Awareness of our inability, unwillingness to accept a "spiritual regimen" results in being "unfree" - Year 4 Day 343

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 4 Day 343

“Not being a hibernating animal, man cannot live by what he stores away. He may have a full memory and an empty soul. Unfree men are horrified by the suggestion of accepting a spiritual regimen. Associating inner control with external tyranny, they would rather suffer than be subjected to spiritual authority.” (Thunder in the Soul pg. 76)

While I am not a fan of Ecclesiastes, reading the first sentence, thinking about the times we are in and have been in almost from the beginning of time, it really is all “mist”, there is nothing substantial that “he stores away” and We the People keep attempting to defy this truth, to prove it wrong, to ‘be the ONE who has it all and takes it with us’? Even having “a full memory” is an exercise in mendacity for the “unfree men” because what they remember is every slight, every resentment, every euphoric recall moment and not the helping hands, the truth of the moments they remember, and turning their inner need to be perfect on another to blame someone else for their predicaments, their errors, their imperfections.

Over the years, when speaking to people about a “spiritual solution”, I cannot count the number of times people recoiled from this suggestion, denied needing a spiritual solution, believed a spiritual solution was not “evidenced-based”, “not scientific”, and not for them. Instead, they would rather wallow in their “quiet desperation” as Thoreau calls the predicament of most people and blame the doctors, their family, especially their mothers, and everyone else they can find. Taking personal responsibility for “unfree men” is tantamount to suicide! In my years as the Rabbi of Beit T’Shuvah and then when I was one of the Rabbis there, the number of “unfree men” and women I met is astounding. Not just the “addicts” coming for treatment, their parents, their siblings, their friends, people in the community, our board members, some of the rich and famous, etc-in other words, “unfree men” in the context we find in the quote above, can pertain, can describe any and all of us!

The emptiness of the soul of our governmental leadership is saddening, infuriating, it leads to the cruelty, harshness, mendacity that pours out of the mouth of ‘these fine christian, catholic, jewish folk’. What is even worse, however, is the “empty soul” of enough of We the People still is turning our power, our morality, our decency, our freedoms over to these assholes, these “unfree men” who then exercise an “external tyranny” upon all of us. Because both leaders and their followers “are horrified by the suggestion of accepting a spiritual regimen” that is true, that follows, lives into the teachings of Christ, of Moses, of the prophets, of the Bible, they have made up a FALSE SPIRITUALITY and too many of We the People are falling for it, believing that cruelty, that being a slave, that maintaining the lie that ‘I can have it all’ and ‘the one with the most wins’, even people who don’t need the help of the government to survive bow down to the Pharaoh in charge, believe they can control the autocrat, they can manipulate the narcissist. HA HA, this has never been the case and never will be.

Knowing what it is like to live with an empty soul, I am at wits end to understand how and why we the people would willingly go back to Egypt, happily march to the tune of the fuhrer in charge, continue to “whistle a happy tune” rather than seek spiritual growth, engage in our purpose with passion and fervor, and maintain a hold on, a learning of, a leaning into the truth of this moment, of every moment. I see this in so many people, most of whom believe their imperfections make them defective, who believe ‘if you really know my faults, my imperfections you won’t want anything to do with me’, who are in the psychic pain of inner loneliness, inner turmoil, and it is saddening to me. Knowing that there’s a solution, knowing that this solution is time-tested, evidenced-based, valid and true, and watching the “unfree men” and women walk through life in a daze, in a drunken stupor of seeking fame, fortune, ‘a name for themselves’, is frustrating, infuriating, and leaves me bewildered.

At issue, of course, is not only “they would rather suffer than be subject to spiritual authority”, at issue is the suffering “unfree” people inflict on the people around them, on the world writ large. We see this with Trump’s idiotic tariffs, we see this with the addict who is stealing money, trust, love, from their families, from strangers-like I did- and we see this with the destructive ruination of the lies and self-deceptions we the people engage in. This is also true for the ‘normal people’ who are “unfree”-remember Rabbi Heschel wasn’t writing for addicts, he wrote for all of We the People. I am calling out the ‘good folk’ who are “unfree” and either unaware of being a slave or a Pharaoh, who believe they are the only ones with a hold on the ‘truth’, who have harmed the people who helped them, who don’t give a damn for anyone but themselves. Accept a Spiritual Solution, so no one else has to die from spiritual malnutrition!

Action Steps:

1. Do a spiritual inventory and see where you are empty or low on spiritual fuel

2) Comprise a spiritual regimen that helps you be freer today than yesterday

3) Wean yourself off of your dependence on the Pharaoh you still worship

4) Make your amends to the people you have harmed because of your suffering

These are some steps to help all of us be FREE-

God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Transforming the randomness of life into a "complete pattern" of good living - Year 4 Day 342

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 4 Day 342

“What constitutes the Jewish form of living is not so much the performance of single good deeds, the taking of a step now and then, as the pursuit of a way, being on the way; not so much the acts of fulfilling as the state of being committed to the task, of belonging to an order in which single deeds, aggregates of religious feeling, sporadic sentiments, moral episodes become parts of a complete pattern.”

Obsessiveness can be, an often is, seen as a good thing because of one’s obsession to ‘get it right’, to ‘learn all about it’, to ‘be the best in the field’, we, the people learn more about a subject, delve deeper into the ‘mysteries of life’, supposedly, and we make a good living from our obsessiveness. Look at Zuckerberg, Bezos, Gates, Jobs, et al and we see the amazing fortunes that tunnel vision, obsessive acting can make for some of us. There are many people who apply their obsessive nature to religious actions as well. They are so obsessive about “getting it right” that often the idea of “the pursuit of a way, being on the way” often escapes us.

Over the years, I have watched how these ‘good Jews’ proclaim their righteousness because of all “acts of fulfilling” they accomplish, even when doing so accosts other people, disrespects others’ practices, invades another Rabbi’s domain. As I read the words above I call BULLSHIT on this idea, I call BULLSHIT that these ‘frumma yidlach’ (religious Jews) are the ‘true saviors of Judaism’. It is important to be engaged in the “single deeds”, it is important to take “a step”, it is important to be aware of what one is doing-full stop. What is not important, in my opinion, is to do it as an assignment, to do it to get a ‘good grade’! In other places Rabbi Heschel teaches us that prayer is to move us, to impact our spiritual life as well as our physical actions, that prayer, any deed, that doesn’t improve our humanity is a wasted deed/prayer. Let’s stop buying the LIES of the ‘frumma yidlach’ and start seeing ourselves as part of the fabric that makes up this world, see our worth and the divine need we are to fulfill, engage our spiritual life, our soul and living into the life we are created to build/fulfill.

We the People do this by “being on the way”, knowing that becoming is more important than arriving, that the destination is not the prize, the journey is. Acknowledging that we the people will never get there is the first step to ending the checklist, the first step in realizing we don’t have to keep the unrealistic goals and be subjected to ridicule because we ‘haven’t made it there yet’. When another Jew(or non-Jew) tries to demean me because of my practice, my “way” of “belonging to an order”, I usually thank them for their opinion and move on-knowing they are so ignorant about “the path” they don’t even realize what is normally called “the Law” in Hebrew the word is Halacha which means the walk, the way, the path. Hence, anyone telling me or you that there is only one way to be “on the way”, to walk the path, is LYING for their own power and control, for their own need for certainty and in this way they are repeating the ways of the Pharaoh in Egypt, they are imitating the Egyptian Taskmasters, they are buying the current incarnation of Goebbels’ lies, they are bowing down to Baal- the false god of the moment.

In my pursuit of a life well-lived, I have relied on the teachings of those who have gone before me to inform me, not to shape me. The beauty of “being on the way” is that we the people get to be shaped by the spiritual maturation of “the way”, We the People get to shape our lives according to the call of the Voice on Sinai and not the voice of idolatry. We the People are being called upon today to show up and stop making excuses for our errors, to stop being defensive and convince another(s) and ourselves that we had a good reason for screwing up rather than admit “OOPS I MADE A MISTAKE”. The words and idea above are coming to teach us that commitment to “a complete pattern” of living well is what Judaism truly calls for, that to say “I am a good Jew because I keep kosher”, talking aobuu the food they eat, while supporting the killing of Renee Good, supporting the horrific ways “the stranger” is being treated here and in Israel, is MISSING THE MARK in BIG WAYS!! To say “I am good Jew” because I go to Shul twice a day while I cheat people in business, while I take unfair advantage of the buyer, rather than follow the over 100 laws of Kosher money is MENDACITY IN ACTION.

“Being on the way” while knowing I won’t get there is the joy of my life. It has taught me to appreciate this moment, it has given me the perspective of seeing more of the picture, of knowing I am an important cog in God’s wheel and so are you, I am part of a chain of people that has sought to improve the world one grain of sand at a time, I have a responsibility to do the best I can in this moment, knowing my best is constantly changing, it is a dynamic experience rather than “this is the best” and I always have to compare myself to some idiotic standard I have erected.

I am instituting a new ending to my blog: A CALL to ACTION

1. Each morning write out your plan of “good deeds” that are part of or beginning of the “complete pattern” to make raise your spiritual life and outer living.

2. Check in during the day and in the evening to see how you have done

3. Take 5 minutes in the morning to connect with your higher consciousness/soul and breathe in the goodness that abounds.

4. Take 5 minutes each day to connect with your spiritual friend, lover, partner with or without words

God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Are you aware of the "constant danger" facing us from the refusal to seek guidance and be vigilant? Year 4 Day 341

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 4 Day 341

“With quiet sadness and rich with strenuous lessons of defeat, we learn today to understand that there are no extemporaneous solutions to perpetual problems; that the only safeguard against constant danger is constant vigilance, constant guidance. Such guidance, such vigilance is given to him who lives in the shadows of Sinai, whose weeks, days, hours are set in the rhythm of the Torah.” (Thunder in the Soul pg. 75)

Yesterday, outside the gates of our Sun City Development, one with 5000 homes, there were a group of us protesting ICE, protesting the cruelty of Kristi Noem, Stephen Miller, Tom Holman, Donald Trump, et al. It was interesting to me in that I canceled a bridge lesson to go to the protest, going to the protest is one of the ways I stay in “constant vigilance”, and there were so many us of ‘old folks’ remembering other protests we engaged in when we were in college and since then. At issue for We the People is our willful blindness to the “constant danger” that is around us, our ignorance of the truth of what is happening, the foolishness of “hyperindividualism” as David Brooks calls the ‘policies’ of the past 40+ years which “expanded individual choice but weakened the bonds between people.” Rather than seek the “constant guidance we all are in need of, our societal norm of believing we are the ‘smartest person in the room’ or need to act as if we are, has caused us to retreat to old worn-out cliches, keep the fight for and against slavery alive and be such ignoramus’ that even those fighting against slavery have no idea of the enslavement they are trying to impose on another!

The “guidance” Rabbi Heschel is speaking of has nothing to do with the rational side, (left) side of the brain, it has everything to do with the creative (right) side of the brain. It is the “guidance” of a part of ourselves that has no real definition nor any place in the brain or body that one can point to and say ‘this is it’. Only through our creativity can we seek, find, hear, listen and understand the “constant guidance” as well as the warnings about the “constant danger” we face in this moment, in every moment.

This “constant danger” begins with our major disease of self-deception, as Rabbi Heschel warns us over and over again. It continues to grow and flourish in the idiotic rationales provided by the purveyors of cruelty and evil through our desire for and conditioning of logic and ‘proof’. It is a “constant danger” we learn about in Genesis when the “Elohim” start to fuck beautiful young girls and take their agency away, as well as the agency of parents, etc. The ‘taking of what isn’t mine, just because I can’ is the breeding ground for our “constant danger”! This is the challenge for We the People to get the “guidance” to stop this path of life.

We the People are witnessing the unleashing of immense cruelty so that a few liars, ego-maniacs, xenophobic, hateful in their hearts, fearful ‘little men’ can retain power and not be held accountable for their actions. This is not just about Trump or Netanyahu, Miller or Ben G’Vir, it is about the societal attitudes, the failure of faith traditions to imbue We the People with the strength of spiritual maturity to rely on the “guidance” that is “given to him who lives in the shadows of Sinai”. Judaism, hence Christianity and Islam, began at Sinai, the Voice from Sinai is always reverberating in our souls, in our higher consciousness, and We the People have allowed ourselves to give into the rationales of societal norms, the lies and deceptions of the grifters, the bastardization of the 10 Commandments by the Preachers and the Rabbis, the Imams, the ministers, the Priests, AGAIN-just like in the days of the prophets!! WTF?!?!

Living “in the shadows of Sinai” is implied in all of Jewish prayers, in all of Jewish learnings, in all of the words of the prophets-everything comes from Sinai and we have never been the same since. Being commanded to “not murder”, not whore ourselves, not steal, not bear false witness, not covet what our neighbor has and want what we have is being commanded to go against the impulses we the people have-as evidenced by the ways of the ‘good christian folk, good jewish examples’ in our government and the friends, relatives of the THIEF IN CHIEF.  Knowing that we have to be on guard against these “constant dangers” is one of the hallmarks of spiritual maturity, the Dalai Lama once said he had to be on guard constantly to not allow his anger to overwhelm him!! The fact that Clergy of all faiths can stand up and support the cruelty of our time, the cruelty that has gone on forever, the cruelty of slavery, the cruelty of anti-semitism, the cruelty of xenophobia, is BEYOND MY COMPREHENSION!!

I live in the “shadows of Sinai” every day since my recovery began, somedays more and somedays less-yet I never leave these “shadows”. My life is based in and on the teachings of Moses, the prophets, the Talmud, and Rabbi Heschel, of course. Through all of these teachings, the Rabbis, guides I have attached myself to, I continue to seek and find the “constant guidance” to live a better life, to be one grain of sand better each day, to find the strength to stand up to the bullies on the Right and the bullies on the Left! Just because you are ‘on the right side of something’ doesn’t mean you can’t be a bully! My “vigilance” is constant and I miss things at times, I get lulled into a false sense of security, I believe when I should question and I question when I should believe at times, thankfully with the “constant guidance” I get from my inner life, my gut intuition, these times are less and less. Going to the protest was a response to the guidance I receive from Sinai, standing up for the poor and the needy, loving the stranger are three ways I continue to ACT ON THE GUIDANCE from the “shadows of Sinai”. How are you acting on the “constant guidance” the “shadows of Sinai” are giving you? God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Living into the sadness and richness of our lessons of defeat - Year 4 Day 340

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 4 Day 340

“With quiet sadness and rich with strenuous lessons of defeat, we learn today to understand that there are no extemporaneous solutions to perpetual problems; that the only safeguard against constant danger is constant vigilance, constant guidance. Such guidance, such vigilance is given to him who lives in the shadows of Sinai, whose weeks, days, hours are set in the rhythm of the Torah.” (Thunder in the Soul pg. 75)

Rabbi Heschel taught at the Union Theological Seminary, he was friends with Reinhold Niebuhr, Martin Luther King Jr. and the Berrigan Brothers, went to Rome to speak with Cardinal Bea and the Pope. In the passage above, from his book Man is Not Alone, he is speaking to Jews about Judaism so please do not understand this as a xenophobia, when speaking of Sinai and the Torah.

The opening sentence is so powerful, full of truths that are not contestable AND, today, too many of we the people are disbelieving these words. It seems there is a group of we the people who refuse to sit with their sadness much less be in quietude about it. No, they rather rage and yell, be mad not sad, and ignore the wealth they have gained from their “lessons of defeat”. Some of these people, of which I was one for quite a while, WAY TOO LONG, I might add, are incapable of being sad because we are afraid that sadness will break us, that the broken heart is a deficiency that we cannot let anyone else see because we are afraid we will have these vulnerabilities used against us, another human being will take advantage of us and our ‘weakness’ will be exploited. It is a horrific way to live, always worried about the person next to you, never knowing when ICE, both the governmental agency and the ICE in the veins of those who need to perpetrate evil by using vulnerabilities against another person, will strike.

Because the people who will not only not sit in sadness, they will also never admit “defeat”, and, instead blame everyone else, “you don’t understand, it’s not my fault”, etc are the excuses of people who will not only deny “defeat”, we/they refuse to become “rich with strenuous lessons of defeat”!! HOW STUPID!! I KNOW because I was also one of these people, belonging to the club that if I deny long enough, both another person and ME will believe the lie! Even worse, instead of accepting Einstein’s definition of insanity, I kept doing the same thing over and over again and truly believing the results would be different. Writing this is giving me the chills, I am in a state of disbelief that I could have been so spiritually immature, so emotionally bankrupt that neither sadness nor lessons of defeat could break through the iron wall I put up within me, the castle of high, thick walls I put around my soul, that every person who engages in the behaviors I did puts around their souls. The suffering I experienced and would not admit I perpetrated onto another(s) and this is one of the MAJOR CRIMES I committed in my days prior to my return to Judaism, prior to my recovering my true essence, prior to my recovery from alcoholism and criminality. All recovering people experience these types of crimes prior to our spiritual awakening, our surrender to the “quiet sadness and rich” “strenuous lessons of defeat”.

This is proving to be another experience where I hear the call of Rabbi Heschel and the call of the prophets, where I connect my prophetic inheritance with both the words above, the actions taken by Rabbi Heschel, by the prophets, and respectfully DISAGREE with “we learn today to understand that there are no extemporaneous solutions to perpetual problems”. It is so evident that We the People not only do not engage in this type of learning, enough of we the people believe the SNAKE OIL SALESMAN, aka TRUMP, who says “I can fix it all for you”, “I am your retribution and I will make it happen immediately” to elect this criminal, this grifter, and his band of THIEVES. After one year, he has been the “retribution” for the Jan 6th criminals, he has been the retribution against the very people who have stood with the U.S.A. since the 2nd World War, Europe, he has once again been the “retribution” for Vladimir Putin, helping him take more of Ukraine instead of supporting freedom in Ukraine. He has overseen higher prices, a worse economy because of his tariffs, he is suing his own government in order to get MORE money from We the People and he is treating the stranger with disdain, with hatred, and with death squads unless the stranger is a white christian, of course. Only “strangers” of color need to be killed, put into concentration camps and this horrific behavior is being sold by Miller, Noem, Holman as a “quick fix” to our economic problems, to the problem of “vermin”  and ‘those people who are infecting the blood of our people”! REALLY PEOPLE, WHAT THE FUCK!!

The problems we face in this moment are not new, they are as old as human history. I was not the first to abandon my morals, the first to be afraid of sadness, the first to not know how to handle the state of emergency I felt inside of my from the day of my father’s first heart attack and the fears of sadness, of shame, of being blamed for whatever was wrong. All of these factors and more drove me to deny the “strenuous lessons of defeat” because admitting “defeat” made me a laughing stock, a fool to be pitied, a weak suck. My father tried to explain how truth would set me free and I was too young to understand the nuances of what my father was trying to tell me and he knew he didn’t have enough time to teach me slowly so he tried to give me all his wisdom at once. I have, in these 60 years since his death, heard and used the wisdom I was unable to use in my youth to make life better, to make the world a little better, to love more, to live in the sadness, rejoice in the “strenuous lessons of defeat” and grow more into the self I was created to be. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

What is the main theme of your life? Do you have a sense of urgency about finding it, living it? Year 4 Day 339

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 4 Day 339

“The quest for right living, the question of what is to be done right now, right here, is the authentic core of Jewish religion. It has been the main theme of Jewish literature, from the time of the prophets till the times of the Hasidim, and it has been explored with a sense of urgency, as if life were a continuous state of emergency.” (Thunder in the Soul pg. 75)

When the government is constantly lying to the people, when the people are consistently buying the bullshit of the liars, when the people are being gassed, shot at, killed, arrested, vilified for exercising their Right to Freedom of Speech, when the people are standing idly by the bloods of their neighbors, We the People are in a “continuous state of emergency” whether we are aware of it or not! And not being aware of this “continuous state of emergency” is what leads us to fall into the trap of the authoritarian, of the liar, of the false prophet, and gives even more power to our self-deceptive ways of being. Sitting here this morning, reading these words again, Rabbi Heschel’s core “sense of urgency” comes through loud and clear. I am embarrassed at how many of us, Jews and non-Jews, miss this “sense of urgency” because we seek comfort, we seek certainty, we seek love and will compromise our ways of being our knowing what “right living” consists of, of responding to “the question of what is to be done right now”.

Experiencing Rabbi Heschel’s many words, teachings, books, actions through the lens of “a sense of urgency”, through “the quest for right living”, we the people are able to share in his belief that “life” is “a continuous state of emergency”, that it is not Hitler we should be hate, it is the sense of non-urgency, the belief that we are not in a “continuous state of emergency” that We the People should beware of. By not realizing this truth, by ignoring the inner “quest for right living”, by providing comforting answers to “the question of what is to be done right now”, We the People ask for a Hitler, a Trump, a Netanyahu to deceive us, to lie to us, to “be our retribution”, to point to someone to blame/hate like Adam does in the Garden of Eden story so he could keep hiding from his own irresponsible behavior of HIDING!

The authoritarian playbook was/is used by both extremes-be it the progressives telling us to put up with everything they believe in and nothing that the conservatives do, them expelling from their midst anyone who doesn’t conform to their way of thinking, talking, acting while proclaiming the deep belief in freedom or be it the conservatives who use also deny freedom of beliefs, speech, etc and find the ‘sweet spot’ of whom to hate/blame in this moment. Neither group cares one whit about the “continuous state of emergency” we the people live in, nor do they believe there is “a sense of urgency” except for their fears, desires! This is the state society finds itself and, finally as we see in Minnesota and the rest of the country, the “sense of urgency” has reached  a “tipping point”. Which way the Thugs and Storm Troopers of Trump, Miller, Noem, Holman will tip is unknown right now, we do know the assault is coming on all sides, in the streets, in the halls of Congress, in the courts with the attempted seizure of voting roles from 2020, and other actions that prove this “continuous state of emergency”.

At issue for me, in this moment, is to deepen our understanding of our inner lives, of our souls, of Rabbi Heschel, of the prophets, of Torah means to appreciate and live at a “sense of urgency”, to seriously SHEMA, hear, listen, understand the words of Rabbi Tarfon when he says “we don’t have to finish the work AND we are NOT FREE to desist from doing the work”(Pirke Avot 2:16). It speaks to the “sense of urgency” of this moment and of every moment! Each moment of our lives has within it the opportunity to make a difference, to help another human being, to NOT MURDER, NOT WHORE OURSELVES, NOT STEAL, NOT BEAR FALSE WITNESS(LIE), NOT COVET OUR NEIGHBORS’ HOUSE, WIFE, ETC. If this isn’t an urgent matter, why would we still believe in putting up the 10 Sayings in our Houses of Worship, try and put them up in schools, government buildings, etc? The joke, of course, is the far right which lies, steals, whores themselves, supports and elected the greatest coveter and cares nothing about murdering the person and the soul of anyone they blame and shame for their benefit are the ones most apt to want to display the 10 Sayings!! Isn’t this proof of “a continuous state of emergency”? Doesn’t this speak to a “sense of urgency” We the People should be in? Rabbi Tarfon, in Avot 2:15 speaks to us about the “sense of urgency” to engage in the work God gives to us, the responsibility We the People get to fulfill and reminds us of our indolence, our laziness to fulfill our part of the task. Indolent comes from the Latin meaning “not suffer pain”.

I am in a “continuous state of emergency” and I have a deep “sense of urgency” and, upon reflection, I understand my life through this perspective and how I perverted my “quest for right living” by hiding from the “sense of urgency I felt, by  my experience of powerlessness in the face of societal norms and prejudices by hiding from the “s My recovery began with a re-igniting of the “sense of urgency” I was born with and my father cultivated, it has continued to grow because I KNOW, in my Kishkas, in my SOUL, that I/We are in a “continuous state of emergency” and my impatience with the willful blindness of people is legendary and it is rooted in this “sense of urgency”. I believe with my entire being that the “Continuous State of Emergency” is a life or death matter, it is exactly what Moses was talking about when he said CHOOSE LIFE! I do this every day, Rabbi Heschel helps me, you help me and I pray I help you to CHOOSE LIFE, meet the “emergency” of the moment head on and keep living into the “sense of urgency” that fills the world. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

What do your actions say about your "quest" in life? Year 4 Day 338

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 4 Day 338

“The quest for right living, the question of what is to be done right now, right here, is the authentic core of Jewish religion. It has been the main theme of Jewish literature, from the time of the prophets till the times of the Hasidim, and it has been explored with a sense of urgency, as if life were a continuous state of emergency.” (Thunder in the Soul pg. 75)

These words from Rabbi Heschel’s book Man is Not Alone published in 1951 cut right to the heart of what it means to be human! In this moment, when so many people who are elected officials, usurpers, dictators, royalty are disengaged from “right living” that their only quest is for power, for wealth, for cruelty, for their own fame, etc. It is not these people that bother me, as we can tell from the sentence that there has always been people who do not have “the quest for right living”. At issue for me, for us, the people is: are we the people engaged in “the quest for right living”, for “what is to be done right now, right here”?

We the People of Minnesota are in this “quest”, they are answering “the question” above with their feet, with their voices, and they are receiving help and support from all over the country! What is more pressing, at this moment, is what “quest” are the Congressman and Senators we the people elect to do the next right thing for their constituents-WE THE PEOPLE- are on. Is their “quest” to serve whichever identity group they belong to, is their “quest” to serve Donny, Der Fuhrer, the Don, Trump and his band of thieves, liars, and idolators? Is their “quest”, like the “quest” of many institutions these days, to just keep themselves in office, somewhat relevant, but mainly to serve themselves, their families, keep their paper house afloat? While Rabbi Heschel writes that this “quest” “is the authentic core of Jewish religion”, it is also, I believe at the “core” of every faith, in the soul of every human being.

What is soooooooo infuriating to me, of course, is the fact that there are WAY TOO MANY JEWS who disregard this truth, who’s only “quest” is their selfish, self-centered needs, their belief in their own self-aggrandizement, their buying of their own bullshit, their own press, and all of this leads us to a Howard Lutnick who thinks it is immoral to complain about, point out, sue over getting fucked by the Government; leads us to a Steve Wytkoff who believes that fucking over our ally, Ukraine, in order to build hotels in Russia, to build hotels in Gaza, is a Jewish Value; leads us to Stephen Miller who is a true believer in Hating the Stranger, going against the command to love, care for, remember what it was like being a stranger in Egypt which is mentioned 36 times in the Torah; leads to Bibi Netanyahu who is so self-centered and selfish he is selling Israel out as a democracy, as a place where the rule of law prevails in order to save his skin, to make his graft okay, to NOT take responsibility for Oct. 7, 2023, to blame and shame anyone and everyone else so he can keep his power and not go to jail where he belongs!

Again, this is not a finger-pointing expedition, it is, as the prophets teach us, a moment to see what is and what are We the People doing about it. It is going to take a massive effort to change the tide here in the U.S.A. and in Israel. The forces of darkness are very powerful, the forces of prejudice, of fear, of lies enforce the power of darkness and it is up to WE THE PEOPLE to say HELL NO LUTNICK, HELL NO KUSHNER, HELL NO WYTKOFF, HELL NO MILLER, HELL NO NETANYAHU, HELL NO TRUMP, VANCE, PUTIN, ORBAN and the rest of the Anti-Semites, Anti-Gay, Anti everything but white ‘christian’ men! Using what is going on in Minnesota, what happened in Chicago, the turning of the tide throughout the country is necessary to build on their amazing efforts and results-AND IT IS NOT ENOUGH!

We the People must engage in the “quest for right living” by asking the question: “What is the question this experience is the answer for?” Rather than see this moment as the problem, lets see it as the solution to the unasked question, the questions we are afraid to ask because they lead to taking uncomfortable actions, they lead to possibly being ostracized from ‘polite society’, from ‘our identity group’. TOO FUCKING BAD! Now is the moment We the People are being called to action, called to take the actions the Bible teaches us, follow the lead of Christ, and LOVE THE STRANGER, the one next to us and the one inside of us. This moment is a moment where We the People can take a breath and reacquaint ourselves with our inner life, with our soul’s knowing, with our spiritual life and do what our SOUL tells us is the next right thing to do, do what our “gut instinct” is screaming at us to do and do what the Bible teaches: “We will do and then we will understand”!

I have been on this quest forever, even during my alcoholism and criminality. In fact, because I knew this “quest”, because my father had placed within me “the questions” listed above, I was never fully committed to a life of crime, to just being a drunk. In my recovery, this “quest” fills every waking hour and even invades my sleep. I have asked myself the questions Rabbi Heschel asks, the ones Judaism asks, and I keep making progress on my “quest” and I keep screwing it up. I also know that living this “quest” is not a normative Jewish way of being in this world. Rather than be like the prophets, too many of our Jewish institutions are like the powerful the prophets railed against!  I write each day to keep the right questions fresh in my mind, I live into “the duty to obey and the duty to disobey” as Rabbi Harold Shulweis taught me. I still fight the assholes, I still keep opening my mouth and I keep being rebuffed by the Jewish community and embraced by Jews-go figure! God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

"A pattern of living" has to be a design to sense the ineffable and serve something greater than oneself - Year 4 Day 337

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 4 Day 337

“A pattern for living-the object of man’s most urgent quest-which would correspond to his dignity, must take into consideration not only his ability to exploit the forces of nature and to appreciate the loveliness of it is forms, but also his unique sense of the ineffable. It must be a design, not only for the satisfaction of needs, but also for the attainment of ends.” (Thunder in the Soul pg. 75)

This is a lot to digest! “A pattern for living” is what the Bible gives us, yet we the people have rejected this pattern because of the conflicting statements the Bible makes at times, because of the ways the Rabbis/Sages decided to both vocalize the text and decide what the text means with their commentaries to influence future generations. In their quest to be relevant, to preserve Judaism, they went overboard in restrictions, in their self-aggrandizement as a body, and they tried to and succeeded in many ways to stifle personal, communal understandings of the text while claiming there are 70 ways to understand the Bible, ‘but ours is the right way’! OY, VaVOY!!

Rather than respect the dignity of every person to experience the Torah, the Bible, the Rabbis, like the priests of old, sought to shape our consciousness of the Bible, stop our individuality, and while claiming the infinite worth and dignity of every human being, legislated, interpreted, and told stories to deny this truth! Just as the Founding Fathers declared “All men are created equal”, we all have “certain unalienable rights”, they kept slaves, denied the dignity and equality of black people, the Christians barely ‘tolerated’ the Jews, etc. We the People are witnessing, once again, the despicable actions of a few, that too many have gone along with, that deny the basic dignity every human being deserves, that denies the pattern of living these immigrants who came here without papers seeking “a pattern of living” that would and could honor their dignity, would and could add to the dignity of the community and country they came to be a part of, and they would both “exploit the forces of nature and appreciate the loveliness of its forms” especially the “form” of “proclaim freedom throughout the land and to all its inhabitants therein” found on the Liberty Bell. Inhabitant is defined as someone taking up a specific space, having nothing to do with ‘citizenship papers’.

The “sense of the ineffable” that the people in power have is BULLSHIT! Their sense is they are the ineffable, they know that ‘God is on our side’ and Jesus wants cruelty towards ‘those people’! How the Clergy that kiss their asses, give them cover, and promote hatred can continue to do this is BEYOND THE BEYOND to me. It goes against everything that the Bible holds dear; especially accountability! Remember God held King David, the most powerful man in the country, accountable for Fucking Bathsheba-another man’s wife hence committing adultery, and then KILLING HER HUSBAND!! Yet these ‘good christian folk’ and these ‘keepers of the jewish faith’ claim to be above accountability above everyone else including God and God’s messengers like the prophets, Moses, Jesus!! WHAT THE FUCK ARE We the People putting up with? Where is our “unique sense of the ineffable”? How are we so deep in our own self-deception, our fears of missing out (FOMO) that this shit has been allowed to flourish and grow??

It is WAY PAST TIME for We the People to adhere to and adapt/adopt “a pattern of living” that “must be a design, not only for the satisfaction of needs, but also for the attainment of ends.” These “ends” are the making of our corner of the world a little better than when we found it. It is NOT allowing this MONEY-GRUBBING WHORE in the White House to continue to make fiats that go so far as to stop the law that Nursing Homes need to be staffed appropriately so people will get proper care! Oh No, says Trump, and evidently RFK Jr., people in Nursing Homes should suffer the indignities of not only their illness, but the indignities of sitting in their shit, piss, and being ignored as much as possible so the Nursing Home owners, many of whom are Jewish I am sad to report, can make more money!! “A pattern for living” is not designed to be about the Benjamins, PEOPLE!  The “ends” are how to serve the “ineffable”, how to serve our neighbors, how to love the stranger, the person next to us, how to feed our enemies, how to treat the poor and the needy, how to BE HOLY, how to live the 10 sayings in our daily lives. So I ask, once again WHAT THE FUCK is wrong with we the people that want to be petty, that promote enmity and envy, prejudice and pridefulness, are judgmental instead of discerning, that are easily bribed by the shining thing being dangled in front of them, who hate with reckless abandon and grift/steal with no barriers?

I am enraged about the situation here in America and in Israel. Please do not tell me that Netanyahu is ‘good for the Jewish people’ as he sits with the right wing fascists who are claiming to be against anti-semitism! Their very nature is to HATE JEWS!! I am enraged that instead of changing his tune, Trump is sending his Border Czar-Tom Holman to Minneapolis, cause he is so empathetic and such a ‘fine christian fellow’! I am enraged that the Congress has stayed on the sidelines, the Courts have tried only to be thwarted by John Roberts that ‘fine upstanding jurist’ who doesn’t believe in the spirit nor the letter of the Constitution he swore to uphold! I am enraged that mendacity, subterfuge, scheming and scamming have become so popular that ‘the people’ have come to applaud it, worship it, and serve it! I am enraged that Jews still believe in the ‘rightness’ of Trump’s politics, Bibi’s policies, their ways of desecrating the “unique sense of the ineffable”. I keep doing the best I can to live “a pattern of living” that honors my “sense of the ineffable” and sees the ineffable in everyone I meet. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

How is your conduct congruent and incongruent with the faith, religion of Jesus, Moses? Year 4 Day 336

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 4 Day 336

“As faith cannot exist without a creed, piety cannot subsist without a pattern of deeds; as intelligence cannot be separated from training, religion cannot be divorced from conduct. Judaism is lived in deeds, not only in thoughts.” (Thunder in the Soul pg. 74)

Focusing on “piety”, not as saintly action, something that very few people achieve, I believe it is important to understand that someone like Miller, Johnson, Vought, Vance, Trump himself, is “pious” to their cause-they have “a pattern of deeds”, that while despicable, they fulfill their “pattern of deeds” with “dutifulness” which is the Latin root of the word! Their warped intelligence is something they have been trained in for a long time, in Trump’s case seemingly since birth. This is how they can claim to be ‘good jews’ like Jared Kushner and the Orthodox Rabbis who support the cruelty of this administration do because there is cruelty in the Hebrew Bible. Rather than look at the words and deeds of Christ, Johnson and Vought can just listen to the lies and bastardizations of the words of Christ and wrap themselves in some version of the New Testament. What is missing today, what promotes the killing of U.S. Citizens by the masked thugs that are Noem’s, Trump’s, Vought’s, Vance’s and Miller’s SS Storm Troopers, is the attachment to the spirit of the Bible, to the spirit of Christ, to the infinite dignity of human beings, to “care for and love the stranger”, to “love your neighbor as yourself”, to “BE HOLY”!

The Rabbis added Mitzvot to the Torah’s “pattern of deeds” for their own power and control, I believe. They wanted to show their importance, their knowledge; to their credit- they also were trying to figure out how to keep Judaism alive without a home, without everyone being together, which in some ways seems like the blueprint for Christianity’s spreading and for other faiths/spiritual disciplines to expand and survive the loss of a homeland. Yet, as we see in the Ultra Orthodox Community-this keeping Judaism alive and thriving has been bastardized for more control, more graft, more strictness, less compromising, less interacting with ‘you heathen jews who don’t study all day’, oh yeah though, send money!!

The priests and ministers, pastors and elders who keep promoting the “prosperity gospels”, keep making anti-abortion their thing when it is never mentioned in the Bible, in the New Testament, are trying to, as the Rabbis did with the Bible’s canonization and the Ultra Orthodox have done throughout history, GET AND MAINTAIN CONTROL! Instead of seeing each of us as unique infinitely worthy souls and messengers of God, the people promoting this bullshit, these lies, using “religion” are in it for their own gain, not for God’s Glory!

It is WAY PAST TIME for We the People to call a HALT to these antics, it is WAY PAST TIME for We the People of these UNITED STATES to assert our freedom, our power, our “conduct” towards Godliness, towards ending the slavery that this administration is imposing upon us, towards ending the slavery the “woke” people were/are imposing upon us.. It is WAY PAST TIME for WE THE PEOPLE to take back our government and make it “of the people, by the people, for the people” as Lincoln preached to us at Gettysburg. Rather than imitate the Pharaoh in Egypt, the Roman Emperors who killed Christ, who killed the Rabbis that defied their orders to not teach Torah, the call has to be to live our destinies as Imitatio Dei, reminders of God, messengers of God, partners with God in making the world better, not just “getting ours”.

The only solution, for a Jew, is to be immersed in deeds-not the bullshit study so you can be saved of the Ultra-Orthodox strictness to the Halacha-the law where service becomes to the law and not God, not the idiotic bullshit of the renewals who don’t need anything but spirit and their liberty to interpret anyway they ‘feel’. Judaism is not a feeling, it is not a religion, it is not a people, it is not thoughts, it “is lived in deeds” and these deeds are under the umbrella of the 10 sayings, hence there really is no place for the xenophobic, hatred being spewed by Netanyahu and his thugs-he uses the settlers as his storm troopers so he can claim plausible denial, he is immune from the DEED of TShuvah, of responsibility for his errors, for admitting his crimes against humanity and his supporters, like Trump’s extol him for his mendacity, his cruelty and then call themselves RELIGIOUS!! Call themselves JEWS?!? OY VEY

I have been thinking about, wrestling with the issue of what Judaism is for a long time and I believe it is “lived in deeds, not only thoughts”. The 10 sayings teach us to display honor and reverence; to be in touch with our inner lives and take a moment to breathe, not be a ‘doing machine’; to not murder in any way-through speech, through physical harm, through mental distress, etc; to not engage in mendacity and be a false witness; to want what we have and not need to have what someone else has-ARE YOU LISTENING TRUMP with your obsession for Greenland-‘ to no longer whore ourselves, Mike Johnson and Republicans in both houses of Government, in the Supreme Court, etc; and not engage in the self-deception of ‘if I can take it then it is mine’ grift and theft of another’s place, another’s property, another’s ideas, another’s …I know the truth of my past actions, I have done the lying, the stealing on a much smaller scale and I no longer do this. As a Jew, I am committed to the 10 sayings, the Holiness Code, to CHOOSE LIFE and no longer give into the need to be right, no longer obsess over what I don’t have, no longer give oxygen to those who have harmed, betrayed me. It is all about what can I do to make this moment better for me, my family, my community, my world. I pray you will join me and so many other people in this endeavor and we will “proclaim freedom throughout the land” and to everyone in it! God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

We are NOT commanded to be Cruel, to hate the stranger, to abuse the poor and the needy - Year 4 Day 335

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 4 Day 335

“As we have seen, religion is not a feeling for something that is, but an answer to Him who is asking us to live in a certain way. It is in its very origin consciousness of duty, of being committed to higher ends; a realization that life is not only man’s but also God’s sphere of interest.”

Reading these words, seeing what is going on in the world, realizing these words were written in the shadow of the Shoah, some 75+ years ago, I wonder at the poor eyesight we the people suffer from that we are unable to get fixed! In today’s world, just as it was in Rabbi Heschel’s time and throughout time, the people running the religious life of individual churches, mosques, synagogues, were bastardizing the “certain” way God was “asking us to live in”. Rather than understand and appreciate the “duty” we are being asked to be in service of, humanity today, as it always has, is constantly manipulating our Holy Texts, our rituals, our prayers, to determine the “certain way” society/the leader wants to live and then attributing these lies to God!! The wars fought in God’s name, the cruelty done in the name of God, the senseless hatred of one another done in the name of God, the hatred of the strangers, the belief that Jesus was white, that only white men can and should be in charge, all are LIES! Yet, we the people seem to keep buying this bullshit, lock, stock and barrel  over and over again throughout time immemorial.

Be it the Roman soldiers, the Assyrian hordes, the Babylonian army, the German Storm Troopers, the ICE Marauders, it seems as if in every generation there comes to be a group calling themselves loyal to ‘their god’ who use their ‘god’ to validate their cruelty, their power grab, their disrespect for the laws of the land, their utter disdain for people ‘not like them’, and their resorting to any means, even killing innocent people, to achieve their goal of dominance. Their motives are not for God’s Dominance, it is for them to be worshipped as a ‘god’, for them to be seen as the incarnation of Jesus’ servant, all the while going against everything Jesus speaks about in the New Testament, going against everything the prophets railed about in the Hebrew Bible, and utterly desecrating God’s Name, God’s Will, God’s Way!

That in the United States of America we see thugs on the street arresting American Citizens without warrants, without cause, breaking into homes, violating many of the the Constitutional guardrails against such actions including the Bill of Rights, the subsequent Amendments, is BEYOND anything we could have imagined 60 years ago while basking in the light of the Civil Rights Act, having our eyes opened to the dignity, worth, brilliance of the Black People and their deserved equality in all ways American. Yet, here we are, the KKK, the South, the haters, the white supremacists have RISEN AGAIN and they truly believe they are heralding the 2nd coming of Jesus!! Or at least most of the followers of the interlopers, the idolators, the scam artists, the grifters believe this while the leaders couldn't care less. Their attitude is how do we get the most people to buy in, stay in the ‘pink cloud’ of getting ‘those people’ until we get so much money, power, longevity and then we can screw them over! What is happening here in America, over there in Israel is in direct violation of the words above, in absolute conflict with “a realization that life is not only man’s but also God’s sphere of interest”! Until We the People come to “being committed to higher ends”, until We the People accept and live into “a consciousness of duty”, nothing will change, the world will keep going through these cycles of cruelty, of idolatry, of bastardizing the Word from Sinai, using peoples vulnerabilities against them-the ultimate evil according to Dr. M.Scott Peck- and will continue to cut God out of God’s “interest” in humanity and our deeds/way of being.

The “consciousness of duty” is at the essence of being obligated to serve God, which We, people of faith accepted at Mount Sinai when we said-“we will do and then we will understand”. Yet, we seem to have lost our commitment over the years beginning with the Priestly class from at least the time of Eli in the book of Samuel! This consciousness of duty led the Maccabees to fight the Greeks and the Jews who wanted to become totally hellenized, only to lose it when the sons themselves adopted Greek names, usurped the Priesthood from the descendants of Aaron, hence We the People are being called by the words above, being cajoled by the Voice on Sinai, being asked by the spirit of God that “hovers over the face of the waters”, being demand by the words, stories, experiences of the Bible to reverse the errors of our ancestors, do TShuvah for their mistakes as well as ours: repair the damage done to those who have been oppressed throughout the millennia, acknowledging how we the oppressed, have, when in power, done what was done to us to another-in other words; gone against the wisdom of Hillel the elder-“what is hateful to you do not do to another”. After doing this repair-which is always ongoing, we the people have to recommit to the “consciousness of duty” that our ancestors committed to for us, and were committed to themselves-knowing we will always err and the our Return to God, to this “consciousness of duty” will keep us coming back. Finally, our inner call to have a new way of being, a different path to living is the third leg of the stool of TShuvah-and this is where we become “committed to higher ends”, the “ends” of God, the making of our corner of the world better because We The People made a decision to “lift up our eyes and see”, to throw off the YOKE OF SLAVERY, SELF-DECEPTION, and MENDACITY!

This is the formula I have used to return from the depths of depravity, to bring light to the world to reject the BULLSHIT of the ends of the continuum, the lies of the ‘religious’, and live in the light of God. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Being Human or Being a Philistine - What do your actions show you being? Year 4 Day 334

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 4 Day 334

“And yet, we, Philistines, continue to insist upon intellectual cliches, upon setting  up our own life as a model and measure of what prophets could possibly attain. We oppose the prophets’ word with our claims that God can never reach and ear, that God will never stoop to light a word in the mind of man.” (Thunder in the Soul pg. 66-67)

To put this quote in context, Rabbi Heschel is taking aim at the people who claim the Bible is just another book, “Sinai is a fairy tale”, etc. His use of the word “philistine” as a descriptor of “we” is, as I hear Rabbi Heschel this morning, an indication of both sadness, fear and a call to all of we the people to leave the safety and comfort of our “intellectual cliches”, the narcissistic belief that “we, Philistines” are superior to God, superior to the universe and know or can find out everything there is to know. This was published, remember, in 1955!! YIKES, I shudder to think what Rabbi Heschel, Rev. King, Bobby Kennedy would think of our world today-of what the United States is doing today.

“We, Philistines” are at work each and every day and always have been; seeking out new ways to lie and manipulate, to deceive both our neighbors and our selves, to ‘gain the upper hand’, to ‘get mine’-whether I deserve anything or not. What is happening today with the grift and the graft, with the lying of the Republicans in Congress and in the street, with the buying of the bullshit by the “MAGA crowd”, with the inability of the Democrats in Congress like Chuck Schumer to stand up and fight for what is good and what is right, to hear the call of the prophets and follow their words and deeds, is an affront to God and the fact that these LYING FAUX CHRISTIANS AND JEWS do these horrific deeds, these desecrations of God’s name in the name of God, in the name of Jesus is BEYOND THE BEYOND!

These idolators, these charlatans, these suckers at the tit of the powerful, are exactly describes the people who “insist…upon setting our own life as a model and measure of what the prophets could possibly attain”. These despicable deceivers who use the vulnerabilities of people seeking spiritual health, spiritual healing, spiritual growth, to promote the lies of the powerful, to pick the pockets of the poor and the needy, to deny aid and comfort to the stranger and the widow, are the Philistines, these are the people infecting the blood of our country, these are the human beings who insist upon dehumanizing people not like them and in the process relinquish everything that makes them human(e). On one hand it is so sad and on the other hand so infuriating, so indicative of the self-righteous bastards they are. They are led by the “greatest Philistine of them all-Donald J. Trump”, who of course hawks Bibles, praises Jesus, and does the exact opposite of every principle that Jesus believed in, fought for, and died for. While Jesus may have died for the sins of the people, that Trump et al use Jesus’ name to continue to commit the gravest of sins-stealing/denying the Infinite Dignity and Worth of every human being- is UNBELIEVABLY THE ULTIMATE DESECRATION OF GOD’S NAME by these “good christian folk”.

The call, the plea, the demand of the words above is for We the People to return to the Bible, to immerse ourselves in the words, the deeds of the prophets’ and We the People clean the wax out of our ears, get the hearing aids necessary, the spiritual training, teachings, counseling, we need to SHEMA, hear, listen, understand the words that come from Sinai, to end our incessant narcissistic bullshit and stop denying the humanity of anyone other than ‘our kind’. If God could tell the Angels to stop cheering when the Egyptians were drowning in the Red Sea with the words “my children are dying, my children are dying”(according to a midrash), isn’t it time for We the People to stop dancing on the graves of our enemies, to end our joyous participation in the demeaning and disrespectful ways Trump, Vance, et al speak about immigrants, women, and anyone else they want to tear down? Isn’t it time for We the People to stand up for God, to live the words and deeds of the Bible, of Jesus, of the New Testament? Isn’t it way past time for We the People to end our phony pious bullshit act and admit our own errors, our own missing the mark instead of wrapping ourselves in the ‘truth of our side’? The opposition to Trump et al, has to admit their own mistakes, their own foibles, and stop being on the exact opposite end of the spectrum because this is not what the prophets tell us, it is not this purity test that God is seeking. The prophets tell us that God calls to all of us and only some of us are so sick and tired of being sick and tired that we clean out our ears, open our hearts and remove the “foreskin” over our souls so we can SHEMA, hear, listen and understand the call of God.

This is the hardest thing for most of us to do. It took me 20 years of running away from what I knew to be right, what I knew to be Godly, what I knew was the path for me to finally surrender to the Truth of what the prophets were saying, the truth of what the Bible was teaching, the truth of the poverty of my soul and the truth that I could rejoin the human race, I could redeem myself and be redeemed by God, I could find my purpose and passion and live them in service to something greater than me-You, God, etc. This is the reason I am alive today, I believe. That I could leave my narcissistic victimhood, my pettiness and pride, my worthlessness  and find the truth of my soul, the freedom to be me-in all the glory and not so glorious, to live a life unafraid of the bullies, unafraid of the laughter, unafraid of my vulnerabilities being used against me and more afraid of not honoring the Truth within me, not honoring the Gift God has given me, not honoring the Love of God, family and friends. This is how I have overcome my tendency to be a “Philistine”. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Engaging in the falseness of the wrong questions leads to the 'right' to break the glass of another's home/car - Year 4 Day 333

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 4 Day 333

“We have learned to listen to every “I” except the “I” of God. The man of our time may proudly declare: nothing animal is alien to me but everything divine is. This is the status of the Bible in modern life: it is a sublime answer, but we do not know the question anymore. Unless we recover the question, there is no hope of understanding the Bible.” (Thunder in the Soul pg. 66)

I am taking this paragraph in 2 days as I find it so rich in meaning for this moment, for the way we move forward, for the way we raise our children. “What the mind can conceive, man can achieve” according to Napoleon Hill from his book Think and Grow Rich. Unfortunately, too many of us have bought this terrible lie and will do anything to achieve our inauthentic as well as authentic needs/desires. In fact, as Rabbi Heschel says in his book The Insecurity of Freedom, our culture has become so obsessed with needs/desires that not fulfilling them results in some mental disorder. I would tell my mother the reason I was so bad was because she didn’t send me to Summer Camp! Because of our incessant desire to fulfill our desires no matter the cost to another human being, no matter the cost to our own souls, the truth of the second sentence above is painfully without question.

We the People have become a problem-solving machine, believing every situation, every problem, every interaction can be solved by us alone. We the People have bought into “survival of the fittest” mindset as well. Both of these beliefs leave God out, minimize the importance of the Bible, and leave us bereft of authentic connection and interactions. Too many of We the People are wearing masks, false facades so there cannot be authentic interactions. We are too busy trying to win, seeking the upper hand, being the smartest person in the room, etc, hence our inability to be real, our fear of being found out, our bluffing and bullying of another to prove how strong we are. This is NOT the way of the Bible, no matter what the Christian Nationalists say, no matter how many Clergy of all faiths proclaim the opposite: Abraham, Moses, both fought for the little guy, all opposed God when necessary, said NO to the bullies in Sodom, in Egypt and lived to tell about it. Proverbs tells us to feed our enemies if they are hungry, The Torah tells us 36 TIMES to LOVE THE STRANGER, nothing else is mentioned this many times in the Torah, I believe. The psalmist, King David, is constantly calling out for help from God to overcome his enemies, internally as well as externally. Hence the mendacity, the audaciousness of society to proclaim: “what the mind can conceive, man can achieve”!

The masks we wear, the facades we put up have reached such a crescendo that we see Masked Men in the streets, breaking car windows, smashing in doors, pulling people out of cars, beds, schools without any due process, without checking anything, without listening to the pleas, the truth people around them are speaking and the ASSHOLE in OUR WHITE HOUSE- NOT HIS, proclaims this is good and right, his holy and sacred duty and, worse, the lying Clergy who go along with him to give him time to do more damage to the poor, the needy, the stranger, the widow, the orphan-all of the people the Bible says to care for, all the people Jesus hung out with, fed, protected. WHAT THE FUCK PEOPLE???!!

Without “understanding the Bible”, we are left to our own devices and this is DANGEROUS! We have the history of the devastation of Attila the Hun, of the Greeks and Romans, of the myriad of empires that have risen and fallen throughout the dark and middle ages. We have the lessons and the testimonies of the people who went through World War II, we have the records of the Warsaw Ghetto, done in an amazing documentary by Roberta Grossman, called Who will Write our History. Yet, We the People seem unable to learn from the lessons of WWII, Trump is making deals with Putin and Xi rather than with NATO countries, he is invading and talking about invading Latin America and Greenland to show his power and to get the American People to stop seeing what is truly happening. His GOON SQUAD is more hateful and despicable than any Mafia Family ever in the United States, his disdain for the Constitution drips from every word he speaks and the abject HATRED AND DISOBEDIENCE of the Bible is appalling and being co-signed by his buddies over in the Churches and Synagogues around the U.S. and by those ‘fine religious folk’ like Ben G’Vir, MBS, the Emir of Qatar, etc!! The speech of Mark Carney of Canada at Davos is an example of one who hears the call and lives into the “sublime answer”!

Of course the Bible gives us a “sublime answer” and it is NOT HARD TO REACH. As we are told by Moses in Deuteronomy 30:14: “It is near you, in your mouth, in your heart for you to do”. I know the simplicity with which one can ignore the truth that is within us-I did it for almost 20 years and I was the most bereft and inconsolable during those years. Once I heard “the Voice”, once I found the “sublime answer”  to the RIGHT question, I began this journey that I have been on for 39+years. It is a hard journey in many ways, it is difficult to see the errors of my ways and repair the damage to the best of my ability. Since the first call from Sinai came, I have been seeking the right questions for the moment I am in, I keep asking what is the question this experience is the answer for-something I learned from Rabbi Jonathan Omer-man. I keep improving my hearing, my vision, my passion, my purpose, my kindness, my acceptance and my surrender to a power greater than me. This is the path to finding the “right question” I believe, it has worked for me and allowed me to help so many other human beings. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

How has your ego, fears of being left out, your reasoning , overtaken the "I" of God in your daily life? Year 4 Day 332

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 4 Day 332

“We have learned to listen to every “I” except the “I” of God. The man of our time may proudly declare: nothing animal is alien to me but everything divine is. This is the status of the Bible in modern life: it is a sublime answer, but we do not know the question anymore. Unless we recover the question, there is no hope of understanding the Bible.” (Thunder in the Soul pg. 66)

This passage comes from God in Search of Man, in the beginning of Part 2 of the book dealing with Revelation. Given that the book was published in 1955, 70 years ago, the “I” we listen to was seen as a problem by Rabbi Heschel. At a time when most people were ‘happy’, the baby boom was on, people were making a decent living or so we are led to believe, and, of course Nixon was VP, McCarthy had been censored and stripped of his powers, we were in an arms race with Russia, Black people still were treated as 3/5’s of a human being by white people in the North as well as the South. And, of course, Rabbi Heschel wrote this in the shadow of the Shoah, the deaths of 55 million people all told in WWII! Status symbols were jewelry, homes, cars, private phone lines,  and, of course Color TV! 70 years ago, the “I” of the individual had reached such a state that Rabbi Heschel was concerned, annoyed, outraged, and wanted to disturb the rest of us to wake us up.

In 2026, the “I” of the individual is so loud, there is no room, no ability for most of We the People to hear, listen, understand the “I” of God. We are so busy trying to make a livelihood, pay our bills, keep food on the table, gas in the car, a roof over our head that the “I” we hear is the “I” of ‘how am I going to make ends meet’, ‘how am I/we going to get ahead’, so taking the time to consider the “I” of God seems like a luxury to many of We the People, and we just take the word of the Clergy because we are too tired, too uninformed, too lazy, believe it will not help to read the Bible, to immerse ourselves in it, to be the prayer we are saying, tone moved spiritually by the mitzvot we are engaging in. The “I” of the individual is so loud today, even louder than it was when these words were written, I believe, that we the people have come to hate the stranger rather than love the stranger as the Bible tells us; we the people have “come to suspect our neighbor”(as Rabbi Heschel says in his interview with Carl Stern) rather than love your neighbor as the Bible demands. There are so many other commands, demands, ethical and moral teachings of the Bible that the autocrats, Der Fuhrer Trump bastardize with a lot of help from their Clergy friends in both the Christian and Jewish traditions, all proving the words above to be, unfortunately, as true today if not truer than when they were written.

Remembering that “sublime” means exalted, higher up, we the people, according to Rabbi Heschel, have rejected the mission of the Bible; to raise up our standard of living, to lift up our beingness to exude and practice more holiness; to attune our ears, our eyes, our hearts, our souls to the call of The Voice from Sinai, to sublimate our rational minds to be the servants they are created to be. WHAT THE FUCK??!!

Seeing the world through clear eyes, watching and listening to the DICTATOR in the White House and his BAND OF THIEVES, NAZIS, CRUELTY PRACTITIONERS, and, of course LIARS, IDOLATORS, we the people are being called to STAND UP and be WE THE PEOPLE that Lincoln was speaking about. It is WAY PAST TIME for us to be the People who secede from this UNHOLY union that the Republicans have allowed, promoted to happen. WE THE PEOPLE are being called upon to say NO to the “I” of the Trumps, NO to the “I” of Miller, Lutnick, Bessent, Vance, Vought, Thiel, Musk, et al, NO to the ICE THUGS who wear masks, who take people out of their homes-citizens no less- which is eerily reminiscent of 1930’s Germany. The breaking of the car windows is reminiscent of Krystalnacht, maybe.

We the People are not powerless, We the People have to get out of our “I” of selfishness, fear, protection and into the “I” of God, the “I” of belonging and the “I” of BEING HUMAN! We the People are being called to a new way of reading the Bible; make it personal, see the “sublime” responses to today’s ills, to our own imperfections, to rejecting slavery, rejecting being the slave owner, to feeding our enemy, to practice righteous justice, to love mercy, walk humbly with God rather than believe one is God like Trump, et al. Like the prophets and like Jesus, We the People have to THROW THE MONEY CHANGERS OUT OF THE Temples, the Churches, the Mosques, the GOVERNMENTS of the world and bring to fruition the prophecy of Isaiah 2:4: “Nation shall not lift up sword against Nation neither shall they learn war anymore”!! We the People make this the new reality with our growing into, merging with, maturing into the “I” of God, the ways of the Bible, the actions of Jesus, Moses, King David, with all their flaws, argue with God like Abraham, wrestle with our demons like Jacob, see God face to face like both Jacob and Moses, be humble enough to admit our errors as soon as we are made aware of them like King David and write love songs to God like the Psalms.

This is the challenge I face each day, I respond to the “I” of God within me through writing and then living one grain of sand better each day. The “I” of me takes a back seat and I am aware of the difference in me. Disappointments do not lead to anger and resentments anymore, they lead to pity for the person, hurts are now learning experiences and neither of these will stop me from being the “I” God created me to be! I am a more whole me each day and I am grateful to the “I” of God for making this so. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Responding to the "ultimate question" or responding to the self-serving question? Year 4 Day 331

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 4 Day 331

“The Bible is an answer to the supreme question: What does God demand of us? Yet the question has gone out of the world. God is portrayed as a mass of vagueness behind a veil of enigmas, and His voice has become alien to our minds, to our hearts, to our souls.” (Thunder in the Soul pg. 65-66)

The first sentence gives us a strong indication of the humility of a person of faith, of a truly religious person. Please notice that the quote from Rabbi Heschel is “the Bible is an answer”, not THE answer as so many so-called religious people (think Mike Johnson, et al) claim. I believe the humility comes from knowing that there are (at least) “70 faces of Torah” according to the Sages, there is the duty to disobey when the Bible is immoral as Rabbi Harold Shulweis teaches in his book: Conscience; The Duty to Obey, the Duty to Disobey. Rather than buy into the bullshit of Ezra, the lies of the Romans, the lock-step way of evangelism, people of faith, of all faiths, know there is dignity in their humility of never being CERTAIN, of never saying THIS IS THE ONLY WAY, because we know, as Rabbi Heschel knows, there can never be only 1 way because every human is unique an each of us has our own path, our own purpose, and our own passion to fulfill.

The question itself is an example of humility as well. Asking “what does God demand of us is certainly different than what passes as humility and faith today. Rather than search the Bible, the New Testament, these so-called ‘religious zealots’, ‘keepers of the faith’, take whatever they can out of context and massage it, bastardize it, abuse it to promote their ways, their prejudices, their gain. There is no way for this question to NOT be “gone out of the world”! To have this question rattle around means wrestling with the whole experience of God at Sinai, God in the Bible, God in the New Testament, Jesus’ ways and words, Moses’ call to “Choose Life”, God’s plea to “Be Holy”, God’s demand to “Love the Stranger because you were strangers in the land of Egypt”, etc. The demands of God are not the 613 Mitzvot, they are the 10 sayings, they are the Holiness Code, all of the other mitzvot fall under these major proclamations, everything else is a help, an aid to being human, to living a life of meaning, purpose, decency and TShuvah.

We are witnessing, once again in a slightly different form, the “children of darkness”, as Reinhold Niebuhr describes these people,  taking control of the body politic for their own gain, for their own power, and for their own satisfaction. That they did it through “democratic means” is especially galling. Hatred for the sake of making a “common enemy” is NOT “what God demands of us”! Power for personal gain and fuck the community is NOT “what God demands of us! Racism, based on skin color, race, religion, ethnicity etc is NOT “what God demands of us”! Niebuhr’s response for the “children of light” is to have the wisdom of the serpent” without the malice; in other words like the Arbinger Institute teaches about going to war with a heart of peace, I hear Pastor Niebuhr teaching us to hate with a heart of love. A tall order, for sure and, given human history, given human nature, I believe this is the way out of our current situation and, very possibly, a way to stay out of the depths of depravity we are witnessing, we hear being promoted by these so-called ‘fine upstanding christian, jewish’ men and women!

The issue is, as it always is, PERSONAL! Each one of us, every one of We the People have to search our souls, our hearts, our minds and find the “enigmas” we have created to hide from “what God demands of us”, we have to search our past and our present to root out “the vagueness” we have enveloped ourselves in so we can avoid “what God demands of us”. This is the work of a person of faith, a person seeking wisdom, seeking truth, seeking to live into the call of their soul, a person searching for their “acorn” as Hillman puts it, their individual, unique addition to the world that only they can bring, the “divine need” only their individual self can fulfill. It is incumbent upon We the People to get our ears cleaned out, as we say in AA, “take the cotton out of your ears and put it in your mouth”! It is WAY PAST TIME for We the People to hear the Voice from Sinai, to listen to the wisdom of Jesus and to understand the Biblical insights as to “what God demands of us” and fulfill those demands, practice the humility of the real person of faith, engage in the work of the redemption from our bondage of self, the bondage of another human being, the injustices being done in the name of freedom, the cruelty done in the name of mercy. We the People have been called upon to engage in redeeming the world, not waiting for someone else to do it, as the story about the flood that happened in modernity and, after three rescuers tried to save a man, he refused saying “God will save me” and, at the ‘pearly gates’, God says to the idiot, who do you think sent the rescuers? WE THE PEOPLE are the REDEEMERS GOD HAS SENT!

The question that was asked of me some 60 years ago is the same one being asked of me, of you, today: Where are You? When my father died, I now know I was absent, I was enveloped in “vagueness”, I hid behind “a veil of enigmas” and this is my recovery, this is my TShuvah-I am so afraid of these “veils” that I am too loud, too quick and, unfortunately many other people pay the same price as me-especially Harriet and Heather. I keep listening and responding to “what God demands of me” with passion and purpose, with power and love, with steadfastness and impatience with the bullshit the mendacity we see today. I also am working on Niebuhr’s challenge to hate with a heart of love and I believe we all need to defeat the “children of darkness” currently spreading their hatred, their venom on the world! God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Celebrating, acknowledging the reality of "Spiritual Events" - Year 4 Day 330

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 4 Day 330

“This is the premise of faith: Spiritual events are real. Ultimately, all creative events are caused by spiritual acts.” (Thunder in the Soul pg. 65)

On this day celebrating Rev. Martin Luther King, a dear friend of Rabbi Heschel’s, what could be a better topic than “the premise of faith”? Dr. King was considered a radical by the white (supremacist) establishment and a moderate by some Black people (Black Panthers, etc). Even those white people who did not consider themselves KKK members held a prejudice against Black people, people of color, Jews, etc in the 1950’s, 1960’s some 100 years after the Emancipation Declaration, 160+ years after the Bill of Rights was ratified! What Dr. King had going for him, for the cause of freedom, of equality, of knowing that every human being was equally worthy and dignified, was FAITH! He, like Rabbi Heschel, and so many other Christian, Jewish, Muslim Clergy lived their faith, lived the principles and the ethics, morals, of their respective Bibles, could not perceive of sitting on the sidelines and doing nothing. There were then, as there are today, Christian, Jewish, Muslim Clergy who promote the lies of the bigots, the prejudices of the white christian nationalists, the radical muslims, the xenophobic jews and even support one another more than they live into the precepts of their respective Bibles-using the names of Moses, Jesus, Mohammed to validate cruelty, hatred, theft, etc. Hence, the problems we face today are caused by a lack of “faith”, a mistrust of “faith”,  a disbelief that “spiritual events are real”!

The first spiritual event in the Bible is the creation of “heaven and earth” which was “unformed and chaotic”, with “darkness” and “the Spirit of God” hovering over the “darkness”. God spoke and the world lit up, so too it is with the history of the world, someone speaks and the world is either lit up or darkened, when it is a “spiritual event”, it is usually the former, when it is a rational event, it is far too often the latter. This is our conundrum, honoring the spiritual and making the rational subservient to it, using our rational minds to follow through on, bring to fruition the creativity that comes from our “spiritual events”. This was the genius of Dr. King, of so many of the great luminaries of history; their ability to use their rational minds as servants to God, to their spiritual events, to their creative thoughts and bring their creations to life, to help another(s), to change the ways of the world.

This is what We the People are missing today: the follow through on the creativity that our “spiritual events” present to us; the blocking out of the deafening lies and bastardizations of the modern day lackeys of wanna be slave owners, ie clergy of all colors and faiths who preach any type of blanket hatred. What we are lacking is the hearing aids needed to truly SHEMA, Hear, Listen, Understand, the words of Dr. King, of Rabbi Heschel, of The Baal Shem Tov and the originators of Hasidism, the Catholics like the current Pope, the Christians faithful to Christ’s words and deeds like John Pavlovitz, Jim Palmer, etc. We the People are being called by the words above, by the times we live in, by the commentaries on the Torah, the Bible, the teachings of Rabbi Harold Shulweis to DISOBEY IMMORAL LAWS, IMMORAL REQUESTS, IMMORAL/CRUEL ACTIONS-no matter where they are to be found. After all, would not DISOBEYING have been an early-on solution to Hitler’s hateful rhetoric before he destroyed Germany, Europe, 6Million Jews, estimates of 20-39 million people died in Europe alone! There were people who had “spiritual events”, who knew how to end this madman’s rule with creativity and truth and they were killed, silenced, put in prison, etc because We the People did not SHEMA!

In a world where technology, science, “measurable objectives”, “evidence-based practices” are considered the ‘holy grail’, the ONLY way to bring something to fruition, to the market place, the words of Rabbi Heschel often seem trite, often seem naive, airy-fairy, woo-woo. Yet, I would submit that all technology came from a “spiritual event” the inventor had, Einstein’s theory of relativity came from a “spiritual event”, what is EUREKA, if not the proclamation of a “spiritual event”? What is recognizing the infinite worth, the commonality of spirit we all share if not a “spiritual event”? What is love if not a “spiritual event”, what is intercourse if not a “spiritual event”, think of the words we use to describe “climax, coming, OMG, etc” even when believing it is just fucking! Birth, childrearing, caring for parents, joining the group that believes in the dictates of the Bible to “Love Your Neighbor”, and the most often dictate: “Welcome, love, care for the STRANGER because YOU WERE STRANGERS IN THE LAND OF EGYPT”!!

I know that when We the People welcome the stranger, love the stranger, care for the stranger, we are acknowledging our commonality, our belonging to the same Creator, belonging to the same kind-human kind. I know without doing this, we separate, berate, blame, shame and screw over the stranger, who then becomes defined as “anyone not like me/us”! Trump’s grandfather came here from Germany and was a pimp, Miller’s grandparents are survivors of the Shoah, Lutnick is a Jew who knows history, Vance is a made-up empty shell, Vought is a true-believer in power, glory, cruelty for the sake of some doctrine that is Anti-Christ. I know the “spiritual events” of me and you can overcome these haters, this moment and turn it into the best of what Dr. King preached-we will judge each other on the content of our character, not on the color of our skin, not of the country we came from. Dr. King, Rabbi Heschel, Rabbi Prinz, John Lewis, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Steve Jobs, et al had a “spiritual event” and the “creative event” that followed has changed the world. Let’s all of us create a society of love and change the world today. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

The need for "proof" can lead us to false beliefs and horrific actions - Year 4 Day 329

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 4 Day 329

“In modern society, he who refuses to accept the equation of the real and the physical is considered a mystic. However, since God is not an object of a physical experience, the equation implies the impossibility of His existence. Either God is but a word not designating anything real or He is at least as real as the man I see in front of me.”

WOW, sitting here reading these words send shivers down my spine. As I hear Rabbi Heschel this morning, I realize the lunacy of our dependence on “proof” for everything and our dependence upon finding a reason whether true or not for every thing that happens. “There must be a reason” is a phrase often used and usually meant to ask/tell another person of their errors when something “doesn’t come out right”, just as Donald Trump, Kristi Noem, Stephen Miller, et al. While looking at our actions is important and good, being judgmental that something “didn't work out” may not be. Because things “don’t go my way” doesn’t mean that they are not working out. In fact, one of my favorite sayings and deep beliefs is “everything works” because the ‘result’ will teach us something, will help us grow our spiritual, emotional, educational selves, and will show us a path that we may never have considered!

Equating “real” with “physical” is one of the grave errors of humanity. I am not a “mystic”, you are not a “mystic” because we know that not everything that is real can be felt, touched, smelled, in the physical world. Or, maybe we haven’t given ourselves enough credit for our mysticism! It is a trap, however, to equate these two terms and we see the danger in this right here, right now. Is someone who has been paying taxes, living a decent life, raising good children who serve in our Armed Forces, for over 20 years really “an illegal alien”? That they don’t have the “physical” papers to show they came here legally, that they have lived somewhat under the radars, does this mean they are not really committed to the United States of America, does this mean their children who are serving in the Army, etc are not proud to be in America? I think not!

We have become so out of touch with what is “real” we have allowed the ‘physical’ lies of Trump to be considered “real” because he shows us “physical” proof. Proof that has been doctored, proof that has be redacted all to hell or not given, like the Epstein Files. Because we have become so dependent upon proof, we have proven ourselves to be unable to discern truth from fiction, believing the bullshit provided by the liars, the grifters, the Mike Johnson’s who don’t know about anything, according to his statements, because they know how to doctor a document, know how to “sell ice to the Eskimos”, know how to make murder in the Caribbean look like a patriotic duty! This is the dangerous place we the people find ourselves in and, without God, without looking in the mirror, seeing the divine image being reflected back to us, without knowing the truth of the Bible, the truth of the New Testament, this is where we find ourselves!

In the beginning of this blog, I spoke about proof, seeking a reason, things working out and the situation We the People are living in is “working out”! Not for the thugs of ICE, not for the Liars like Noem, not for the meanness of a Stephen Miller, who’s grandparents are survivors of the Holocaust, not for the profit of Donald Trump, even though all of these ‘results’ are happening. What is ‘working out’ is the uprising of We the People taking place across the land, the protests, the admittance of the depravity of the apartheid being pursued by the Government, the despicable use of Christ’s Name to do the work of the Anti-Christ, the desecration of God’s Name by the Jews purporting they are doing God’s work by hating, killing, supporting the segregation of ‘those people’! For the Jew in the Pew, there is a lot of awakening that this bullshit is not ‘good for the Jews’, for the Christian in the Pew, there is a lot of people waking up to the truth of Christ’s words and the defamation of Christ’s name, words, actions, by these ‘fine christian white supremacists’.

The challenge in front of us today and every day is: “Either God is word not designating anything real or He is at least as real as the man I see in front of me”what say you to this challenge of Rabbi Heschel’s? It is WAY PAST TIME for We the People to come to the rescue of God’s Name, God’s Truth, God’s ethereal beingness. We the People are being called to stand up for what we believe in with our actions, our words, and by being witness’ to the power of God, to the realness of God, to the truth of God. The question I pose to all of us this morning: ARE YOU COMING TO RESCUE THE TRUTH OF GOD TODAY?

I know the “real” of God and I do my best to show this reality in my daily doings, how I live my life, how I speak truth to power, how I put my self out to show people a different way, how I continue to show up for people without needing their reciprocity. I show up because I know “THE CALL” when I hear it and the call that I show up for/to is “THE CALL” from the Ineffable One, the call from the universe and I have no way to live with myself if/when I ignore “THE CALL”. This has been the truth for longer than I realized. Even in my addicted, criminal time, I showed up for “THE CALL”. That I didn’t equate hearing THE CALL with changing my lifestyle is a mystery to me and, I know, because I could hear “THE CALL” in my ‘other life’, the knowing of “THE CALL” in that jail cell in Van Nuys, CA. in December of 1986 so “real”. God is as real as the man in the glass, the “man in I see in front of me” and responding to “THE CALL” makes my life richer and more meaningful each and every day. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

What is the question this (any and all) experience is the answer for? Year 4 Day 328

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 4 Day 328

“Lift up your eyes on high and see who created these”(Isa. 40:26). There is a higher form of seeing. We must learn how to lift up our eyes on high in order to see that the world is more a question than an answer… The grandeur of nature is only the beginning. Beyond the grandeur is God.” (Thunder in the Soul pg. 63)

The words I have bolded above cannot be re-iterated enough! “Learn to lift up our eyes on high” is crucial if we are to have a society built upon justice, mercy, kindness, love, truth, compassion, etc. It is not “an impossible dream” as some say and many others believe, it is an achievable goal, or at least we can take the baton from our ancestors who began the journey of learning “how to lift up our eyes” and move further down the road to “see” as Abraham is commanded, as we are commanded, as Isaiah is pleading with us to do. There are certain phrases which keep coming up again and again in my mind and one of them is Einstein’s “the intuitive mind is a gift and the rational mind a servant, we have forgotten the gift and worship the servant.” We the People cannot “learn how to lift up our eyes on high in order to see that the world is more a question than an answer” without our “intuitive mind”. It is just impossible and too many of us are trying to do just that, or even more scary, too many of us are either attempting to deny the statement/truth above, abuse it and use the world as “their oyster” and/or are indifferent to the evil being perpetrated by those in power who only worship power, who worship the “rational mind” that can and does figure out how to gain and retain power using cruelty, mendacity as their main tools. HOW CAN We the People BE INDIFFERENT TO THIS IDOICY, THIS INSANITY, THIS MENDACITY??

As one can see, I am passionate about this because I know where we are headed, I know the horrific road we have traveled down so far with the current world leadership of Trump, Putin, paper tigers who are really bullies and liars, using the tools of the authoritarians of old, reminding us of Nazi Germany and Communist Russia under Hitler and Stalin of the 20th Century. Here in the United States, we see the rise of the worst of the underbelly of the Revolutionary Period-white supremacy. The current administrations ICE ‘soldiers’ are not any different that the white ‘law-abiding citizens’ who hung black people from trees, who banned Billie Holiday from singing “Strange Fruit”, who killed Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman in Mississippi and the limp-dick Republicans in Congress are just going along with the tide of evil that they are sword to stop! These ‘good christian folk’ betray their oath to Jesus, to the Constitution, to their own constituents to kiss Trump’s ass for ???  It is way past time for we the people to rise above the smallness we have adopted and adapted to and stand up as The People who are Partners with God in advancing creation!

We the People do this by learning the truth about living a decent moral life, we do this by living a life filled with study, with good spiritual counseling, the maturing of our souls and reversing Einstein’s statement. When “we…learn how to lift up our eyes on high”, we see the world from a different perspective, we realize that our view is limited and we need the input of another(s) to see more of the picture, to be able to gain more insight as to the next right action to take, to check ourselves and our action to make sure they are ‘in line with the divine’. Engaging in a spiritual practice, engaging in spiritual, moral, ethical learning leads us to the uncovering of our eyes, it is a cataract surgery for our souls, and then we are able to discover “the question this experience is the answer for” instead of always seeing the experience as a problem to solve. Flipping the script in this way gives We the People the insight, the realization, the question to meet this moment and the next. It is the solution to all of our issues today-finding the right question so we can have a response that is worthy of our partnership with God, that is worthy of our status as human beings, that increases our ability to be human.

“The grandeur of nature is only the beginning. Beyond the grandeur is God” comes to remind us of our innate ability to see beyond the surface, to go deeper into what truly is and not get caught up with the shiny things, to keep digging into our selves, our souls, our inner life so we can “see” “beyond the grandeur” and, like Moses, meet God “face to face”. We the People have this opportunity every day, all it takes is learning and practicing how to “lift up our eyes on high”, all it takes is to hear and respond to God’s call of “Ayecha, where are you”. All it takes is not an easy task and it is simple, it is a 2% shift from 49% yearning to “see” to 51% learning and willing to “see”, a 2% shift from 51% needing to be right and have the answer to 51% being a student, a learner, person who belongs only to a community of seekers, of nomads, of wanderers searching for truth, decency, justice, mercy, love.

I began making this 2% shift in December of 1986, I knew I was firmly rooted in 51% when I acknowledged my alcoholism, let go of my need to be right, jettisoned my greed and belief in net worth=self worth. Since then, I keep growing in my ability to “see on high” and keep searching for the questions this experience is the answer for, and grow my response to injustice, to disrespect, to mistreatment of people, all peoples, animals, nature because I cannot access God, I cannot access the best of me when I am not engaged in striving to be a better human. I know the importance to my spiritual health that living a congruent life, using my voice, loud as it is, as uncomfortable as it makes people, even those who love me, and not allowing my sight to become clouded like it was before the spiritual cataract surgery God performed on me in that jail cell. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Higher and lower forms of seeing Year 4 Day 327

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 4 Day 327

“Lift up your eyes on high and see who created these”(Isa. 40:26). There is a higher form of seeing. We must learn how to lift up our eyes on high in order to see that the world is more a question than an answer… The grandeur of nature is only the beginning. Beyond the grandeur is God.” (Thunder in the Soul pg. 63)

I am going to comment on this passage for two days. This passage from Isaiah is preceded by “comfort my people, comfort my them” (Isa. 40:1) which gives me the sense that to “lift up your eyes on high and see who created these” is to uplift the people, to lift us up and know that not only does God comfort us, God supports us when we do right, as we learn in the fourth chapter of Genesis, when God tells Cain that “negativity couches at your door, it desires you much and you can master it”. We the People can “master” the negativity that is within us, aka the evil inclination, and use it to attain “a higher form of seeing”. This is the GOOD NEWS of the Bible, the GOOD NEWS of the Torah, and the NEWS that is ignored, bastardized, abused, and misused by the charlatans, the idolators, the people in power both in Isaiah’s time, in the times of all the prophets, and in our time as well. Using the words of the Bible, the insights and teachings of the prophets for their own gain has been a theme of ‘religious’ people throughout the millennia and it is on the upswing right now!

We the people have become so small-minded, so small-seeing that we have fallen for the lies and the bullshit of the autocrat, the insanity of the judgmental, the cruelty of those in power, the horror of white supremacy in action. It is so antithetical to everything the Bible stands for and on, everything Jesus taught, everything the Constitution has within it to protect us from what is happening right now and we the, small-minded, afraid of our own shadows, people just wring our hands and/or even worse, cheer the hatred, the killing, the denial of humane treatment that is happening in America today. In our small-mindedness, we the people are unable to see the truth of pardoning the former president of Honduras who was responsible for 500 MILLION POUNDS OF COCAINE coming into this country and kidnap, arrest the president of Venezuela(a bad dude) and take the oil that belongs to the PEOPLE of Venezuela and call ourselves wonderful liberators!!??? WHAT THE FUCK?

Rather than leaning into the words of Isaiah, rather than hearing the words, the ways Rabbi Heschel lived his life, rather than living the words of Torah, of Hasidic teachings, of the Sermon on the Mount,  we the people would rather kiss the ass of the rich and powerful, sit like trained seals waiting for some leftovers of their food, of their businesses, etc so we can eat! Rather than reaching for “a higher form of seeing”, we the, small-minded, stunted vision, bastardizers of faith, people like looking down, especially if we can look down on another human being. This is what brought about Donald Trump’s success at the ballot box, the ‘good progressives, those people who are always on the “right” side of the argument” looking down upon the “deplorable”,  looking down on those of us who are not so erudite, so smart, lifting up their noses to avoid the ‘stench’ of those of us who are so impatient with bullshit, with pat answers, with being told ‘you just don’t understand, it is too above your ability to understand’ and instead respond/react with loudness, with truth, with rage at the injustices these so-called ‘nice people’, these progressives engage in and their inability to admit their own errors.

“Lift up your eyes on high” is the call to Abraham as well, it is the call to all of us each and every day-to “lift up your eyes” and open up our ears to the Voice that broadcasts from Mount Sinai on the Ultra High Frequency of our soul’s language, our soul’s knowing. This is the way We the People get right-sized! We the People are not meant to be small-minded, afraid of our own shadows, stunted vision, bastardizers of faith! We the People are created in the IMAGE OF THE DIVINE, We the People “are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”! There is no place for autocracy in the American Constitution, in the American Revolution, in the Jewish world of Torah, of Bible. King David is held to account and can admit his guilt and the ASSHOLES in charge today cannot-this should tell us something! King David is willing to listen to women and follow their direction and the progressives can only wrap themselves in their platitudes and never surrender to the truth of the harms they have wrought upon us.

“Lift up your eyes on high” and engage in “a higher form of seeing” has been the mantra of my recovery, my ability to change, my eagerness to learn, my willingness to do T’Shuvah, my impatience with mendacity and need to rebuke those who are mean and cruel, those who are, wittingly and/or unwittingly, making errors in real time. It is the call of Isaiah and it is the call of God who gave Isaiah the words to speak, the spark of light to “see”, the opening of his soul, and ours, to hear. I am asking all of us to, once again, do a daily Chesbon HaNefesh and ‘see’ where we are keeping faith with this “higher form of seeing”, where we are acting with gratitude and humility when we “see who created these” and where/when we are not. This is the greatest call for and to We the People this call to “Lift up your eyes on high and see” because all of the ills we have experienced throughout history comes from looking down, not looking up, comes from looking in our pockets, our banks, for more, more, more and not looking up, gaining sight and vision to “SEE” the person next to us, in front of us, behind us who needs our help. This has been the true shift in my being in these 38+years of recovery, I continue to grow my practice of engaging in “a higher form of seeing” so I can continue to serve We the People, serve God, serve my better angels. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

The need for power, order, control, and certainty can lead to being inhumane - Year 4 Day 326

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 4 Day 326

“Modern man dwells upon the order and power of nature; the prophets dwell upon the grandeur and creation of nature. The former directs his attention to the manageable and intelligible aspect of the universe; the latter to its mystery and marvel.” (Thunder in the Soul pg. 63)

“Modern man dwells upon the order and power of nature” because it gives one a sense of control, a sense of certainty that the sun will rise each morning, the moon will be able to be seen in the evening, snow in the winter, rain in the spring, etc. The need of human beings for order, power, certainty and control is so great in some of us that this need overshadows all other concerns, all other demands of God, even the belief in God gets overshadowed by our needs for these things. These needs place humans before God, as if God doesn’t really have a say in our lives, as if God is meaningless to us because satisfying our needs for control, order, power, and certainty are greater than anything else. We the People are addicted to these needs and will do anything and everything to have them fulfilled, just look at the ways in which so many people have given their vote, their power, their future over to the likes of Trump, Vance, Netanyahu, Ben G’Vir, Putin et al!

History will record this time as a depression, as a retardation of God’s Will and ways. It will write chapter and verse on “man’s inhumanity to man” after only 90 years since the last experience of it. It will speak to future generations of the inhumanity done by the ‘bad’ people and by the ‘good’ people. When we the people are so small minded, so spiritually stunted that we need a ‘bad guy’ in order to feel good, we the people are engaging our evil inclination, and this happens on “both sides of the aisle! When we the people are so small in our own esteem that we need to deny the infinite worth and dignity of another human being so we can value our self, our narcissism is alive, well and running the show and, again, this happens on “both sides of the aisle”. When we the people cannot give one another our due, cannot be happy for the joys and success’ of another human being, when our agendas, our dogmas overshadow our kindness, our humanity, our call to be generous of spirit and loving, we are focusing on our need for “order”, “power”, certainty, and control. This is true of the progressive and the conservative, their surety in their own ‘rightness’ propels them to acting inhumane and their denial of their inhumanity only serves to make them more and more inhumane. The denial of the rights of a person because of their race, creed, religion is as abhorrent as the denial of the rights of a person who doesn’t want to do business with people of a ‘certain kind’ because in a free society if someone doesn’t want my business- I go someplace else. The same is true for places of worship; we have many synagogues, churches, temples, because we the people don’t like some and like another. Like we say in AA- all it take to start a new meeting is “a coffee pot and a good resentment”! Yet, the need for “order, power”, control and certainty causes the denial of rights, the theft of the dignity of an individual, and validates the inhumanity shown by one person to another in their minds.

The prophets, however, give us a different way to see “nature”, to live in the world: dwelling upon the mystery and marvel of life, of “nature”, of the awesomeness of being a partner with God in perfecting creation-knowing it will never happen in our lifetime and we engage in the work anyway, as Rabbi Tarfon teaches. The prophets left with us, as an inheritance, the ability to gaze upon the sunrise with awe and amazement, knowing the “Tifferet”; the beauty, the combination of all our needs and powers coming together in praise and joy, beauty and wonder! WE THE PEOPLE are being called by the Voice on Mount Sinai each and every day to use our inheritance to make the world better, to let go of our unrelenting needs for control, power, order, certainty and live into the power of the universe, live in the spirit of the world of nature and protect it, nourish it, grow it so the spirit within each one of us grows as well. Protecting, nourishing nature leads us to protecting and nourishing one another which leads to the uplift in our spirituality and our way of living life as a being that is compatible to be a partner with the Ineffable One! The prophets, with all their doom and gloom, had great belief and faith in We the People! Otherwise, why waste their breath and since they were ‘sent’ by God, God has great faith in We the People! ISN’T IT WAY PAST TIME FOR US TO HONOR THIS BELIEF AND FAITH? Isn’t it way past time for us to let go of our joy and rapture at the inhumanity we can do to one another? Isn’t it time for We the People to hold the people responsible for the deaths, the torture, the imprisonment of people that ICE is doing in our name?

Living the inheritance the prophets left for me is a difficult life! As both Socrates and Malcolm X said: “the unexamined life is not worth living” and “the examined life is painful”! 60 years ago today, I buried my father and listened to the asinine comments of people telling me “I know how you feel” when their fathers were still alive!! This is an example of inhumanity because by trying to feel better themselves, they lied, they took away my feelings, my experience, my dignity-isn’t this the definition of inhumanity? I engaged in being inhumane to another(s) and I still experience the regret and I shudder inside from it. Hence, my commitment to the legacy, the inheritance of my father, Jerry Borovitz, z”l, the legacy, the inheritance of the prophets and to being human in every situation-not always making it and sure as hell trying to. I bristle and speak out when someone is being inhumane to another and get in trouble for it sometimes, so what! Seeing what is ‘behind the curtain’ makes me dangerous and not wanted in some circles-oh well. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Hearing, Reasoning, Perceiving, using the ears, the mind can lead us astray! Year 4 Day 325

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 4 Day 325

“And yet, what the ear fails to perceive, what reason fails to conceive, the Bible makes clear to our souls. It is a higher truth, to be grasped by the spirit.” (Thunder in the Soul pg.63)

Ah, the hubris of humanity is stated in the words above. We the People have been told by societal norms that our hearing is excellent, that our reason is uber alles the holy grail of living and none of this is true! Yet, no matter how often these ideas, these “conventional notions” are disproven, humanity comes back to them over and over, ignoring the consequences, the hatred, the murdering, the deaths by suicide, the myriad of ways to escape when our reasoning fails us, when we are deaf to what is really happening. This may be, the greatest tragedy of a human life; not accepting that our ears and our reason will get us only so far and, to be human, to be in joy, to be decent, to be kind, to engage in a reciprocity of generosity, “a higher truth” has “to be grasped by the spirit.”

We are so full of ourselves, also so full of shit, that there are people like Donny- the Boy and Bibi-the denier, Vlad-the pouter, Vance-the made-up man, Miller-the hater, Lutnick-the quintessential picture of the Shylock, Hegseth-the face, Bondi-the blonde whore, etc who claim to be the ONLY purveyors of Truth. These people and their cronies like RFK Jr claim to have the corner on the truth and ‘those’ people who disagree with ‘us’ are your enemies, they are the liars, they are the false prophets, it is only ‘we’ that follow Jesus, it is only ‘we’ who care about the poor, the stranger, the …. AND We the People bought this bullshit enough to elect Bibi, Donny, Vlad, more than once!! WTF!!???! Since there is more than “the ear” can “perceive” and “reason” can “conceive”, what possible excuse can We the People have for shrinking our soul’s knowing, for keeping our soul’s at an immature level? We have the record of a higher hearing, a higher consciousness at the Red Sea, at Mount Sinai. We know the experience of Moses upon seeing the “back of God’s presence” and the glow he had after that. We have the record of Samuel’s being called, of David praising God in the Psalms and being able to hear another person’s advice, even a woman’s!

Yet, we the people have gotten so small-spirited, so small-minded, so unreasonable, so deaf that only hatred, only blame, only retribution make sense any more. Our attention span has become so short as evidenced by the ways the DRUMPF has taken the Epstein Files off our radar, he has essentially gone to war to cover up, to ignore his role in the doings and goings on of Jeffery Epstein. He has sent his Goon Squad, his SS Storm Troopers into American Cities to kill American Citizens in order to hide the fact that Melania was an Epstein Girl, that he partook in the Epstein Parties, we know he desired Ivanka as a girl.

Yet, we the people are so short-sighted, so inept spiritually to stand up for the truth that goes beyond the mendacity, the bullshit being shoveled our way. We the people have forgotten the words of the prophets, we have misread the Bible, the New Testament, history itself. It doesn’t belong to the winners, it isn’t the strongest that win/survive. Jesus tells us “the meek shall inherit the earth”, the Bible is the story and written by the JEWS who were displaced from their land, who wandered for almost 1900 years!

We the People must wake the fuck up! We the People are being called by the words above, by the situation of today to go beyond our hearing and our perceiving, to rise above what “the ear fails to perceive” and “reason fails to conceive”. We the People are being given the opportunity to repair the damage we have done by electing the charlatans, the idolators to office. We the People are being given the power to be a blessing, as Abraham was given, by standing for what is good and holy, decent and kind, by rising above the mundane murmurings of society. We the People have within us the ability to be “maladjusted to” societal norms and our mental cliches, to climb up Mount Sinai and meet the One who IS, the One who WAS, the One who WILL BE. We the People are able to grow our spiritual life so We can “grasp” the “higher truth” with our “souls’. To do this, We the People have to rise above the pettiness and pride we seem to always fall into. We have to let go of our need to be right, our need to blame and shame, our need to demean in order to feel stronger, to rise up, to stop needing to step on someone else in order to “climb the ladder of success”. We the People are being asked to take the cotton out of our ears, to stop acting on the first thought and wait for the second one, to see with our ‘third eye’ and allow our souls’ to guide us instead of false ego, false pride, etc being our motivator.

While this seems hard for most of us, I have found it possible to live into the Spirit that guided the Israelites in the Desert, the Spirit that has guided me into recovery and continues to be the guidance I need. I know the draw of false ego, the relief of being able to blame another for my errors, the false claim of ‘not my responsibility’, etc. they’re the tools I used in my life prior to recovery. What I have recovered is ME, the authentic Mark Borovitz, the son my father raised, the soul God created me to be. I engage in higher consciousness every day and ‘see’ things that most people don’t, “hear” things that are unintelligible to many and preach them loud and louder. I experience the sadness of being left out, the sadness of loneliness that the prophets experienced throughout our time, the sadness of disappointment in not being known by those I trust. AND, I experience the joy of speaking truth to power, the joy of continuing to have the energy and staying power to keep preaching the gospel according to my soul, to what God tells me and the joy of being known by so many. It is truly a both/and. The Bible sets my soul free. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

"Sense for the Sublime", growing the "inward greatness of the human soul" or becoming "flat and the soul a vacuum" Year 4 Day 324

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 4 Day 324

“The sense for the sublime, the sign of the inward greatness of the human soul and something which is potentially given to all people, is now a rare gift. Yet without it, the world becomes flat and the soul a vacuum.” (Thunder in the Soul pg. 62)

Reminding ourselves that “sublime” is defined as elevated, grand, heroic from the Hebrew, these words are making me shudder, helping me to wake up and use my 5 senses to appreciate, live into, and respond to the “sublime” that is surrounding me at all times.  At stake right now, as it has been in the past, is “the inward greatness of the human soul”, the living into the potential we are all created with by having the our souls blown into us by God, as the 2nd chapter of Genesis teaches. This is the challenge for all of us!

We the People are being bombarded by bullshit and mendacity, by subterfuge and cons, by Ponzi schemes and brazenness at the top of our ‘food chain’, our Federal Government from the President on down the line. There is no one in this Administration that believes in the Constitution, that believes in the Oaths they have taken, and, by extension, they help to promote a “the world that becomes flat and the soul a vacuum”! When the President of the United States says about   The Civil Rights Act that “White people did very badly…and they were not invited to go into a university or college”. “So, I would say in that way, I think was unfair in certain cases.” WHAT THE FUCK!! The Civil Rights Act was a path to right the WRONGNESS of the UNFAIR TREATMENT of Black people for 200+ years here in the “land of the FREE”! Rather than acknowledge the “inward greatness of the human soul” of people of color, of Jews for a time, of every ethnic group that came here to escape persecution or poverty, these ‘POOR WHITE FOLK’ like Donald J. Trump, JD Vance, Russell Vought, Stephen Miller, Jared Kushner need to only acknowledge “their kind” as having any greatness, as having the right to do as they please. These words have to enrage We the People because they deny the truth, they skirt the issue, they use subterfuge to cover the ways the Civil Rights Act sought to elevate the plight of the Black Person, sought to end the SENSELESS HANGINGS of those ‘fine white southern christian KKK members’ that Trump thinks are “good people”.

I am railing about this because if I don’t We the People may become immune to the lies, immune to the hatred being spewed and confused because there is a grain of truth in what President DRUMPF(his real name) said; namely the universities and colleges started to admit more people of color, the job market opened up to more people of color, the wages of people doing the same job became the same for people of color as they were for white people-these are all terrible things for a Free Society to do, right!!??

We the People have to regain our “sense for the sublime” in every thing we do, this is the core aspect of the Mitzvah, the basic tenet of Christ’s teaching as I understand it. We say a prayer before we eat to express gratitude, to acknowledge that on our own, we could not have prepared “this meal”, “this bread”. Then, as Jews, we say a prayer after eating to express satisfaction, to express joy, to remember to Whom we owe our gratitude. With each action we take,  from waking up through going to sleep, we say some prayer acknowledging the action, reminding myself of the obligation, and growing our“inward greatness of the human soul” within us. Each prayer, each mitzvah, each action either retards my march to growing and living at an “elevated” state, to living into the “grandness” of our being, to being an example of “heroic” to our children, family, community. This is the challenge of the words above, are we going to buy into the mendacity, approve of the grift, the graft, the theft of money, of people, of property this government is engaged in or are we going to STAND THE FUCK UP FOR THE TRUTH, THE CONSTITUTION, LOVE, KINDNESS, ETC? Are we going to STAND AGAINST THE MENDACITY, THE HATRED, THE AUTOCRACY these people who are “flat” and whose souls have become “a vacuum?

These are a few of the questions facing We the People in this moment. I have seen this movie before, I have hear the testimonies of people who survived a moment like this in the past, I can give testimony to what it was like for a black man to be dehumanized by having to be paid less than a white man for the same work because I heard it directly from the black men who worked for my father and who praised him for raising their wages to be equal when he took over the business! I can testify to the dehumanization of a Jew in Hungary when the Nazis came and the Hungarian government was so happy to fulfill the call for more Jews to be gassed, for Jews to be shot in the back of the head and fall into the Danube after their shoes were taken from them because I heard the testimony from survivors. I can attest to the discrimination against Jews in the Armed Services during WWII, and in America as well because my father was subjected to it and he stood tall, he would not give in to changing his name. I can attest to the emptiness of life when my “soul” was “a vacuum” and I was a flat two-dimensional being. I refuse to live this way, I refuse to be ignored, I refuse to stop my goal of reaching you and me so we can grow our “sense of the sublime”, so we can live an “elevated, grand” life. This is the heroic task that we are presented with in this moment, to fight these autocrats, the senseless hatred being spewed by this government and to say YES to the teachings of Christ, YES to the teachings of Moses, YES to the Call from Sinai. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark