Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 2 Day 254
“Depth-psychology has made it clear to us that the springs of human action are complex, that the subrational either dominates or at least affects the conscious life, that the power and the drive of the ego penetrate all our attitudes and decisions. We may assume we love God, while in truth it is the ego we care for.”(God in Search of Man pg 387)
How to differentiate between loving God and loving self thinking it is loving God is a challenge for all of us. We say and hear often “this is for your own good”, “God will take care of you”, “God is punishing you”, “they are in a better place”, and other such inane sayings. My mother, z”l, used to look up to the heavens and ask: “Gott in Himmel, why do I deserve one like this?”, always in reference to me:) She was, as are most parents, worried about how she would be perceived because of my bad actions and believing she was more concerned about me. While she believed it was me she was concerned about, the “subrational” was affecting her without her knowledge. This is an example of how we lie to ourselves without realizing it, how we attribute good to our daily living without realizing “that the power and drive of the ego penetrate all our attitudes and decisions.” It is a challenge that most people are oblivious to which makes their self-deceptions, the believing the deceptions of another(s), and the mendacity penetrating our world so believable and so ‘true’.
We witness and participate in assuming “we love God, while in truth it is the ego we care for” on a daily basis. Religion has become anathema to many because it is not God that we are hearing from in our Churches, Synagogues, Temples, Mosques, it is the ego of the clergy and people spouting cliches and misinterpreting the word of God, the words of the prophets, the text of the Torah and the Bible(new and old testaments), the Koran, etc. Young people are staying away in droves, people who have grown children do not participate in worship because they know they are hearing ego instead of God. Religious membership has fallen to under 50% because “the power and the drive of the ego” has replaced God in our lives and most people are unaware of this fact. We live in a facade of righteousness and kindness, holiness and spirituality while we are actually, in many cases, worshiping our ego, satisfying our needs and desires, being nice and acting in ways that are in our best interests first, not necessarily caring for the poor and the needy, welcoming the stranger, loving our neighbors as we love ourselves, acknowledging the infinite worth and dignity of every human being, etc.
There is a movement by the Heritage Foundation to upend our democracy, to give such power to the President (if it is a Republican) that autocracy will be supplant democracy in the USA! These Heritage Foundation people believe they are following Christ’s teachings, they fervently believe the lies they tell themselves and one another that Christ wants white Christian men to rule and have everyone else, white women, people of color, people of different religions, spiritual disciplines, etc, bow down to them and do their bidding. We are witnessing and, for some, participating in the deconstruction of democracy, following and/or doing nothing while Steve Bannon, the Heritage Foundation, the Christian Nation, America First, White Supremacy groups work hard to finish the work that was begun on Jan. 6, 2021. For many of us, we are afraid to confront, we are afraid to ‘risk’ our position, our wealth, for fear of retaliation. We say we love God, we say we are spiritual not religious, yet our actions don’t always mirror our words and we are too oblivious to notice.
The 12-step movement uses ego as an anacronym, “Easing God Out” which is what Rabbi Heschel is teaching us in his wisdom above. We are constantly on the lookout for the lies we tell ourselves in recovery, we are reviewing our actions to suss out the self-serving aspects we claim to be for God, the insidious ways our ego fools us and we learn how to transform “the power and the drive of the ego” to serve God and then as the ego “penetrate(s) all our attitudes and decisions” these attitudes and decisions are more in line with the Divine.
I continue to see the lies I tell myself and transform them into truths that serve God. It is hard, the obliviousness I experience in myself is painful and I keep opening my eyes, my soul, my beingness to truth more each day. I am also aware of the lies that run the lives of people around me and how they affect me and the myriad of people they come into contact with. More on this tomorrow. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark