Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 2 Day 63
“The greater the man, the more he is exposed to sin. Piety is at times evil in disguise,, an instrument in the pursuit of power.” (God in Search of Man pg. 370)
These words make me tremble with awe and fear. The first sentence above is so true and we are usually so oblivious to this truth. It is scary to ponder the myriad of ways we all fall prey to our experience of greatness, to our experience of exposure to sin and how we succumb to both our greatness and our sins.
Each of us has within us greatness, each of us live our greatness out loud, even those who feel ‘less than’. Our insecurities, our foibles, our sureties, all lead us to either proclaim our greatness and/or proclaim our unworthiness. Both sides of this coin lead us to sin, because both are only one side of our beingness. When we are stuck in our insecurities, when we are trapped in our feelings of ‘less than’ many of us wear it as a badge of dishonor and this exposes us to the sin of unworthiness, the sin of never enough, the sin of not living our divine Image out loud. Many people revel in their victimhood and blame everyone else for their ‘lot in life’. When we only identify with our traumas, when we only identify with our insecurities, we expose our self to the sin of shame, blame, we give up our power and become enslaved to the names we call ourselves, the ‘place’ another(s) put us in and settle for table scraps rather than taking our proper place at the table of life. When we are in this ‘less than’ way of being, we are denying our infinite worth and unique dignity, thereby proclaiming that when we were created, God made junk! This way of being/thinking exposes us to sin.
Of course, on the other end of the spectrum, those who achieve greatness, those who achieve power, those who achieve stature are exposed to sin because it is easy for us to believe our own press. Great people have to be on guard against thinking they know what is right and good in any and every situation as this leads us to become more and more oblivious to what is good and what is not good. When we are living into our greatness, living into our power, we are susceptible to forgetting the truth of Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom above. As the Ramchal said in his forward to Path of the Just, precisely because something is true and everyone knows it, we become oblivious to it. When we are in power, be it as a parent, a child, a teacher, a clergy person, a politician, a businessperson, a doctor, etc; we have to be constantly aware of our increased ability to fall into sin.
Just as Moses was held to a higher standard because of his leadership position as were Aaron and Miriam, so too are we who are leaders, parents, bosses, medical professionals, government workers, judges, senators, Congresspeople. Yet, we are witnessing the results of what happens when great people are oblivious to the sin they are exposed to and the sins they succumb to. “Because I say so” is not an effective way to parent, it is not teaching anything, it is only exerting power for the sake of power and we see the negative effects this has had on our children throughout the generations. Yet, we continue to act this way, not realizing the sin of callousness and fear we are exposing our self to and exposing our families to. Children who rebel rather than individuate are unaware of the sins they are exposed to by their rebellion, they are seeking escapes from their situations rather than learning the tools to go through the essential pain of growing up. This has led to a drug epidemic that is roiling our people. Doctors who have bought into the lies of Big Pharma and helped to make us an “Addiction Nation” as Timothy McMahon King has authored, are oblivious to the sin their power as Doctors exposes them to and how they have veered away from their Hippocratic oath.
We are in need of taking the blinders off, we are in need of gaining insight to the sins we are exposed to each and every day-both in the world and in our own inner life, in our own inner dialogue, in our own thoughts. We are in need of becoming more aware and sensitive to “the more we are exposed to sin” each and every day. We need to stop believing the lies we are telling our self, we need to discover the myriad of ways we succumb to obliviousness and the soul-crushing patterns of knowing truth and living falseness.
In recovery, we adhere to the phrase “more will be revealed” and seek to uncover the lies we tell ourselves and become more aware and sensitive to the sins we are exposed to daily. We no longer deny our greatness so we can bathe in the waters of denial, we no longer surrender to our fears and our false egos. We engage in living more authentically each and every day by removing the barriers we have constructed that have led us to live out of proper measure and use our God-given/natural traits to harm self and another(s). In recovery, we seek to make amends to the world for our obliviousness to our greatness and our obliviousness to the sins we have been exposed to and succumbed to.
OY! I have so much inventory to write and ponder about the first sentence above! Immersing myself in these words of wisdom leave me in trembling awe. More tomorrow, God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark