Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 2 Day 141
“If the nature of man were all we had, then surely the outlook would be dim. But we also have the aid of God, the commandment, the mitsvah. The central Biblical fact is Sinai, the covenant, the word of God. Sinai was superimposed on the failure of Adam.”(God in Search of Man pg 374)
Our experience of Sinai happens every day, according to Jewish tradition. God is calling to us, God is reminding us to “Shema Yisrael”, Hear Israel. Remembering that Jacob’s name change means to “wrestle with God, with another(s) human, and to wrestle with oneself tells us we have to wrestle with “the nature of man” within ourselves and with one another. “The failure of Adam” also happens every day with our blaming of another(s) for our own errors in judgements and actions, with our own finger-pointing and shirking personal responsibility.
Immersing ourselves in this ‘wrestling match’ each and every day can be exhausting. When we hide, like Adam did, it is exhausting. Continuing to wear masks that hide our face from another human being, from God, from our self, we find ourselves lost, alone, fearful, and tired. We are never sure of our place, we are always afraid that someone will find us out and we sit in a prison of our own making that is isolated, cold, damp and confining. We are judgmental of everyone else, we find flaws in another(s) and we exploit those flaws so the attention is on someone else and no one sees the deceptions we are engaged in. We come to believe our own press and we use our nature to gain power, money, prestige. We use our hiding to blame another for our plight and stay stuck in ignorance, hatred, blame, shame, and perpetrate evil upon another and the world. We continue to embellish “the failure of Adam” and find ourselves further and further away from God, mired deeper in Egypt and exile. Every human being engages in “the failure of Adam”, none of us are exempt from this situation, this experience. Putin’s war in Ukraine is an example of using the “nature of man” and “the failure of Adam” to cause ruin and destruction. Orban in Hungary is another example of the blaming of another for the problems he has caused. White supremacists, like Ron DeSantis, use women, people of color, Jews, ‘liberals’, LGBTQ+ as excuses for their power grabs, for the necessity of controlling the vote counting, the books that can be read, etc. all the while proclaiming their love of God! Idolators always do this, the make false gods of themselves and the ‘leader’ and worship them, proclaim them to be the True God and forget the call of God at Sinai, the words of God at Sinai, replacing them with their own. This is how lost we can, have and currently are!
Humans have worn masks for so long, throughout our history as evidenced by Adam, it is hard to discern what is real and what is a mask. We have so many rationalizations for our masks, for believing that our false selves become our real selves if we live them long enough and hard enough. We are so fearful of facing truth, facing our self, facing another without our masks that we engage in subtler ways to hide while trying to pass ourselves off as authentic! We have perfected the art of hiding in plain sight. We have perfected the bastardization of the Sinai experience to make our engaging in “the failure of Adam” and giving in to “the nature of man” seem like God’s Will, even going so far as to proclaim engagement in these ways what God wants for us! There is a solution and I will write about it tomorrow.
The joy of recovery is that we take off our masks and find acceptance, love, fellowship and camaraderie. When we go to a meeting, when we have a coffee with another person in recovery, we are greeted with a hug, with a smile, with a warmth that is genuine and safe. We are told “let us love you until you can love yourself”, we learn how to live a life of principles rather than personalities. We learn/relearn how to overcome our “nature of man” and use the “aid of God” to improve our lives and the lives of everyone around us. In recovery, we find that we no longer need to put a cover over our souls, we no longer have to put make-up on our faces, we no longer need be in shame for who we are.
I know when I am in “the failure of Adam” internally and externally because I am exhausted mentally, physically and spiritually. I wrestle each day with my own inner critic that tells me “you are wrong”, “you are not enough”, “you are a loser”, “who do you think you are kidding”, etc. It has become much subtler over the years and it is still within me. I realize how much of my outer bluster came from hearing these same criticisms or believing I heard them from another(s). I would yell at, deny and fight these outer critics. Maybe they weren’t critics at all, maybe my inner critic twisted my hearing and I lashed out in error. I am sure both are true. I am better today than I have ever been and more aware of the subtleties of this “failure of Adam” inside of me. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark