Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 252

“It is easy to speak about the things we are committed to; it is hard to communicate; it is hard to communicate the commitment itself. It is easy to covey the resentments we harbor it is hard to communicate the praise, the worship, the sense of the ineffable.” (Insecurity of Freedom pg. 83)

In the first sentence above, Rabbi Heschel is calling out to us to know what making a commitment truly entails, what a commitment is. In the dictionary, it is defined as “an engagement that restricts our freedom”, “the state or quality of being dedicated to a cause, activity”, and “a pledge or undertaking”. The word commit in the dictionary has as its first definition, “carry out or perpetrate (a crime or immoral act)” and comes from the Latin meaning “to send with”, “to join”, “to entrust”.

In responding to the first sentence above, we have to think about what is our dedication to and how to communicate this dedication. We have to find ways to explain to another and to our self why and how we are restricting our freedom by our commitments. What are we joining with, what are we entrusted with and entrusting to another human being and a power greater than ourselves, what are we sent with from birth? These questions and more disturb me, they are giving me, and hopefully you, a new way of experiencing my relationship with people, especially the younger people in my life and those I may still reach. The things we are committed to are definitely important and to communicate the commitment itself is as important if not more so. We have to be able to communicate the commitment itself: if we want to follow the dictate to “teach your children”, if passing wisdom and experience from one generation to another is as important to us as we say it is. How will the next generation know how to make a commitment if we don’t teach them what it means to commit-not to “carry out or perpetrate a crime or immoral act” rather to send our whole being into the fray to battle for what is right and true, what is good and holy, what takes care of the poor, the needy, the stranger, the powerless and the voiceless.

I hear Rabbi Heschel call out to us from the depths of his being, from his own insight in 1961 of where we were headed and how the reviling of the generation of people who risked everything to come to America, who knew “the commitment itself” and lived it was  dangerous in 1961 and how much more dangerous and devastating is it now. We have a political party that wants to take us back 50, 60, 170 years to a time in our nation’s history when equality was a joke, when ‘good christian folk’ could freely hate Blacks, Hispanics, Jews, and never be called out about it. We are hearing a political party rail against their ‘enemies’, which are actually just political opponents, accusing them of everything they have been doing for the past 30 years - seeing politics as war, promoting violence like Jan. 6th, etc and people are committed to this way of being, this thing called MAGA-yet once one asks a MAGA “the commitment itself” we find them tongue-tied and inarticulate, deflecting and defending.  When you ask most people to communicate “the commitment itself” we become tongue-tied because we don’t ask ourselves these questions, we just follow along and, unfortunately, we become “excellent sheep”.

We, the people, have to put more thought and energy into what we “join with”, what we “entrust” and to whom, what we engage in and the reasons for doing taking a commitment on. We get married for emotional reasons, most of the time, while marriage is a commitment that needs to be communicated, it is a commitment of spirit, it is a commitment of trust and we “join with” another human being to create a new entity, an entity that, in Jewish thinking, brings together two parts of one soul, a repairing of what was broken at the time of creation, at the time of birth. It is a commitment of knowing and learning each other’s inner life, how to help them and us grow along spiritual lines and a connection that goes beyond all emotional ties. How many people are able to communicate “the commitment itself” that marriage truly is?

We all need to sit down and ask ourselves what is our commitment-not to what, not what is our commitment to-really discern within our selves what commitment is to us, in our lives and are our actions and deeds reflecting what we say commitment is? This is a hard process and a necessary one. As we enter the “three weeks” of mourning net Tuesday to commemorate the destruction of the Second Temple and the fall of Jerusalem we are being called to look at the ways we have destroyed our sense of commitment, our definition of commitment for our immediate needs and desires. We are being called to see how we have constructed immoral commitments, how we have built alliances that will destroy the fabric of our spiritual life. We are also 7 weeks til the month of Elul-the month of doing more inventory and getting ready for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. It is the month of making amends and the month of forgiving people who have harmed you. It is the month also to forgive oneself. Forgiving oneself for the bastardization of “the commitment itself” is crucial during the next 7 weeks for without doing this, we will never be able to believe in our ability to embrace “ the commitment itself”!

In recovery, we are recovering our integrity, our commitment to something greater than ourselves. I have found myself unable to contain myself when someone is bastardizing the commitment we have made. A deal is a deal-it can be changed and to change it both/all parties to it have to be part of the change or at least informed of it. I have found myself equally agitated when I have bastardized what a commitment is-not when I have been unable to fulfill one as this is one of our human frailties. What I am agitated with myself and/or another is when a commitment is made and then broken because it is expedient without any notice, when it is forgotten because it wasn’t important enough, when I am reminded of the ways I behaved prior to my commitment to decency. I become bombastic because I remember the ways my ancestors communicated “the commitment itself” through their actions as well as their words. For the older generation of my family-their word was their bond and I have made this my definition as well. I continue to find ways to communicate what a commitment is, the meaning of making it comes from my soul and when I miscommunicate and/or do not fulfill it, I am bereft and when another uses “the commitment itself” to manipulate me or another, I am bombastic. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark