Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 2 Day 248
“The experience of bliss in doing the good is the greatest moment that mortals know. The discipline, sacrifice, self-denial, or even suffering which are often involved in doing the good do not vitiate the joy; they are its ingredients.” (God in Search of Man pg.385)
Immersing ourselves in the second sentence above can change our entire way of being, thinking and experiencing life. Discipline comes from the Latin meaning “knowledge, instruction”, sacrifice means “holy” from the Latin and “coming closer to oneself” in Hebrew, suffering means “to bear” from the Latin, while vitiate means “to impair” from the Latin. Putting these origins together allows us to experience Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom as: The instruction, holiness, self-denial or even the bearing “which are often involved in doing the good do not” impair “the joy. This is a radical way of understanding how to live life well, I believe.
We are so accustomed to not wanting to “bear” any discomfort, to believe we don’t need to keep receiving “instruction”, that we deny the myriad of opportunities each day to “come closer” to ourselves, to deny our pleasures, our desires of our hearts and eyes and engage in the self-deception that we are “doing the good”! We are afraid of truly “coming closer to ourselves” because of the changes we will have to make in our daily living. Rabbi Heschel is calling to us to see the truth of our actions, the truth of our inauthentic way of being and to change our ways, to come closer to our soul’s desires, to approach each day, each experience in daily living with a desire to learn, to add to our knowledge, to bear the ‘distresses’ we think are involved in “doing the good”. Yet, we continue to resist this wisdom, we continue to seek an “alternative truth” that makes us ‘feel’ good, that we can deceive ourselves and one another with.
We are witnesses to this happening around us, some of us watch in horror at the ways our freedoms are being curtailed, the power of the few who are afraid of being irrelevant cause them to seek ways back to “the good old days” denying the necessary march towards growing our knowledge, maturing our spirits, bearing the discomfort of progress, feeding our souls with the holiness that “discipline, sacrifice, self-denial or even suffering” bring. Some of us watch in delight and joy at these very same happenings and herein lies the challenge. We can’t seem to agree on what “doing the good” actually entails. We are at odds with one another and within ourselves over what God’s discipline/instruction for us is, we argue about basic, foundational principles like: welcoming the stranger, caring for the poor, the needy, the widow and the orphan; responding to God’s question of Ayecha, where are you; choose life; love your neighbor as you love yourself; and so many others.
Paraphrasing what Rabbi Heschel, in his essay, “Religion in a Free Society” writes, we have come to regard any denial of a feeling, a desire to be the cause of present and/or future mental illness/distress. We are so obsessed and addicted to “self-care” that we are actually engaging in self-indulgence. We are so fixated on what we think is “doing the good” we have become unteachable, we are so afraid of being wrong, making a mistake that we live in denial of what is happening around us so we can bask in the splendor of “the good old days” some of us are trying so hard to bring back. Listening to Tommy Tuberville take months to acknowledge that being a White Nationalist means one is a racist is painful. Yet what is more painful is that his fellow Republican Senators stood by and did nothing, they are standing by as he puts our Armed Forces at risk by denying necessary promotions and these Republicans shout how they support our military! Some of us are in opposition to the teaching above, some us believe that any “discipline, sacrifice, self-denial, or even suffering” do “vitiate the joy” and deny “they are its ingredients”.
In recovery, we know we have to remain teachable, we have to learn each and every day, we have to grow our spiritual life at least one grain of sand each day. We have to grow our inner life each day, we have to learn from our mentors, sponsors, newcomers, we have to deny the lies we have been telling ourselves for so long, we have to leave the aura of those who desire to deceive us, we have to engage in “doing the good” a little more each day and we have to be grateful for life each and every day. In recovery, we know the truth of Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom, we are aware of the demand to welcome all who have a desire to change the ways they have been living just as we were welcomed even though we might not have been fully committed at first. This is the way we practice “attraction not promotion”. I believe we all need a program of recovery from the self-deceptions and mendacity we live in. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark