Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 3 Day 245
“This is one of the beauties of the human spirit. We appreciate what we share, we do not appreciate what we receive. Friendship, affection is not acquired by giving presents. Friendship, affection comes about by two people sharing a significant moment, by having an experience in common.” (Insecurity of Freedom pg. 83)
Still in the chapter “to grow in wisdom” from his lecture at the Conference on Aging in 1961, Rabbi Heschel presents a very interesting concept above, one which humanity in the modern age has tried to deny and failed in our denial of the truth above. In a society that is so concerned with wealth and power, thinking these two things will protect us against old age and death, we have found neither one engenders authentic “friendship” nor “affection”. In the 63+ years since these words were written, society has focused more and more attention on “getting rich”, on “making it big”, on staying young looking through Botox, cosmetic surgery, etc. The idea of making it on your own has strengthened and the rich have given more and more to their children who appreciate it less and less. We have become an entitled society because of a lack of appreciation and gratitude for what we have acquired. We believe we ‘earned’ our wealth through our brilliance, rather than know we are blessed and have used our skills to make something of value; when being a celebrity because of marketing overtakes being valued because of what you add to the world, humanity is in grave danger of losing it’s appellation “very good”(Gen.1:31)
We have seen for a very long time human beings’ reluctance to share, we see it first in infancy, where we teach our children to share with their friends, we allow them to cry when they continue to believe they are the center of the universe, we help them learn self-restraint and then we see selfishness and harshness come back in their teen years-think “mean girls”, “jocks vs. eggheads” etc- and without parental influence, without teachers stepping in, this behavior gets normalized and we raise generations of “ME/MINE” adults. This belief that I can have whatever I want with little or no effort has resulted in a generation of “failure to launch” adults as written about by Mark McConville in 2021. He is recounting what Clergy, Parents, Therapists, Psychiatrists have seen for a long time and what has resulted in therapists and psychiatrists getting a lot of therapy hours and payments to ‘combat’ this dreaded disease. Rather than heeding Rabbi Heschel’s words, society has ignored them to our peril and to the detriment of our youth and young adults.
To share an experience with our children, with our peers is to join together in joy and sorrow, in creating and in letting go throughout our lifetimes. It is to teach gratitude and responsibility from a young age, it is to not allow the children to be the center of attention always-their needs come before the parents and/or anyone else’s-and to not ignore them as well. Finding this balance has been the bane of our existence since the beginning of humanity! Yet, we keep trying to find the right measure of both and, in our failures, we continue to learn more and more. We learn that giving our kids everything and/or nothing is not a path to appreciation and affection, we have learned that being our kid’s ‘friends’ means we relinquish our authority as their parents and elders as well as our wisdom from our own experiences. While each generation has proclaimed they will raise their children differently, they will raise the standards of living to be better, we are witnessing today more selfishness, more entitlement, more poverty, more senseless hatred, more mendacity, more danger to freedom than since before the American Revolution!
In our drive to ‘succeed’, we have almost lost one of “the beauties of the human spirit”, sharing, allowing people to work for what they have, and gratitude for what we have. As wisdom found in Chapters of our Ancestors teaches: “Who is rich? One who rejoices in their place, portion” ie, one who wants what he/she has. When we live a life of honoring others, of learning from everyone, a life of subduing our ‘evil’ inclination in order to use the energy to do good, and we find our ikigai, our purpose-all we can have is gratitude and the desire to share with another, share with the world our unique talents and gifts as well as receive from another(s) their gifts and talents so one doesn’t have to do it all. Living this type of life allows us to live in proper measure, to know we tend only a small portion of the garden and we need people around us to tend their portion so the weeds don’t become overgrown and wild. While we have lost this way of living in many areas of the world and in our own country, we can regain this path, we can teach our children and help them live lives of meaning, we can stop the accidental path of life from overwhelming us and live with and on purpose. We can return to a time where giving was another form of gratitude, where sharing our wealth, our ideas, our skills was the path we all took in order to “make a more perfect union”. We have to end our practice of “buying our children’s affection”, we have to end our practice of “I am only as happy as my unhappiest child”, we have to teach our children how to share and stand on our own, we have to help our friends with our support and counsel, we have to ask for and take the same from them. We have to change our ways so we can grow into the people our individual souls want us to be. We do this by sharing, not by taking.
I have lived both ways-entitled because my father died when I was a young teenager, thinking that I deserved more because I was so traumatized and this led to crime, alcoholism and prison. It also led to me thinking I was smarter than most people because I could ‘get over’ on them. At age 37, I found myself in a prison cell with very few people to call, seen as a pariah by my family and peers, except for the other people who were in the same boat as me. My change happened because of an ecstatic experience and my daughter’s letter to me. I made a decision that I could not live the way I had been living and honor my father nor be a father to my daughter. Since then, Heather and I have had many shared experiences. I have many shared experiences with Harriet, with the people I have been and am Rabbi for/to. I relish these shared experiences because they help me grow in gratitude, in awe, in learning and in witnessing the beauty of life. I am joyful for all the people I know who have ‘made it’ and the spiritual growth they have attained. I am grateful that I don’t ‘take’ anymore, I earn the respect and the love that I have because of the sharing of experiences, wisdom, kindness, love and truth with the people in my life. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark