Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 4 Day 15

“We feel jailed in the confinement of personal needs. The more we indulge in satisfactions, the deeper is our feeling of oppressiveness.” (Insecurity of Freedom pg 7)

Putting ourselves into this teaching of Rabbi Heschel causes us to ask ourselves; are we jailed in the confinement of our “personal needs”? I am not sure how many of us realize or even think this way. It feels so natural and societally acceptable to seek, obtain, maintain, and grow our “personal needs” that most of us are not aware of the prisons we build, walk into through our seeking “personal needs”. Beyond the basics, which everyone needs, the rest of the ‘things’ we believe we need in order to “be happy” are actually the walls of a prison of our own making. We build these prisons for ourselves, we walk in and lock the doors behind us, then we complain about the feeling of the “walls closing in on us”, we are overwhelmed by the mountains of debt one acquires in order to satisfy one’s “personal needs”. This mountain of debt is more than money owed, money borrowed or charged. All of us owe, as I have written before, as Rabbi Heschel, Rabbi Steinsaltz, St. Francis write about, this debt is for our life, being able to wake up in the morning and do something that adds to the world. The feeling of being “jailed in the confinement of personal needs” is the debt we owe to another(s), the selling of our own soul, our morality, our sense of what is true and false, our knowledge of what is right and what is wrong. In order to become “jailed in the confinement of personal needs”, we have to surrender these basic parts of our humanness, we have to block our hearing of the call of our souls and our inner life, we have to ignore the call of the stranger, the poor, the needy, we have to become willfully blind to the moral pandemic happening all around us, we have to adopt an “indifference to evil”! It seems impossible for human beings who are created in the image of the divine, who share the same basic goodness of being that Jesus, Moses, Mohammed, St. Frances, Maimonidies, Heschel, et al have, can become so imprisoned, so blind, so deaf, so indifferent-yet we have been, we are, and, unfortunately, we will be.

This is not a sentence that is decreed from above, however. This is not the way it is ‘supposed to be’. We are given great teachings, imbued with great wisdom, provided with great teachers of the spirit, so we can tear down the prison walls we have built for ourselves. We learn of the exodus from Egypt so we know we can leave the feeling of being “jailed in the confinement of personal needs”. The journey through the desert, that could have taken a week or two and lasted forty years so the people who could not let go of their inner slavery would die and not taint the new land with their ‘poison’, teaches us that we have to continually be on guard that we are not rebuilding the walls of the jails we are leaving. As we do Tashlich, we cast our bread upon the waters to separate ourselves from our negativity on Rosh Hashanah, I always suggest to people that it is imperative for them to not jump into the water to retrieve their negativities. We are given a road map for life, a way of being that combines our spiritual nature with our intellectual nature and each of us brings a unique set of talents and perspectives to the task of making the world a little better and not screwing it up anymore.

We fail when we build the jails of “personal needs” and believe we have to “indulge in satisfactions” which only leads to becoming “deeper (in) our feelings of oppressiveness.” This is so apparent in the way people treat one another vis a vis the way they treat their “things”. While someone will spend 1000’s of dollars on a tie, or a suit, they will not give $18.00/month to a charity that saves lives. The number 18 represents life in Jewish tradition, hence the choice of this number. Yet, it is not selfishness nor indifference a lot of the time that causes a person to choose their “personal needs”, it is the societal pull, the need to ‘stand out’, the walling off of one’s soul, the beating down of one’s moral compass because of ‘what will the neighbors think’, that drives most people to this depth of oppressiveness. It is what is at the root of many people’s addiction to drugs, to alcohol, to gambling, to escapes of any and all kinds as well as what sends so many people to therapists. “I have the American Dream and I am empty” is a common refrain, especially among the rich and famous, whether out loud to friends, therapists, or silently to themselves. We build the jails, we lock ourselves in the prisons and then are miserable because we know we are oppressed by our “personal needs” and feel unable to get out. This is the great trap we are suffering through and the people who claim to be the ones who will ‘save us’ are really the ones who want to be the “New Pharaoh” that arose and “did not know Joseph”, in our case, how forget the constitution and the declaration of independence, who use the system to abuse and get the rest of us to build the walls of our jails and prisons, taller, wider and stronger.

We, the People, can recover from our addiction to “personal needs”. We, the People, can recover our basic goodness of being by realizing that we are all in the world together. Acknowledging the truth of the St. Francis prayer, committing to us “console, understand, love, pardon”, bring “light hope, joy,” etc. When we are committing ourselves to the Holiness Code of Leviticus 19:1-18, we seek to honor, pay people on time, share our bounty, no matter how big or small, give people who are in need help and dignity, we don’t stand by and allow someone to do things that will harm them or another(s) physically and/or spiritually, we let go of hatred in our hearts, we will love ourselves and our neighbors. Living into these principles and so many others, allows us to realize our imperfections, make amends, change our ways and recover our authentic selves. In doing this, we unlock the doors of the prisons we have constructed, we tear down the walls and use the bricks to build homes of love and joy for ourselves and for another(s), our homes become meeting place for wisdom and we impart our spiritual knowings to our children, family, friends so they too can leave the prisons that their “personal needs” have constructed. We, the People, not only rise from the depths of “our feelings of oppressiveness”, we raise the people around us from their “oppressiveness”, we set a new course and we repay the debt of gratitude for being alive, for being part of something greater than ourselves, and for adding to our corner of the universe.

I have experienced both the prison of “personal needs” and the freedom of being liberated from a Egypt of my own making. Freedom is better, though harder. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark