Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 242

“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)

“To endow “the good drive” with more power” begins with immersing ourselves in our inner life and wrestling with the seemingly opposing forces of our intuitive mind and our rational mind, our soul and our rationalizations/calculations. The teaching above comes from the chapter titled: How to deal with the Neutral and I hear Rabbi Heschel calling to us to stop deceiving ourselves that we can be neutral about anything. While, “I don’t have a dog in this fight” is a common statement, Rabbi Heschel is asking us to look deeper inside and see how ‘neutral’ is harming us and those around us. The sentence attributed to Edmund Burke: “evil flourishes when good people do nothing” is playing loud and clear in our world right now, whether in the Ukrainian War started by Russia for no good reason and called a “territorial dispute” by Ron DeSantis, the “culture wars” the Republican Party is waging on voting rights, civil rights, “all men(people) are created equal and endowed with certain unalienable rights…, their attachment to racism/racist ideology and/or thinkers, their uncompromising certainty that they are right and that white is right.

All of the wars that are being fought in our political arenas, on the world stage, can be traced, I believe by living into Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom above, to our inability, unwillingness to engage in the inner battle to endow our “good drive” with more power.” Instead of seeking to “lend beauty to sacred deeds” we are calling the ugliness of conflict, the spewing of vile homophobic words and actions, the anti-semitic actions of painting swastikas, wearing swastikas, denying the Holocaust, calling ‘walking while black, driving while black’ a crime punishable by possible death, shooting people because they walk up to the wrong address, etc sacred deeds! This is how distorted we have become because rather than engage in the wrestling with our seemingly opposing forces we deceive ourselves that the bad is good, that hatred is love, that prejudice cures the “cancer of the soul” and makes our “eye disease” healthy. We see this lack of engagement in the actions of people who are on the other side of the spectrum, standing up for “the right causes” and then going along to get along with their neighbors, their ‘country club’ friends, etc. Some of the same people who stand up for the marginalized are members of exclusive clubs and blackball  anyone they don’t like/think is inferior to them and/or keep the fee structure so high most people can’t join; all the while patting themselves on their backs and one another’s back for helping ‘those poor people’.

Engaging in the internal battle is helped by prayer when we use prayer, as Rabbi Heschel teaches, to raise up our inner life, to feed and mature our soul. We “endow “the good drive” with more power” when we engage in study of our Spiritual texts in order to better understand the ways our “evil drive” infiltrates even our best thinking, the ways our “evil drive” seems so logical, etc. We engage in prayer, study, meditation so we can learn how to hear our higher consciousness, our soul’s calling, our intuitive knowing better and stronger. We need to look at ourselves as we go about our day, from the moment of awakening with gratitude for being alive, being able to serve God, serve humanity, to meditating on the gifts and talents we have making a commitment to use them for good today a little more, making the corrections we need to for yesterday’s errors as well as amends to those we have harmed. We welcome the stranger, help the needy, feed the poor inside of ourselves as well as the people we encounter. We see our neediness not as weakness, rather as an opportunity to connect with a power greater than ourselves and with another human being who can help, we see the poverty of the spirit as well as the material and raise up our own spiritual poverty with community, we see the ways we have been unwelcoming to the parts of our self that we see as strange, how we try to hide from it and hide it from everyone else and we, instead, see how our ‘inner stranger’ is actually a gift from God that is our unique image of the divine and has a sacred purpose and beauty.

I am a grateful recovering Alcoholic and recovering criminal with a pure soul, as Rabbi Twerski taught me to say. I am grateful because without these addictions, I might never have engaged in the inner wrestling that has changed my life and continues to change it. I had the inner war forever, that’s one of the reasons I turned to alcohol for relief, I just didn’t have a way to resolve it, to deal with it, to “endow “the good drive” with more power” than the “evil drive”. Through living Jewishly and in recovery, I do with all my imperfections. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark