Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 234

“As said above, one of our problems is to endow virtue with vitality. Sin is thrilling and full of excitement. But is virtue thrilling? Do passion and virtue go together?” (God in Search of Man pg. 384)

The Latin root of virtue is “merit, valor, moral perfection” and valor’s Latin root is “be strong” while the Latin root of vitality is “vital”. Endowing our meritorious actions with strength and realizing the vital nature of being virtuous is a great challenge, it always has been and, it seems, we have not learned the lessons of our ancestors nor history in pursuing actions that are in sync with being in partnership with God. Sin, missing the mark, however is a “guilty pleasure” that so many of us pursue with the strength, vitality that Rabbi Heschel is calling on us to pursue the next right action with!

We are in the throes of another era that is bastardizing virtue, that is selling us on the idea that our “guilty pleasure” of the pursuit of power, the domination of one group over another, the enslaving of a group of people for our pleasure is actually virtuous! We are witnessing people engage in willful and unwitting actions that go against doing “the next right thing”, who are unable to deal with their own guilt(the Latin root of sin), who blame another for their errors, who falsely proclaim their virtue and being misunderstood. We are watching, some of us in horror, as elected officials use the Bible, use spiritual traditions to validate their sin, their willful actions of making some people less than human! We are hearing in our Churches, Temples, Synagogues, Mosques religious leaders extol these actions in the name of God, country, their own power, etc. Our own negative natures, our baser drive is being appealed to by these actions and words, we seem to unable to rise above our baser drive to our virtuous, higher self in the onslaught of them. Hence, we unwelcome the stranger, we ‘get in bed’ with people who want to destroy us, like the Christian Nation people, we embrace those who have the same ‘enemy’ even though these same people hate us, we believe the lies of ‘the one’ who can save us from all the ills, ‘the one’ who is fighting for us, being persecuted for us, all the while ‘the one’ is out for her/himself only! We find it exciting to be “on the inside” with the haters who say they are lovers, the thieves who say they are protecting us, the power hungry who proclaim they are simpatico with us!

We are failing to be in truth with ourselves and one another. We are afraid to be virtuous because being moral, taking actions that bring us merit, staying strong for what is good and right, holy and serving God doesn’t bring instant fame, doesn’t bring instant results and we have lost the ability to appreciate our inner life and how these actions enhance our living, allow us to grow and mature our spirits as well as meet the daily challenges we encounter with grace, dignity, kindness, truth, and love.

The root of thrilling, from Middle English, is ‘to pierce, to penetrate’. We are being called upon by Rabbi Heschel to allow “the next right action” to penetrate our hard shell of false ego, the protective shield of mendacity, the willful blindness of self-deception that we have constructed, that society has taught us to build. Endowing “virtue with vitality” is the path forward for all of us, it is the path to wholeness, holiness. It is the path that our religious and spiritual disciplines show us and it is the path we have to return to. Not the path of the people who are bastardizing spirituality for profit and power, not the path of the people who are falsifying the words of our religious texts, rather the path of virtue, the path of meritorious behaviors, the path of truth, the path of kindness, the path of service. We have the power to follow this path, we have the spiritual insight to see the truth and reject these false calls of virtue at the cost of our humanity. We have to engage in piercing the veil of duplicity, the glare of deception, the shade of deflection and allow the truth to penetrate our minds, allow our spirits to override our false egos, our rationalizations, the untrue desires of our hearts and minds.

This is the essence of recovery! We are constantly seeking to change from our deceptions and the penetrations of sin, of mendacity and allow a path of spirituality, a path of wholeness, a path of imperfection, a path of joy, of service, of oneness penetrate us instead. We engage in a life-long journey, knowing there is no ‘there’ there, to be one grain of sand better each day. We have found and continue to find joy, maturity, learning and connection each day as we actively engage in rejecting the lies of our past and having the truth of spirit penetrate our daily living. It is a daily struggle for me and I know that goodness is piercing my soul, my mind, my actions at least 51% each day. I wrestle within myself and I continue to learn new meanings of the virtues I know to be true and good. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark