Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 92

“Its aim is not to record history but rather to record the encounter of the divine and the human on the level of concrete living. Incomparably more important than all the beauty or wisdom that is bestowed upon our lives is the way it opens to man an understanding of what God means, of attaining holiness through justice, through simplicity of soul, through choice. Above all, it never ceases to proclaim that worship of God without justice to man is an abomination; that while man’s problem is God, God’s problem is man.” (God in Search of Man pls 243-244)

Rabbi Heschel’s words in the first sentence above, I believe, is crucial to our understanding, engaging in, and immersing ourselves in the thoughts of the Bible. Whether one believes everything in the Bible actually happened in the exact ways the stories relate, everyone can, and I believe needs to, immerse ourselves in “the encounter of the divine and the human on the level of concrete living”!

We live in a time where ‘alternative facts’, this “record of the encounter of the divine and the human” are being used by liars, are being used to promote mendacity and horror, indecency and injustice, degradation of the infinite value and dignity that every human being has. Be it the invasion of the Ukraine by Putin’s Russia, the terrorism of Hamas, especially since Oct. 7, 2023, the hatred and bastardization of Judaism by Netanyahu and his cronies, the lies of the MAGA crowd, the comparing of Trump to Jesus, the overturning of Roe and affirmative action as well as the Citizens United decision by the Supreme Court, all of these are examples of mendacity, injustice, and degradation of humanity. As soon as ‘those people’ are used in a sentence, as soon as language that denigrates any person, group, etc is used by anyone, we are either witnessing or engaging in denying the truth, wisdom, as well as the “encounter of the divine and the human on the level of concrete living” the Bible gifts to us.

When we receive the Bible as a gift, when we seek to understand and use this “record”, we find ourselves living and taking actions we never thought possible. We become part of the solution rather than part of the problem presented to us in any given moment. This gift gives us the opportunity to mature, to grow our spiritual life which then gives us the opportunity to have an “encounter of the divine” in any and every aspect of our “concrete living”. Rabbi Heschel, as I hear him speaking to us today, is reminding us that it is truly our souls that need to be in charge rather than our desires, our minds, our emotions. This first sentence is reminding me that our souls have to be the arbiter of our actions, our minds and emotions have votes, yet they no longer can veto what the next right action is for us, when we live the “record of the encounter of the divine and the human”.

This “record” has to be experienced and engaged in on a personal level, in Judaism we never study alone because we can easily bastardize the words and the “encounter” when we study the Bible alone. Yet, together we can discern the words and actions of the prophets so we can use them in our day to day living. We can learn from Jacob how not to treat our children, we can learn from the Israelites how enslavement can become so mundane we don’t even realize we are enslaved. In Exodus 5:21, the people come to Moses and say: “you have made us loathsome in the eyes of Pharaoh and his servants and put a sword in their hands to kill us”. Imagine how insane this sentence is when they have been beaten, abused, killed, enslaved for years and, seemingly did not know it!!

Without the Bible, without immersing ourselves in the “record of the encounter of the divine and the human on the level of concrete living” we too can be enslaved and not know it. In fact, truth be told, we witness the enslavement of another on a daily basis because of the lack of engaging in this “encounter”. We sometimes get a glimpse of our own lack of freedom, our own enslavement to ideas, prejudices, the deception by another(s), our own self-deception and push these ‘awakenings’ off because they seem to painful to experience and impossible to change. Rabbi Heschel’s solution for all of us is to immerse ourselves in the “record of the encounter of the divine and the human” as the Israelites eventually did when they were in Egypt. His solution for all of us is to discover and recover this experience and use the wisdom of the Bible, the hope and the solution the Bible gifts to us and become free from the mendacity, the self-deception, the inhumanity and the degradation of our dignity and worth we have come to accept as ‘normal’.

This teaching of Rabbi Heschel, once again, is part of the Recovery Revolution! While not explicitly using the word recovery, I believe Rabbi Heschel’s teachings call for us to recover the questions that God asks everyday, to paraphrase Reb Zusya: “when they ask me why were you not more like Zusya, I will have no answer.” Recovery is a path to be able to be more like one’s true/authentic imperfect self. We have a spiritual awakening that, while painful, is too powerful to ignore. We “encounter the divine” and we begin a process of living this “encounter” on a “concrete level”. We find living our spiritual principles to be doable and powerful, to give us a sense of comfort and joy we never thought possible. We “practice these principles in all our affairs” so we can raise up our standard of living, so we can live into and act with love, justice, mercy, kindness and truth which allows us to be comfortable in our own skin which is the greatest gift of all. I am blessed to “encounter the divine” each day, many times a day and I keep learning and seeing this “encounter” more and more each day. My goal is to continue to grow the learning and experience of these encounters to make my life one grain of sand better each day! God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark