Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 3 Day 99
“How is it conceivable that the divine should be contained in such brittle vessels as consonants and vowels? This question betrays the sin of our age: to treat lightly the ether which carries the light-waves of the spirit. What else is the capable of bringing man and man together over the distances in space and in time? Of all things on earth, words alone never die. They have so little matter and so much meaning.” (God in Search of Man pg. 244)
Dwelling in Rabbi Heschel’s words above disturbs me greatly!! His description of “brittle vessels of consonants and vowels” is so in our faces, in our consciousness, through social media, the Cable News, Podcasts, etc as well as in the speeches and writings of people. The Bible is the foundation for democracy as well as theocracy, it is the home of peace and war, kindness and cruelty, justice, mercy and injustice. All of the disparate and the myriad of emotions, rationalizations and wonder/awe/radical amazement that human beings encounter, discover, and experience are found in the Bible. Ergo: all of them have the ability to enhance our spirit, mature our souls and retrain our brains. Almost every experience we are able to put “consonants and vowels” to and learn from each experience and the ones that overwhelm us, that have no other words for than OMG, we also learn and grow from. The challenge that I hear from Rabbi Heschel this morning is to honor the “brittle vessels” rather than crack them open by misusing the “consonants and vowels” to promote a personal agenda rather than a holy agenda. Hence, my being disturbed by Rabbi Heschel’s teaching: Alex Jones, Steve Bannon, Joy Reid, Fox News(?), Mike Johnson, Rashida Tliab, AOC, DJT, Clarence Thomas, Ginny Thomas, the rest of the ‘conservatives’ and ‘progressives’, Bibi and his gang of ‘religious’ thugs et al all are using “consonants and vowels” to lie, cheat, deceive, steal, and “treat lightly the ether which carries the light-waves of the spirit.”
We are being bombarded with mendacity and deception by people using the “consonants and vowels” of the Bible for their own sake. We are in a war for the soul of the Bible as well as the soul of democracy, we are in a war for the soul of humanity as well as the soul of freedom. While we all have the free-will to buy into the lies of another and the lies we tell ourselves, we also have the free-will to be in truth with ourselves and one another. We have, as I hear Rabbi Heschel this morning, the free-will obligation to recapture the the “ether which carries the light-waves of the spirit”. Rabbi Abraham Twerski teaches us that what makes us human is our ability to make “free-will moral choices” and we find what is moral and what is immoral in the Bible; ergo: when these “brittle vessels” are violated, cracked, broken, it is easy for the liars and deceivers, charlatans and idolators, to convince people that what is immoral is moral, and what is moral is immoral-this is the soul sickness that Maimonidies speaks about in his writings called “Eight Chapters”.
Ether is not just a knock-out drug used in surgeries, it is also “the upper regions of air above the clouds” and “to be the medium whose vibrations constituted light”. Rabbi Heschel is calling out to us to end our incessant need to ‘see’ everything, our outlandish denial of the world of the spirit and the world we are unable to see with our narrow vision. Just as narrow-minded and narrow-visioned people once believed the earth was flat, just as people believed everything revolved around the earth, the idea that their is no medium for “light-waves of the spirit” is ridiculous also. I am thinking of love for which is transmitted through these same “light-waves” because love is a spiritual experience even though many people fake love for their own purpose. Authoritarians/Populists do this all the time, men have done this just to take a woman to bed to satisfy their selfish desires, women have done this faking so they can be protected, taken care of, etc as well. We have ‘religious’ people who claim God wants us to suffer so we can be pure, which is another bastardization of God’s love and God’s desires according the “brittle vessels” which contain the “consonants and vowels” of the Bible. When we “treat the ether which carries the light-waves of the spirit” with the respect and awe it calls for, when we allow these “light-waves of the spirit” to penetrate us, to change us, to redeem us, life changes and we become less self-deceptive and believe the lies and deceptions of another much less as well.
In recovery, we become aware of the “brittle vessels” that words are, we chose our words wiser than we had before our recovery. We are able to understand that our “illness” of the mind, body, spirit is not one that medicine can fix, cure and/or even alleviate completely. We know as Father Martin says that we suffer from a Soul-Sickness and only through engaging with and allowing in the “light-waves of the spirit”, only by connecting with the “ether which carries” these light waves can we find a reprieve, and it is only a daily one. The work of the spirit never ends, the careful caring for the “brittle vessels” of “consonants and vowels” that are contained in the Bible, in our spiritual texts of all spiritual disciplines need our heeding them as well as guarding against bastardizing them, against breaking the spirit and call of the divine they contain.
As always, I hear Rabbi Heschel reproving me and uplifting me. I have, at times, misused the “brittle vessels” with an individual and a group and I am sorry for this. I also am uplifted by the numerous times I have helped another human being let go of the lies they told themselves and felt/feel a little freer each day. I have experienced and continue to experience the “light-waves of the spirit” and become more and more connected to more people and to God, to justice and to mercy, to truth and to love, to kindness and compassion. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark