Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 2 Day 264
“The discovery of this tragic predicament is a most painful blow to man’s sense of spiritual security. What lesson is to be drawn from it if not the advice that suspicion is the shortest way to the understanding of human nature. This it seems is the modern version of the Golden Rule: Suspect thy neighbor as thyself.”(God in Search of Man pg. 389)
Rabbi Heschel’s assessment of the state of humanity is as true if not more true today than when he wrote it some 68 years ago. We are desperately in need of more trustworthiness and more honesty/truth today with the advent of “alternative facts”. We are in a time where everyone suspects the words, the motives, the actions of another person. Because of the belief that everyone acts only in their self-interest, even actions which are good, holy, kind, generous, etc. are suspect to people. We are living in a world where trust is on the wane and suspicion is the norm.
This experience has exacerbated not just because of the lies of people in power, it is exacerbated by the lies we tell ourselves. As Rabbi Heschel teaches, human beings are aware of the intrusion of “instinctual desires” and “vested interests of the ego” in our motivations and our thinking. Because we suspect ourselves, because we know, at some level conscious or unconscious, that our actions are tainted, we believe everyone else’s are also! We are in this “tragic predicament” because we grow up afraid to be who we are, afraid to admit our ‘missing the mark’, afraid of our imperfections, and taught to ‘hide our dirty laundry’ lest the neighbors find out. “The Emperor’s New Clothes” is not just a folktale from Hans Christian Anderson, it is a real state of being for individuals, be they power brokers, elected officials, despots, royalty, and/or ‘normal’ folk.
We hide our mistakes from our parents for fear of punishment, for fear of rejection. We witness and experience the betrayal of their ‘unconditional love’ for us when they get angry at our mistakes, we are afraid of their disappointment and their wrath so we lie, we hide, we meld ourselves into being what they want us to be and we carry this on throughout life. We watch the anguish of our parents at the compromises they have to make to ‘put food on the table’ and we accept this way of being as ‘normal’, as ‘this is the way life is’, etc. It skews our vision how to be, it implants in us an erroneous belief that we have “to go along to get along”. It also gives our “evil drive” much more energy, power to assert itself and strengthens “the vested interests of the ego” so we come to believe we have to ‘get ours’ because everyone else is ‘getting theirs’. We learn to make contracts that we can break, take the risk of being sued for our breaking a contract and have lawyers who find the loopholes so we can betray our word, our signatures. “A man’s word is his bond” is an antiquated phrase that is laughed at, talking smack about everyone else is de rigueur, a ‘normal’ way of being.
Because we learn suspicion from a young age, because we learn that trustworthiness is for fools, we betray and get betrayed daily. The biggest betrayal that we engage in is the betrayal of our self, our authentic self, our fulfillment of the divine need we are created for. We know this to be true and we run from this truth, we, like Jonah, try to hide from God, attempt to go in the opposite direction of God’s will and call, and while we think we have succeeded, we are distraught, unhappy, depressed, etc. We put thieves in jail as an attempt to distance ourselves from the thievery we participate in each day: running from the truth and stealing from God, from our true self, from humanity.
In recovery, we realize that our escape into the addiction of our choice was an attempt to hide from ourselves the “exact nature of our wrongs”. Whether it was the facade, the mask we wore, the drug, the booze, the gambling, the co-dependency, etc, we were consciously and subconsciously hiding from and running from authenticity. We come to realize our actions were driven from a deep belief of our unacceptability by people when we were authentically our self. In recovery, we know we may be unacceptable to people and accepting our self, our truth becomes our North Star!
My daily writings give me new spiritual awakenings and I accept that my authentic self is not acceptable to many, that I have mistaken acceptance of my gifts, acceptance of my help as acceptance of me. They are not the same and I became too attached to being accepted to realize this. My gifts, my assistance comes from God and they are not mine to keep and I know this and live this more today than yesterday. I have to accept me, I have to be acceptable to God, and I have to never be a victim to anyone’s betrayal, anyone’s non-acceptance of me. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark