Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 29

“Either we are ministers of the sacred or slaves of evil. Let the blasphemy of our time not become an eternal scandal. Let future generations not loathe us for having failed to preserve what the prophets and saints, martyrs and scholars have created in thousands of years. The apostles of force have shown that they are great in evil. Let us reveal that we can be as great in goodness. We will survive if we shall be as fine and sacrificial in our homes and offices, in our Congress and clubs as our soldiers are on the fields of battle.” (Man’s Quest for God pg. 151)

Reading Rabbi Heschel is, at times, difficult! His wisdom, his teachings, his combining of prose and poetry make quoting him easy; living into his words takes an inner experience of his brilliance, a decision to imbibe his calls to us a little at a time. I have been experiencing Rabbi Heschel as a teacher, a master, a guide, a prophet, for almost 35 years, he continues to give me a “bad conscience”, a measuring stick of where I am at in my inner and outer life, a reality check on my incongruences and where I am walking my talk. My raison d’être in writing this blog is to share my experiences with Rabbi Heschel’s teachings, and provide a pathway for people to experience him for the first time and/or anew.

The first sentence above makes me shudder! I hear Rabbi Heschel calling us to account, to account to and for ourselves when we are “ministers of the sacred” and when we are “slaves of evil”. We do not live in one and not the other, only a slim minority of people are “slaves of evil” nor “ministers of the sacred” all the time. Most of us live in both realms and the challenge is to admit this to ourselves, to stop wrapping ourselves in the ‘cloaks of piety’, to stop believing the lies we tell ourselves and the judgmental ways of society that label us ‘bad seeds’ for our negative actions. Given history and our present, Rabbi Heschel is teaching us that we have a choice, a minute by minute choice, as to where we want to live; in the freedom of the sacred or in the slavery of evil. His choice of descriptors is very important to me: minister comes from the Latin meaning “servant” and slave meaning “captive” from Latin.

Rabbi Heschel’s use of these two words are apt descriptors of the choices we make each day, in each situation of living. Are we going to serve or are we going to stay captive is the question Rabbi Heschel is asking, it is the question God asks throughout the Bible/Holy Text of every spiritual discipline. Yet, it seems that most of us are unaware of this question, unaware of our own captivity, ignorant of our choices and adjusted to societal needs, conventional thinking, etc rather than the calls/demands of God from Sinai: “Hear, Choose Life, Let Freedom Ring throughout the Land and to all its inhabitants therein, Care for the stranger, the poor, the needy, Love Your Neighbor as You Love Yourself”, etc. We seem to be captives to our baser urges, we seem to be under the spell of the authoritarians, the deceivers, the power-hungry, wealth-driven minority that continue to promulgate the Big Lies, be it about elections, the stranger, people who are not male, people who don’t ‘fit the mold’, etc. We are “slaves of evil” when we go along to get along, when we stay silent in the face of injustice, when we are unwilling to stand up for and be “ministers of the sacred”! It is hard, it is lonely, it is walking on a narrow path, it is living into the nuances, it is being Godlike by distinguishing what is light, what is dark, what is chaos, what is wandering, etc, knowing we don’t have all the answers, listening to our souls knowledge rather than the rationalizations of our minds and the call of our captors.

In recovery, we find ourselves at the crossroads of being “ministers of the sacred or slaves of evil” every day. We know the slavery of evil, we have been captives of our old incongruent, evil ways. This knowing is ever-present in our decisions; are we moving one step closer to our ministry, our serving, or are we moving one step back into slavery, into our captivity. In recovery, we constantly seek ways to be of service; our work becomes not just a means to be self-supportive, it becomes an opportunity to serve another individual; our meetings are places to be of service, to welcome the newcomer(stranger), to “hear’ the call of God to be in recovery, to allow another to love us until we can love ourselves and then give the same love back to the people around us, and to, above all, “Choose Life”!

I wrestle with these choices each day, I know some have felt captive by my way of being and I am sorry. I have worked diligently to be a “minister of the sacred” and make amends when I am a “slave of evil”. I continue to “grow along spiritual lines” knowing I will never achieve perfection, nor do I need to; all the while seeking spiritual progress, living into God’s call and Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom a little more each day. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark