Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 284

“Time and again the Bible calls upon us to worship Him “with all thy heart.” “Walk before me, and be wholehearted” (Genesis 17:1). “Thou shalt be wholehearted with the Lord Thy God” (Deuteronomy 18:13). “And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul, and with all thy might” (Deuteronomy 6:5). And yet it seems that the Biblical man was disturbed by the problem of whether man is at all capable of serving God wholeheartedly.” (God in Search of Man pg. 390)

Rabbi Heschel’s words above gives everyone pause, hopefully. The Bible’s call “to worship Him “with all thy heart” and to “walk before Me, and be wholehearted” in all our affairs seems to have eluded humankind since the beginning of time. Taking a deep dive into these words and the meanings they convey during this month of Elul gives us the opportunity to review when we have been “capable of serving God wholeheartedly” and when we haven’t. Separating our self-centeredness from our service is a difficult exercise for most of us. While we wrap ourselves in our ‘piety’ often, we quote Scriptures, we quote spiritual texts, we quote Rabbi Heschel often, leaning into the words, living the meanings behind the words has proven much more difficult.

“Walk before me, and be wholehearted” are words ‘spoken’ to Abraham and they give us a glimpse into God’s belief in humanity. We are capable of doing this, we are capable of walking before God, doing the next right thing on our own, we are capable of being wholehearted in all of our affairs. Yet, it seems we have fallen short of, as we say in recovery, “practice these principles in all our affairs”. When we use this command as a yardstick and a question into our behaviors, our actions of this past year, we give ourselves the opportunity to do T’Shuvah, to return to our true self, to repent for our inauthentic ways of being, to repent for our hiding our whole heart, to have a new response to “situations that used to baffle us”, to return to honoring our “intuitive mind” and returning our rational mind in its proper place, as a servant to God, to our intuitive mind. We are, as we have always, engaged in an inner war between walking before God and being wholehearted and thinking we are God and being hidden, having our own agendas, spreading mendacity and deception in our wake.

Herein lies our challenge: are we willing to let go of our false egos and serve our God-Image, serve the divine need we are created for, be a reminder of God in order to make our corner of the world a little better than we found it? In order to do this, we have to let go of our false selves, we have to stop wearing the myriad of masks we keep in our closets and put on each day, we have to stop living in silos, being different depending on the ‘role’ we are playing in any given hour, day, week, etc. We are being called by God to “be wholehearted” to “walk before me” and yet, we seem to be substituting our needs as God’s needs, we seem to be walking before the idols we have made rather than worshiping God, we seem to be more interested in being wholehearted in our duplicity in order to “get ahead” than serving God. We are witnesses and good at seeing the duplicity of another, we are good at witnessing the idolatry of another(s), and we seem to “go along to get along”, we scream LIAR when confronted by people who are being “wholehearted”, by people who seek “righteous justice” as we were told to practice in last week’s Torah Portion.

There is a solution, however. Let’s all go back to basics, let’s all go back to immersing ourselves in our own truths, let’s all go back to using this month of Elul to begin again to fulfill God’s call. We can do this when we make a decision to “turn our will and our lives over to the care of God, as we understand God” as the third step of AA suggests.

I have bastardized “walk before me” by thinking I was the “me” at times in my life and I realize my “stinking thinking” at those moments. I live and lived wholeheartedly in all my affairs, I have never be a spectator in my life, and while this is a good trait, again I have used being wholehearted to ignore God’s call and substitute my false ego and my rational mind for God’s voice and I am sorry for these moments as well. I also know how these bastardizations have happened, I was scared of being me, I was scared of being rejected, I was scared of being left out, etc. I know I was scarred by the death of my father and didn’t not want to go through that pain again, so, at times, I put up my armor and my shield to save me from this pain. Today, I am able to withstand the rejections, I stop and ask “which me is seeing, talking acting”; the false one, the masked one or the authentic me that is walking before God? Using Rabbi Heschel’s words to review life is difficult and exhilarating, painful and freeing. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark