Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 2 Day 255
“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)
The title of this chapter is “the problem of Integrity” and this subchapter is called “vested interests.” The Latin word that integrity comes from means “intact” and the Hebrew word means “wholeness”, while the #2 definition is wholeness, the first definition is: “quality of being honest and having strong moral principles; moral uprightness”. The history of humankind, since Adam and Eve, has been one of incompleteness, ‘broken’, not intact. Our “subrational” keeps us off-balance and incomplete, “the power and drive of the ego” continues to help us lie to ourselves and believe we can be complete and/or we are complete. The deception of our selves because of the “subrational” and “the power and drive of the ego” has led us to war, famine, slavery, idolatry, authoritarianism, etc. Every time we ‘feel’ an ‘inner peace’, we are deceiving ourselves because to love God is to be challenged by God, Rabbi Heschel teaches. To love God is to be responsive to God’s calls, the demands of the prophets, the cries of the widows and orphan, the pleas of the needy, the poor, the stranger. It is not sitting back in comfort and thinking we have made it, we have reached the top of the mountain, it is not in believing we know what is best, it is not in the betrayals of and destruction of another(s) souls in order to feel good.
It is imperative, as I hear Rabbi Heschel today, to end our mendacity, understand that satisfaction is a momentary experience, not meant to last forever, and we cannot be whole without connection to, hearing, and responding to the call of the universe to us. As I am understanding Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom today, we have to to beyond the realm of “depth-psychology” and delve into the realm of the spiritual. We keep seeking pills, mindfulness, eastern philosophies, etc as quick fixes rather than as help and pathways to our inner life, to the spirit within us which will lead us to connection to the spirit of the universe. We are trying to be whole and intact by “keeping it together” rather than realizing until we “let it all hang out” we are trapped in a prison of our own making. “Vested Interests” from the Latin means “clothed in importance”. Putting this definition together with integrity, we see how our minds, our egos lie to us and we, in turn, lie to everyone else. As Bill Wilson wrote: “the deception of others is rooted in the deception of ourselves”. Our “vested interests” and our need to be “intact” and project “wholeness”, as well as smartness, along with our need to be #1 or #2 cause us to feed “the power and drive” of our egos that welcome the lies of the “subrational”.
We are living a lie that society bought into since the beginning. We are so intent on ‘being whole’, on proving ourselves to be ‘intact’ along with our need to clothe ourselves in importance, we have engaged in the very mendacity and false ego-driven activities that make having integrity impossible, that make knowing the importance of self and every other self to make the world whole and complete. We are being tested and called, by Rabbi Heschel’s words and teachings, by the teachings of the Bibles, the Koran, Eastern Philosophies to leave the world of subterfuge, to let go of our old ideas, to be “maladjusted to conventional notions and cliches” so we can live in “radical amazement”, so we can stop serving the idols we have made of ourselves and another(s). We can end the endless wars in the world when we surrender our false egos and follow the call of our souls, the demands of our spiritual life, the love call of the Ineffable One. It is not an easy path, it is not a perfect path, we will continue to stumble and we will continue to right ourselves when we seek to be whole in our inner life rather than keep our facades intact.
Recovery is just such a movement, it is a spiritual discipline that demands, surrendering our mendacity, surrendering our false-egos, surrendering our need for comfort and complacency. It is a spiritual path that leads us to truth, to self-examination.
Socrates said: “the unexamined life is not worth living” and Malcolm X said: “the examined life is painful”-both of these statements are true and my recovery, my living Rabbi Heschel’s teaches helps me live an examined life and move through the pain of it into the light, the spirit, the joy of truth, connection and love. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark