Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 2 Day 265
“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)
Engaging in Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom above allows us the opportunity to appreciate our need to constantly check our spiritual temperature. It is imperative, if we want to live in accordance with our spiritual nature, to examine our inner life and our rational minds in order to discern when we are acting from suspicion and when we are acting from love. Suspicion of another(s), like deception of another(s), is rooted in suspicion of ourselves, I believe.
There is a great difference between suspecting ourselves, from suspecting another(s) motives and examining one’s motives, one’s “vested interests of the ego”. When we act and live from suspicion, we are denying the essential goodness, the need to be of service to another. We are surrendering to the “evil drive” and we become untrustworthy and, seemingly, incapable of doing the next right thing for its own sake. We are susceptible and give in to the lies of another who appeals to our negative drive, who validates our inner anger and feelings of powerlessness over change. While change is the only constant, besides God, in our lives, many of us fight changes we don’t ‘like’ and feel like a fish out of water in ‘this new world’.
Teaching that slavery was helpful to the slaves because it gave them skills they could eventually use is ridiculous, yet there are many people who will buy into this because of their inner guilt, their inner suspicion of Black people, and their inner fear of losing power to people of color because people of color will ‘get even’ with the white people for the crimes committed against them all these years. People suspect that the inhumane actions they have done to another(s) will be done to them, when another(s) are in power.
The suspicion with which we view another(s) and ourselves comes out in the labels we use to identify human beings; progressive, conservative, Jew, Christian, white, black, Asian, Latino, etc. Once we label someone, we suspect them and their ‘tribe’ because of the stereotypes we have of their ‘tribe’. “All Jews have money, they control the media and the banks, Jews will not replace us, are all examples of the inner suspicions of people who want to demonize, paralyze, keep Jews away from sitting at the table of decision making. Yet, the labels we use have no real meaning anymore. A conservative does not really want to conserve the dynamic nature of the US Constitution nor the dynamic nature of the Bible, they want to conserve their power structure; a progressive doesn’t necessarily want everyone to move forward according to their spiritual nature, they want to move the needle forward for their ‘tribe’ even if it means pushing the needle back for another ‘tribe’. Both of these ‘tribes’ need a ‘bad guy’ to point to, rather than being dynamic and seeing the good in all, seeing that we all need to move forward, continue learning what the next right action is for the particular situation we are in.
We need to pray/meditate often during the day in order to keep checking in on our spiritual condition. Paraphrasing the Big Book of AA, we have a daily reprieve from our suspicious natures based on our spiritual condition. In recovery and in life, prayer and meditation, study and action are essential to grow our spiritual condition and relieve us of “the bondage of self”. Once we leave the “bondage of self” we get, as Chuck C writes, “a new pair of glasses”, an improved vision of what is, what can be, what God wants, what is the truth of living.
As the month of Elul approaches, the month where Jews do their annual accounting of their soul, I continue to pray, meditate, study, “lift up my eyes and see” how and when my actions were from goodness as well as from suspicion. I am awakening to the truth that suspicion was present in some of my actions, it motivated me in ways that were not always right and good, and it helped me avoid pitfalls and trouble. I am sorry to those I harmed when my suspicions were wrong and I acted them out. Hindsight is always 20/20 and I realize these errors of judgement and how they affected everyone around me. Suspicion does this to me, and I believe, everyone else. Most of the harms I have wrought in my recovery have been based in my suspicious nature and I am committed to the teaching: “give each person the benefit of the doubt” found in Pirke Avot 1:6. Examining life through Rabbi Heschel’s teachings and wisdom is hard, painful and exhilarating and joyous! God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark