Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 2 Day 207
“The world is in need of redemption, but the redemption must not be expected to happen as an act of sheer grace. Man’s task is to make the world worthy of redemption. His faith and his works are preparations for ultimate redemption.” (God in Search of Man pg. 380)
Immersing myself in Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom above, I ask myself what happened to our commitment to “do and then understand”? I am thinking about Einstein’s quote: “the intuitive mind is a gift, the rational mind a servant. We have come to forget the gift and worship the servant.” While people will pay millions for a piece of art from a famous artist, we will pay $1000’s for seats to our favorite musician, we will also vote for people who want to take music, art, etc from our school curriculums! While we will be in awe of the genius’ like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, et al, we will ignore the genius in ourselves and in so many others. We all have an intuitive mind, call it our inner voice, conscience, spirit, higher consciousness, in us; we will either not hear it, ignore it, and/or override our intuitive mind in favor of the rational mind.. Isn’t it time to celebrate and use the gift of our intuitive mind? Isn’t it time to recommit to our response at Mount Sinai to “do and then understand”?
Our intuitive mind, which I call our ‘knowing’ like our rational mind, needs to be fed, needs to be nurtured, needs to mature and needs to be heard. How often have we said: “I should have known better” or “I knew the right answer and I talked myself out of it”? This is where our rational mind has overridden what we truly know, what our intuitive mind is telling us. Unfortunately, there are not many places where intuitive thinking is taught, where intuitive mind is nurtured, where intuitive mind is listened to even when we speak it. Not only have we forgotten the gift, as Einstein says, we have become afraid of the gift because we will be ridiculed, we will be shunned, we will be ignored by the loud bullies who want to use their rational minds and ours to control us and have power over us. When we engage our intuitive minds, we are no longer subject to the mendacities of another(s) and we no longer engage in self-deception. Our intuitive thinking and acting on it give us a greater understanding and vision of what is and how to “make the world worthy of redemption”.
While we may teach religious education, how to perform rituals, what to celebrate on Holy Days, we are not teaching and nurturing our spiritual essence enough, I believe. When we deny our young people the opportunity to engage in learning in their own way, when we deny the insights and intuitions of our children, we are teaching them to “forget the gift and worship the servant”. When we ignore the wisdom and truth of our spiritual texts and instead see them as rules and have only one way to do them and understand them, we are aiding our own “worship the servant” ways. We need to engage in the wisdom of the Sages; there are 70 ways/faces to the Torah, the Bible. We need to immerse ourselves each year in the study, the essence of the Bible so we can continue to grow our intuitive mind, so we can increase our intuitive learning, our ‘knowing’. We have seen throughout our history and certainly in our time, knowing right from wrong can easily be distorted, the hatred of the Jews throughout history does not come from an intuitive mind, slavery and prejudice against black people did not come from a deep ‘knowing’ what God wants, using the fears and desire to be deceived to make wrong right and right wrong is not the work of our intuitive minds, it is not the actions of people who commit to doing God’s will as we did at Mount Sinai. We are in desperate need of heeding Einstein’s words, we are in desperate need of living into Rabbi Heschel’s teaching. We are in desperate need of integrating our rational mind to serve our intuitive mind, integrating our ‘math brain’ to serve our spiritual ‘knowing’.
This is the goal of recovery, we let go of our need for rationalizing and denying. We ‘join the winning side’ of following a way of living our spiritual principles and grow our ability to hear our intuitive mind, our ‘knowing’ and follow through on them rather than ignore and/or rationalize what we want over what is true and the next right thing to do.
I have always heard my intuitive mind and for a while I ignored it, rationalized it, etc. In my recovery, I have honored it. I am guilty of miscommunication what I ‘know’, I am guilty of being too loud and too brash, too blunt and too abrasive. I know my delivery has been used against me and against truth. I know that I could not rationalize the “usual way”, I could not stand by the injustice, the destruction of goodness that was taking place. I pray that eventually my warnings will be heeded and my ‘knowing’ used to improve our world. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark