Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 3 Day 263
“The effort to restore the dignity of old age will depend upon our ability to revive the equation of old age and wisdom. Wisdom is the substance upon which the inner security of the old will forever depend. But the attainment of wisdom is the work of a life time.” (Insecurity of Freedom pg. 84)
“Wisdom comes from the Latin “sapienta” meaning “to know, to perceive, to taste, to discern” and Carl Linnaeus chose a variation of this word, sapiens, “for the Latin binomial for human beings”(Wikipedia). “Attainment comes from the Latin meaning “to touch, to arrive at, to manage, etc.” Hence, the last sentence above can be understood as “to arrive at/to touch knowing, discernment, is the work of a lifetime.” The question for all of us is: Is this the work we are engaged in?
Wisdom is not what everyone seems to be searching for, knowing what is right and what isn’t doesn’t seem as important to some as the need to ‘be right’. The need to have power and wealth, the need to control and dominate. By bastardizing and misinterpreting the words of every Spiritual Text, Spiritual discipline, we can find ways to seek everything but wisdom and, throughout history, society has engaged in this pursuit! We are seeing the fruits of this search for anything but wisdom, the arriving at a point where truth and facts don’t matter so much, where conspiracy theories are more relevant to people than what is real and authentic. In the 60+ years since these words were written and delivered, we seem to be losing our ability to “discern, to perceive” what is true and good from the lies and the evil being perpetrated by the ones who promote these conspiracies, like PizzaGate, like Trump being the Messiah, like White Men are supposed to rule, Christian Nationalism is what Christ preached, and other such poppycock. In Israel we are witnessing the lies of the UltraOrthodox taking the country into a hell that is antithetical to everything in the books they revere, Torah, Talmud, Tanakh! Yet, both the Christian Nationalists, the Radical Islamists, the Right-Wing Jews all seem to believe that they can declare what is wisdom and what isn’t. Only they know what God wants, what the spirit calls for us to do and other such lies-hence the inability of society to truly “attain wisdom” because the “work of a lifetime” for people who want control, wealth, power, is not “the attainment of wisdom” it is the attainment of control, wealth, power by any and all means possible.
Those of us “of a certain age” need to stand up for truth, we need to stop hiding and begin “touching” what we “know to be right and true”. We need to use our powers of discernment, our perceptions so we can fully live into being “homo sapiens”, human beings. Without the attainment and the exercise of our “wisdom”, what are we but human doings? Without practicing what we know to be right, what are we but liars and deceivers? This is the challenge of being human, this is the challenge of living to be older adults, this is the challenge of being bound to something greater than ourselves. We teach history to our children and we fail to learn from it ourselves! We promote ‘religion’ to our young children and then tell them, by our actions, that after reaching puberty one doesn’t need it so much because we ‘know’ what is right and wrong. Again, poppycock that we tell ourselves and another because we are more interested in power and control than “the attainment of wisdom”. We send our kids to college to get a job, not to discover themselves, we work hard to control our children so they will be ‘successful’ and we can take credit for their greatness, we have become so lost in our lies and self-deceptions that we have lost sight of what is “wisdom” and what is self-seeking what is “wisdom” and what is our need to be #1. We are suffering from this loss of “wisdom” today in ways that seemed unimaginable after World War II and the rise of authoritarianism is so subtle and strong, promoted by the baseless conspiracy theories of both the far right and the far left, we need our “older adults” to promote the “attainment of wisdom” that our lifetimes have given and are giving us!
We, the older adults, have to take serious stock of our lives-full stop! We have to stop defending our choices, we have to stop proclaiming our innocence and ‘good intentions’. We have to end our need to control the narrative and speak of what was and what is truthfully. None of us are perfect nor are we supposed to be. Perfection and the shame attributed to making a mistake are societal controls to keep us in perpetual misinformation. They are the ways of the Greek society that crumbled in Antiquity, remember the only society to survive Antiquity intact was the Jewish society. It is now incumbent upon all of us, no matter what faith we practice or don’t practice, to stand up for what our experience has taught us about demagogues, about these authoritarians who proclaim their camaraderie with the ‘masses’ when they are elites who lie to gain control and power. We have to take stock of our errors and learn from them, we have to “proclaim freedom throughout the land and to all its inhabitants there in” especially to ourselves and our children. Being free means “the attainment of wisdom” from our experiences so far in life, it doesn’t mean being tied to the lies of the past, being tied to the bias’ of society, being tied to optics as opposed to truth! We, the “older adults” have to clean up our acts, we have to shout from the rooftops what we know to be true, we have to “touch” our humanity by “being human”. It is always important, as each generation has faced this choice in one way or another and when you are in it, as we are right now, it feels monumental. We have to remember we can rise above our fear of society’s pushback, the long-arm of the authoritarian, the chants of the conspiracy theorists and stand for what is true, what we ‘know in our bones’ and what life as taught us.
Each day that I write and live, I attain more and more wisdom. I have made mistakes, I have learned from them. I have admitted them and taken the abuse and abandonment that some of my errors have resulted in. I no longer am at odds within myself with anyone, there are people with whom I have no desire to interact with and because I know what hatred does, I know I can not hate anyone in my heart as the Bible teaches. I also know that I have an obligation to promote the wisdom I have “attained”-not because it is the end-all/be-all, rather because it is a part of the truth of life and can be used by people younger and older than me to make their lives and our world a little better-for the younger generation, maybe they won’t repeat my mistakes, making their own, and maybe when confronted with similar times and experiences, they will have a different response. I pray for those who dislike me, who have walked away and I reach out to those who feel I walked away from them. The greatest wisdom is to know “You Matter”! God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark