Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 2 Day 102
“Religion, therefore, with its demands and vision is not a luxury but a matter of life and death. True, its message is often diluted and distorted by pedantry, externalization, ceremonialism, and superstition. But, this precisely is our task: to recall the urgencies, the perpetual emergencies of human existence, the rare cravings of the spirit, the eternal voice of God, to which the demands of religion are an answer.” (God in Search of Man pg. 372)
There are so many urgencies and perpetual emergencies that are not only too numerous to elucidate, they are overwhelming for most of us when we begin to think about them. We have, however many times, confused ego-centric urges for urgencies, personal desired as emergencies; doing this causes the real urgencies and perpetual emergencies to go unnoticed by most people. In unpacking this phrase, we can begin to discern the differences. In today’s society, as in all prior societies, we have confused the urgency and perpetual emergency of freedom with personal liberty. As I was taught by Rabbi Jonathan Omer-man, prior to receiving the 10 Sayings at Mount Sinai, we were slaves in Egypt, upon our redemption from slavery in Egypt, we spent 50 days in liberty-doing what we wanted to- and upon receiving the 10 Sayings, we became free. Freedom, as defined by Rabbi Omer-man, is when we surrender to God’s Will rather than follow our self-will. Even prior to our enslavement in Egypt, we were in the narrow straits of doing what we thought best, disregarding even the Noahide Laws given after the flood. We were seeking power and control in order to have certainty and feel good about our self without dealing with our inner life and our imperfections.
Unfortunately, we have not truly embraced the free-will choice to follow the 10 Sayings and the rest of the Torah, etc to “nullify our will before God’s Will so God’s Will becomes our will” as we learn in Ethics of our Ancestors Chapter 2:4. We have not “turned our will and our life over to the care of God as we understand God” as we learn in the third step of Alcoholics Anonymous. Instead, we are still confusing our personal desires, our ego-centered feel good urgencies with authentic needs for our souls, our bodies, our minds. We are still hiding from our imperfections, we are still hiding from a power greater than ourselves, we are still hiding from our Higher Consciousness, we are still hiding from our selves. While it is easier to substitute our personal desires for the “urgencies, the perpetual emergencies” Rabbi Heschel is reminding us of, it is an error that causes us much more pain, suffering, angst, anger, retaliation, violence, self-deception and deception of another(s) than most of us realize. We are in desperate need of unraveling the confusion we have created out of the fear of truly facing our self, having our authentic and true self face the world and risk being laughed at, being scorned, being ridiculed, etc. Only when we let go of the masks we wear, when we drop the pretenses upon which we have built our egos and our life will we be able to respond to the authentic urgencies and perpetual emergencies that are present each and every day.
Letting go of our inauthentic needs, facing our true self, presenting our authenticity to the world is freedom. Freedom is one of the most basic urgency and perpetual emergency we face each and every day. We are tormented by our inner slaveries each and every day. We are tormented by the outer enslavers each and every day. We seem to be powerless to meet these challenges and challengers, we seem to ‘give in’ to these false ideas and our own self-deceptions. Yet, we can go through these embedded ways of being, we can surrender our will to the Will of a power greater than ourselves. We can stop worrying about how exacting we are in the performance of God’s Will and immerse our self in the spirit of the God’s Will so that our will becomes like God’s will! It is a hard road, it begins with the action of surrender as Pirke Avot has taught us for the past 2000+ years, and as every spiritual discipline teaches as the first step to finding our true and authentic self. It is also the way to healing our shame and stopping our blame, it is the path to responding to the urgent pleas of everyone around us to be free. It is the path to knowing we belong, we are loveable and loving, we are forgivable and forgiving.
This surrender is what the first three steps of Recovery are all about. Each day we remind our self that we are powerless over ___ and we “came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity”, leading us to “turn our will and our lives over to…”. Using these three steps every day brings us closer to our Higher Power/God, brings us closer to our own inner dialogues, brings us closer to discerning the stumbling blocks that caused us to fall into the abyss of self-centered fear and self-loathing. Each and every day for those of us in recovery know we have to surrender and look at our actions, our thoughts, so we can discern truth from fiction, desire from authentic needs, God’s Will from our ego-centric will.
I longed for freedom long before I realized it. I also misunderstood and mis-defined what freedom is/was for a long time. My life, these past 35+ years is based on God’s definition of freedom, based on understanding the layers of shit I have to let go of, wash away so I can continue to grow into more “freedom from the bondage of self”. I can say, without shame, that I made errors and hurt people because of my misunderstanding of the layers of freedom and thought I was there. I will never be completely free and I am truly freer than I have ever been because of my surrender, the love I receive and give and knowing the embrace of God. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark