Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 272

“The self-suspicious man shrinks from the light. He is often afraid to think as he feels, afraid to admit what he believes, afraid to love what he admires. Going astray, he blames others for his failures and becomes more evasive, smooth-tongued, and deceitful. Living in fear, he thinks that ambush is the normal dwelling place of all men.”(God in Search of Man pg. 389)

Leaning into the 3rd sentence above reminds me of Rabbi Heschel’s teaching in the introduction to the last book he wrote, A Passion for Truth: “To live in both awe and consternation, in fervor and horror, with my conscience on mercy and my eyes on Aushwitz, wavering between exaltation and dismay? Was this a life a man would choose to live?” Rabbi Heschel’s teaching “going astray he blames others for his failures and becomes more evasive, smooth-tongued, and deceitful” was not heeded then and we have come to ‘improve’ our blaming, our evasiveness, our smooth-tongued has become sharper and our deceitfulness is on steroids! Living in awe of Rabbi Heschel’s mercy, awe, fervor, exaltation, his hope, his actions for good, his covenantal relationship with God, with goodness, his commitment to the words of the prophets motivates us, hopefully, to emulate, to learn from and to take action on his life’s work: service to God and service to one another, ie being more human. My consternation comes my blindness, wittingly and unwittingly to “going astray” and blaming “others for” my “failures. It comes from being blamed by others for their failures. I am in awe of Rabbi Heschel’s ability to live in the tensions he lists in the quotation above.

We are so addicted to perfection, we are so engaged in our facade of always ‘looking good’, we are so concerned with power and our hold on it, we are so in need of control, we have forgotten our humanness, our imperfections that are God-given, we have forgotten the stories and lessons of the Bible. Because we are unable/unwilling to do T’Shuvah-translated here as repentance, return, new response- we continually hide from our selves, from our errors, from our ability to improve and do better one grain of sand each day. We would rather blame another for whatever goes wrong, for our failures, than learn from them, than be responsible for them because we are afraid of seeing our true selves and living authentically. This fear comes from being shamed by society for our failures rather than using them to grow, to ask for forgiveness, to return to our souls, our spiritual homes, and/or to have new responses to the situations that we will find ourselves in over and over again.

The ‘popularity’ of Donald Trump and the Republican Party is an example of how low we have sunk in our fear of being real, in our fear of following the examples of King David, Jacob, Judah, and the Israelites in the Desert to turn back to God, to turn back to their authentic nature, which includes fears, imperfections, and learning. Rather than accept responsibility, Trump, the MAGA crowd, the Republican Party have made blaming everyone else into a death match, they are in a MMA fight with truth and responsibility as their opponents and they are out to prove that power gives them the strength and right to lie, blame, become more evasive than the people Rabbi Heschel saw in the 1950’s, and do all of this smooth-tongued deceitfulness in the name of God, when really they do all of this in the name of themselves whom they have made into idols, authoritarians, false gods.

In recovery, the 4th step we take is: “Made a fearless and searching inventory of ourselves”. Prior to being in recovery, we all had PhD’s in “going astray” and blaming everyone else for our failures, being evasive was our normal MO, deceit was at the core of our speech, our actions, our everything. Even though we may have had ‘feelings of love’ we were incapable of acting loving. We are aware of our ability to deceive ourselves and another(s), we are aware of our smooth-tongues and how their sharpness cuts into the souls of people around us, and we know we have to admit our failures so we can learn and grow. We also know that we have to see the good we have done, the basic goodness of being that is implanted in us by God at birth, and doing our “searching and fearless moral inventory” clears a path to our souls that we had blocked prior to our recovery.

I, of course, have a PhD in “going astray, he blames others for his failures”. My recovery is rooted in returning to God, returning to my rightful place, returning to my basic goodness of being, returning to belonging in the world one grain of sand each day. I understand Rabbi Heschel’s awe and consternation. I am grow more each day in accepting responsibility for my errors more each day and I am learning to accept the blame another puts on me and discern my part, be responsible for it, and feel sad that they have to hide from themselves. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark