Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 57

“What is sin? The abuse of freedom. A failure in depth, failure to respond to God’s challenge. The root of sin is callousness, hardness of heart, lack of understanding what is at stake in being alive.” (Essential Writings pg 85)

These words, this wisdom from an unpublished manuscript of Rabbi Heschel’s are as relevant today as when he wrote them, at least 51 years ago. Our “lack of understanding what is at stake in being alive” seems to have grown rather than us becoming more aware and understanding! Human beings seem to be unable to find ways to “turn our swords into plough shares and our spears into pruning hooks”, we have lost our ability to learn from Cain and realize we are “our brother’s keeper”. Hamas is celebrated and Israel is castigated, a truce is set and Hamas claims responsibility for a terror attack in Jerusalem. People say they love  Jesus and turn their backs on the stranger, the widow, the orphan, the poor and the needy. We have become a society that knows no shame in our mendacity, our deceptions, our warmongering, our hate, our blame and shame.

While society has a hand in this horrific situation we find ourselves in, the responsibility rests upon all of us. As I wrote yesterday, we seem to be denying our what makes us human, according to Rabbi Abraham Twerski, the ability to make “free-will moral choices”. We have done a wonderful job at exercising our free-will, we have enslaved people, we have dictated how people ‘should’ act from our free-will, we have started wars from our free-will, we have voted in authoritarian governments in democratic elections from our free-will, we have continued the millennia-long anti-semitic crusade against Jews from our free-will, etc. What we haven’t done is be human, we haven’t used our free-will to make moral choices, and herein lies our dilemma and our solution.

“What is at stake in being alive” is our spiritual survival, our moral survival, our physical survival and none of this is determined by outside forces, unless we allow them to be. We, the People, can choose to throw off the yoke of the kingdom of greed, the yoke of the kingdom of power, the yoke of the kingdom of mendacity, the yoke of the kingdom of deception, the yoke of the kingdom of terrorism, the yoke of the kingdom of fundamentalism. We can break these yokes and no longer be directed by the liars who turn us this way or that way as farmers do with oxen. We, the People, can choose to see the truth clearly rather than live life through the veil of lies and self-deceptions we have bought into and tell ourselves each and every day. We, the People, can choose to return to our roots, return to the basics of living: stop murdering one’s own soul and the soul of anyone else; stop whoring ourselves and/or turning another into a whore for money, property, prestige, self-gain/self-worth, no longer whore ourselves at the altars of our false gods, our false self-seeking bastardization of God’s will; end our stealing from our soul, stealing from another human being, stealing from the poor and the needy; stop ‘taking the fifth’ and no longer lie  about everyone else and ourselves, no longer use God’s name for our self-centered, self-aggrandizing lies and false testimony; return to living in gratitude for what we have, end our need to take from someone else what they have, end our jealous and envious coveting and learn to have joy for the success of another human being.

While it is convenient to blame governments, society, radicals, and they have their responsibility in creating the world we are living in today, it is more appropriate to take responsibility for our part the creation of this mess, our part in participating in “sin” through our “lack of understanding what is at stake in being alive.” We can choose to keep the status quo or we can choose to change the paradigm at which we live. This change will mean living by Rabbi Heschel’s phrase: “In a free society, some are guilty all our responsible”. We are being called by the spiritual forces in the universe to end our blame game, to stand tall and take responsibility for our errors of judgement, our self-seeking bastardization of the Bible, and every other spiritual/religious text, etc. We are being called to end our senseless hatred of religion because of the actions of people who claim to be “God fearing people” while they are, in reality: idolators. Be it Ben-Gvir in Israel, Johnson in the America, Sinwar in Gaza, or any of the myriad of liars and misinterpreters of the Big Book of AA, the Bible, the Koran, the texts of Buddhism, etc. We are being called to imbue the call of the Universe, the demands of God, the lessons of the prophets, the hope of Jesus, the prayers of Mohammed and live them in all our affairs so we can, one person at a time, change our current situations and make our corner of the world a place of redemption and revelation.

This is what the Recovery Revolution is all about. In recovery, we separate the lies and the truths we have bastardized, the deceptions we have bought into and the self-deceptions that have guided our living poorly, that have helped us to misunderstand “what is at stake in being alive”. In recovery, we begin with the commitment to live according to a standard that is higher than our self-serving old mentality, we are committing to live a life that understands and embodies “what is at stake in being alive”. We take our own inventories, we make our amends, we commit to living differently than we did, we know living well is dependent upon our daily spiritual health. We learn to live in both the call of God, the call of spirit and the call of our neighbor. We let go of being self-centered and become centered on doing the “next right thing”. It is a way of being aware of our imperfections and, rather than hiding and denying them, celebrating them as ways to learn and “fail forward”. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark