Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 2 Day 251
“To have joy in an object is to respect its individuality. This is implied in the very idea of delighting in it for its own sake. To have joy in what is real is to subordinate individual opinion wholeheartedly to the truth of the matter; to have joy in what is beautiful is to trust to the inspiration of beauty and not to the contrivance of artifice. The interests of the object dictate at each step the line of advance.(W. R. Boyce Gibson, Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, vol. VIII, p. 152a) (God in Search of Man pg 385-86)
“To have joy in what is real is to subordinate individual opinion wholeheartedly to the truth of the matter;” gives us all a moment to stop and reflect on “what is real” and do we seek “the truth of the matter” rather than what we want the truth to be. “Subordinate individual opinion wholeheartedly” is a very difficult action for most of us, yet it is required if we are to recognize both “what is real” and what “the truth of the matter” is. It seems so difficult to do these days, as I am sure it has been throughout the history of humankind. Without God, without a recognition of a “power greater than ourselves”, without seeking a higher consciousness, we will sink into our individual opinions, we will miss the joy life gives us, we will wallow in self-righteousness, self-pity and self-destruction, I believe.
We are in a constant ‘political cycle’ it seems, with politicians telling us one thing and doing another, with a tribalism that denies what is real, engages in mendacity rather than truth, and is unwilling to “subordinate individual opinion” at all, much less “wholeheartedly”. Watching the same elected officials who voted against the Infrastructure Bill take credit for it when it comes to their state or district would be laughable if it were not such a display of deception and lies. Listening to the “law and order” party want to defund the FBI and the Justice Department is mind-boggling and their unabashed brazenness is frightful. Listening to Mitch McConnell proclaim the Supreme Court to not be political causes one to shake one’s head because he refused to even speak to the nominee for the Court in 2016, because he went against his own reasoning when RBG died less than a month prior to the 2020 election! The subterfuge that is being perpetrated upon us, whether from our own press, elected officials, Vladimir Putin, et al is scary and dangerous. What is more scary and dangerous is how many of us buy into their lies, their deceptions and our own self-deception; having no awareness of “what is real”, what is “truth”, and we seem to “subordinate our individual opinion” to the group think of the best deceiver/liar.
This phenomenon happens because we surrender our ability to engage in seeing the whole picture, our surrendering of our will to the loudest voice in the room, our fear of being on ‘the losing side’, etc. All of this at the cost of our souls, our individuality, our mental, spiritual and physical health. Like the German people of the last century, we teach our children obedience rather than following the saying from Proverbs: “teach each child according to their understanding”, we are no longer (if we ever did) growing the individual spirit and gifts of our children for their sake, we are training them for careers, for power, for hatred in some cases, for our sake and not for God’s sake. We have twisted “reality” to whatever cause we want to take up, to whatever ‘feels’ good to us rather than seek to understand “what is real” and go on the journey of finding “the truth of the matter”. We are in a state of chaos and have come to regard this chaos as normal, we are in a state of mendacity and have come to see these lies and deceptions as truth. We are incapable of living in a state of joy because of the ways we are living and lying to ourselves and everyone else. Gratitude, prayer, have become more rote than real, more of a feeling rather than an experience for most and our Religious Institutions seem to be following the lead of the deceivers rather than the words of the Prophets! We need a revolution and the recovery movement is just such a revolution.
Recovery begins with a “surrender of our individual opinion wholeheartedly”. We let go of our old idea that we can never change, we stop believing the lie “a leopard doesn’t change it’s spots”, acknowledge that our ways of being make our life unmanageable and we are powerless over our “stinking thinking”. This is the first step in recognizing “what is real” and “the truth of the matter”. We never leave this new way of being, we continue to learn how insidious “our individual opinion” permeates our living, we change from knowing everything, from believing “the lies we tell ourselves” to asking for help, taking direction and seeking God’s help to live in reality, to live in truth, to elevate our being to the paradigm of joy. It is a slow and steady elevation, it is a gift we receive from the hard work we do to seek truth and find “what is real”. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark