Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 222

“Religion is not made for extraordinary occasions, such as birth, marriage, and death. Religion is trying to teach us that no act is trite, every moment is an extraordinary occasion.”(God in Search of Man pg.384)

Rabbi Heschel’s teaching above comes to remind us to stop relegating religion to certain acts, rites, rituals. Since time immemorial, we have compartmentalized our religious practices, our spiritual disciplines to certain times, to “birth, marriage, death” and to once a week practices, or even daily worship services. In fact, I hear Rabbi Heschel reminding us of another reason religion became defeated, eclipsed; a statement he begins this entire book with. This compartmentalization is one of the “problem with the neutral” which is the title of the chapter I have been writing on. When we are neutral, we “render ineffective; deprive of vigor”, according to the dictionary definition of the Latin root of the word. We are “not either”, we are, as we say in Yiddish, “nishta hin, nishta hare, neither this nor that. We go through the rituals, we say the words of prayers, we are amazed at the birth of a child, we pledge certain vows at the marriage ceremony, we cry at a death, yet we forget that religion is for so much more than these rituals. We forget that religion is to prepare us for these events, to help us “enoble the common” of everyday events, as Rabbi Heschel teaches elsewhere. We forget that religion gives us the path, the vision, the power to see that and experience “every moment is an extraordinary occasion.”

We are hearing much about “the weaponization of the Justice Department/Government” from our Republican friends and foes. We are hearing these ‘good christian’, ‘believing Jews’ upstanding ‘moral’ men and women defend their rape of the trust and bastardization of the freedoms guaranteed in our Constitution and its Amendments. We are witnesses to their phony explanations of ‘law and order’ is for everyone else and doesn’t apply to them, to Donald Trump. We are watching a man accused of high crimes and misdemeanors, twice while in office and now as a private citizen, be extolled and lead the race for the Republican Party nomination to be President again! We hear and see people who have said it is wrong what he did say they will vote for him if he is nominated by the Republican Party! These same people will wrap themselves in some bible, some religious words, proclaim him to once again be Christ’s agent; using religion to bastardize this moment, using religion to make the moment trite rather than extraordinary!

Rabbi Heschel is calling us all to task, calling us all to wake up! Upon arising in the morning, Jewish people say a prayer of thanksgiving and commitment; thanking God for returning our souls to us with compassion and extolling God’s faithfulness in us. This is a prayer to start our day with gratitude for being alive, understanding that being alive is a gift, it is an act of compassion and we commit to respond to today with compassion, faithfulness, awareness, connection, kindness, justice, mercy, love, truth. For our prayers to have meaning, we have to take action on them during our daily routines, we have to live into the prayers we say at every opportunity, we have to stop praying to God and then lying to one another, we have to stop saying are grateful for the ability to distinguish night from day and then cheat our fellow human being. We have to stop being grateful for the capacity to think, to know what God is calling us to do and then denigrate the poor, demean the stranger, and criminalize the needy. The teaching above should be shaking us to our core, it hopefully will be the bucket of cold water we need to wake up to what our souls need, our fellow human beings need, our world needs in order to move closer to God, closer to the messianic era.

In recovery, we know the truth of Rabbi Heschel’s words above because we had become experts in the trite, we had become experts at hiding and lying, at compartmentalizing our living. In our separation from Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom, we had come to see everything as trite, seeing no real purpose in life other than to ‘get mine’, and death was seen as a relief from our spiritual suffering. Now, in our recovery, we open our eyes each day and are grateful for this day, we seek ways to serve something greater than ourselves, we turn towards helping rather than hurting, serving rather than being served, loving rather than being loved; we engage in the actions of the St. Francis Prayer, the tenets of Judaism, etc.

Since I first began immersing myself in Rabbi Heschel’s teachings and wisdom, I have not said: “same shit different day”. I know that each day is a gift and I do my best to honor this gift of life, I do the best I can to use religion to see this moment as extraordinary and respond with awe, action and gratitude. I fall short, I miss the mark and I keep getting up and ‘failing forward’. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark