Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 2 Day 107
“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)
God calls to us, according to Jewish Wisdom, each and every day. God cries that we are in exile. God wants a relationship with each of us, our souls cry as well to be heard, to be followed, yet we continue to run the other way. We say we are confused, we believe we are following God’s Will when we are distorting and diluting God’s call and the call of our souls. Here are more ways to hear, listen, understand; to live the Shema Yisrael, daily.
7) Do not curse the deaf, do not put a stumbling block before the blind. We go against this command all the time. Society, for the millennia, has taken advantage of people, has used our vulnerabilities against us. We use double speak and false flags, alternative facts and spin to confuse one another. We speak in ways that are so easy to misunderstand in order to ‘win’. We refuse to hear the call of our souls, we refuse to discern truth from fiction, we are proper and polite rather than real and messy. We believe Caveat Emptor is the way to go rather than disclosing everything to someone else. We hide the real us so we can get along, so we can overpower, so we can be ‘king/queen of the hill’. We live in a world where leaders and us play 3-card monte with the truth. God and our souls are calling for us to live authentically, to be messy and to return to our basic goodness of being.
8) Practice righteous judgement, do not slander. Rather than judge according to our bias’ we have to discern what is true, what is righteous, what is charitable. We have to stop allowing our feelings, our political bias’ from blinding us to truthful and correct. We are so caught up in running with the majority to be liked and be with the ‘in-crowd’, we go along with distortion, with dilution and with evil! We have to stop slandering one another as well as ourselves. We have to heed God’s call to judge ourselves and one another with righteousness, we have to stop slandering ourselves with negative speech and we have to engage with one another in truth. We cannot return to our purpose and/or our authentic self without living these commandments.
These four ways of heeding “the eternal voice of God” that religion provides for us as solutions to the problem of evil, the problem of living well are essential for us to recover and to live. We are in the depths of despair, we are in the throes of a pandemic which are isolating us more and more from one another and from our self, our soul. We are living in an epidemic of addiction and it touches each and every one of us. This epidemic is not just about drugs, alcohol, gambling, etc, it encompasses the lies we are telling our selves, the lies we tell one another, the anger and hatred that is being spewed in the halls of justice, in the halls of government, in the halls of our schools, in the restaurants we go to, the business’ we enter, in the halls of our workplace and within the walls of our houses of worship and within the walls of our homes. We are willing to throw people who have helped us away when they can no longer do something for us, we are willing to throw people away when they speak truth we do not want to hear, we are willing to throw people away for being themselves, messing up and not giving them a path of repentance, repair and new responses. Yet, we never want to be thrown away by God nor by another! We are engaged in violence in our speech, in our actions towards another and towards ourselves. This is why the Holiness Code is so important to our well-being!
In recovery, we put down our swords and our shields, we turn them into pruning hooks and plowshares. We stop making war with another and within our self. We engage in these actions that God calls us to do. We “practice these principles in all our affairs” because we have woken up to truth, we have woken up to what is authentic inside of us and outside of us. We let go of needing to be right and we engage in learning how to leave the past in the past, see today as a gift, and be of service as a way of paying God back for the bounty we enjoy in our new way of living.
I know how difficult living these principles are, I am aware of the times I have fallen short in achieving them and I know that over these past 35 years, I have made spiritual progress. Rabbi Heschel speaks of “taking a leap of action” and these principles give me the opportunity to do this. I slander less, I am more righteous in my judgements, I work hard to uncover my eyes, let go of my prejudices so I do not curse the deaf nor put stumbling blocks before the blind, beginning with myself. The more I take these actions towards me, the more I act in these ways towards everyone else. I repent, I repair and I have new responses to old ideas, old ways. This allows me to be present, relish this day and hear God clearer and improve my spiritual connection with God, with you and with my soul. God Bless, Rabbi Mark