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Ghosting God, Ghosting Self

Ghosting God, Ghosting Self

Day 59

For the next week, in honor of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, I am going to look at the words, discern meanings and intentions and look to see how they are in sync with the Bible, the prophets, and when and how they are not.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men (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” WOW, what a truly revolutionary document, what a spiritual document written by deeply faithful men and men who knew their misogyny was suspect, their treatment of Black people even more suspect, and rose to meet their higher angels in this document. What has happened to “these truths” that, to the men who wrote and signed this document, are believed to “be self-evident”? What happened to the idea that each one of us, as a religious group, as an individual have different experiences with “their creator”? According to the stories of the Rabbis, which were supposedly passed down through the generations, each person who crossed the Red Sea, each person who stood at Mount Sinai, had their own personal experience with “their Creator”. Each of the prophets had their own experience with “their Creator”, each of the Biblical Heroes had the same, yet, in these 250 years, we the people have lived down into ego, narcissism, being pharaohs to black people, to immigrants of all stripes when they first come over, and now to the refugees from different lands-“how  have the mighty fallen” is both King David’s lament at the death of King Saul and his dear, dear friend, Jonathan AND the lament many of We the People are saying now.

Caring for, loving the stranger has become so passe, for so long, that it seems as if the people following our “founding fathers”, lived in a narcissistic bubble and rather than learning from the stories in Exodus about how not to be a Pharaoh, they seem to have believed Pharaoh is good, Slavery is fine and only “certain” “men are created equal”! This is as true if not more true today than it was 200 years ago. The question for me, for we, is how does a Donald Trump, a Stephen Miller, a Steve Bannon develop into the Pharaohs they have become? All of their ancestors came here from lands that were not treating them so well, Drumpf running away from military service in Germany (sound familiar), Bannon from Ireland during great poverty, the Potato Famine, and Miller’s from Nazi Germany, yet these three have made it their life’s passion to deny the same rights, the same opportunities to the people in need right now, to the refugees from Haiti, from Syria and, soon from everywhere else! Thanks to the Supreme Court, one of who’s members adopted 2 Haitian children-will they have to go back also, declared the ‘right’ of Trump to deny entry, to deport the hundreds of thousands of refugees who are adding to our society, who work, who pay taxes, etc-all because of the color of their skin!

“Proclaim Freedom throughout the Land and to ALL its inhabitants therein” is the writing in Leviticus, the writing on the Liberty Bell, and the LAST CONCEPT that a portion of we the people want to see happen. The taskmasters in charge right now, listening to the directives of their Pharaoh, Trump, are enjoying a renaissance of hatred towards anyone who is not a “white Christian nationalist male”, being a believer in Jesus Christ as a Catholic is not good enough forthe Evangelical far right who believe they are more equal than the rest of us Jews, Blacks, Hispanics, etc is the name of the game right now. Miller, Trump, Bannon are repeating the insidious, horrific, hateful actions of Cordell Hull when he turned the St.Louis away after pressuring Cuba to not take them in either. His ancestors were seeking a better way when they immigrated to America yet, he and his descendants like Bannon, Trump, Miller don’t want anyone else to have the same opportunity! WTF?

“Give me your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free”, these words on the Statue of Liberty gave hope to people like my Grandparents when they were on the boat-in steerage of course-coming into New York Harbor, running away from the hardships of their homelands, Poland, Ukraine, etc and this hope developed into determination to be decent to all, neither of my grandfathers would allow disparaging talk in front of them, they welcomed everyone in need to their homes and businesses, they adopted two children and in my father’s home, took in 5 of their nieces and nephews when their mothers died. My amends to them, at their graves in 1990 was for shitting on their courage, on not making their hope into a reality, my living amends is they way I conduct my affairs, the help I have given to many and the humility to serve God, repay the debt and love my neighbor.

ACTION STEP

“How the mighty have fallen”, is the question we have to ask about our self and our country

GOD BLESS, STOP GHOSTING GOD, GHOSTING SELF, Rabbi Mark

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Ghosting God, Ghosting Self

Ghosting God, Ghosting Self

Day 58

Acknowledging TRUTH has become very difficult in the world we live in now and have lived in for the past 11 years. While politicians and elected officials have always “spoken with forked tongue”, the assault on TRUTH has never had this much cooperation from “those fine christian folks” and “those keepers of the jewish faith” like Vought, like Vance, like Netanyahu, like Trump! What is so terrifying to me, a child of the protest movement, a child who’s parents and grandparents were subjected to Anti-Semitism for so many years, is that the young people, people from the age of 14-25 have no idea what TRUTH is and how to discern it, they are ill-equiped to suss it out because even the College-Educated young people no longer are given the space to seek and find themselves, TRUTH, how to get along with one another, etc. Rather, it is all about the Benjamins, all about the money, all about seeing another human being(s) as an enemy who is ‘after your job’, “after your wives”, “eating your pets”, and other such BULLSHIT!

JD Vance, speaking at the Nixon Library, says what Nixon did with Watergate is no big deal, he was run out of office inappropriately, and just like Donald Trump, Nixon got us out of Vietnam in strength, he conducted foreign affairs with an iron hand and other bullshit. Trump gains a victory from the Supreme Court so he can throw out asylum seekers, refugees from Syria, Hatti, rather than follow the call of the Founding Fathers, the promise of the Statue of Liberty. According to Sam Alito and the right-wing majority on the Court, calling people of color as “coming from shithole counties” is not racist, calling out the Somalis who came here under extreme duress as less than human, begging people from Norway to come instead of ‘those people’ is not racist. DOES ANYONE REMEMBER HISTORY? DOES ANYONE REMEMBER GERMANY in the 1930’s? What the Fuck People??!!

The hubris of Trump, et al, of the Republican Party writ large, of that ‘fine christian gentleman’ Mike Johnson in ignoring the words of Amos 2:12 “But you gave the Nazirites wine to drink and commanded the prophets, saying Prophesy not”! This is referring to the Northern Kingdom of Israel and the priests, royalty, wealthy got people who took vows to not drink to drink and people who were called to speak truth to power, to shut up. SOUND FAMILIAR? When CBS caves into the lies of Trump, when Trump engineers the takeover of major media outlets by his ‘good friend, Larry Ellison”, when the ultra rich, the oligarchs in and of America, keep using the rest of us to feed their insatiable need for more, more, more, when people who speak up and out are indicted by Grand Juries with lies and innuendos by this NON-JUSTICE department, when people of color, women, Jews are denied promotions, denied access, forced to quit, made to swear allegiance to TRUMP and not the flag, not the United States Constitution, I believe we are in the ballpark with Ancient Israel, with Hitler’s rise in Germany.

When Mamdani has done to undermine the Center of the Democratic Party is atrocious! His left-wingnut bullshit ‘progressive’ agenda is not about equality, not about freedom of thought, choice, etc- it is as racist as Trump’s! Remember the Nazi Party was called the National Socialist Party! Mamdani and his co-horts, AOC, Bernie, et al are not seeking to find common ground, they are feeding the narrative that Democrats don’t care about the average joe, the average jane! How could I believe they will protect my interests as a JEW, when they have such venom and hatred for Israel-not the government of Netanyahu, the entire country, when they go along with and, in some cases, lead the “from the river to the sea” chants? When I am not one of poor nor am I one of the rich-I am part of the millions of Americans who live in the “middle of the road” politically, religously, spiritually, and financially-the part of America these ‘fine progressive folk’ seem to hate as much as they hate the rich!

What is the solution? It has to begin with hearing the call of Amos’ words. We the People have to demand that our elected officials get back to serving the Constitution and their constituencies-US! We the People have to return to our roots, the Bible. We the People have to demand of ourselves an endng to the Lies, to the excuses, to the ways we run after the majority, and sometimes, lead the majority to DO EVIL! Amos is calling us to account and We the People have to make a spiritual accounting of our actions:

ACTION STEPS

We the People have to see how we have betrayed the people who sacrificed so much so We could live in, grow up in a Free Country.

We the People have to make our amends, take the corrective actions that will change our thinking

We the People need to follow the paths of the Bible, the paths of T’Shuvah.

We the People are being called back to living decently, to doing justly, to be merciful, to walk in the ways of God-will you begin anew today

GOD BLESS, Stop Ghosting God, Ghosting Self, Rabbi Mark

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Ghosting God, Ghosting Self

Ghosting God, Ghosting Self

Day 57

‘Don’ Trump has watched the Godfather too much, it seems. I believe he keeps believing he is “offering them a deal they can’t refuse”, because of the behavior of some of these so-called “independent” lawmakers on the Republican side of the aisle. Maybe he is threatening them, a guy like Bill Cassidy is, or at least once was, a man with morals and concerns for the people he serves-not no more! After he and Rand Paul stood for the courage of their convictions, they both backed down like sheep, afraid of their shepherd. What a shepherd the ‘don’ Trump is-he has invaded sovereign countries, he has fucked over our allies for over 80 years and kissed the ass of our enemies for over 80 years, he has treated the stranger with cruelty and contempt, he has treated the poor as if they are criminals, has led the wealthy in running after evil, has never been responsible for anything except his lies about his greatness, etc. This is the shepherd that the Republican Party is raving about, following around like a puppy, and worshiping more than they worship Christ!

Watching this reminds me of the words of Amos: “but for the 4th, I will not turn away his punishment; because they have despised the Torah(teachings) of Adonai and not kept the commandments; and their lies, after which their fathers walked have led them astray”(Amos 2:4). Here we the people are, some 2700+ years later, some 2500 after the first reading of the prophets STILL despising the Teachings of God, not keeping God’s commandments, and our lies are still leading us astray! What the Fuck, people? Is humanity this stupid, this arrogant? In the United States, learning about the heroism of the founding fathers, the ‘soldiers’ in the Revolutionary War, soldiers in all of our wars fighting for our freedom of choice is automatic. Yet, here we the people are, denying their heroism, giving up our freedom of choice, going along with the despot because of fear, because believing his/her lies is better than facing the truth of our own? It is inconceivable to me that after all these years, all of the readings of Amos, the prophets, that we the people still act like small frys, like idiots that need to be led, like people who have drank the juice and want to follow ‘der fuhrer’ and yet, here we are!

What makes it all the worse, what makes our current situation all the more confusing and despicable, is that these lies, the despising of the teachings of Adonai, are being fomented, aged, pushed by the very Clergy Amos is speaking to! The very people who claim to have “heard the call of God to serve”, are the ones promoting the lies, the despising of Adonai’s teachings! This is so revolting, I don’t know where to put this. I keep asking myself how does this happen and then I realize this has been happening forever! What is so annoying is the refusal of we the people to learn about the consequences of following our lies, the consequences of not following the teachings of Adoani when it keeps happening over and over again throughout the history of humanity.


The punishment is, as we learn in the Bible, exile and wandering. While we can see this on the macro level, it is as important, if not more so, that we look at our individual experience. “Despising the teachings of Adonai” led Jesus to call out the priests and the wealthy, led Jesus to teach the ways to love your neighbor, to do justly, kindly, follow the ways of God. Yet, the Christians also have had an issue with their clergy “despising the teachings of Adonai” by perverting them, using them to spread hatred and strife, to value themselves and Christians in general over any other peoples, etc. They have been spreading and following the lies of their fathers which has ruined many good people, promoted hatred of Jews, hatred of indigenous people and their religions, ‘worship(ed)’ Christ and not followed the ways in which he lived. The Rabbis in their fear of the prophets have done this also, have gone along with the altering of the Biblical Text by Ezra(I have learned) and keep spreading the lies of their fathers as well as making up new ones of their own!

THIS HAS TO STOP! Haven’t we suffered from the consequences of our behaviors enough to learn? I guess not because electing Trump, voting people who see the both/and when it comes to Israel, to change being incremental, all show that we the people have learned nothing in the past 11 years since Trump announced he was running. I keep thinking about the lies I told myself for so long about myself-never believing I was able to return, that my return was even wanted, that my shame was so great I would never be able to dig out of it, etc. These lies kept me stuck in a life that was not mine, that “despised the teachings of Adonai” for over 20 years. Only when I began to immerse myself in the Bible, in the teachings of the prophets, could I begin to have hope and the rest, as they say, is history. The teaching I want to leave you with today is:
Redemption and Return are “Teachings of Adonai” -are you practicing both

Writing down the Lies you tell yourself helps you separate fact from fiction

GOD BLESS, Stop Ghosting God, Ghosting Self, Rabbi Mark

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Ghosting God, Ghosting Self

Ghosting God, Ghosting Self

Day 56

The prophet Amos tells us about the 3 things God will forgive different nations for and the 4th God will not. When talking about Israel, ie the Northern Kingdom, Amos states they will not be forgiven because they “sold the righteous for silver and the poor for a pair of shoes”. Does this sound familiar? Isn’t this way of almost every autocrat, fascist, dictator, Monarch, power-hungry asshole, almost every Musk-like person? Have not we watched throughout our lifetimes the rich banding together to get richer and fuck over the little guy? As I am writing, I think of the story and King David and Bathsheba and Uriah. The prophet Nathan pronounces King David guilty of having enough and then stealing what a poor person only has one of, in this case-Uriah's wife and, on top of that, sends Uriah to his death! Every time Trump is being pushed, forced to admit truth, he covers it up, he deflects by causing death, be it in Iran, Ukraine (because he isn’t helping our ally), in the Carribean, and who knows where next!

When we went to war to help Kuwait, it was about the oil/money, when we went to war against Saddam, it was about the oil/money, when we went to war with Iran it is about the oil/money and for the oil/money, we the people have allowed our leaders, our military to commit war crimes and taught our children to hate and shoot first, ask questions later, causing so much mental and moral injury to our young men and women in uniform. People who stood up and railed againt these practices, these actions done for the money, were/are villified, primaried, sold out by members of their own party. We have seen this on the Republican side of the aisle and, now, Mandami, AOC, Bernie are taking the Democratic Party to the other extreme-I keep hearing Pete Seeger’s words: “When will they ever learn”! That Israel is ‘the issue’ for these ‘progressive’ ‘socialist’ democrats is a JOKE! Israel’s beginnings were all about socialism, now that this government has taken the country to the extreme is not what Israel is about, it is what this government is about. According to the logic of these ‘progressive democrats’ the Constitution should not be followed nor should we uphold the principles of the Declaration of Independence because the only way to be eligble for the freedoms provided for within each is to be on their side!

When they had power, especially during the Obama years and Biden years, these ‘progressives’, made bathrooms their Alamo! Unless people would allow all bathrooms to be non-gender they were homophobic, racist, etc! How about the truth that some women don’t want to see dicks hanging out in their bathrooms? How about the truth that some men don’t want women seeing their dicks hanging out when they are using the urinals! This never occurs to these so-called ‘progressives’. They “sold the righteous for silver” because they can’t see anyone but themselves as “righteous”! When it comes to the poor, they use them as spears to attack everyone else-no one does enough for the poor except them! Bullshit-Lyndon Johnson oversaw and initiated the “Great Society” and did so much for the poor-it is the rich bastards on both extremes who keep the poor people down, who sell them out every chance they get! So, mr. mandami, ms. AOC, mr. sanders-what you are reaping is going to kick us all in the ass when you sow! Dan Goldman is a decent righteous man and your opposition to him because he supports Israel as a Jewish State and believes in limitations to the aid given to them, is ridiculous and a prime example of how you have “sold the righteous for silver” and to the people of New York, I ask you: “How could you go against the truth, the decent, the righteous and say you are ‘progressive’ and at the same time ANTI-SEMITIC?

I call BULLSHIT on you Mandami, AOC, Sanders- your so-called socialism is nothing but a new twist on you being the rich and powerful, you doing to your ‘enemies’, aka, decent righteous people who see the both/and of life, what you claim they have done to you and the ‘poor’ people around you. It is WAY PAST TIME for We the People to re-assert OUR POWER, it is WAY PAST TIME for We the People to take back the reins of government, follow the call of Amos and repair the damage we the people wrought by selling “the righteous for silver and the poor for a pair of shoes”. We the People are being called upon to find our humanity again, to seek out the righteous for their wisdom and guidance, to lift up the poor so they can make a life that honors their infinite worth and provides them with the opportunity to regain their dignity, to honor the uniqueness of every human being including our own so the world can move forward and each of us can be a little more decent, loving, and join together to find better solutions than come out of just being in an echo chamber. I am, once again, afraid that there is no place for the both/and I live in the American political system!
ACTION STEP:

  1. Find the ways you have sold out your righteousness and the righteous around you for “silver”

  2. Look at the ways you have exploited the poor within you and outside of you

GOD BLESS, Stop Ghosting God, Stop Ghosting Self, Rabbi Mark

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Ghosting God, Ghosting Self

Ghosting God, Ghosting Self

Day 55

On page 132 of God in Search of Man by Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, he states: “In this sense, faith is faithfulness, loyaty to an event, loyalty to our response”. I have been thinking about this a lot lately, as we are approaching the 250th year of the Declaration of Independence, the precursor to freedom which we supposedly revere and can’t seem to be loyal to its calling to us, the same is true of the Constittution since it was ratified in 1787! It is also true for the ‘religious’ people who are constantly displaying their DISLOYALTY to the Bible, to the ways of Christ, to the words of Christ, to the thoughts of Mohammed and all of these disloyal ‘holier than thou’ ‘religious’, charlatans, idolators, authoritarians are reminiscent of the days prior to the destruction and dispersement of the Northern Kingdom, Israel and its inhabitants therein!

I am so enraged, righteously indignant, spiritually fighting about our current situation, which is not really new-just an extension of what was, what has been passed off as loyalty and, we the people in our “faithfulness” to the glory of our self-deception, are like guppies lapping up the lies, promoting the deceptions of society and our own self-deception. I keep asking WTF and I realize each time that living into TRUTH is too difficult for most people. It is anathema to the willful blindness many of we the people have come to cherish, relish rolling around in like pigs in slop! I experience the rage of the prophets, which all of them had to a greater or lessor degree. The inner sadness they experienced because we the people did not listen, believe, change as they spoke to them God’s words, God’s call: “RETURN” as they reminded us that “I will heal their backsliding, I will love them freely”(Hosea 14:5) and we the people in our smallmindedness, in our rejection of spirituality and spiritual, moral teachings/ways of being, caused and are still causing our own destruction. It is not “Why is God doing this to me”, which people ask and have asked for ages-my mother among them when she would look at me in my other lifetime:). It is not “God has a plan, God works in mysterious ways” bullshit either because, while God does work in mysterious ways, while we human beings will never fully know God nor understand God because God is limitless, God’s plan is laid out in the Bible, in the words of Jesus, whom David Brooks calls a “Jewish Radical”.

Of course being Jewish is being a radical, just as the prophets were radicals who kept pounding into the Kings from David on how to live in agreement with God’s principles rather than their own self-centeredness, their own false ego. Understanding that kingship was a privilege not an entitlement, that with this privilege comes great responsibility to BE LOYAL to God’s PRINCIPLES. Be it Christ who says: “If you love me, keep my commandments”(John 14:15) or reading the Bible where it states that to love God is to keep God’s commandments, We the People are constantly being called to BE LOYAL to “caring for the stranger”, to “loving our neighbor”, to “rebuking people when they are going off the path”, to “not run after the majority to do evil”, to “pursue Justice, Righteousness, TRUTH, Kindness” continuously. DUH PEOPLE!

Listening to the politicians who claim such fidelity with Christ go against the commandments would be a joke if it were not so serious! Listening the the Clergy preach the Gospels of Hatred, of Power, of Disloyalty to God’s Will in the Churches, Mosques and Temples across the globe is INFURIATING! Being in the midst of the current war amongst the Jews over how to love Israel, who is a Zionist, not just who is a Jew is so ridiculous, so reminiscent of the senseless hatred that, according to the Rabbis, caused the destruction of the 2nd Temple, that I am jumping out of my skin at this DISLOYALTY to principles, to faith, to Emunah-loyalty to God. That so many clergy, leaders invoke the names of Christ, Adonai, Allah to make their cruelty, their graft, their despicable behaviors “come from God”, as mike johnson likes to say, if you want to know my political agenda read the Bible-the fucking problem is johnson is NOT READING THE BIBLE, DOES NOT BELIEVE IN CHRIST! If he were doing either-his agenda would be so different, if the Republicans in Congress and across the land either read the Bible or believe in Christ, Trump and his thugs would not be in office and would not be encouraged to burn down the Declaration of Independence after 248 years!

Being loyal to God is to allow God to “heal our backsliding”, “to take us back in love”, to know that “God’s anger is turned away” from We the People. Being loyal to God is living a life based on the principles of the Bible, the ways of living in concert with God, the ways in which we take our rightful places being servants of God and not servants of our rational minds, of the liars and cheats, of the idolators and charlatans. IT AIN’T EASY and it is simple. I have been doing this for better and worse each day for the past 39+ years and the joy of being faithful greatly outweighs the rush of the score!

GOD BLESS, STOP GHOSTING GOD, GHOSTING SELF, Rabbi Mark

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Ghosting God, Ghosting Self

Ghosting God, Ghosting Self

Day 54

WooHoo, the first day of talks with Iran are over and niether side walked out, tried to sabotage them!! I have such confidence in Jared the lying, grifting, ‘businessman’ and Steve the real estate mogul Wytkoff, both of whom have been barred from Putin’s presence, to be productive in the subtleties of these negotiations with JD Vance and his vast experience with diplomacy being able to pick up their slack! NOT

As we get closer to the 250th birthday of the Declaration of Independence, the beginning of the Revolutionary War, the birthing of the United States, I keep getting drawn to the prophets, in this case Hosea. These phony balony ‘good dogmatic jews and christian nationalists’, the idolatrous clergy who support them, the news media who give them oxygen and notice, we the people who cheer them on are the very reasons the 13 colonies revolted! AND no one is saying this. The level of cruelty, nastiness, lack of civility is astounding and was on full display at the PGA U.S. Open yesterday. For 17 of 18 holes, fans of Scotty Scheffler who was in the last group booed when Wyndam Clark had a good shot and cheered when he hit a bad one- how unkind, how disgusting and, I wonder, why didn’t Sheffler do something to stop it, to mitigate the cruelty? Yet, this is just another indication of how far we have fallen, how far we have gotten away from the principles that were outlined in the Declaration of Independence and fueled the fight against tyranny, against taxation without representation, against having to be of one faith, having to read the ‘company’ paper/news, etc.

What we the people are watching happening is all of the above: Trump’s tyrannical hold, reign over the Republican Party has rendered the Republicans in the House and Senate to be neutered, they have allowed themselves to be castrated which leads the people who elected them without personal representation because all they do is bend over and take it in the ass from Trump, Lutnick, Bessent, Rubio, Blanche, et al. The Christian Nationalists driving Project 2025 want the United States to be a “christian nation” while discarding Christ’s teachings and ways of being and Trump is having his cronies, also autocrats like Larry Ellison, buy up the media so most of the media will be like Fox News(which doesn’t engage in news at all) a mouthpiece and a clean-up for all that this horrific government is doing.

For a solution, I turn to Hosea again! In chapter 14, verses 2 and 3 mentioned in the past two days give us the path back-turning towards the Ineffable One, asking for forgiveness and having a plan to make the amends needed and to find a different response to the triggers that will happen again. In the case of the United States’ current situation of abandoning the principles that led to our Declaration of Independence, the taking on the same ways as King George III, trying to make this nation a ‘christian nation’, etc We the People have to gather on the 4th of July and say NO to this bullshit, NO to the lies, NO to the tyrannical rule, NO to the thievery, NO to the proliferation of White Supremacists trying to intimidate the rest of us, NO to going against our beginnings of being a nation which was a haven for the outcasts from another(s) country, NO to the cruelty, NO to the deceptions, NO to our own self-deceptions!

In Hosea 14:5 the result of our “turning back to Adonai” is: “I will heal their backsliding, I will love them freely”. This is God’s will, this is Christ’s God, not the bullshit we are led to believe by the lying Christian Nationalist Clergy who are racists, anti-semites, haters of Islam, and any other spiritual discipline that isn’t their brand of Christianity. I know that verses 2, 3, 5 are the real deal. 39+ years ago I began my “turning” and I have kept engaging in turning and returning to God, to the principles of the Bible which are all throughout the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. I know that God heals our “backsliding” because my has been healed every time I turn back to God after failing forward, learning something from my not so good actions. I experience God’s free love as it says: Amazing grace, how sweet the sound That saved a wretch like me I once was lost, but now am found Was blind, but now I see. God’s healing of my/our backsliding is immediate as is our/my experience of God’s love once we/I made the turn back to the beginning, back to the creator’s words, messages, and the story of the ‘founding mothers and fathers of the Bible’. “When will we ever learn” rings in my ears each and every day-it seems like we the people refuse to learn today, refuse to turn back today, refuse to be grateful for what we have today!
ACTION STEPS:
1) What are your foundational principles How do you live them each day

2)  What “backsliding” do you need healed

3) What is the state of your “return”

4) How do you reconcile your need for freedom with the ways in which your cruelty, your autocracy, your’s being the only opinion that matters

GOD BLESS, STOP GHOSTING GOD, GHOSTING SELF, Rabbi Mark

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Ghosting God, Ghosting Self

Ghosting God, Ghosting Self

Day 53

STOP THE PRESSES: VANCE IS OVER IN SWITZERLAND TO SAVE THE PEACE DEAL WITH IRAN! Thank God for JD, for DJT, for MR, for HL, et al for saving the United States from the threat of nuclear war that Iran posed after Trump tore up the first Iran deal because it was made by Barack Husein Obama, a black man who had the audacity to live in the White House! A black man who called Trump out at a Correspondents Dinner over his ‘birther’ bullshit! How he got elected fair and square remains a mystery to many of We the People! Hillary ran a bad campaign, Joe’s ego telling him he was the only one who could beat Trump and his family/advisors indulging him was horrific, and Kamala did not run a good campaign for her 101 days. So, here we are with Trump in charge, Trump stealing, grifting, picking the pockets of America and individual Americans each and every day - while telling us this is what the Founding Fathers meant to happen? OY VEY! Isn’t WAY PAST TIME for us to hear the call of Hosea with new hearing aids, read his words with a new pair of glasses?

“Turn to Adonai and say: forgive all iniquity and take us back in goodness and graciousness. We give you the words instead of the calves”(Hosea 14:3). I am calling out the Clergy who go along to get along, the FBI who have forsaken their sworn duty, the Department of Justice who have perverted Justice because as Deuteronomy teaches: “bribes blind the eyes of the wise and perverts the words of the righteous”(Deut.16:19) for not hearing this call of Jesus, of Moses, of God and, instead doing everything that the beginning of Parasha Shoftim in Deuteronomy warns against! Rather than appointing officials and officers to guard the gates, we the people elected someone who appoints officials and officers who will tear the gates down so the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, Billionaire Boys Club will be able to enter, rape, rob, and pillage this beautiful land, this democracy, and no more let freedom ring, no more “give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”. Rather, how can I steal from Venezuela, Iran, Cuba, NATO, etc to gain more power so I can be more corrupt is the way of this administration, is the way of these ‘fine christian nationalists’, these ‘fine Israel-loving jews’, etc. It is ingenious to make loving Israel and its current administration one and the same, which Trump has done forever because he is “the best friend Israel has ever had”! BULLSHIT- Friendship requires Truth, it requires rebuking your neighbor, friend, family member with love and concern-neither of which are present in Trump and his cronies-including the Jews who suck his ass!

For the Clergy to not be SHOUTING FROM THEIR PULPITS and ROOFTOPS is totally bewildering to me and, it is typical of what has happened to all people. Rather than channelling their inner prophet, their prophetic inheritance, Clergy want to ‘belong’, they are willing to WHORE themselves to ‘be accepted’, each day they live in fear of speaking truth to power because they are worried about making a living-financially. Their reasons may have some logic to them, be real and their rational minds make them HARLOTS just like Ancient Israel (and some would say modern-day Israel under Netanyahu. “Turn to Adonai” is the beginning of change, change cannot happen without both a turning away from old ways and ideas AND a turning to new ways of behaving, acting our ways into right thinking, returning to the source of wisdom and the stories of both successful and unsuccessful living found in the Bible, in its entirety and I especially am enamored with the tales of the prophets and the Psalms because they once again illumiate the lessons taught during the 40 years in the wilderness!

“Turn to Adonai” is only the 1st step in change, Adonai does a lot for us, for sure-AND Adonai doesn’t do it all, I can’t just turn my troubles, my foibles over to Adonai and believe everything will be okay-I have to do MY PART! I have to make the amends necessary for past behavior, I have to ask for forgiveness, for goodness, for grace and I have to forgive another(s), I have to practice goodness and give people grace. It is incumbent upon me to be Adonai’s partner, not supplicant, not mealy-mouthed slave, a partner. In fact, with the exception of the “big Aleinu” on the High HolyDays, we the people are always standing when we say God’s name in our prayers. We the People are called to face God, to be in a “face to face” relationship with God, to make the words of our lips become the reality within which to serve Adonai, our family, community, world! This is the goal, the yoke I accepted almost 40 years ago and I keep moving forward, with a lot of ups and downs each day.

ACTION STEPS

  1. How often do you read the prophets, the Bible and mine the wisdom from it and practice the wisdom in your daily living

  2. What will it take for you to STAND UP against the harlotry being pursued openly in America, in Israel, in your own living

GOD BLESS, STOP GHOSTING GOD, GHOSTING SELF, Rabbi Mark

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Ghosting God, Ghosting Self - Day 52

Ghosting God, Ghosting Self

Day 52

WOW, what a day it is as the Psalmist says: “This is the day God has made and let us rejoice in it”. I think of this verse each and every morning when I walk outside and marvel at the weather, the wind blowing, the sun shining and know that human beings had, have NOTHING TO DO WITH THESE THINGS, except maybe to fuck them up! I keep shaking my head at how humanity, since our beginning, have been unable to “Rejoice in it” and how sad this is. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel is quoted a lot and his teaching of “radical amazement and wonder” still eludes most of we the people. He would talk about the great miracle of the sun setting and the moon rising each day and people would look at him and not understand his marvel and joy at these ‘everyday occurences’ to most people and the electrifying charge of spiritual energy these daily miracles that abound around us daily mean to people of faith, people who know that “This is the day God has made” and to “rejoice in it” means to appreciate it, care for it, use it to move at least one grain of sand closer to finding and fulfilling the purpose each of us, individually, are created for and joining with family, community to promote the actions that make us worthy to “rejoice in” this day.

This idea was on full display yesterday at the opening of the Obama Presidential Library. The joy on the peoples’ faces who were there was infectious, the power of the musicians who were there infused all of us who heard them with hope and belief, the words of both Michelle Obama and President Barack Obama filled us with direction, being called to action, and with the task of making “this day” a day to “rejoice in” because We the People are not pining for what was, rather we are marching ahead to what can be. This is what President Obama said his Library is about, watching Presidents Clinton, Bush, Biden all sit, know and believe that “this is the day God has made” and their ability to “rejoice in it” together, without worrying about ‘party loyalty’, only caring about the personal bond they all share as former Presidents, only caring about their shared loyalty to the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, only caring about being “trusted servants of God” and of We the People!

Having met President Bush and corresponding with him for a minute, I was and am deeply moved by his faith in God, his belief in recovery and the brightness of his soul, while disagreeing with so many of his policies. After stating this to him in an email, he wrote me a hand-written note and I have it to this day on my desk-another reason to “rejoice in it” because two people who have such different backgrounds found the commonality of spirit to bond together and know that “this is the day God has made” and, together at times and individually we “rejoice in it”. I imagine the same is true for the Clintons and know from their words that this is true with the Bidens and Obamas. All of these men and women aspired while they were in office to “form a more perfect union” and kept fidelitty with the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence to the best of their ability and in their understanding of them.

Each day, We the People have the opportunity to acknowledge “this is the day God has made” and NOT THE DAY THAT TRUMP HAS MADE! Each day, We the People are able to have the experience of “rejoice in it” rather than go along with the MAGA CROWD AND SHIT ON IT and ALL THE PEOPLE THEY DEEM AS “ENEMIES”! While I am loathe to believe that the MAGA crowd is unredeemable, I keep thinking about Pharaoh and how he kept going back on his words, kept breaking the promises he made to God, to Moses, to the people-both the Egyptians and the Jews, ie the stranger- and how at a certain point he just wasn’t able to return, he was too far gone. I see this in Trump and know the responsibility is upon all of us, beginning with his father, then Roy Cohn, then the NY media, then NBC and now with the portion of we the people who actually bought the bullsht that he cared after his 1st term! These people, who claim such devotion to Jesus, are the charlatans, the “money-changers” in the Temple and in such stark contrast to the 4 former Presidents we were able to see yesterday, in such stark contrast to the staff, volunteers, people on display yesterday.

We the People are being called to make a very deliberate and decisive choice “this day”: Do We follow the Psalmist who teaches: “this is the day God has made and let us rejoice in it” or do we follow the MAGA’s who believe that “this is the day” for “christian nationalism” and Trump “to rejoice in”. I choose the former, no matter whom is President because to “rejoice in” God allows me, forces me, guides me to live in wonder and radical amazement!
ACTION STEP:

  1. Make a practice of rejoicing in this day, in this moment

  2. Make a practice of rejoicing in what is, even if it is shitty

  3. Make a practice of recognizing how to make this day better for the sake of Heaven, the sake of another(s)

GOD BLESS, STOP GHOSTING GOD, GHOSTING SELF, Rabbi Mark

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Ghosting God, Ghosting Self - Day 51

Ghosting God, Ghosting Self

Day 51

There is a Memo of Understanding between Iran and the United States, YAY, except neither nation understands the other, neither nation can count on Israel to agree, and how can one make a memo of understanding between untrustworthy people? I am elated that the ‘war’ is over-maybe- and afraid that, besides giving away the store, making a worse deal than Obama made, that Trump is so unpredictable, his ‘advisors’ are so hateful, that this could blow up at any moment. It is truly a both/and experience for me and many others, across the political spectrum. It points to a larger issue, for me, the trustworthiness of We the People. Since the beginning of the Bible, human beings have demonstrated their untrustworthiness to God, to one another and we the people have paid the price by being enslaved, exiled, taken over, and made into scapegoats-think Hitler blaming the Jews, the Southerners blaming the Blacks, the ‘White Man’ blaming the Native Americans, the white christian nationalists blaming LGBTQ+, the Jews, immigrants, Muslims, Hispanics, for all the ills of the nation while their ‘leaders’ rape, rob, and pillage the treasury, the government, foreign policy, etc.

Thinking about this, in this moment, I have an insight as to what Adam and Eve saw after “eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil”, they saw their own mortality, their uncertainty, there were answers to questions they would never be able to find, and there is more to a human being than our material selves. Their fear at seeing what truly is caused them to become untrustworthy to God, to one another. Curiousity may have been the reason they disobeyed and they ignored their curious mind once their ‘eyes had been opened’ in favor of their fearful mind; hence they hid, what I believe is the actual sin. Cain couldn’t be trusted to have a conversation with Abel because he was untrustworthy in SO many ways; beginning with him not bring his best when he made an offering to God, he did not bring his best self when dealing with Abel, and this is a theme repeated over and over again throughout the Bible.

We the People have been lying to ourselves and one another forever and it leads to wars, to slavery, to deep unhappiness, to authoritarian governments, to family mistrust, to scaring our children at their most vulnerable moments, ages, to cheating the customer because I can, to not covering the insurance plans a company sells because of some arithmetic, etc. In our dealing, a handshake is no longer to be trusted, a contract is something to break, find the loophole in, etc. This may be a reason that kids like their chatbot therapists better than actual ones-they can trust the chatbot, they believe they can trust AI or so the people behind AI are telling us and people like Musk, Trump, Lutnick would never be untrustworthy, would they? Most distressing is that we the people have come to accept our deception of self and another, our indifference to evil, our politicians are going to accept money from lobbyists and do their bidding rather than serve the people who elected them, our belief that screwing someone else before they screw me is acceptable behavior, that “love your neighbor” has turned into “suspect your neighbor”, that “love the stranger” has turned into imprison the stranger, that care for the needy, the poor, has become fuck the little guy over and over again. We the people are engaging in untrustworthy behaviors across the political, social, economic spectrums without regard to the ways of God, the words of Jesus… WHAT THE FUCK PEOPLE?

Hosea 14:2 has part one of the solution to our untrusteworthiness: “Return Israel to Adonai your God, even though you have stumbled in your iniquity” Return is the first step in our recovery from being untrustworthy, our first step in our recovering our inner life, our essence, our authenticity. It means we have to first admit that we strayed, that we were/are in error, that our untrustworthiness has permeated every area of living. Most of we the people don’t have the ego strength to do this, there is plenty of egotism surrounding us and the people who suffer from egocentrism do not have the Ego Strength to be real, to be trustworthy. The only way back, I found, is to return to God first, returning to my spiritual essence gave me the impetus to continue the journey to finding my authentic self, my purpose. I have gone from really untrustworthy to very trustworthy and it started with my “return to Adonai”, with letting go of the lies, the deceptions, the suspicions, and being open and making deals that might not work and keeping my end of the bargain up to the best of my ability-faltering sometimes and making amends for the missing the marks.

ACTION STEP:

  1. Make an inventory of the times/areas where you are untrustworthy

  2. Make an inventory of the times/areas where you are trustworthy

  3. What do these times/areas share

  4. How do enhance #2 and repair #1?

GOD BLESS, STOP GHOSTING GOD, GHOSTING SELF, Rabbi Mark

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Ghosting God, Ghosting Self - Day 50

Ghosting God, Ghosting Self

Day 50

I am reading, finally, the New York Times magazine issue that is devoted to AI. I say finally because Harriet has been after me to read it and I have put it off:)! It is, in some ways, very scary and in some ways AI is going to be helpful, a both/and that has to be managed very carefullly and seriously. At issue for me is how the ‘powers that be’ will bastardize, mismanage, exploit and fuck the rest of We the People with AI. Think Elon Musk and his benevolence towards government workers when he had the opportunity to work for the US Government and he took it to be he was working for himself, getting rid of anything and everything that might make him, his business’ accountable. I am reasonably sure the people behind the Orange Asshole are using it to figure out ways to steal more money from We the People and fuck ‘the average Joe/Jane’ in new and bolder, more brazen ways. It is DISGUSTING!!

Reading and not finishing the magazine, I turned to Hosea and in verse 13:8 found: “You are undone/destroyed Israel, you have no help but me” in reference to the Northern Kingdom’s constant and consistent turning against the covenant made at Sinai. This comes to describe what We the People are allowing our Clergy, our Government, our private business’, the oligarchs, billionaires, tech CEO’s, etc to do to the American Dream, the promise that we the people made to NOT GO BACK TO EGYPT and here we are, once again on the precipice of heading back in new and innovative ways that feed our self-deceptive desires and our egotistical bullshit. I am only able to read so much at a time because I become so fucking pissed off at how We the People have turned away from our inner lives, how We the People have dishonored the sacrifices and bravery of our ancestors to get here, to the “golden medina” as America was referred to by Jews in Eastern Europe, to the land of opportunity for so many from Ireland, Italy, Germany , Poland, etc when they were being threatened by both nature and the people in charge. Yet, like Nero fiddling while Rome burned(I know this is a myth), too many of we the people  are hiding, licking our wounds, scared of our shadows to STAND UP, to GET CONGRESS to do their jobs, to STOP the maniac in chief, to SAY NO to the cruelty he and his gang of thugs impose on Americans, on people throughout the world.

The fact that Universities are using AI to teach their students and Trump is touting the AI firms he, Lutnick, Kushner, Wytkoff, Don Jr., Eric et al have stock is is INSANE. “Back in the day”, We the People went to college to learn about life, learn to live on our own, budget our money, meet and get to know people of wildly different backgrounds, and learn how to learn, learn how to discern our own thoughts from those of parents, teachers, and the other influencers prior to college. This morphed, unfortunately, to college becoming a trade school for white collar jobs, to become CEO’s, to become entrepreneurs, without the life skills learning, without finding our path to becoming the soul we are created to be. Now, we are taking away the skills to think, to discern, to make judgements by relying on AI, let the Chatbot tell us what to do, write our papers, emails, etc. I am of the belief that We the People are losing the very essence of what it means to be human in the ridiculous search for perfection, certainty!

What is so evident, to me at least, is that the Clergy who support Trump, who tout AI because of their mega-donors, are telling We the People that they don’t give a shit about our inner life, they could care less about truly helping we the people to grow into the “soul we were created to be” and more about control, money, fame, power. Be it any of the ‘good christian nationalist preachers’, those ‘fine orthodox jews in Israel and across the globe who preach the hatred of “the other”, and/or anyone else who is so disinterested in serving God that they promote the “destruction Israel” because too many of we the people have forgotten that God is our help not the lies we tell ourselves, not the autocrat who promises to “be your retribution”, not the AI chatbot, not the Universities and colleges that contine to care more for their continued existence than the covenant they made/make with their students.

I am not anti AI! I am pro Inner Life! There is HOPE! In all of the Western Religions there is a belief in T’Shuvah(called by different names of course), a returning. In all of the Eastern Philosophies, from what little I know of them, losing and then regaining our higher consciousness is a constant back and forth. WE THE PEOPLE must demand of our clergy assistance in studying the Bible and immersing ourselves in the wisdom found there not the LIES and POLITICAL bullshit of the priest, rabbi, imam, etc. We the People have to immerse ourselves in “Our Stories” to find the solutions to the issues facing us today. AI is NOT the issue-Human emptiness is. More tomorrow.

ACTION STEP:

  1. Allow your higher truth to say NO to the relentless onslaught of the mind

GOD BLESS, STOP GHOSING GOD, GHOSTING SELF, Rabbi Mark

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Ghosting God, Ghosting Self - Daya 49

Ghosting God, Ghosting Self

Day 49

There have always been two conflicting inner experiences for me, ever since I can remember: 1) righteous anger at the state of things, the way people treat people, standing for the voiceless and powerless, etc-even to the point of getting into fights at school; 2) deep fear of not being with ‘the in crowd’, not being liked, not being seen. These two opposing forces have been fighting forever within me and, I am elated to report, force #1 has won out for the past 39+ years! I know I am not unique in this experience, I know that most people have some conflicting inner experiences and I also know that most of We the People refuse to deal with them, go to shrinks for them and have these natural human experiences turned into some pathogical issue that a ‘pill’ can mitigate, treat, heal. BULLSHIT!

Another phrase from Homeboy Industries and Father Greg Boyle is: “nothing stops a bullet like a job” and my theory/thesis today is: “nothing loads a gun like hiding from our humanity, our inner life, our war within”. Using Trump, the Republicans, the right and left extremes as examples is just too easy. My goal today and everyday is for We the People to look at ourselves and stop pointing at another(s) to deflect the truth we all need to face. It is imperative for We the People to realize that the Bible never asks for us to be perfect! This constuct of society, this societal norm is killing all of us, it is preventing great works of art from being painted, sculpted, built because ‘if it isn’t perfect what does that say about me’ and ‘how can I show my face after this mistake/no one will forgive me nor forget that I am a fuck-up’ are so prevelant in our society and have been adopted as a “societal norm”, one which We the People have to become maladjusted to so We can have “an authentic awareness of that which (truly) is”, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel’s definition of radical amazement/wonder.

To quote Howard Beale from the movie Network: “I am mad as Hell and I can’t take it anymore. We the People say this not as a sign of suicide or surrendering to these societal norms, rather as a statement of intent, an MOU(memorandum of understanding), that declares our fidelity to BEING HUMAN. Our fidelity to the principles of the Bible, of Jesus, to care for one another, to love one another, to make sure those without sight are not made fun of by putting a stumbling block before them and this is not just people who are physically blind, it is for anyone and everyone who is blind to the truth, to the “authentic awareness of that which is”.

I am mad as hell, I won’t take it anymore and I am asking you to join me in battling the inner demons that stop we the people from joining in the fight against cruelty, against love, against helping another human being in their struggle to BE FREE! There can be NO FREEDOM without engaging in and winning this battle between the action of standing up, of living in and with the righteous anger of the prophets and settling, doing what is politically correct, going along to get along. Freedom, as the Bible teaches us in Exodus 6:6 (one of God’s promises) is to free us from both the outer and inner slavery of Egypt(narrowness/narrow places) and the bondage of the Egyptians(needing to go along, refusing to deal with our inner life and hear the call of our souls). This is the CALL I am issuing to all of We the People. Stand up, respond to the war within and find the path to making the world a little better rather than going along to make it worse.

Hosea 12:7 calls out to us to be mad as hell, in my opinion with the demand to: “turn to your God, kindness and justice you must guard and trust in God continuously.” Just as the prophets lived this demand from God, so too do. we the people have to also. I know the risks of doing this, I know the political fallout, the fear of losing one’s job, one’s friends, one’s place in the community-I have experienced it all and, looking back on these past 39+ years of “turning to God”, the only regrets I have are when I looked the other way, when I was afraid not to “go along to get along” and I am proud of, grateful for the Serenity/Clarity and the Grace God has given me to stand up and “damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead”. Not that I was right all the time, not that I did not cause hurt feelings, rather-I won the war between fighting the fight for what is good and right and hiding, being fearful, selling my soul. I am sorry for the hurt feelings, I am not sorry for standing up for principles, for truth, which is the ultimate kindness and justice, in my opinion.

ACTION STEPS:

  1. write down and look at the myriad of ways you hide from yourself and decide if these paths are good for your spiritual life or not

  2. determine the ways you are joining in the very actions that are counter to kindness, justice, love, mercy, clarity, truth and ask yourself if these are truly the ways you want to live

  3. GET FUCKING MAD AS HELL

  4. GET MALADJUSTED and live into radical amazement

  5. Join in the march to freedom, the battles of our inner lives and stop trying to find the ‘pill’ that will make it all good without effort.

GOD BLESS, STOP GHOSTING GOD, GHOSTING SELF, Rabbi Mark

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Ghosting God, Ghosting Self - Day 48

Ghosting God, Ghosting Self

Day 48

There seems to be a deal in the making to end the senseless, reckless war with Iran, please God! The problem, of course is the leaders involved just never tell the truth, are given to follow their cruelest instincts, constantly tear up deals that make sense in order to show ‘how smart am I’! I am sure that Trump is going to declare he deserves the Nobel Peace Prize for ending the war with Iran-even though the ASSHOLE started it! And, the new Ayatollah, Bibi are not exactly trustworthy partners either. So, the crude oil prices will drop and no one knows if the price of gasoline will drop because the oil companies are making tremendous profits here as we never relied on foreign oil through the Strait of Hormuz. What we seem to have here, in America and across the globe is “a failure to communicate” as the saying goes in the movie Cool Hand Luke.

“He should not have returned to Egypt”(Hosea 11:5) is what seems to have not been communicated to the mendacious ones in charge, to the liars in chief, to those ‘fine christian nationalists who hate everyone’, to those ‘wonderful progressives who treat people who don’t agree with everything they say, do, believe in as ‘riffraff’, as ‘stupid’ and are prejudiced against them! In the former’s world there is no place for dissent as in the later’s world-hence they have dissented into “Egypt”, that narrow place where there can be no learning, no compromises, no true kindness, no truth, no justice-only judgmental thinking, niceities, indifference to the plight of people ‘not like us’, and perverted unjust decision making. And, as in Israel, Judea, the people who are the guardians against such mendacity and harlotry: the priests, the rabbis, the ministers, the imams; are not doing their jobs-on the whole. Too many of our Clergy are either in lockstep with the assault on Biblical Values, lockstep with the bastardization of God’s words and Will, lockstep with the LIES they spout about Jesus being the Lion rather than the lamb, supporting the money-changers in the Temple, in power rather than railing against them. OY VAVOY! If this isn’t desecrating God’s Name, what is? If this is not taking the Name of God in vain, what is? If this is not creating false Images of God, what is? If this is not murdering the souls of another(s), what is? If this is not stealing, committing adultery, bearing false witness and coveting your neighbors’ wife’s ass, what the fuck is?

We the People who are not part of either of these two extremes, are given hope and wisdom in Psalm 121: “I lift my eyes up to the mountain, where will my help come from? It comes from Adonai, maker of heaven and earth”. Whenever we the people stay in our small little prisons, are locked into the emotions and lies of our rational minds, give power to the emotions of despair, despondency, disaster, catastophizing, we have “returned to Egypt”. It is incombent upon We the People to read/re-read our holy texts, mine them for their wisdoms, their ways of peace, their teachings about justice, truth, compassion, kindness, and LOVE. We the People are being called upon in this moment to end the disastrous “failure to communicate” going on right here, right now-without fear nor favor, without taking any side except the side of God, which is the side of caring for everyone, seeing everyone as an Image of God, a divine reminder, doing T’Shuvah every day, enhancing our goodness and repairing our not so good actions/ways.

It is important to hold people accountable for their actions-something the Supreme Court is not applicable to Trump-how could they and say they are defending the Constitution, they are fulfilling their oath, is beyond me AND it is as important, if not more important to hold ourselves accountable sa well! One of the narrowest places in life is the constant blame and shame game, the need to hide our own insecurities and uncertainties by “accusing them of that which I am guilty of” as Josef Goebbels taught the current ‘leaders’. I believe one of the reasons immersing ourselves in the holy texts is so important is that we learn differently than what the LYING ASS CLERGY are attempting to sell us. King David, argueably the greatest king in Biblical times, took responsibility for his actions! He could admit his errors, sometimes it took someone to point them out to him, like Nathan the Prophet, and he could take advice even from WOMEN! Yet, to today’s crazies, women shouldn’t even have the right to vote, only white christian men are citizens and every one else is 2nd class, or below, slaves. This is the way we the people are imitating, repeating the errors of Ancient Israel. THE SOLUTION is in our

ACTION STEPS:

  1. what are the extremes you are living in/at and how is it serving God?

  2. what will it take for you to leave the Egypt of self-assuredness

  3. how will you deal with the uncertainty of living in God’s world

  4. What are the ways you continue to engage in “failure to communicateboth as the listener and the speaker?

GOD BLESS and STOP GHOSTING GOD, GHOSTING SELF, Rabbi Mark

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Ghosting God, Ghosting Self - Day 47

Ghosting God, Ghosting Self

Day 47

I have been engaged in conversations with Harriet and many people about the dramatic shifts of the pendulum and how, we the people, are not allowing the pendulum to settle down in some sort of middle. When it slows down to find common ground, when it is starting to give us the both/and, when the cognitive disonance that is part and parcel of being human begins to take shape and hold; one extreme or another pushes the pendulum to “their view” rather than what is good for We the People, what is good for God. All of these ‘good people’ who are behind these political, social, religious extremes are not ‘true believers’ rather they are rank opportunists, like the leaders of the MAGA movement, the leaders of the “squad”, like Doug Wilson who misquotes Jesus, take Paul’s teachings out of context and feed this bullshit to his boy Pete Hegseth, etc. The real “extreme” is, as Father Greg Boyle says: “erase the margins”-seeing every human being as a child of God and to practice “radical kinship”-knowing we are connected one to another and all of these false ‘differences’ are nothing but distractions and deceptions to gain and hold power, money, and prestige! Hosea in Chapter 10:13 has already taught us what we are doing is ridiculously stupid and we cannot hide from the truth that “you have plowed wickedness; you have reaped iniquity; you have eaten the fruits of lies; because you have trusted in your way, in the multitude of your mighty men”. If this doesn’t describe both our current situation and the struggle of humanity,  I don’t know what does.               

Yet, because we the people show such disdain for Biblical Wisdom, we fail to learn from it, we fail to hear the call to return, we fail to practice “radical kinship”, continuing instead to compete and compare, need to save our face rather than our ass, need to get ‘there’(which there is no there) fast and stay as distracted as possible by gadgets, by thoughts on a loop, by planning our escape, our revenge, our next ‘score’. Because we the people have made a decision to serve our rational minds, keep our “earthly inclination” as the arbiter of our actions, it is impossible for us to learn, it is anathema to think about T’Shuvah, to making amends, to turning back to be the soul we are created to be, to see beyond our own self-centeredness and give a shit about the world, about another human being, just because they are fellow travelers on this earth. HOW FUCKING SAD!

Elon Musk became a trillionaire on Friday-whoopee do! He will continue to think he is the smartest person in the room when he is nothing but a GREAT ConMan-someone who built two companies, Tesla and SpaceX on the back of We the People, our government has financed him through his trials and errors and Trump has not gotten anything back from him for We the People, instead he used his money to get elected, used his money to lie to so many Americans and they both used one another to kill funding for humanitarian needs, to kill people’s jobs so the poor would increase, to be as cruel as possible-just like a ‘good Afrikaner’ would treat Black People in South Africa. When we the people hail him for his genius, we are forgetting his grift, his con, his hatred of anyone not white male like him, etc. This is a classic way we the people have “trusted…in the multitude of your mighty men”, just like electing Trump to “be your retribution”. How has “trusted in your way” worked out for you-not so good for the rest of us!!

Be it Doug Wilson, Ben G’Vir, any of the Rabbis, Priests, Imams, Ministers who continue to rant and rave about their particular soap box, they all “plowed wickedness”, “reaped iniquity”, fed we the people “the fruits of lies” and, like stupid ass guppies, we the people have eaten the lies up, allowed ourselves to be yoked together as beasts of burden to help the ‘multitude of men” to plow our fields for their gain, then gathered in the crops so they could reap the ill-gotten gains-Anyone see the lunacy of this and We the People are continuing to do it!

There is a solution and one of them is found in Hosea 10:12; “for it is time to seek Adonai, till Adonai comes to rain righteousness upon you”. We the People are capable of return and repentance. Our solutions to bring an end to our “plowing wickedness, reaping iniquity, eating the fruits of lies” are found in the Bible, and it all begins with TRUTH, with a real investigation into our actions, reactions, responses and learning how to manage our “earthly inclination” with our “divine inclination”, manage our rational mind with our intuitive mind, make a decision to live in the ways of holiness, godliness, decency, kindness, justice, mercy. This is the ‘secret’ to my success-hearing God, listening to what I know is right and seeking the wisdom of spiritual counselors rather than “the multitude of your mighty men”

ACTION STEP

Make a list each day of how you practice “radical kinship” and erased margins and the ways you plow wickedness enjoy the iniquity you reap.

GOD BLESS, STOP GHOSTING GOD,GHOSTING SELF, Rabbi Mark

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Ghosting God, Ghosting Self - Day 46

Ghosting God, Ghosting Self

Day 46

We the People are all created in the Image of God and, as I have said before, we are equal in our dignity and worth and each one of us is unique. Nowhere in the Bible does it say the Chieftans were better than the rest of the Tribe, the chieftans had a different job and, as it says in Deuteronomy 29:10 “you stand here this day, “all of you…. your wives, even the stranger in your camp, the woodchopper, the watercarrier to enter into the covenant which God is cutting with you this day.” Each and every one of us is unique, equally dignified and valuable, and each and every one of us are descened from those who entered into the covenant at Sinai, each and every one of us are descended from those who entered the ‘Promised Land’. Each and every one of us are descended from slaves! Yet, we the people continue to forget this truth, continue to act as if we have to run away from the shame of being descendants of slaves, here in the US, in Israel, throughout the world. This is borne out by the myriad of wars that have been fought for pwoer and control, taking the Name of God in vain and making false images of God, forgetting that Adonai brought us out of the land of Egypt to be Our God. Basically, each and every day we the people choose to forget our history, ignore the truth of our history, we are saying FUCK YOU to the 1st 3 commandments! This from those ‘fine white christian folk’, those ‘good jewish boys studying Torah to save Israel-on the same level as the soldiers in the IDF who kill and are killed so they can break these 1st 3 commandments! WTF?!?

Prophecy in the Bible was not so much about predictions as it is about calling attention to the INATTENTION of the Israelites in both the Northern Kingdom and in Judea. This inattention will have severe consequences for the people as they have for us. Hosea calls us whores, harlots and he is right! He tells us that bringing the show, the wonderful sacrifices while continuing to act in opposition to God’s ways is BULLSHIT-he is telling we the people that the only ones we are fooling is ourselves. Each and every day, the call from Sinai is RETURN, I MISS YOU, each evening, according to a story in the Talmud, God cries “my children are in exile”, each day our souls cry out to be connected to the source of being once again and our minds ignore these cries. While it is easy to blame our leaders for the situation we are in, TRUTH says we are responsible, we put them in charge, we knew they were snakes and liars, grifters and thieves, bullies and weaklings!

What is the pull, the magnetism of this type of person for we the people? I have been pondering this question for a while! The responses I have come up with go back to yesterday’s writing: We the People are AFRAID to see our authentic selves with the glory of God that emanates from us and the lack of maturity, lack of growing our intuitive minds and our growing our rational minds out of proper measure. When we the people would rather not look at our selves and instead, look at the foibles of another, when we the people decide it is too painful to see the glory of God that glows from within us because our awareness of ‘falling short’ is too much, we the people have joined with the liars, the deceivers, the grifters and the thieves. We the People are being called back each day, every day. Hosea is pleading with us to STOP our harlotry, to “walk the path of return” that is uniquely ours.

I know this place, this way of being, I still fall into the trap of blaming another for my errors, for ‘losing’ when sometimes there is no fault, their is no one to blame, not even myself. While many people of faith will tell you it is “god’s will” that this tragedy/expereince happened, I believe in the power of the human being’s rational mind to do what it thinks is best and fuck everything and everyone around them up! I am guilty of this as is everyone I know, everyone I have come in contact with. Being responsible for my actions, being in tune with the divine spark within me, ensuring that I am growing in decency and kindness, truth and justice each day is the way I have and continue to “walk the path of returning”, “improving my conscious contact with God” as the 11th step of AA reminds us is a crucial part of moving forward, and my commitment to move forward one grain of sand each day. The sadness I experience is the lack of same from many of my colleagues in the Clergy, many of the people I meet, and listening to their hatred, their inabilty to be responsible for their own actions is enraging and counter-productive to “walking the path of return”. So, the question and the ACTION STEPS:

  1. How are you carrying your self as an equal to everyone?

  2. Are you aware of your foibles, know they probably will not go away, and you can master them

  3. Do you see the subtle ways you have joined with the minority to do evil

  4. What are the ways you are being responsible to the God Image within you?

GOD BLESS STOP GHOSTING GOD, GHOSTING SELF, Rabbi Mark

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Ghosting God, Ghosting Self - Day 45

Ghosting God, Ghosting Self

Day 45

The more I have been pondering the ideas of the past few days, the more eye-opening, mind-blowing, and soul-knowing they have become. Harriet and I were speaking and Harriet’s belief, along with mine, is our unwllingness “lets go and return to God” stems from our need for certainty, our inability to admit to our imperfections, and, Harriet adds, knowing that we will die. Since we the people are the only animals that know of their mortality, as far as we know, impending death and our fear, our not wanting to admit it is a natural process of life, creates within us a burning desire to ‘be eternal’. The issue has become, as Trump shows us, the need to be the ‘biggest and the best’, to “kill the competition” as Bezos is trying to do with Amazon, to kill my enemies rather than feed them, help them when they are in need goes against the dictates of the Hebrew Bible that Ben G’Vir, Smotrich, and Bibi use as reasons for their mistreatment of Palestians in Israel, in the West Bank, and in Gaza. Be it Putin, Trump, Netanyahu, et al, the all of these little men are trying to ensure their names for eternity, like Attila the Hun, Napoleon, Hitler, et all as the ‘worst of the worst’, so they can puff out their chests and walk with a strut that says, I am the “baddest man in the whole damn land”. Maybe because they fear their death so much, because they fear they may have to answer for their deeds in the world to come, they think immortality here is all that matters.

At issue for We the People in this moment, in all moments, is whom do we want to learn from? Is learning from the Greeks, the Romans, the King Solomon and his descendants,  the trough we want to drink from? Is learning from King David, who knew how to admit his errors, who is known for his bringing together the different factions within the Jewish people at the time, who is known for, supposedly, writing the Psalms more in line with our divine call? We the People are faced with this issue on a daily basis. Misguidedly, too many of us continue to believe our names on buildings will bring us eternal respect and being known, too many of us believe that ‘making a name for ourselves will bring us eternal glory, and so cruelty, winning at any and all costs becomes the way of the world. Rather than living with Radical Amazement as Rabbi Heschel suggests, rather than “love your neighbor”, rather than feed your enemy if he is hungry, too many of we the people are under the spell of the autocrat who reminds us to “suspect your neighbor”, “get retribution from your enemies”, all that matters is power, control, wealth and white men being in charge. Is this REALLY the way to honor and live into the words of Hosea: “let us walk and return to God”? If you listen to these ‘fine christian nationalist white men, and women,” it is!! All so they don’t have to face their own mortality, their own imperfections, their own lowliness as humans rather than being exalted like God.

As I wrote the last sentence I blinked twice, once because it did not come from my mind, aka, from my soul, my connection to God, and the second time because it is a lightening bolt to me. In the program of AA, in every spiritual discipline, living into one’s proper place and with proper measure is crucial to living well. In the Bible, every human being is created in the Image of God! From this, the Rabbis realized: “to save one soul is to save an entire world…each of us comes from Adam… and each of us in unique”, so there can be no ‘who’s the best”, no naming of the “GOAT” because no one can live like I do, no one can bring to the table the talents, insight, brilliance that each of We the People have individually so this bullshit of “I am the Best”, “I am your retribution”, “I am a genius”, Trump’s depicting himself as Jesus, “I have stopped 8,9… wars” is RIDICULOUS and only comes to show how fearful these people are at facing God, at looking at their own imperfections, their own inablity to be worshiped like God. It is sad and dangerous, pathetic and cruelty comes from these fears. And, we the people who are not confronting the lies and the bullshit, who are not “walking the path of returning to God” are just as responsible-knowing the crimes of another, not trying to stop them, not bringing them to justice goes against the principles of Justice, Love, Righteousness, Truth found in the Bible.

Sitting here, at my computer, I realize how I have fallen into this trap in subtle ways. While I no longer equate my self-worth with my net-worth, I still have to always have cash on me-which seems more and more ridiculous as society is heading towards a cashless way of doing business. I also know the need to be seen, to be held in esteem, to be known and, this need has morphed into knowing another(s), to respecting and holding another(s) in esteem, seeing another(s) human being for whom they are, not what they can do for me. My writing is the “bully pulpit” I have now, it reflects my prophetic voice, my spiritual and moral inheritance from my ancestors and God.

ACTION STEP: Face your mortality, your imperfections, your own place in the universe with joy, with compassion, with strength and resolve

God Bless, Stop Ghosting God, Ghosting Self, Rabbi Mark

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Ghosting God, Ghosting Self - Day 44

Ghosting God, Ghosting Self

Day 44

Every morning, after I write and, usually make Harriet her coffee, she reads what I have written and we talk about it. Yesterday’s writing spurned a discussion that is continuing-I played Bridge yesterday afternoon- about what is it that causes the 3rd and 4th generation to bastardize, blow-up, abuse, etc the brilliance of the creators, the inventors, the thinkers, rather than take their brilliance, take the wisdom of the Bible, etc, the Magna Carta, the Declaration of Independence, Constitution, scientific breakthroughs, family business’ and improve upon it and NEVER losing the spirit of these things? We are still talking about this idea.

In the political arena, we are watching, many of We the People in horror, the 3rd/4th generation after the “Greatest Generation”, according to Tom Brokaw, went to war, won the fight against fascism, witnessed the atrocities that senseless hatred and prejudice, blame and anti-semitism can bring about on an entire continent and came back, enough of them to make a powerful minority, to hate Blacks, not wanting women to be anywhere but barefoot and pregnant, taking care of the house, and those uppity Jews had better stop their money-grubbing ways and NOT have a seat at any table of power, only a table with ‘those n——-‘ to bring their vision to fruition, to cause senseless hatred between minorities, to split the Black/Jewish alliance that caused the Civil Rights Act to happen, that worked together with a shared belief and commitment to the words and lessons of the Bible. And, it seems, they are winning at the moment-hence Trump is in the White House, Thune is the Majority Leader of the Senate, Johnson-a lying no good, IDOLATOR and CHARLATAN who MISQUOTES the Bible everytime he speaks, are in charge-YIKES!

What is also apparent, certainly since the days leading up to the Civil War and ever since is that, like the Jews have not all ‘been one people’ except for maybe part of the 40 year reign of King David, We the People have not been united States, rather red/blue/purple, at one another’s throat ever since Gingrich declared politics is war-again beginning with the 3rd/4th generation following the Revolutionary War. Now, as we approach the 250th anniversary of Independence Day, it is a joke that all of these ‘big, beautiful activities’ are celebrating our Independence, like Trump’s face on a $250.00 dollar bill, 70 billion more dollars to fund ICE so more cruelty can be wrought on a nation CREATED BECAUSE OF THE CRUELTY OF KING GEORGE!, a new Arc D’ TRUMP disrespecting both Arlington Cemetery and the Lincoln Memorial, tributes to brave men and women who served our country with passion and purpose.

In business, many times the same experience happens, be it through mismanagement, sales of companies like Warners, MGM, Columbia Pictures, the entrepreneur spirit has left and all that remains is the search for more money, power, prestige. Today’s entrepreneurs are interested in making money, not music, in enriching themselves and their shareholders and, like Trump stated, they “don’t care about the plight of average people”, only how it affects them, their bank accounts, etc. Think about this movies are less than 150 years old and the commercial studios are less than 120 years old, again the 3rd/4th generation. In families, the 3rd/4th generation have, in many instances, lost their family story, their family history-hence the popularity of Ancestry.Com-there is a yearning to know where we come from, how we got here, etc. What causes this is for tomorrow, hopefully, after Harriet and I discuss it more:)!!


This is the reason, to me, that Hosea’s words are so important, so powerful! RETURN, walk back to the ways of Godliness, the ways of decency, the ways of loving our neighbor-not suspecting them, take the path back to kindness and concern for the needy, the poor, the widow, the orphan, walk back to the path of freedom and proclaiming it for EVERYONE! This walking back to is not going backwards, it is reclaiming the roads and paths that our recent ancestors left so they could ‘make it’ and using the principles, the pathways to MOVE FORWARD and promote the ways of decency, love, kindness, concern, compassion, TRUTH, and JUSTICE! Knowing the difficulty of this task, knowing it is counter-intuitive to everything society preaches and does, I can attest to the joy, the power, the finding of my authentic self and an adult partnership, covenantal relationship with God which gave me a new address to live at: Joy, love, truth, justice, kindness and, at times, my house is messy and I screw up-this too is part of being human, I do my Tshuvah’s upon realizing them.

ACTION STEPS:

  1. Find your Family history and see how you are honoring the power of the good in it

  2. Re-read the Declaration of Independence for US and Israel and ask if we are living in to them, up to them or ignoring them

GOD BLESS, STOP GHOSTING GOD, GHOSTING SELF, Rabbi mark

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Ghosting God, Ghosting Self - Day 43

Ghosting God, Ghosting Self

Day 43

My brother, Rabbi Neal Borovitz, sent me an email yesterday about even though Amos and Hosea were absolutely pissed off at the ways in which Israel demeaned, desecrated, spit on, ignored, etc God and the ways of Godliness, they believed wholeheartedly in the power of return, the compassion of God, the eternal covenant that God made with us human beings, the unconditional love of God for humanity! Heaven forbid lest anyone think I am only condemning We the People. I am pointing out the lessons we can, and in my opinion, must learn from our communal stories found in the Bible, in the New Testament, in the Koran, in the Eastern Philosophical writings, etc. In fact, before I got my brother’s email I had picked out this verse from Hosea 6:1- “Lets go and return to God, the One who tore us can heal us, the One who wounded us can bind us”

The Hebrew word for “lets go” or “come” is the word that is at the root of what is called “Jewish Law”, the Halacha. It is the word for walking also, it is the word that God spoke to Abraham, “lech” to let him know it was time to continue his inner spiritual journey and the outer journey to a place where he and his family, his people, could worship Adonai in semi-peace. Sitting here this morning I am overwhelmed with the inner experience that “return to God” is the purpose of the “Halacha” and the Rabbis of old, the OG’s did not want it to become the club that it has, did not want the Halacha to pit the people one against another, as has become the norm. They gave us majority and minority opinions, they gave us the permission, the demand to keep arguing with the text and it is only since the Middle Ages, since the Priniting Press that discussion, dissent has been stifled. The Hasidic Movement begun by The Baal Shem Tov was a revolution against the stiffling of creativity, spiritual enthusiasm, etc and, as a desecration to God’s Name and the legacy of the Baal Shem, Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev, Reb Nachman, the Maggid, et al, it has “run after the majority to do evil”!

While this is not what I had in mind when I sat down to write, I have to stay on this theme else there is no point to the words from Hosea for us now. The gift of the Bible for We the People is to remind us of previous errors and returns, previous choosing the next right thing to do and the deeper connection with God and self. When we engage in “walking to”, strictness, we are missing the point of Hosea’s words, when we engage in elitism, we are missing the point of Hosea’s teachings, when we engage in cruelty for its own sake, we are missing the call to RETURN! When we support any type of cruelty, even the slightest amount with the caveat “this is the way of the world”, we are rejecting Hosea’s demands, we are telling God to go fuck Godself, we the people know better! This is what Reb Joshua told God and Rabbi Eliezer when Eliezer corrected him on what the “way of the law” should be. This type of behavior was not limited to the times of the prophets, the times of King Saul, King David, et al, it was not limited to the power struggle amongst the Rabbis, the power struggle between Jews and Christians, it has continued to this day and all of it is a desecration of God’s Name. I am enraged, sitting here thinking of how little we the people have learned, how ridiculous it is to keep doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results, how we the people proclaim our faith and allegiance to the god we make up for ourselves and not GOD who is “our father, our King”, who calls to us each and every day, 24/7/365 to return, to come back to God’s fold, to “walk in the ways of God” as we learn from the prophet Micah, yet we the people keep ignoing the demands, shutting out the “noise” of the call.

I know this way of being so well-I lived it for 20 years, drinking to quiet the ‘noise’ in my head asking me “what the fuck are you doing- you know better and are better than this”. It worked sort of for those years, I say sort of because the voice, the call, the demands were always niggling around in the front, back of my head, my neck, my shoulders, etc. Knowing right and doing wrong is the most excrutiating pain I have ever endured, I am not sure it is as bad as the physical pain of a terminal illness, I do know that spiritually it is the worst. The cutoff of God is not something that God has done, the cutting off from family, friends even when we “look good” is our doing, and the inner psychic pain is piled on exponentially to the psychic pain of the trauma we endured to begin to lie, to cheat, to be cruel, to “get ours”, etc. The only solution is “L’Chu”, lets go and return to the way we know we should live, lets go and return to one another and make amends for our behavior and forgive them when the make theirs, lets go and return to the soul we are created to be, lets go and stop the CRUELTY that is rampant in our midst, lets go and return to our covenant with God and with one another!
ACTION STEP:

STOP GHOSTING GOD, STOP GHOSTING SELF

GOD BLESS, Rabbi mark

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Ghosting God, Ghosting Self - Day 42

Ghosting God, Ghosting Self

Day 42

“Their doings do not permit them to return to their God; for the spirit of harlotry is in the midst of them and they do not know God.”(Hosea 5:4) I am stuck on Hosea, as I have written before, because his words, his description of the actions of the Northern Kingdom, Israel, are so appropos for our times, for all different times throughout the millennia and we the people, cannot figure out how to learn from his words, from history, from our own experience! I understand it taking a while, it took me 20 years to return from my own harlotry, and I don’t understand it never taking hold, never understanding the whoring we the people are doing and rather than holding the whoremongers, the whoremasters accountable, we the people(at least some of us) worship, promote and praise the harlotry that is happening in front of us and bastardizing God’s name, Jesus’ ways!

The rockets are raining once again in the Middle East, who broke the ‘cease-fire’ first is immaterial, what is material is that Bibi and his thugs have become like Pharaoh in Egypt; causing the people of Israel to go to war while their ‘yeshiva bochers’ stay at home and study because their study is going to save Israel-BULLSHIT! He is like Pharaoh because for the past 15+ years all he has cared about is himself, his need for power, his wanting to be the ‘king of Israel’, restoring the ‘glory days of King David’. I am surprised he hasn’t claimed his lineage goes back to King David. AD MATAI, “until when” Bibi, Ben G’Vir, Smotrich et al “will you refuse to humble yourself before God?” These people and their followers promote “the spirit of harlotry” “in the midst” of the Jewish people to the extent they and their fellow perpetrators of harlotry at AIPAC and other right-wing crazies have caused the rise of Anti-Semitism, have gotten into bed with the Christian Nationalists, the Evangelicals, who proclaim their ‘love for Israel’ while teaching Jews killed Christ, Jews control the world through the banks, and other such blood libel-THESE ARE BIBI’s GOOD BUDDIES!!! “I am a Zionist” like Mike Huckabee, is the rallying cry of these ‘fine christian nationalist folk’ who then say Jews who disagree with Bibi, who believe in the original 2-State solution of the UN in 1947, are anti-zionists! WTF?

All of these so-called “religious people”, “good jews”, “righteous Gentiles” are the HARLOTS Hosea is speaking about and, like our ancestors of old, we the people are unwilling to take action, unable to stand up, fearful of our safety, as I am sure people in Congress are because the way of Bibi, the way of Trump and their thugs is to threaten, to scare, to ensure the demise of the people who stand in their way as well as their families, as Mitt Romney said in his book. They do NOT KNOW GOD, for all their holy-roller shit, for all their Bible-quoting. They are like the Rabbis of old, afraid of the prophets, afraid of the message of the prophets, afraid of losing control, afraid of being found out to be frauds, afraid of facing the consequences of their actions, afraid to face God, to face their neighbor who they abhor rather than love, afraid to face their actions through doing T’Shuvah, afraid to be seen, afraid, afraid, afraid. They are hiding their fears through wars that did not need to be started, by abandoning and blaming allies for their woes, being as cruel to “those people” as possible.

How in this era of AI, can the fascists still deny the truth of the Declaration of Independence, the promise/goal of this blueprint on this our almost 250th anniversary? “All (people) are created equal” is not a statement that is up to debate, their is no wiggle room, no amount of talmudic arguments, pilpulling, no ‘re-interpretation’ by Kavanaugh, Roberts, Thomas, Alito can change the explicit and implicit truth and meaning of this statement. And yet, the very people entrusted with holding these “self-evident” truths, near and dear, the very people who swore to uphold the laws, to defend and protect the Constittution, the People of the United States, the People of Israel are the ones violating all the principles, the hopes, the decency, the freedoms both countries were founded on and founded to ensure!

What is scarier to me, however, is that we the people in our smallness, in our own harlotry, refuse to KNOW GOD, to KNOW OURSELF, and give into the lies of another(s) and our own self-deceptions. That We the People could be lulled into electing self-centered, egotistical, assholes who are thieves, conmen, ne’er do wells, is BEYOND the BEYOND! Yet, we did! I believe one of the reasons is the Bernie’s of our time also do not heed the call of Hosea, do not KNOW GOD, they too have “the spirit of harlotry in their midst”. That anti-semitism is rampant on the left led by Bernie and AOC, support for Hamas’ terroism, raping, killing of babies on Oct 7th was condoned by them, is BEYOND THE BEYOND as well. We the People are being called by the words of the prophets to stop our harlotry and end the harlotry of elected officials.

ACTION STEPS:

  1. Write down the ways you adhere to and don’t adhere to “all people are created equal

  2. Do a 7 day daily inventory on how you did and didn’t give in to harlotry

GOD BLESS, STOP GHOSTING GOD and SELF, Rabbi Mark

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Ghosting God, Ghosting Self - Day 41

Ghosting God, Ghosting Self

Day 41

“Harlotry(lust) and wine must take away the heart”(Hosea 4:11). I love all the prophets, as you know, and these words from Hosea seem especially poignant in this moment, in every moment. The importance of immersing ourselves in the Bible is, of course, to learn how to live and how not to and, I believe, to see the danger that is coming down the pike, to realize the problems that need to be tracked, the people who need to be careful of, and the ways of Pharaoh, the Romans, Babylonians, Assyrians, Greeks, fascists of all stripes that are waiting for their opportunity to pounce, like a cougar, a puma, a lion. It is also to help us realize and assess when we are being like the Israelites who willingly went into slavery in Egypt even though we “are more and mightier than we”(Exodus 1:9) and the Israelites who summoned the courage to walk through the Red Sea and stand at Sinai.

Ivanka and Jared Kushner have been in the news lately for their “deal” with the Albanian Government to ruin a beautiful wildlife preserve and beachfront by developing both into a commercial venue for Kushner to use the money he acquired from Saudi Arabia for his Affinity Partners group-because he was such a great businessman-ha ha. Trump is in the news for whatever his latest grift, theft is,and the lust of the billionaire class and those who believe this class will help them that has our country by the throat is beyond the beyond. Hence, the words of Hosea come to describe this moment with such power and simplicity. The drunkeness on power that has taken over the Republican Party, the addiction to lies and mendacity that good people like Bill Cassidy have succumbed to has also taken over the Republicans and some Democrats in Congress(think John Futterman), the horrific prejudice against Hispanics, against Jews, against Catholics and the Pope, against anyone who is not a ‘good white christian male’ protecting his women and children from “those people” is running rampant. The whoring of themselves, their values, their principles is atrocious and, it seems, has taken away “the heart”, the seat of compassion, wisdom, knowing from them. And, this way of being is ruining the country’s foundational principles, the promise of the words on the Statue of Liberty, the freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution, the goals of the Declaration of Independence, the reason for the Civil War, the results of winning the 2nd World War, at the cost of millions of lives”-defeating fascism.

It seems like the fascists never were defeated, they surrendered, they raised the white flag and have been chipping away at the freedoms, the recognition that ALL PEOPLE are CREATED EQUAL, with “certain unalienable rights”. The fascists like Lindbergh, Coughlin were replaced by the KKK and the John Birch Society among others who were replaced by Gingrich and his cronies who were replaced by the Tea Party which has morphed into MAGA, have played the long game, they used people and played upon the fears of people about “those people”, “anyone not like us”, and Mitch McConnell, John Thune, et al have aided and abetted the fascists like their ‘daddy’s before them’. Chuck Schumer, AOC, Bernie Sanders with their ridiculous rhetoric and Schumer’s need to ‘obey the proper rules of the Senate’, are “bringing a knife to a gun fight”, hence aiding and abetting the fascists. IT IS TIME TO STOP THEM!

It is WAY PAST TIME for We the People to immerse ourselves in Hosea’s words and the actions they demand of us. We are being called to stop our own lust for power, prestige, money from perverting our knowing what Justice looks like, for knowing how to BE HUMAN, our knowng what is true and what is false, our knowing how to connect to a higher power than our “rational mind”, our knowing how to live with the intention and purpose to serve rather than be served, to understand rather than be understood, to love rather than be loved, paraphrasing St. Francis’ prayer for peace.

I am a terrific example of how lust/harlotry, booze can take the heart away, it happened to me when I was 15-I did not want to feel the powerlessness of being a kid without a father, who’s mother just didn’t get him, and I ran right into the arms of being a whore and stayed there for about 20 years. I lived in both worlds, KNEW what I was doing was terribly wrong, felt powerless to stop until Det. Jim Bashira arrested me, until God intervened on me. I am also a terrific example of what T’Shuvah looks like, an example of doing the  next right thing, living by the words of the prophets, doing what I believe necessary in the moment, being wrong and makeing amends, not worrying about another person’s part, just cleaning my side; being pained because I am shunned by ‘polite society’, and not changing my beliefs nor values to ‘get along’. I, like most people, am a BOTH/AND kind of human being!
ACTION STEPS:

  1. What are the lusts that keep you drunk and take away your heart

  2. How can you heal these lusts, live a life of service to another(s)

  3. What will it take for you to leave the fascists and join the God followers

GOD BLESS, STOP GHOSTING GOD, GHOSTING SELF, Rabbi mark

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Ghosting God, Ghosting Self - Day 40

Ghosting God, Ghosting Self

Day 40

“My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge/ because you have rejected knowledge…seeing you have forgotten the Torah of God…” (Hosea 4:6) describes our current situation as well as the one he encountered some 2900 years ago! “The more things change, the more they stay the same” comes from French wisdom by Jean-Baptiste Karr and applies to our times as much, if not more, than when he said it in the 19th Century. Why do I bring these two quotes up and together? I am not sure except as I immersed myself in the news overnight, the words of Hosea(who I love) and thought about all of the “changes” modernity has brought-many of them very good-I am struck by the never-changing ways of human beings when they obtain power, when they are brought up on and spoon fed “lying is good as long as you don’t get caught and when you do, deny, deny, deny”-thank you Fred Trump and the guy who taught Donny boy everything he knows-Roy Cohn! That we the people stand idly by the bloods of our brothers and sisters, our neighbors and enemies, that we the people are living just like the children of the 10 tribes, the Northern Kingdom of Israel did, and not taking into account what their “because you rejected knowledge” did to them is UNBELIEVABLE! What makes this all the more devastating is, as “back in the day”, the people leading this “reject knowledge” way of being are the Priests, the Imams, the Ministers, the Rabbis who are either too scared to speak truth to power, too drunk on being ‘close to power’, too ignorant of their own spiritual crisis and too arrogant to realize they “have forgotten the Torah of God”.

I am so filled with righteous indignation, I am so tired of hearing about Rabbis who are worried they will piss off their donors, Rabbis who want us to be “Am Yisrael Chai” the People Israel live/are alive, rabbis who, like the Priests in Ancient Israel and Judea, “have forgotten the Torah God” and made it into the Torah of the Rabbis-as the argument in the Talmud, Baba Metzia 59b teaches us. When Rabbi Eliezer argued for the Halacha(way to walk) of God, Rabbi Yehoshua argued for the Halacha(way to walk)  of the Rabbis using a part of a verse from Deuteronomy 30:12 “It is not in Heaven” and another from Exodus 23:3 “after the majority to incline/run”. Both of these proofs for wrong judgments are taken out of context, are used in the exact opposite ways they are meant in the Torah. This is the issue facing all of We the People in this moment, in every moment: are we the people going to make the “way to walk” according to some fixed human ideas, are We the People going to make the “way to walk” as God intends us to, there is a saying in Genesis Rabbah(commentary on the book of Genesis) that goes: Each day in the Heavenly court, God makes new Halacha, new ways to walk  in God’s ways and not give in to the “evil in the hearts of men since their youth”!

WTF PEOPLE?!? How is it possible that these important pieces of wisdom are not being taught? How is it possible to know there are 70 ways to see the words of Torah so no one has ‘the way’ and go along with the bullshit of “only I can save you”? How is it possible to keep the beauty of knowledge, the importance of change, the sanitizing of Truth to meet the ‘needs’ of the Clergy and people in power and proclaim allegiance to God? How is it possible to stop the voices of the prophets, the voices of the people who are promoting God over their selfish needs, the voices of the poor, the stranger, the needy in favor of ICE, in favor of Bibi, Ben G’Vir, Smotrich, Rubio, Trump, Miller, Vought, Johnson, et al? This is ridiculous, this will not end well, as the destruction of the Northern Kingdom teaches us, as the “lost tribes” remind us AND we the people refuse to heed the warnings, the history, the words of Hosea.

What is the solution? There is not just one! I have been talking about solutions of the past 37+ years, I have been seeking them in earnest for almost 40 years now. I know the seduction of the rational mind, I know the seduction of the fearful mind, I know the seduction of the angry mind, I know the seduction of ‘being the hero’, I know the seduction of “I have to fix it” because in my youth I succumbed to them all! I am shuddering as I write this, I am pissed off at my lack of education in these points in my Religious education, I am embarrassed at how long it took me to realize and reject these seductions, these calls, and how they almost ruined my life and me. One of the first solutions I learned was to “immerse” myself in the Bible, not read it, not just comment on the verses, not go along with the “Rashi” on it, rather to put myself in the text, ie ask myself,  “how am I “destroyed by lack of knowledge”, how have I “rejected knowledge”, how have I “forgotten the Torah of God”?

ACTION STEPS:

  1. How do your respond to the questions above

  2. What is your process for surrendering to the Will of God and not the will of humans who promote their will as God’s

  3. How are you standing in the way of progress because you are stuck in the past and how are you ignoring the lessons of the past at your peril

GOD BLESS, STOP GHOSTING GOD, GHOSTING SELF, rabbi mark

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