Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 3 Day 352
“Personal meaning is meaningless, unless it is related to a trans-personal meaning…Religious education must recognize the dialectic of a human situation, pay attention to both the individual and the people, to discipline and spontaneity, to principle and example, to the pattern and the poetry, to inwardness and outwardness, to events and ideas.” (Insecurity of Freedom pg. 65)
One of the many gifts of the Bible is acknowledging the “dialectic” that every human being experiences. One of the tragedies of religious education and, I believe, the major reason people are not affiliating with religious institutions, is we have stopped recognizing “the dialectic of a human situation” and instead focused on dogma, on “personal meaning” and forgotten about the “trans-personal meaning”, on “trans-personal meaning” while telling some that their situation, their “personal meaning” is unimportant because god doesn’t love them as much-hence they are poor and here to serve the rich and the ones “god loves”.
What gives our lives meaning and purpose, as I hear Rabbi Heschel demands in my ears and my inner life is that is “related to”, and I would add, connected to a “trans-personal meaning”. We see this in the ways people feel when they post a Birthday fundraiser on social media-they are doing something that recognizes their birth, their life, and helping another human being, institution that is doing good beyond their own ability to help. Hence a joining together of “personal meaning” and “a trans-personal meaning”. We cannot do this without some type of religious education that does “recognize the dialectic of a human situation”. Dialectic meaning dealing with our contradictory natures to help and be selfish, to hunt and gather and to care for the animals and the stranger, to be greedy and want it all vis a vis the call to redeem the captive, help the poor and the needy. Rabbi Hillel says in the Talmud: “If I am not for myself who will be for me, if I am only for myself what am I, if not now, when?” Living in the tension of this quote, of the words in the first sentence above can bring us joy and despair, hope and cynicism, love and loneliness, community and isolation, etc. Finding the proper measure of being “for myself” and not being “only for myself” is a daily challenge. We are not being told to bow down to some authoritarian, some king, some wannabe god, we are being told to stand for our self, to stay rooted in the spiritual truths that we know and not be a doormat, not go along to get along, not give into the our selfish needs to the point we believe the lies of liars, the bullshit of grifters and empty our pockets of money, our spiritual muscles of the strength to stand up for what is good and right, what is true and holy. When we give into our “personal meaning” alone, we are truly lost and so susceptible to the deceptions of another(s), we often find things being done in our name that are anathema to our soul’s calling. The last phrase of Rabbi Hillel is crucial-there is no time to waste, there is no time to contemplate, to give moral equivalence to evil, to lies, to mendacity because we will find ourselves like Martin Niemoller who lamented his not standing up sooner because there was no one left to stand for him in Nazi Germany!
To a great degree the situation we find ourselves in is not the fault of the people, much of the problem lies in our religious education system. When it doesn’t engage in the both/and of a human being, when it believes and teaches the “fire and brimstone” approach, when it neglects the spontaneous discipline and control, when it forgoes the “poetry” and the 70 faces/meanings of each verse of the Bible for the “pattern” it wants people to follow like ‘good nazis’, when dogma is more important than “ideas and events”, when these “ideas and events” are twisted and bastardized to fit a certain ideology and agenda that the ‘preacher’, the ‘leader’ is pushing, we are in deep trouble. We then either turn people away who are seeking some responses to the challenges of living in this “dialectic” or we make them into robots who become immune to the troubles and fears of another person and believe in the “god punishing” bullshit, that has been fed to us forever, and ignore the cries of the oppressed and the call of the suffering-exactly the opposite of what the Bible teaches, what Jesus taught/said, etc.
We, the People have to stand up for ourselves, we have to live into the teachings of Rabbi Hillel: be for our self and demand of our spiritual leaders to learn what the Bible says and then interpret these words for ourselves, learn from the stories what principles are at the foundation of living well and how to practice them in all our affairs, use the examples of the ‘people’ in the Bible as the how to and how not to be human. We can read the poetry of the Moses, the beauty of the words of Psalms and find the patterns we can all follow to help another and ourselves at the same time, we can find the ways to incorporate our opposing inclinations to serve both our need for “personal meaning” and our need for “trans-personal meaning”. We, the People have to learn anew how to read and understand the Bible and the wisdom of the Greeks, Romans, etc from antiquity not as ‘history’ nor as ‘battle cries’ rather as eternal wisdom and truth about the “human situation”; the ways to be and not to be, the maturing of our souls and intuition so we can handle situations that used to baffle us differently, engaging in our inner dialogue rather than escaping it so we can become more integrated and congruent. Living in this way, finding meaning and purpose for us personally and being engaged in serving something greater than ourselves brings us to an inner breath that is deep, relaxing and we feel from our toes to our head-to me this is the greatest meditation technique.
In the second paragraph of my writing today I speak of Rabbi Heschel’s demands, the truth is I hear him cajoling me, encouraging me and helping me rise above my current spiritual status each day. The ‘dance’ of living for me and not only for me is fraught with imbalance and staying on this “narrow bridge” as Reb Nachman says, takes awareness and determination, grit and resilience, the desire to be free and the need to stand with the prophets and rail against injustice. It takes the constant exercise of my spiritual muscles, it means getting off my ass and doing something each day to learn and grow, to take inventory, make amends and change. Having Rabbi Heschel in my soul gives me no rest and I know I don’t need the ‘rest’ I thought I was entitled to prior to recovery and to ‘meeting’ Rabbi Heschel. I know the difficulty in being human and I know the excruciating pain of not being human. I choose the difficulty over the pain each day. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark