Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 2 Day 114
“After the Lord had created the universe, He took a look at His creation. What was the word that conveyed His impression? If an artist were to find a word describing how the universe looked to God at the dawn of its existence, the word would be sublime or beautiful. But the word that the Bible has is good. Indeed, when looking through a telescope into the stellar space, the word that comes to our mind is grandeur, mystery, splendor. But the God of Israel is not impressed with splendor; He is impressed with goodness.”(God In Search of Man pg.372-373)
God’s repeating of the word “good” in the first Chapter of Genesis points to the validity and wisdom of Rabbi Heschel’s teaching above. In the first chapter we are told that light and good comes from God’s declaration of the need for light that emanates from the darkness over the deep and the chaos and void that precedes the light. Only upon seeing what is needed to make the world better and fill that need can God declare “good”. Immersing ourselves in the text of this first chapter and in the wisdom above, gives greater definition to what it means to be human, I believe.
Humanity became obsessed with creating splendor and beauty, grandeur and solving the mysteries of the Universe while ignoring the teachings of God in the first chapter, deceiving itself that it was caring for the earth, that self-satisfaction, self-importance, self-empowerment was ‘good’. We made up laws and rules that served the strong, the mighty, the rich, the ruling class in order to control another(s) and to make oneself into an object of worship. Bowing down to kings, queens, etc became more important than worshiping God, from taking a “leap of action”, as Rabbi Heschel teaches, to fulfill the need that only we can fulfill. We became and continue to be a society that is obsessed with power, glory, beauty, splendor, grandeur, solving mysteries; a society that is obsessed with our mental acuity at the cost of our spiritual health, at the cost of “goodness”, at the cost of being human and humane.
We have forgotten that light/good comes from the darkness, the void, the chaos that life is. Nowhere in the Bible are we told that these three basic elements of creation are eradicated, nowhere are we told that they disappear and/or they have no effect on us. Because each and every day is new, each and every day is pregnant with possibilities of creations, the three foundational elements are with us each and every day. Yet, we keep trying to ignore them, go around them, explain them, overpower them with our intellects as Descartes said: “I think therefore I am”. Rather, as I understand Rabbi Heschel today, We are therefore we act, think, etc. We have to see ourselves and all humanity as beings that are created in the Image of God, we have to accept that everyone is needed in order to fulfill the need only they can fulfill. Rabbi Heschel is reminding us that we need to return to our basic goodness of being that is implanted in us by God. We are being called to imitate God’s goodness, to “do justly”, to “walk in God’s ways”, to return to God each and every day.
We are in a state of being, as has been the case to a lessor and greater degree forever, of crowing and reveling in our power. We are engaged in a war with false ego, false pride, power for the sake of enslaving another(s), worshiping our minds and fawning over beauty, splendor, mystery, etc. We see this in our government, we see this in our institutions, we see this in our obsession with social media, we see this in the ways we hide from self and one another, we see this in our religious institutions, we see this in our families. Yet, we have come to normalize these behaviors and are bewildered that someone would call us out on it. We have all the excuses and reasons as to why and how we are ‘good people’ and ‘doing God’s will’ while we are blind to our indifference to the “goodness” God desires, the “goodness” our souls cry out to do. We engage in the ‘goodness’ our intellects direct us to and it is almost always tinged with self-aggrandizement, self-centeredness.
In recovery, we “turn our will and our lives over to the care of God…” and we have a prayer that asks to be relieved of the “bondage of self”. We know we are in need of help from a source greater than ourselves because we have failed in our attempts to think our way out of the darkness, chaos, emptiness of life. We know we have a strong ego that wants to, and has in the past, overpower our soul, drown out the “still small voice of God” within us. So we ask to be relieved of the “bondage of self” and in this way we can see/hear how to live in the “goodness” God is calling for, how to act ourselves into the “goodness” God is demanding of us. This is, again, a foundation of our recovery and needs to grow at least one grain of sand each day.
I am loud and abrasive, impractical and demanding, and constantly seeking ways to live in the “goodness” Rabbi Heschel is teaching me about and that God is demanding. I fall short as does every human being; this is not the core of this teaching, the core of God’s Demand. The core is to keep “failing forward” as I learned from a businessman many years ago. The challenge is to never give up, never get stuck in the chaos, the void, the darkness. The challenge is to continue to reach up to the spirit of God that hovers over our world and reach down within us to our soul’s knowledge, strength, power so we continue to be 51% decent, 51% kind, just, loving,caring, truthful; thereby living 51% in goodness each day. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark