Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 285

“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)

Being wholehearted with God has proven, over the millennia, to be difficult! The story of Jacob teaches us that our intentions, while important do not necessarily lead us to this state of being. Jacob’s promise, Jacob’s intentions to be wholehearted with God begins with him making a deal, after he has acknowledged that “God was in this place and I, I did not know it”. He gives us insight and a teaching as to our relationship with God; rather than it being covenantal, it is conditional/transactional. We keep ‘making deals’ with God, we keep wanting to be shown/given something before we commit and even then, we are constantly asking/demanding a quid pro quo from God. We ‘pray’ to God for x and if we get it, we give thanks and are committed to serving and being “wholehearted with the Lord Thy God” for the moment, until we want/need something else. We have forgotten the teaching of the Kotzker Rebbe: “Where do you find God? Wherever/whenever you let God in.” While we give lip service to this command, we seem to not be able to sustain it. Instead, we engage in so many actions and say it is ‘what God wants’, we lie to ourselves and everyone else in order to feel good about the evils we perpetrate, the negativity we promulgate, the power we seek and wield for our own sake, not for God’s.

We witness this in the ways people in power have, throughout history, said they are doing “God’s Will”, from the Pharaohs in Egypt to the Kings of Israel/Judea to the Holy Roman Emperors, to the politicians in our country today. Listening to them speak of their deep devotion to God, to their wholeheartedness in serving God while they do everything they can to keep out the stranger, to harass the poor and the needy, to deny people their God-given equality, their God-given infinite value and dignity is infuriating to many of us and for many of us we ‘drink the kool-aid” and believe our prejudices, our ‘getting ours’, going against our self-interests and God’s interests is holy. We seem to be wholehearted in our worship of idols, rather than being “wholehearted with the Lord thy God”.

The difficulty of living into this command is apparent with the Rabbis of old; they found ‘clean-ups’ for Jacob’s behaviors in their commentaries and they teach us in the Talmud to “nullify your will before God’s will so God’s will becomes your will.” The Rabbis knew that senseless hatred is/was the destroyer of community and the antithesis of “love your neighbor as you love yourself”, yet they engaged in it under the guise of power, needing to be right, and through the self-deceptive belief that they were serving God and their opponents were not. This is not to denigrate the Rabbis of old, this is to point out to us how difficult it is to live into being “wholehearted with the Lord Thy God”. We are called upon to take some action, in olden times it was bringing an offering, to draw near to God (sacrifice) and today, we do T’Shuvah, Prayer, and Tzedakah to draw near to God, as ways to engage in the introspection necessary to let go of our deceit, our mendacity, our false egos so we can “be wholehearted with they Lord Thy God.”

In recovery, we call this surrender; turning our will and our lives over to the care of a power greater than ourselves, admitting our powerlessness over people, places, things, praying for the clarity to “accept the things we cannot change” and the clarity to see we have “the courage to change this things we can”. We engage in looking at ourselves daily-seeing how and when we served God wholeheartedly and how and when we were actually serving ourselves wholeheartedly and lying to ourselves by calling this service to God.

Each day, not just during Elul, I ask myself: “Whom am I serving, God or my inauthentic self?” I do this so I can catch myself quicker when I am serving inauthenticity, falseness, mendacity. I have used loudness, crassness, at times to get a point across to help another and, at times, to indulge myself and my caricature of myself. Looking backwards I see that many times when I said my actions were for the sake of heaven, they were for my sake 51% and God’s only 49%-I am sorry for these times. Looking back I also see how often my actions were at least 51%+ for God and <49% for me and I am filled with gratitude to God. I wrestle each and every day to “be wholehearted with God”, knowing the language is in the imperfect tense, so it and I am works in progress. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark.