Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 2 Day 286
“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)
“And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul, and with all thy might” is the first sentence of the V’Ahavta Prayer following the Shema and, again, it is in the imperfect (future) tense, meaning something that has begun and is not yet completed. It is a seemingly impossible command! Loving God with everything we have calls for an abdication of false self, a complete surrender of shame, an acceptance of our infinite worth and dignity. It also calls for us to respect, honor and embrace every human being, immersing ourselves in “love your neighbor as you love yourself”. While we will never achieve the totality of this command, we can move towards it more and more each day; which is the goal of every command, I believe.
The path to leaning into and living these words of The Torah is to honor the Divine Image we are created in, letting go of the facades and masks we wear to ‘protect’ ourselves from life’s sadness’ and tragedies, from our own inadequacies and imperfections. We have to end our seemingly incessant need to compare, compete with one and another, the conventional notion that putting someone else down makes us better, let go of the self-deceptions and mendacity that we engage in every day. Immersing ourselves in teachings of the Talmud that remind us we are all equal in ‘God’s eyes’, we are all in need of one another, we all bring unique gifts and talents to the world opens our eyes and reveals a path to living together in camaraderie, in service and in love.
Religion is becoming more and more obsolete for many people because our institutions do not live the words they preach. Religion speaks in the name of authority and perfection, harshness and obliviousness rather than guidance, compassion, love, imperfection and T’Shuvah/return. In Genesis Rabbah, we are taught that God makes new laws every day in the Heavenly Court while we seem to be stuck in laws and paths from over 2000 years ago. Religion needs to speak in the ways of the prophets, not in the ways of human power. Politics is turning people off and away because many politicians and states speak in the name of power for themselves rather than improving “government of the people, by the people and for the people shall not perish from this earth”.
It is impossible to speak of religion, of politics, of democracy, of freedom when we love ourselves, our images, our power, our status, more than we love God. Without “Love your neighbor as you love yourself” as the guiding principle, as Rabbi Akiva taught, we cannot say we love God! Yet, we keep up the facade in our institutions of higher learning, of religion, of government that we are ‘serving God’, ‘following what Jesus wants’ when we deny voting rights, when we deny the dignity of choice to and for women, when we seek to rule rather than govern, when we ego along to get along, when we ostracize people we disagree with rather than learn from one another, when “winning is everything” and we do anything and everything to ‘win’. Rather than live into the words of the prophets, rather than celebrate each day that we “were brought out of Egypt”, we ignore the words and seek to become the new Pharaoh who “did not know Joseph” and who does not know Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Lincoln, etc.
In recovery, we are aware of our incomplete beingness and we “seek to improve our conscious contact with God” every day. We “practice these principles in all our affairs” knowing practice is not perfection. In my Elul inventory, I realize the myriad of ways I deceived myself over the years prior to recovery and I broke the hearts and spirits as well as the trust of those who cared for me and loved me. I have made my amends and I continue to live these amends by healing my self and helping people heal themselves. I am aware of the times in recovery when I thought I was loving God with everything and, as it turns out, I was loving me more-I thought I was taking actions in the name of God and they were for my own sake more than God’s or another’s. I am sorry for these harms. I realize that I also deceived myself through my need to be accepted, loved and bought into the mendacities of another”s which, again, did not serve God. I also know I did serve God by loving my neighbor as myself and this helped so many people. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark