Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 4 Day 78
“Man’s true fulfillment cannot be reached by the isolated individual, and his true good depends on communion with, and participation in, that which transcends him. Each challenge from beyond the person is unique, and each response must be new and creative. Freedom is an act of engagement of the self to the spirit, a spiritual event.” (Insecurity of Freedom pg. 16)
In the first sentence above, Rabbi Heschel’s use of the word “transcends” reminds us that there are obstacles that we have to “climb across” in order to experience “freedom”. For most of us, that obstacle is our egos, our rational minds, our immature, under educated spirits/inner lives. The lie of the “rugged individual” or the “self-made man” has been with us for so long and is so ingrained into the psyche of We, the People that we fail to see our “adjustment to this conventional notion” has caused us to lose our inner knowledge and our inner eyesight. Elon Musk would be another drugged out ketamine addict if he hadn’t received so much government money for Tesla, SpaceX, StarLink, and he goes around thinking he is the smartest guy in the room and has to take a chain saw to everything around him because he is afraid to be found out to be a fraud. The same is true for every autocrat, every oligarch, every asshole who delights in their cruelty. When one is in “communion with” and participates in, “that which transcends him”, we become not only free for the moment of this experience, this experience leaves an indelible mark on our souls, on our inner lives that we continue to long to visit, to experience again and again. Yet, we can only do this, when we are in community and engaged in ways of being that allow us, help us “climb across” the abyss of our mind and our reason to reach and dwell in wonder and/or radical amazement.
We seem to have lost the ability to hear the “challenge from beyond” ourselves. We have become so preoccupied with our own self, we have forgotten the “gift” of the “intuitive mind” as Einstein teaches us about, and we have come to worship the “servant”, our rational mind. Even more dangerous, we have become “servants” to the rational/irrational mind of the fuhrer, which historically has led to the loss of freedom, the loss of connectivity, the loss of desire to “transcend” ourselves. We are in such a state now across the globe. The leader of the Free World and his partners in crime both here in America and in Israel, are doing everything they can to put cotton in our ears and blinders on our eyes so we can no longer hear the call from Sinai nor see the Mountain in smoke, no longer see the trembling awe of the mountain nor hear the cry of our neighbors. The Fuhrer does this so we no longer see our uniqueness, because seeing the uniqueness of ourself causes us to recognize the uniqueness of another and fuels our creative energy, the awakening of our inner lives to respond to the unique call/challenge we are given in this moment with a new and different response. To be in “communion with, and participation in, that which transcends him” we are being called to be present in this moment, we need to live in a state of wonder/radical amazement so we can hear the challenge, respond to it in our unique way and remember that SAME SHIT DIFFERENT DAY IS A LIE!
We seem to have lost our “challenge” spirit, we seem to have given away our creativity and our uniqueness in order to ‘get ahead’, to ‘go along to get along’. This is in direct opposition to the message of the prophets, to the experience of our enslavement in Egypt, and to the entirety of the Bible. We the People have continued on in the ways of Solomon, not necessarily going back to Egypt, but skirting the issue by getting horses, women, etc from Egypt. We the People have allowed the Fuhrer we have chosen to follow to lead us into a spiritual slavery, into a groupthink that kills our intuitive mind, that makes us “servants” to their irrationality, to their cruelty and one day we wake up and find we are willing to ‘throw our neighbor under the bus’ to earn some creds with THE LEADER! We have seen this story play out over and over again, in Rome, in Greece, in Jerusalem, in Germany, in France, England, in the USSR, in Iran, Saudi Arabia, all over the globe and we seem incapable of learning from our history and our ancestors.
We the People are in desperate need of heeding the last sentence above, our very existence as beings that can make “free-will moral choices” depends on it. We are at or almost at the tipping point of whether “this nation or any nation can long endure on the earth” and the time has come and is coming when each of us will have to make a choice-freedom or slavery, goodness or evil, kindness or cruelty. While I am usually against “either/or” language, there are times when it is necessary and Choose Life is one of the times. We the People are being reminded to tend to our spiritual life, to make for ourselves a spiritual practice and follow a way of being that supports, encourages, educates and matures our inner lives in order to “grow along spiritual lines” so we can live into more and more “acts of freedom”, more and more “engagements of the self to the spirit” and no longer buy the bullshit, the rhetoric, the irrational minds of the Fuhrer, the autocrat, the liars in chief like Trump, Musk, Miller, Bannon, Vought, Johnson, Schumer, Fetterman, et al. We the People can do this, in fact, this is the basic element of recovery from addictions; we people recovering from alcohol, drugs, gambling, etc “turn our lives over to the care of God as we understand God”, in Pirke Avot, we are told to “nullify your will before God’s will so God’s will becomes your will”. We believe we didn’t achieve Freedom until we reached Sinai because we were able to have a moment of transcendence, the problem for the newly freed slaves was they did not follow this moment up with more learning and developing of their inner lives. We the People can learn from our ancestors, we can stand up to the bully, deny the Fuhrer, cancel his/her minions and puppeteers. It will take “a spiritual event” that only we can make happen by being ready to hear and prepared to act upon the call, the challenge from beyond and the willingness to “climb across” the abyss.
I have been blessed with many moments of transcendence. Every day I write I have at least one. I have also experienced many moments of freedom and I realize the times I have been most enslaved were moments of my own making. No one enslaves me, I was freer in prison than I had been for over 20 years on the streets, I am freer now than I was at times when I was working, because I chose to “go along” or I chose to “follow the leader/money” and while I can give many reasons why, the truth that I am facing is that I willingly gave up my freedom for a few shekels and I will never do this again! I have returned to the Sinai experience over and over again, this Passover I will be a little freer than I was last year and a lot more aware! God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark.