Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 2 Day 241
“We must learn how to endow “the good drive” with more power, how to lend beauty to sacred deeds. The power of evil can be consumed in the flames of joy.” (God in Search of Man pg. 385)
On this July 4, 2023 as we celebrate 247 years since we left being subjugated to the King of England, since we declared “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Although the signers were themselves holding people captive as slaves and unable to see their incongruences, this is an imperfect example of Rabbi Heschel’s teaching above, I believe. They endowed “the good drive” with the power to know what is true and right in the God’s world, in the Spirit of the universe. They lent “beauty to” the “sacred deeds” of freedom, of liberation from tyranny, of the lies of false hierarchy. The writers and signers of the Declaration of Independence differed on different parts of it and what we have here is the compromise that could get passed and signed by the Continental Congress. It is an example of how to work together to begin a process since freedom is a journey and, while we call July 4, Independence Day, it is, actually Liberation Day. We liberated ourselves from King George and England, we were not yet (nor are we, unfortunately, now) free.
I am using the Declaration of Independence as an example because of the words and sentiments expressed by these words. “All men are created equal” was an outrageous term 247 years ago, as it is now for many people who are authoritarians and those who worship these modern-day King Georges. While they forgot they were treated black people as less than, they forgot that women were their equal as well, they endowed “the good drive” with enough “power” to not fight one another and acknowledge the truth that “all men(people) are created equal” by God, not by some fiat of humans. God endows us with “certain unalienable rights” and this statement, while not followed up with actions towards all, is how they moved their “good drive” forward enough to see truth, to state truth even though, as is the case with all of us, they couldn’t act on these truths for the good of all people.
We are still an “imperfect union”, we are still not moving the needle forward enough, we are still not endowing our “good drive with more power” to transform our “evil drive”. We are still deceiving ourselves and one another with the mendacious words ‘this is what Christ taught’, this is the will of God’, as we watch people in power use their power to subjugate anyone who is not ‘like them’. A twice impeached, twice indicted ex-president is leading the Republican Party polls for the nomination in 2024! Supreme Court Justice, Clarence Thomas, bases his rulings on “getting the libs”/revenge, another, Samuel Alito, thinks hanging with rich people who have cases coming up to the Court is cool and he doesn’t need to recuse himself even though he would reprimand a lower court judge for doing this, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Barrett all forgot their pledges under oath to not overturn precedents because of their religious/political bias’ and use their ‘understanding’ of the thoughts of the Founding Fathers to give the “evil drive” more power and call it “the good drive”. We are witnessing prejudice against LGBTQ+, black people, Jews, minorities and poor people from leadership in our government and, tragically under the guise of the Rule of Law! What is amazing is the amount of people who are being adversely affected by these charlatans, these authoritarians, these idolators who support them, who clap like trained seals at everything they do, who empower them to be more and more despicable; they are like the Egyptians who followed Pharaoh into the sea, the Germans who followed Hitler to death, etc.
Being in recovery is living into Rabbi Heschel’s words above, it is truly living into the words of the Declaration of Independence. Our recovery is “one day at a time” for the rest of our lives, I believe. It is steeped in learning how to “endow “the good drive” with more power” and “how to lend beauty to sacred acts”. The first “sacred act” for me and many of us in recovery is our gratitude for being alive today, which causes us to commit to “endow “the good drive” with more power” to do the next right thing, to live a life of decency, service, love, kindness, letting go of resentments, allowing the hurts, the betrayals, the errors we commit to serve as teaching moments instead of anger producing ones. We have committed to asking God for help, asking for and taking the advice of another(s) and being grateful for each and every day. We are committed to being one grain of sand freer each day through living the spiritual principles of recovery, of religion, of God and moving from a moment of liberation to the paradigm of freedom-no matter how shaky it may seem. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark