Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

                                                             Year 3 Day 246

“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)

The last two sentences above are crucial to our understanding of what a friendship, an intimate relationship is actually based on. Most people are acquaintances, they are often need based and therefore time limited, and when the significant moment arrives where we actually need another person, our ‘friends’ turn out to be acquaintances and/or ones who show up when they need something and not the other way around. Other instances are the ‘friends’ who want to cozy up to people they think will help them or give them some celebrity/gravitas because of their closeness to hip, to power, to wealth, etc. There can be no real friendship nor true affection in “role to role” relationships. These are the I/It relationships that Martin Buber speaks about. They are also what I call I/object relationships where one person treats another as a tool, an object for their benefit with no real feeling or caring about the welfare of the person they are using.

We are witnessing this phenomena more and more in modernity and we recognize it more and more the older we get. We have the opportunity to impart the hard earned wisdom of what true friendship is from all of the battle scars we have from getting it wrong. We have the obligation to teach the younger generation of our errors and triumphs in having authentic affection for another human being and what it takes to maintain and grow this affection in all of our relationships, especially our intimate ones. We have become afraid to share a “significant moment” with another person because we have been laughed at so often for our seeking of real connection when so many people are only into ‘faux’ connection. We watch our political leaders put down authentic moments of grief by blaming people not guns so there is no need for gun control. We are witnessing one party relish the thought of being fascists and dictators while reveling in the idea they can end democracy and do this in the name of our founding fathers! No wonder our children and grandchildren don’t have faith in anything any more. No wonder they are so susceptible to the lies of Hamas and the far left as well as the far right and religious fanatics- they are searching for certainty and we in the middle have forgotten to teach them that there is no certainty, we are all just doing what we believe is best with the information we have in the moment. When we can share a significant moment, when we acknowledge our need to have a common experience, then we can hear one another’s perspective and wisdom which leads to authentic affection and true friendship.

We all need to stop believing in “alternative facts”, in the rewriting of history as the Republican Party is trying to do regarding Jan. 6th, as the Supreme Court is doing with the immunity case, the Dobbs decision, and the other ones they have overturned and look forward to overturning. We are not a country governed by the rule of law anymore, we are being governed by fascists and a Supreme Court that cares more about the wishes of the rich than real justice. We have to end our fascination with the Reality TV show that Trump and his minions and his puppeteers are running on our political stage. We have to do this because it has infiltrated all our relationships, it has made us suspect of everything and everyone. We are afraid to speak about the dangers that are hanging over us lest someone who is a MAGA will berate us, will shame us, will enrage us. We have lost the ability to “share a significant moment” because we are afraid of being real. This is one of the ways we have hindered our knowledge, I believe. We have bought into the lies of people so much that we accept the societal norms and cliches that we know are wrong and destructive. We have allowed these deceptions to penetrate our being and we have given into our own self-deception.

We have the solution, however. Letting go of our need for certainty, revealing to ourselves our self-deceptive ways, and offering a hand in true friendship and authentic affection to those who have helped us, those who have reached out to us, those who seek real connection with us. They are all around us, our children who need to see us as human beings with all of our flaws and greatness; people we work with who need to know we care about them, their families, their way of life; parents and family who need to know we know they did the best they could to connect and help us grow; friends who reach out and need our help and need to be needed by us; and the people we pass in the street with whom we share our space with and are in need of a smile and/or a hello. In other words, everyone we come into contact with gives us an opportunity to share a “common experience”-being human and a “significant moment”, the one we are in right now. Taking off our armor, letting down our guard will result in some pain because not everyone we meet will honor our attempts at true connection and the pain will pass quickly while the guilt from not doing this stays with us and turns to shame when we find out the ramifications of our imperviousness. Rabbi Heschel’s teaching above gives us the wake-up call, the opportunity to ask ourselves if we are happier in our own bubble or do we realize how necessary the true friendship and authentic affection that comes from “sharing a significant moment” and “having a common experience” are?

I have been blessed with both authentic affection, true friendship, real connections and the faux ones as well. The pain of finding out someone is having a faux relationship with me when I believed it was a real one is excruciating. I also know it is part of being human, I will recover from the pain and living as an open book, offering real affection is better than living the other way-since I have done both. I understand my grandfathers belief that if someone cheated or hurt them, it is sad for the other person and not a reflection of who they were. I am coming to the same realization, slower than they did and getting there. I know the “common experiences” I have had with people who have forgotten them or cared about them only as long as they needed something, I know the “significant moments” I have shared with people who decided they didn’t matter. I know the people for whom my way of being became too difficult for them and they decided to forgo the friendship, the relationship we had forged together. I know the people who withdrew their affection when it became uncomfortable to stand with me. I get it and blame no one, I understand the difficulty in maintaining friendships and have let some go that I needed to hold onto. I am grateful for the affection and friendship I share with people and for the love and gratitude I share with them and with my family. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark