Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 3 Day 21
“For evil is indivisible. It is the same in thought and speech, in private and in social life. The greatest task of our time is to take the souls of men out of the pit. The world has experienced that God is involved. Let us forever remember that the sense of the sacred is as vital to us as the light of the sun. There can be no nature without spirit, no world without the Torah, no brotherhood without a father, no humanity without attachment to God.” (Man’s Quest for God pg. 150)
While many people may agree with Rabbi Heschel’s words and wisdom above, these same people don’t realize that wrapping themselves in self-righteousness, believing the lies they tell themselves, seeing themselves as ‘all good’, misses the depth, truth, and demand of Rabbi Heschel’s teaching above. “The sense of the sacred” can only come to us, envelop us when we realize how we are stuck in the pit, when we come to grips with the myriad of ways we have neglected, missed “to take the souls of men out of the pit”, especially our own souls. While looking at root causes is the normal, rational, way of solving this problem, it is not going help us “take the souls of men out of the pit”! Rather, we need to “get into the solution”. We have to acknowledge our souls are in the pit, we have to end our self-deceptions and mendacities. We have to stop hearing and believing the rhetoric of lies and societal norms we have based our beings on. We have to begin our rise out the pits by letting go of our rationalizations, our blaming and shaming of another(s) and our selves. We are in desperate need of being responsible for our selves, our souls, for speaking the truth of our souls to our minds and be responsible to help another “out of the pit”.
Only when we develop our “sense of the sacred” in our inner lives, only when we realize this sense “is as vital to us as the light of the sun”, only when we then live into this truth, will we be able “to take the souls of men out of the pit.” This can only happen when we end our seeking to blame another, when we follow the wisdom of Portia Nelson’s “There’s a Hole in My Sidewalk:The Romance of Self-Discovery”, which reminds us of our willful blindness when there is a hole in the street we walk down and we fall into twice from willful blindness and denial of our responsibility. By taking responsiblity, we no longer need to find the cause, we no longer to find someone to blame, we no longer have to walk through life creating a deeper rut in our pits, we no longer have to keep repeating the same behaviors, the same evil, the same deceptions, etc.
Developing our “sense of the sacred” begins when we see the Tzelem, the Image of God, we are all created in. History has shown us the only way to deal with evil is living through our “sense of the sacred”; we dealt with Hitler’s Germany, our own evil path of slavery, our treatment of LGBTQ+, the myriad of examples of anti-semitism, anti-Italian, anti-Irish, anti-immigrant, the war in Vietnam, etc. Yet, we continue to fall back and constantly need “to take the souls of men out of the pit.” It is apparent that we need to keep developing our “sense of the sacred” and growing it each day because it; like positivity, like goodness dissipates quickly. The lure of evil, the warmth of the pit is constantly calling to us, as individuals, as communities, as nations, as humanity.
The recovery movement is a response and a path “to take the souls of men out of the pit”. We do this together, our goal is not a selfish goal, rather we are acutely aware of our need to help one another recover from our myriad of addictive behaviors; drugs, alcohol, blaming, mendacity, self-deception, ignoring the plight of another(s), etc. In recovery, we are made aware of our need for “a power greater than ourselves” to help us overcome the lies we have been telling ourselves, we need to live according to a higher standard of being than our rational minds tell us, we “made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understand God”. While we are not promoting any particular religious belief, in recovery we acknowledge early on that we need to recover “our sense of the sacred” and attach ourselves to a way of being that helps us out of the pit and we do it together. The recovery movement is an example of Rabbi Heschel’s teaching above.
I was brought out of the pit through my willingness to learn, becoming aware of my need to learn and feed my soul instead of feeding my lies. Only with the help of God, Rabbi Silverman, the Jewish Community in Prison, my family, my daughter, my friends, family, Heather, Harriet, my teachers, the Beit T’Shuvah Alumni have I stayed out of the pit-most of the time. I follow Portia Nelson’s advice exploring new avenues to be able to living well, I no longer need to have enemies and allies, I only need to grow my “sense of the sacred” so I can experience the “light of the sun”. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark.