Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 2 Day 57
“Even more frustrating than the fact that evil is real, mighty and tempting is the fact that it thrives so well in the disguise of the good, that it can draw its nutriment from the life of the holy. In this world, it seems, the holy and the unholy do not exist apart, but are mixed, interrelated and confounded. It is a world where idols may be rich in beauty, and where the worship of God may be tinged with wickedness.”(God in Search of Man pg. 369)
While we will never get “pure” in either our thoughts or our actions, this is left to the realm of the Angels I believe, we can and, I believe, must begin to improve our awareness of what is holy and what is unholy. We can and need to be aware of how we mix these two modes of being together and how we easily and subtly move from one to the other. As with everything in life, we have to become aware before we can change, we have to acknowledge the true challenge before us prior to being in the solution.
The beginning of our awareness begins with our letting go of our self-deceptions, the lies we tell ourselves to make our self feel good/better about our self and believing the deceptions of another(s). As Rabbi Heschel teaches, “self deception is a major disease”. When it is in the political sphere; Hitler comes about, Putin becomes a hero to White Christians, elections here become stolen and people put partisanship above caring for the stranger, the needy, the poor, etc. In this sphere, we can bring down individuals and countries through our need to lie to our self and to believe the mendacity of another(s). We are witnessing politics as war and have since the mid-1990’s, we are witnessing our court system, from the Highest to the lowest, become pawns of political and religious rhetoric rather than stand for the rule of law and the holiness of our Bill of Rights and Constitution. We have to be aware of our actions and the motives behind our actions in this realm in order to separate the holy and the unholy. We have to end the interrelationship between holy and unholy in our politics so we don’t lose this shaky, beautiful, frustrating and bright star called Democracy, that our ‘forefathers brought forth on this continent”.
This confounding of holy and the unholy never happens in the political sphere if not for it happening in the personal sphere of life. In the family we watch how parents will say “do as I say not as I do” which causes consternation and sets up ones deception receptors as ‘just the way life is’ and ‘everyone lies’, etc. We teach our children to lie and hide, to deceive and to believe/go along with our deceptions and wonder why they lie, hide, steal, from us. We teach them it is okay to deceive to protect the “family honor”; it is okay to be unholy to protect the “family honor”; it is okay to cheat in business/work to “get ahead of the competition”, etc. All of these ‘normal’, accepted deceptions we teach and practice and wonder why the holy and unholy are confounded? How far have we grown as human beings since the days of the Roman Coliseum? How do we continue to deceive our self about our spiritual growth when we continue to use religion to separate us from one another? How do we continue to believe the lies of those who tell us that our unholiness is for the the greater good? How do we follow the leader who is so flawed and so anti what our spiritual and religious texts teach us about being human tells us to? How do we continue to defend practices that marginalize people when “all men are created equal” and we “are engaged in a great civil war” for the soul of community and family?
In the personal sphere it is not okay to blame parents, teachers, religious and political leaders for our own self-deceptions, our own mendacity, our own desire to be deceived. It is time for each of us to take responsibility for our giving in to our unholiness, for our mendacity, for our glee at taking over for someone else, for causing the downfall of another so we can ‘get ahead’. We have to do a daily inventory of the lies we are telling ourselves at night and see how the lies are leading us to confuse “the holy and unholy”, more each day. We have to find the kernel of truth in these lies that make them so believable and so powerful for us and begin to let them go so we can see clearer each and every day. It is a process that is never finished and the more we engage, the more we can live into the holiness we are and the holiness we bring.
In recovery, we “continue to take personal inventory and promptly admit when we were wrong”. We have lived in the mixed-up space of unholy/holy and it drove us to drink! We found ourselves so far out of the realm of being human that we had to come back to the holy/unholy way of living and this is what our recovery is truly all about: separating the holy from the unholy and living more holiness in our everyday actions. We know that “deception of others is rooted in deception of self”.
I have been writing the lies I tell myself and counsel everyone to do the same. When I get away from doing this for too long, I find myself waist deep in mendacity, self-deception and this has led to despair, errors and being too blind, arrogant to see what was and what is. I am jolted back to seeing the lies, the deceptions of another that I believed and the self-deceptions and lies I have told myself. It is exhilarating to see truth and devastating to see the subtler ways I deceive myself. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark