ife Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 2 Day 62
“It was not the lack of religion but the perversion of it that the prophets of Israel denounced. “Many an altar has Ephraim raise, alters that only serve for sin”(Hosea 8:11).”(God in Search of Man pg. 369)
Today is Pearl Harbor Day, 81 years ago we were attacked by the Japanese and brought into World War II. World War II was the result of the perversion of religion, the perversion of truth, the worshiping at the altar of sin/power. One would think that we would have learned from this decimation of land, countries, people and we seem to have not. Rabbi Heschel is, hopefully, disturbing our comfortable way of being a perversion, upending the mendacity of our belief we are worshiping at the altar of God, at the altar of Higher Consciousness, at the altar of truth. And, I fear that his words and wisdom will continue to go unheeded by so many of us.
We all find “altars that only serve for sin” to worship at. Be it our need to be right, our need to have power over another(s), our cancer of prejudice, our bastardization of freedom for all, our false interpretation of holy texts, etc, we find ways to pervert the truth and the love that we are born with. It is a difficult task to align ourselves with principles of truth, love, kindness, compassion and mercy when we are faced with opportunities to ‘get ahead’, pathways to riches, roads to blame another for our circumstances, and we need to tear down these altars we are worshiping at so we can stop living in the various fears that run our lives.
To do this, we have to begin with our self, our inner self, our authentic self. We have to return to our basic goodness of being and let go of our false needs. We have to discern what is an authentic need and what is an erroneous desire, what our inner truth is and what our inner gift is. In Deuteronomy, Moses address the whole Israelite people, from the chiefs of the tribes to the water carriers, teaching us that we all have a place and a calling, a gift and a demand that is no better nor worse than another’s, we are not judged by our job, by our social status, by our wealth. We are judged by our goodness, by our truthfulness, by our kindness, by our show of mercy, by our compassion. We are constantly being called upon to be human.
Yet, we are prone to surrender to our perversions of truth, to the persuasive perversions of truth by another(s). We are not suffering from a lack of direction, a lack of inner wisdom, a lack of spirituality, we are suffering from the perversion of all of these gifts. We are not in need of more knowledge, we are in need of using our inner knowledge more. We are not in need of more resources, we are in need of using our resources well. We are not in need of more______, we are in need of using what we have and who we are in service of another(s), in service of God, in service of our humanity.
We are unable to fulfill our authentic needs as long as we engage in perverting our authentic needs into desires for fame, fortune, power, irresponsibility, escape, etc. We are in desperate need of ending our perverted ways, our false and half truths, our eye disease of prejudice, our inauthentic need of needing a ‘bad guy’ to blame. We are being called upon to ‘circumcise the foreskin of our hearts” and to no longer give lip service to truth, to articles of faith, to closing the door on people who challenge us. We are being reminded of how easy it is to fall prey to falseness and to perversion. The people who yell the loudest about how “those people” are ruining our country and causing all the ills that befall us, are the true perverts, the real offenders that Rabbi Heschel and the prophets rail against. We have to stop listening to the loudest voices and begin to listen to the “still small voice” of God, Higher Consciousness that is inside of us.
In recovery, we put on “a new pair of glasses” as Chuck C teaches us so that we can learn to be in acceptance of what is. We learn to engage with our inner life, to see through our third eye, to acknowledge what is, what was and what can be and the path to travel to grow along spiritual lines. We learn to accept and welcome the stranger, to embrace the newcomer as our way of worshiping the principles of kindness and mercy. We learn to tell the truth to and about our self as a path to loving ourself and being compassionate with our self so we can do the same with another(s). In recovery, we are recovering our ability to be human once again.
The foreskin of my heart grows back when I am not careful and diligent about being open, being truthful, being aware of the perversions that I am capable of. I continue to rid myself of the lies and the inauthentic notions that creep up on me. I delve into my inner life each and every day to learn more, to be more authentic, to let go of the false needs that have defined me in the past. Each day I begin with gratitude and learning. Each morning I wake up excited for what I will learn today. Each day my soul wrestles with my mind and emotions so I can stay away from the “altars that only serve for sin”. Each day, I remember Hosea’s call to stop whoring myself, I remember what it says in the Book of Numbers: “don’t scout after your heart and eyes and whore after them”. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark