Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 2 Day 185
“It is true that the commandment to be holy is exorbitant, and that our constant failures and transgressions fill us with contrition and grief. Yet we are never lost. We are the sons of Abraham. Despite all faults, failures, and sins, we remain parts of the Covenant.” (God in Search of Man pg. 378)
Exorbitant is defined as “unreasonably high” and the Latin root means “from the course(usual). Rabbi Heschel’s use of this word in conjunction with “the commandment to be holy” is interesting to me. I hear him calling out to us to realize that being holy is a high bar that God has set for us, being holy is, unfortunately, a way of being that is far “from the course” of usual behaviors. The second half of the opening statement validates this truth. I am just not positive that most of us are filled with contrition and grief from “our constant failures and transgressions.”
This is our challenge as human beings always and in particular in our times. We have seen an uptick our “failures and transgressions” and a downturn in our “contrition and grief” over them. We are witnessing people of the cloth and people of faith use mendacity and deception on one another and of themselves to convince them that their “failures and transgressions” are actually holy so they applaud one another and give themselves pats on the back for their “failures and transgressions”, they defend them to the death rather than express and experience “contrition and grief”.
We all need to recognize that being holy is not the usual way of living for all of us, this is why, I believe, it had to be a commandment, it has to be told to us and we have to remind ourselves of this commandment and, as the Torah says, realize that holiness is a continuum. The commandment is in the imperfect tense in the Bible, meaning it is an action that has begun and is not yet completed. We begin as holy souls, we can choose to grow deeper into our innate holiness and we can choose not to. As I write this blog today, I realize how “radical amazement” is a necessity for us to grow deeper into being holy and how our adjustment to conventional notions and mental cliches keeps us from paying the “unreasonably high” price of being holy, of hearing and following God’s command. While it is not actually that difficult to be holy, according to Leviticus Chapter 19, verses 1-18, the difficulty we experience and the cause of our “failures and transgressions” lie with our immature egos, our attachment to self-deception and mendacity. This is why we have become so adjusted to the ‘normal way of doing things’ rather than seek new and “maladjusted” paths to fulfill both God’s commandment and our souls’ desire to be holy.
Contrition comes from the Latin meaning “to wear away, to grind down” and grief from the Old French meaning “burden”. As many of us who have experienced death of a loved one can attest to, grief is a burden we carry. Rabbi Heschel’s use of the word above gives me a new way of experiencing grief; recognizing the “burden”/heaviness of grief that comes from loving someone, loving a career, a mission that has been lost is important in learning how to carry the burden and know we have to share this “burden” with another(s). We also have to commit to not letting the “burden”, the “grief” negatively impact our living, we have to learn how to live with these “burdens”, with the myriad of grief we have for all our losses and “failures and transgressions.” We can only become contrite, when we allow our “failures and transgressions” to “wear away” and “grind down” our inauthentic ways of being, our mendacities, our false egos, our belief that our facades and false selves will save us from ever having to be contrite, our need to be right all the time and the smartest person in the room. “Contrition and grief” are, as I understand Rabbi Heschel today, what will save us from self-destruction, from destroying one another and bring us together to fight our common enemies, mendacity and evil.
In recovery and my return to Judaism, I learned early on that “failures and transgressions” do not make me less human, they make me as human as the next person. What recovery and my return to Judaism has done is give me the wisdom, the strength, the courage and the spirit to no longer hide from my “failures and transgressions” as well as no longer be the entire problem. I carry the truth of my errors with me as reminders and signposts now instead of as burdens and they have worn away and ground down my false ego to where I can openly and freely admit my errors and make my T’Shuvah, my amends. I just no longer have to make an amend for who I am, for my humanness, and this is the paradigm shift that my teachers and fellow travelers in recovery and Judaism have helped me achieve. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark