Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 296

National Month of Repentance and Change

“The most unnoticed of all miracles is the miracle of repentance. Its is not the same as rebirth, it is transformation, creation.” (Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity pg 69)

We are at the halfway point between the 1st of Elul and Yom Kippur, a period of 40 days and today is the 21st day of Elul. I hope you have been doing your inventory and seeing where you have missed the mark and where you have hit the target, if not the bullseye:). As I think about the words above, I realize the truth of the first sentence is because we are not taught, as children, as teenagers, as young adults, etc that being ‘less than perfect’ is okay, natural, and human! We are not shown how to do repentance while we are taught to be repentant. We are not aware that repentance is a miracle, that it does happen when we engage in it with reckless abandon and give ourselves over to the power of repentance, the miracle of repentance and the healing of repentance.

We live in a world where Greek Philosophy of ‘perfection’ still rules. We live in a world where the societal norm is ‘being right’. Because of these two and other such idiotic norms and cliches we are unable to be in repentance, to do repentance and to be surrounded by the miraculous light of repentance, return and new responses. We are too afraid to admit our errors because we are ashamed of them. We are sure that being in repentance will lead to ridicule and shaming by another(s), by society, so we continue to hide from ourselves and hide from everyone else. Think of how often, when someone is found to be a serial killer, a sexual predator, a thief, a con, the people around him/her proclaim that they had no idea, she/he was such a nice person, a regular guy/gal.

This happens because we are so engrossed in being right, in the way things look, in getting ahead, we cover-up our flaws, we put them on another, we point the finger away from ourselves, we shrink our responsibility and we bury our truth deep within us. Yet, we are never free from our deceptions of another and/or our deceptions of ourselves. How many people think: “if they only knew who I really am, they wouldn’t have anything to do with me”? We are desperately in need of being In Repentance instead of being repentant. Being repentant in our society is to say “I’m sorry” whether we are or not, remember our parents telling us to say this to someone else without explaining why we should be nor listening to the whole story? Remember the shame we felt at being exposed without being heard? Remember our commitment to hide our “dirty laundry” because we don’t want the neighbors to think bad of us-forgetting they have their own “dirty laundry” they are hiding?

It is time to end this bullshit, this deception of another(s), this self-deception. It is time for us to end our wallowing in shame and fear of being ‘found out’ to be less than perfect, less than ideal. It is time for us to stop hating those who have it better and look better because their inner life is just as chaotic as ours. It is time to end our incessant need to ‘win at all costs’ because we always lose our truth, our ability to change and find wholeness and some peace. It is time to engage in and notice the “miracle of repentance”!

Being In Repentance is not self-flagellation, it is not denigrating ourselves. It is not poof, we are reborn. It is, as Rabbi Heschel says above, “transformation, creation”. Repentance is the process by which we transform the energy we have used to hide and deny to come out of our particular closets and admit to our imperfections. It is the process where we open our hearts to our truth, we “circumcise the foreskins of our hearts” and allow the light to flow into the darkest recesses of our inner life that we have been hiding in, we transform the energy we have used to stay silent and hidden into the energy to speak and open ourselves up to the healing of repairing the damage we have done to another human being as well as the damage we have done to ourselves. We transform the energy of negativity to do positive things in the world, beginning with restoring the dignity that every human being has and, in our hiding, blaming, lying we have taken, back to the people we have harmed and restore our own infinite dignity. We use the energy we have bastardized to ‘getting ahead at all costs’ to moving forward in ways that are congruent with our uniqueness and help us reach a state of integrity with people and within ourselves. This is a miracle that, prior to now, has gone unnoticed.

We then see a new creation of our self, a new way of living and being-we no longer hide our flaws and errors, we can own up to them. We are connected to people in the most authentic of ways because we have created a community where truth and authenticity, integrity and congruency are foundational values. We are in a way of living with people who want to rebuke us when we are going back into hiding and lying, who applaud us when we are doing the next right thing. We have created a world that mirrors the one we have dreamed of and never thought possible. This is a miracle that has also gone unnoticed!

I have been in this miracle for over 36 years. I was brought into this state by Rabbi Mel Silverman and his teaching me both Rabbi Heschel and the Rambam, the Torah and T’Shuvah. I have been a student of T’Shuvah and engaged in knowing I am not always right, knowing I have a nose for bullshit, knowing I am so impatient with mendacity and deception, knowing I am not ‘politically correct’ and knowing I am an acquired taste. It is hard to live in the miracle of repentance because the world doesn’t want to be reminded of its flaws, society doesn’t want to change, wonder is a feeling rather than an way to meet the day. Repentance has been and continues to be a miraculous state for me. I continue to repent and change, repair and find new ways to be, be rejected and embraced and, most of all, I continue to live in integrity and authenticity. I am in the miracle of transformation and creation each and every day-how wonderful it is! God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark