because this is the way my grandfather lived. He was poor and he got by financially, spiritually and morally he was the richest guy in town because everyone had a good word to say about him and he did not deny justice and compassion to anyone-even those who hurt him, took advantage of him. I know my pretending led to my criminality and alcoholism and they led to my pretending. In these last 35+ years, my commitment is true and complete, I experience being “called upon” and I know I am obligated to give 100% to being just and compassionate even to those who do not reciprocate. I have learned that my personal hurts mean much less than the call of “this most urgent problem”-saving a life, saving our freedoms, living into and being the “divine need” I was created to serve. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Living into Rabbi Heschel's Teachings - A Daily Path for Growing our Souls

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 255

“This, then is a most urgent problem: How to convey the inexpressible legacy, the moments of insight, how to invoke unconditional commitment to justice and compassion, a sensitivity to the stillness of the holy, attachment to sacred words.” (Insecurity of Freedom pls 83,84)

“Convey” comes from the Latin meaning “way together”, and the English definitions include: “carry to a place, communicate, make an idea understandable”. Rabbi Heschel’s question above, “how to convey…the moments of insight” is a very important one for all of us. The question assumes we all have “moments of insight”, we all know what the next right thing to do is, we all have a sense of what our Higher Consciousness is telling us, what need we are created to fill, what God wants from us, etc. This means it takes a great deal of inner negativity to draw ourselves away from these “moments of insight”, it is not the ‘easier softer way’ to be negative, it actually goes against our very nature-as I hear Rabbi Heschel calling out to us this morning!

No one is devoid of “moments of insight” and many of us are not willing to convey them from our souls, our guts to our brains. Society seems more interested in conveying the negativity of our minds to the world and denying, decrying those who share and look for a “way together” through their “moments of insight”. Railing against those wanting to join with everyone else’s “moments of insight” to create the mosaic, the amazing quilt called living together in tolerance, in a harmony that brings together the cacophony of each person’s unique melody of their soul. These naysayers are the “populists” of our time, they are against “the elites” even though they graduated from every ‘elite’ institution they want to ban, even though they are the ones with money and are catering to the rich and powerful, even though they want to have complete authority over women’s bodies, minds, over those low-life Jews, Muslims, etc, those criminals who were not born here-even though all of their ancestors were immigrants, legal and illegal. They have made a cottage industry of denying their “moments of insight” and proclaiming their negativity and con games are the ‘real’ “moments of insight”!

While it is easy to blame the populist politicians, we have to look at our institutions, communities of faith, and our families to see what it is that gives these lying deceivers such popularity and a fairly huge following. In our institutions and businesses we see Boards of Directors who are interested in satisfying their shareholders, their stakeholders. In for-profit organizations, if it helps the bottom line, that is all that matters-who cares about the workers, the environment, etc. In non-profit organizations, the Boards of Directors care about how they look to the outside world, demand to follow the “evidence-based” solutions rather than color outside the lines-even though most non-profits were created by people coloring outside the lines. Yet, just like with businesses, non-profit institutions get corrupted by people who are unwilling to find a “way together”, to join in the “moments of insight of those who are being served, doing the work, and/or created the project. Optics is more important than essence for many businesses and non-profits. How sad!

In our communities of faith, we are witnessing the same difficulty of communicating true “moments of insight” and instead we are deluged by simplistic, stupid one-way solutions. “Follow me, I have the answer and all you need to do is believe”, this and other such bullshit has turned many away from faith communities which is the very place where we should be learning how to discern what are “moments of insight” and what are mental gymnastics. For those who stay in these communities, the hubris of clergy, governing bodies, elders, etc that they alone know what God wants, they alone know the One-Way to be is blasphemy! It is saying they are God themselves. What passes as Judaism, Christianity, Islam is so far from the foundational texts and are purposeful mis-understandings of what the people closest to the beginning knew-there are a myriad of ways to understand these texts and it is our job to find the different ‘faces’ that are appropriate for this moment, for this instance. Nowhere does Christ say: hate the immigrant, nowhere does Moses say: it is okay to pervert justice for the ‘greater good’, nowhere does Mohammed say: a Muslim should go against the laws of the land of their residence. Yet, the charlatans and self-declared ‘prophets of doom’ preach these and other such lies! It is way past time to end our reliance on deceit and ‘populism’, it is way past time to end our joy in kicking people when they are down, it is way past time to stop making someone else bad so we can feel good, feel superior.
We have to end our veneration of the strong, the worshiping of the Rebels of the Confederacy, the pity for the Jan 6 rioters who stormed the Capital, who assaulted Police Officers, etc. We have to end our genuflecting at the feet of Navarro, Bannon, Trump, Vance, et al. We have to end our going along with Mike Johnson being a ‘good christian man’ because they are all LIARS!

We, the people, have to listen to the “moments of insight” from our souls that are struggling to get through to our brains. We are in need of seeing Physicians of the Soul to help our sight get better, to enable our souls to speak loud enough for our brains to hear and to give our spiritual insights veto power over the ‘evil thoughts’ of our brains. We have the power to do this within us, we just have to unlock it, we have to nurture it and we have to live it. I know this to be true as I was a con man and a thief, I ruined my life and everyone else’s around me. I only gave heed to my brain until December of 1986-when I was arrested for the last time. My brain was struck silent in a jail cell and I heard a call in my soul that I repeated out loud-“God was trying to tell me something and I had to sit here and figure it out.” This encounter with this “moment of insight” and my ability to convey it to another human being and to myself made me who I am today. It has propelled me to never think I am the smartest in the room, to find a “way together” with another person, a group of people forward in our quest to help an individual heal the spiritual malady they are suffering from. It has kept me together when my world has fragmented, it has made me never suffer from despair and always seek new ways of seeing what is going on. It has allowed me to ask the question: “What is the question this experience is the answer to” so I see each experience as answers/solutions and I just have to find the right questions/problems that fit these solutions. I am constantly seeking to improve my daily living, to listen more carefully to my spiritual awakenings each day and to better “convey the moments of insight” I experience. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Living into Rabbi Heschel's Teachings - A Daily Path of Spiritual Growing

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 254

“This, then is a most urgent problem: How to convey the inexpressible legacy, the moments of insight, how to invoke unconditional commitment to justice and compassion, a sensitivity to the stillness of the holy, attachment to sacred words.” (Insecurity of Freedom pls 83,84)

The questions Rabbi Heschel asks above have been at the core of human existence since the days of Adam and Eve, or at least Cain and Abel. Given that these words were written and spoken some 60+ years ago, did our parents generation find a solution to “this, then most urgent problem”? Many did as we witnessed the support of Civil Rights, Voting Rights, Rev. King, Bobby Kennedy, the protests against the Vietnam War, etc. the real issue is how we, of this generation of elders, may have not! We became obsessed and focused on “success” and “generating generational wealth”, and raised our children with either privilege or poverty as birthrights. We built more and more gated communities to keep ‘those people, the riffraff’ out of our ‘pristine neighborhoods. We tried to perfect the two-tiered justice system, and other such separations, we forgot the lessons of the previous generation after they saw the horrors in the aftermath of the Nazis and the destruction of Europe by both the Axis and Allies.

Across the globe we are witnessing the replaying of Moses and Pharaoh, arguing as to whether Pharaoh will heed “Thus says God, Let My People GO!!, or will Pharaoh continue to seduce the people themselves into believing they are better off under his/her thumb than being free. “How to convey the inexpressible legacy” of desire to be free, the actual leaving of slavery-inner and outer- and the long road ahead to create an environment of freedom for all, to “proclaim freedom throughout the land and to all its inhabitants therein” as we are taught in Leviticus 25:10. We read this each year in the weekly Torah readings not because we don’t know the story, rather precisely because we know the story, we need to live the story out loud, we need to find ways to express this “Inexpressible legacy” of freedom for all, express the “inexpressible legacy” of the end of slavery in Egypt, in America some 3100+ years after the Jews left Egypt! What we are finding is there are many people who want to keep the myriad of “inexpressible legacies” quiet, they are in desperate need of denying the exodus from Egypt, denying the right of Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists to practice their faith (which has happened off and on throughout history), and the need to deny truth, deny the “unalienable rights…to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” that our Declaration of Independence calls for. Like some in the State of Israel, some here have said the Declaration Of Independence means nothing and only the ‘christian nationalists’, the ‘real jews’, ‘the true believers in Islam’ know who should really have those rights and who should not-according to these ‘religious fanatics’, these people wanting their version of what their particular ‘religious law’ says to be the law of the land for one and and all. Rather than “proclaim liberty/freedom” they want to proclaim adherence and slavery and, unfortunately, because they waive the false flag of ‘we will let YOU keep your money’ too many people are selling themselves and the rest of us down the river.

We have seen this movie before, many times throughout history and, we seem incapable of learning the lessons of our legacies with tyrannies, with despots, with authoritarians, etc. We seem to be incapable of truly living into the legacy of Paul Revere, the Adams Brothers, Moses, Aaron, the Israelites, Joshua, Caleb, the Prophets, Jesus, Mohammed, Lincoln, Roosevelts(both of them), Kennedy, Johnson, G.W. Bush, McCain, etc who have found the ways to speak truth to power and listen to truth when they had power. We have watched people ignore this “inexpressible legacy” in favor of ‘winning’, in favor of ‘making a lot of money’, in favor of enslaving/blaming someone else. We are seeing the results of the poor jobs some of the elders of this generation have done in expressing the legacy of freedom, the legacy of unalienable rights, the legacy of democracy and we are seeing the results of those of the current generation who are using the legacies for their own power, for their own greed, in order to be taskmasters, slave owners, Pharaohs! This is one of the problems that have been with us for time immemorial; using the legacies of goodness, justice, compassion, truth, for one’s own benefit, as ‘covers’ for the real agenda which is power, wealth and control. When we “convey the inexpressible legacy”, we have to be careful and aware of how people receive it, we have to ensure, to whatever extent possible, that they do not use the Goebbels method of accusing someone else of what they themselves are doing. We have to ensure, to whatever extent possible, they are not proclaiming evil, good; wrongs, rights; slavery, freedom; etc. It is a hard task and it is our task, we are seeing the fruits of inaction in these ways today as a criminal is immune from his crimes, a party is buying into ‘christian nationalism’ that has the opposite principles of Christ, and a populace who believe these selfish, power-hungry, despots will give them more freedom to..hate, to feel superior to those Jews, Blacks, Muslims, Asians, Hispanics? We, the people, have to rise up, as the Founding Fathers did, as Paul Revere’s Ride did and “PROCLAIM FREEDOM THROUGHOUT THE LAND AND TO ALL ITS INHABITANTS THEREIN!”

I am writing this because the words above stir me to think of the ways I have and have not expressed the “inexpressible legacy” to family, friends, people around me, congregants, and the world. I know I am a small voice with a small platform and I know if I can light a fire in someone else’s belly, as Jeremiah says” then we can begin to effect change. My father did not have enough time to express the “inexpressible” to me and, I hear him speaking it to me daily, I never met nor learned directly from Rabbi Heschel and I hear him expressing the inexpressible to me and everyone who studies with him, I have heard great teachers like Rabbi Harold Shulweis and he, along with Rabbi Ed Feinstein, Father Greg Boyle, John Pavlovitz, Dr. Lisa Miller, Rev Mark E Whitlock have ignited a fire within me that is never quenched nor drowned out. This fire propels me to be bombastic if that’s what it takes, to keep pounding the pulpit until people realize the rank manipulations that the ‘good people’ are pulling, until those who buy into the subterfuge of both the left and the right are able to “lift up their eyes and see” truth, justice, compassion, etc. Human beings need love not absolute control, we need companionship not ass-kissers, we need truth not the lies that make us feel good, we need freedom, not the subtle chains of slavery being promoted.  I pray we all begin/continue to express the “inexpressible legacy” of our families, our faith, our beliefs, our countries, etc. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Living into Rabbi Heschel's Teachings - A Daily Path for Growing our Spiritual Life

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 253

“It is easy to speak about the things we are committed to; it is hard to communicate; it is hard to communicate the commitment itself. It is easy to convey the resentments we harbor it is hard to communicate the praise, the worship, the sense of the ineffable.” (Insecurity of Freedom pg. 83)

The word “resentment” comes from the French with the original meaning being “to experience an emotion or sensation”,  “to feel deeply”, and only in English did it become “feeling aggrieved by”. With these widely different definitions, Rabbi Heschel’s second sentence above is pregnant with meanings and eye-opening possibilities. It is safe to assume that “it is easy to convey the resentments we harbor” is speaking to the feeling of being aggrieved. Feeling bitterness and or indignation towards someone, some group, some idea, is a cottage industry all across the Globe. Hitler used it well, as did Stalin and Putin is a re-incarnation of the two. Le Pen, Orban, Erdogan, MBS, Netanyahu, Trump, Vance, Johnson feed off of their resentments and stir up the crowds to share their resentments as a means of power seeking and power grabbing. Listening to the political rhetoric in this country is a one-stop shopping spree of bitterness and indignation with no end in sight. What is so amazing about many of these shit-stirrers is they are using God, Jesus, Mohammed, Moses, to bolster their false claims and their indignation, resentments, bitterness and feelings of being aggrieved! How sad, how seriously dangerous and what a desecration of God’s name, of the teachings of so many spiritual guides and teachers.

In the New York Times on July 16, 2024, there was a two page article about how children are cutting off their parents because they are “toxic”. It is another cottage industry where therapists charge these adult children to tell them that the problems in their lives all stem from ‘abusive’ ‘traumatic’ childhood experiences. This is not to say that there is not abusive situations and childhood itself, growing into and out of adolescence is traumatic, it is questionable to this writer, and I believe it would be to Rabbi Heschel, that all of this stems from bad parenting. I know people who were treated horribly by their parents and, in their recovery, in their spiritual journey, find ways to heal the rifts, to take their responsibility and allow their parents and siblings to take theirs. Yet, blaming the parents has been a therapeutic tool for some time now and it seems to be reaching a crescendo. While no parent is perfect, isn’t it important to give the benefit of the doubt to our parents who did not kill us, who fed us, who raised us and who loved us to the best of their ability? “Honor your mother and father” is not in the 10 sayings/commandments because it is a natural state, yet, isn’t this the whole point of life- to go beyond our limitations and boundaries to enhance, nurture the spiritual growth of ourselves and another(s) which is M.Scott Peck’s definition of love? I pray there is a reconciliation as we end the words of the prophet Malachi with: “He (Elijah) will reconcile parents with children and children with parents so there is not total destruction”. We all need to own our parts and stop these “resentments” from blinding us to the whole story, to the good and the not good we have done as children and parents. Owning up to our part and seeking forgiveness, reconnection is how we stave off the destructions that so many people who “feel aggrieved” are trying to bring about, be it the destruction of Jews, of Muslims, of Democracy, of kindness and goodness-we all have a part in making the world whole, either again or for the first time-depending one ones’ belief

If we, however, use the original definitions, then it isn’t so “hard to communicate the praise, the worship, the sense of the ineffable.” Of course it is as we have seen throughout the ages-religion is “the opiate of the masses” and religious rivalries have caused more wars in the history of humanity than any other. Even WWII there were religious overtones to it, hence the Catholic Church did not do everything they could have to stop the extermination of 6 million Jews, and so many others, ie. Gypsy’s, Gays, resistance fighters, etc. In America, no one wanted to go to war “to save the Jews”, an idea promoted by the Christian Nationalists. Even with using the original meanings, “to experience an emotion or sensation”, “to feel deeply”, it is difficult for most human beings to express these experiences. How many times do we get tongue-tied when trying to express the love and joy we have just because we are part of a family, because the person who is our partner makes our life better each day-just by being who they are? How often do we realize how much better a room is because ‘so and so’ just walked in?  What stops us from communicating “the praise”, “the worship”, “the sense of the ineffable”? It is our fear of how that will change us, how we will lose our ‘edge’, naysaying is much safer and having resentments means I don’t have to own my shit and I can blame another. “Praise, worship, the sense of the ineffable” all come to life us up, they give us more awareness and more sharpness, we have a clearer vision and ‘edge’ because we are more comfortable with what we know and never have to prove to another because we Know it in our bones, in our kishkas, in our guts. Changing the ways we encounter the world doesn’t mean we are stupid, it doesn't mean we are naive, it means we want to see more of the story, we are seeking truth and looking at our lives and life itself through a myriad of prisms and making decisions based in reality and based in kindness, based in justice, righteousness, love, compassion and cooperation. We are able to seek out the visions of another(s) because we know we are all pushing/pulling in the same direction-toward a greater sense of the ineffable.

I have lived both sides of this coin of resentment. Living the “feeling aggrieved” has always left me empty, miserable and alone/lonely. Nothing good has come from this state except it has given me the awareness of my need to end my ‘poor me’ attitude. I felt aggrieved when my father died and rode it for over 20 years. I felt aggrieved at my mother’s inability to see me for who I am and I rode that for the same 20+ years. In my recovery, I left that side of resentment, sometimes quickly and sometimes slowly. Resentments have not been the long-lasting fuel of my life anymore-I feel them and I let them go much quicker, thank God and I do this through “Praise, Worship, the Sense of the Ineffable”. I wake up with and in gratitude, I sit down to write this blog with a joy and excitement of what I am going to learn today and I send out “good vibrations” “deep feelings” of being blessed and being loved. I forgave my mother for her shortcomings a long time ago and they don’t run my life anymore, my father’s death still stings as I would love to have one more talk with him and I hear him each day speaking to me, with joy and with wisdom. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark