Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 2 Day 95
“Let us not labor under no illusions. There are no easy solutions for problems that are at the same time intensely personal and universal, urgent and eternal. Technological progress creates more problems that it solves.. Efficiency experts or social engineering will not redeem humanity.” (God in Search of Man pg. 372).
Rabbi Heschel published God in Search of Man in 1955, imagine what our world could be had we all heeded his teaching, wisdom and insight above! People are still looking for “easy solutions” and failing to see what the real problems are. We are still laboring under illusions of grandeur and superiority over evil, we are still believing in our mind’s capacity to think and solve these “intensely personal and universal” problems. We are as stuck in our own “stinking thinking” as we were some 58 years ago, maybe even more stuck than when Rabbi Heschel wrote these prophetic words.
We are continuing to live in a world where atoning for our sins is difficult and rare. To atone, I believe, means to become ‘at one’ with truth, with self, with humanity, and with God. We are still using our mind to show how smart we are, rather than using our spirit to learn how connected and in need of “a power greater than ourselves” to help us with these “urgent and eternal” problems that can and do harm our humanity. “To atone for the holy” doesn’t even enter the realm of necessity for most people so we continue to mix up evil and good, unholy and holy in willful blindness and in our obliviousness. At issue, as we immerse ourselves in Rabbi Heschel’s teaching above, is do we even realize that we are suffering in such delusion that we don’t even recognize the “intensely personal and universal, urgent and eternal” problems we are facing? It seems as if there are enough people who do not see this suffering, who when they do want to blame anyone and everyone else for it and believe there are easy solutions! We hear this from religious leaders, we hear this from political leaders, we hear this from teachers, parents, etc, “just follow me, just listen to me, just do what I tell you, don’t believe your soul, don’t believe your eyes and/or ears, I have the answer, etc”. This mendacity that we hear from these ‘smart people’ is killing us, wounding our souls and keeping us stuck in our own self-deceptions.
Technology is important and good, as well as being a weapon to harm and used for evil purposes. We are witnesses to ‘bots’ targeting susceptible people with lies and hatred so the puppet masters who are sending them can cause chaos, stop truth, turn elections and sow more hatred and suspicion in our country, our world, our homes, our inner lives. We have fallen for the lie that technology will solve our problems, it will be the solution for the problem of evil, it will save us from the mendacity we are bombarded with daily through ‘the media’. Instead, technology is used very often to create more problems, it is used to confuse and deflect us from what is really happening, it has become a tool in our political wars to engage in lies so they can win elections. Technology is being used to kill free and fair elections, as we have seen over the last four election cycles. Technology has made it easier to get information out quicker which in cases of emergencies is a great gift and tool. It has also, by design, gotten so many people addicted to their devices and interested in how many likes, how many clicks, how many shares we get, the content is no longer important, only how famous we can become through technology matters.
We labor under the illusion that ____ will solve our problems, there is an easy answer if we only seek it and/or listen to people who proclaim they know the answers. Those of us in recovery are well aware that solutions are never easy and there are simple solutions to the intensely personal problems we face daily. Simple does not mean easy, it does not mean these solutions are not complex, it means that we stop complicating our solution seeking with the lies, deceptions and blinders we seem to approach all issues. These complications begin with seeking an answer-the one right way out of our personal predicaments and these is none. An answer implies that we will have a result and people in recovery know, just as there are many layers to peeling an onion, there are many layers to each and every solution. Our experience is when we are in the solution, there are many doorways to go through and we become less intent on finding the answer, less in need of a certain result and more engaged in what we are learning, how this impacts our past actions and what it means for today and tomorrow.
I have relied too often on people seeing and knowing me, I have relied too often on ____ to ensure that people hear and understand me. I have bought my own press at times as well. I have never, in the past 36 years since my last incarceration, believed in easy solutions, I have, though, labored under the illusion of being in partnership with people seeking solutions forever, not realizing that at different points our agendas become different, our visions become different and I haven’t seen this, I haven’t heard this and the loss of connection I have experienced has wounded me deeply. These experiences bring up my deficiencies, my sins, my self-deceptions and have taught me to take off my rose-colored glasses, stop deceiving myself and not depend on technology to get my messages out clearly, to take off the blinders when I am dealing with my inner life and with another human being. These experiences continue to remind me that serving God, living a life of reciprocity is part of the solution and it is difficult at times while being extremely simple. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark