Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 152

“It is not God who is obscure. It is man who conceals Him. His hiding from us is not His essence…A hiding God, not a hidden God. He is waiting to be disclosed, to be admitted into our lives.” (Essential Writings pg.91)

Rabbi Heschel’s teachings in the last two sentences above cannot be taken in by reading them just once, as with all of his wisdom. God is not hidden, God “is waiting to be disclosed, admitted into our lives” both exhilarates one and causes us to take a careful inventory of our ways of being in the world and holds us accountable. Rabbi Heschel is dispelling the myths and lies we tell ourselves about God, about the world, and, especially, about ourselves.

Both those ascribing to religious teachings, faith, and humanism are being called to account for the myriad of times we force God into hiding. Rabbi Heschel is speaking to us of our power, our use of our free will, our commitment to the Covenant God made with us at Sinai, the covenant of Christ, the covenant of Mohammed, the call to higher consciousness of the Buddha, the covenant of morality that humanists claim, etc. Because we have free will, because we have the power to deny, to lie, to deceive Rabbi Heschel is reminding us to be in truth with ourselves, to be in truth with God, to allow God “to be admitted into our lives”!

Our self-deception keeps growing and growing, our deception of another(s) keeps expanding as well. We have ‘grown up’ with religious teachers and leaders, moral truths and ways that have become so twisted and manipulated that they have become almost meaningless and many people either give lip-service to them or reject them completely. In America, 33-40% of people claim “none” when asked their religious beliefs, they have become so jaded, so fed up with the ways God has been misused as an excuse, a weapon, an alibi by ‘religious’ manipulators. While the attendance at Houses of Worship declines, fundamentalists double down and those who are not fundamentalists still give pap to the people in the pews.

God is not a trinket to pull out when things go well or go not well, God is not an icon/idol to hold up to prove one’s worth. God is waiting “to be admitted into our lives” wholly and completely. We cannot have ‘religious fervor’ in our Houses of Worship and then go cheat our competitor, our customer in our businesses. We cannot claim to wrap ourselves in the mantle of God while treating people who are not ‘like’ us differently and with prejudice, envy, enmity. We cannot claim to be Godly while we act selfishly, cruel, unkind, unwelcoming, refusing to ransom the captive, etc.

We are witnesses to and participants in a great crime-making God hide. God keeps calling and we keep twisting God’s words and ways to fit our needs, our desires rather than change us to adhere to and fulfill God’s ways and desires. God cares about humanity-full stop. It is humanity that is ignoring and uncaring of God’s will, God’s desire “to be disclosed” in truth, in love, in kindness. When ‘religious’ leaders call for the killing of the infidel, when they say God wants people who seek abortions to be called murderers, when they claim with authority that only they know what is right and good, when they claim their way is the only way, when they support authoritarians, liars, despots, when they give credence to internment camps, to the lies of politicians, they are the ones who are obscuring God, they are the ones working hard to conceal God.

Admitting God into our lives means we “walk in God’s ways” in all of our affairs, it means we have to live the principles of the Bible in our everyday lives, not just on the Sabbath, not just on Holy Days. We have to engage in wrestling with the myriad of spiritual texts available to us, choosing the one that speaks most directly to us, and then follow the precepts and morals, the actions and the truths the text offers us. All spiritual texts lead us to admitting God into our lives-when we engage with them for the sake of Heaven as well as ourselves, when we engage in them to raise our spiritual and inner lives as well as the spiritual and inner life of another(s). We have the technology to “spread the word” that God is here, that God is knocking at our hearts, at our souls’ gates and we have to unlock the solid iron doors/gates we have put up as barriers to God’s call, to God’s knocking, to allowing God in. These iron doors have been put in place because of the myriad of hurts, the bruises and tears in our hearts and souls put their by our experiences with the “religious” lies we have been told, the rejections of growing into the divine need we are created to fill that is rejected by ‘society’.

The only remedy for us, as I hear Rabbi Heschel call to us, is to allow God in! “Admitting God into our lives” is the only path of healing that is sustainable, no person, no job, no amount of money, nothing will heal the “hole in our soul” that we have suffered. This means we are going to “miss the mark”, be stubborn and inappropriate at times, be vulnerable to the attacks of another(s), at times be unpopular because we stand with and for God in our world, in our ways. It means that we commit to live into the principles of the spiritual path we have chosen, even when this makes us unpopular. It means we are quick to forgive those who come to us in remorse, we seek to resew fabrics of connection rather than make more outcasts, we receive people who have ‘fallen’ “back in love” as God does. We no longer use status to keep people out, rather we use our status to bring people in. God’s tent is large, all of us, no matter our spiritual discipline, can belong and we have to embrace people and let them know we all belong to the human race, we all are imperfect and we all need to disclose God to one another and admit God into our lives. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark