Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 2 Day 312
“Each person must examine whether one is part of a movement forced upon us by the environment or whether one is personally motivated, whether one is responding to pressure from outside or to an internal sense of urgency. At stake is not the sincerity of the motivation but the earnestness and honesty of its expression. This considered reflection has to become a permanent part of our conscience.” (Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity pg. 70)
As I finish my second year of writing on Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom and today is Yom Kippur (I wrote this yesterday), Rabbi Heschel’s question above is crucial for us to answer. Are we coming to Temple/Synagogue today and any/every day because we are “responding to pressure from outside or to an internal sense of urgency”? Are we examining our lives and determining “whether one is a part of a movement forced upon us by the environment or whether one is personally motivated?”
While we all need teachers and guides, spiritual leaders and therapists, friends, family, and confidants, we have to determine the answers to the wisdom, the questions that Rabbi Heschel puts before us, and what better day to make these determinations that today, Yom Kippur? Many people have a hard time with the word “surrender” because it connotes bad things, that we are defeated, we are weak, we are subjugating ourselves to someone else’s power and whims. Yet, we seem to ignore the myriad of ways we surrender to our feelings, the too numerous to count instances of abandoning ourselves completely to our rationalizations, putting societal norms before our spiritual truths. We surrender to the “pressure from outside” in so many ways each and every day all the while telling ourselves we are in control. We need to understand how surrender is a good thing for us to engage in when we surrender to our inner need and outer call to repentance.
Surrendering to our soul’s knowledge, to the higher logic of our spiritual life as opposed to the lower logic of our minds rationalizations, allows us to be “personally motivated” and responding “to an internal sense of urgency”. Our motivation and our urgency is to return to the soul, the person, the self, we are created to be! It is to repent for our errors, to acknowledge our goodness of being and actions, it is to repair the damage and learn “how to handle situations that used to baffle us.” Surrendering to God, to authenticity, to responsibility, to truthfulness is the path to making our changes permanent; not complete just a permanent way of being a “Baal T’Shuvah”, a master of repentance, return, and new responses. This surrender is how repentance, reflection, becomes “a permanent part of our conscience” and we continue to grow in our errors being less and our goodness being more apparent and more natural.
This is what recovery is all about. We live in a state of personal motivation to be one grain of sand better each day. We live in a “sense of urgency” to do the next right thing, make our amends for our past mistakes, grow out of our need to rationalize, grow into trusting God, trusting our soul’s knowledge more and more each day. We continue to be more earnest and honest in our expression of our changes and our spiritual disciplines. We engage more and more in “practice these principles in all our affairs”, we deepen our service to God and to another(s). We embed our new paths into our being so they “become a permanent part of our conscience”!
I am not perfect, nor is Rabbi Heschel’s brilliance above asking for perfection. In 1986, there was no outside pressure for me to repent-everyone had written me off as a lost cause-and the motivation to change, to learn, to re-learn, to return to a moral way of being, to return to being a pro-social member of society, to return to the family table and to return to being Heather’s father was personally motivated because of my encounter with God, because of my spiritual awakening/experience. In my sense of urgency to change and to help another(s) change, I made errors, I was too loud, abrasive, shocking, overbearing, difficult. I was deeply motivated by my need to express my earnestness and honesty to the people I was encountering, to the people from my past, because I heard God calling me to help, to serve, to be human. While it put some people off, it made many uncomfortable, I followed my path and continue to follow it today. I am sorry for the times when I confused my needs/ego with God’s call and the people impacted by these times. I am grateful for being able, with the help of God, Harriet, Heather, my sister and brothers, my family, my guides and friends, to help so many people recover their souls, recover their passion, and together, make repentance, make decency, make spiritual growth “a permanent part of our conscience.” God Bless, G’Mar Tov and stay safe, Rabbi Mark