Living Rabbi Heschel's Wisdom - A Daily Path to Living Well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 70

“Indeed the most horrible manifestation of evil is when it acts in the guise of good. “Such monstrous evil deeds could religion urge man to commit” (Lucretius)”. (God in Search of Man pg.370)

Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom stays with me day and night. It keeps giving me a bad conscience and makes me review my life in new and different ways, causes me to take a breath when I am sure I know what is right, and elevates me to new ways of being, thinking and acting. Rabbi Heschel’s teaching above goes so unnoticed by most people because, as Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzatto an Italian Rabbi who lived in the early 18th Century wrote about his own work Path of the Just, what is being said is so true and so accepted as truth that we pay little attention to it. So many of us believe the words above and forget that this teaching is for all of us, for all our interactions, for all of our doings and beings in the world. Rather, many people use the truth of Rabbi Heschel’s teaching, or some variation of it, to blame, shame, attack someone else and set themselves up as the only ones who can see this way of being in another(s) and can always sift the evil out of the good they do so they are “the pure ones”.

We have all witnessed the events of Jan. 6, 2021, both the insurrection and the desire of many of the Republican House of Representatives and some Senators to invalidate the free and fair elections of Nov. 2020. There were two insurrections that day, one violent and the other was “the most horrible manifestation of evil” because these Congresspeople, actually idolators posing as “God-fearing believers”, were rebelling against the wishes of the majority of the people, they were trying to install their person as ‘the anointed One’ and crush the democratic system and the spirit of freedom for all that our Country has promised since it’s inception. These people in Congress were/are wrapping themselves in ‘godliness/idolatry’ to justify the evil they were perpetrating on America. Now, these liars, these mendacious folk are going to be in charge of The House of Representatives and investigate, castrate, bully, pummel anyone and everyone they see as standing in the way of their next attempted takeover of our Government, democratic system and rule of law. We are aware of their knowledge of the way they tried to disguise their evil as good because they asked for Pardons from Mark Meadows, chief of staff to Donald J Trump! If you didn’t do any crime, why would you need a pardon?

While it is easy to pick off the hypocrites and the non-believers, non-practitioners of the good in public life, it is crucial that we see how we disguise the evil we perpetrate in our personal lives. In our faith communities we manifest evil whenever we ‘sell’ our religion, our faith as better than any other. Whenever leaders demand strict adherence to the ways of past generations without seeing how the principle of past decisions and the ways past generations understood the paths of faith, the ways of God, and use their experience to inform rather than dictate, they are disguising evil as good. In the prayer Jews say as we put the Torah into the Ark, we declare that the Torah is “a tree of life” and all of its ways are ways of pleasantness and all it’s paths are peace/wholeness. There is no one way, there is no way to be certain that my way is the best way and the only way. There are many paths to God, to decency, to being human and we have to find, live and immerse ourselves in the path that speaks to our soul, otherwise we run the risk of disguising evil as good to our self and harming another(s) with our false ways of being. We, the people, have to demand of our faith leaders: truth, the ability to admit the ways they ‘miss the mark’, the humility to ask for forgiveness, carefully screen their words and their actions for their “most horrible manifestation of evil disguised as good”. No more ‘anointing’ of a leader as the messenger of Jesus Christ because this denigrates God, the concept of the Messiah and the paths of faith and religion when it happens.

In recovery, we no longer need to prove our faith, we no longer even have to name our faith, we just have to live our faith. Faith begins with accepting the love of another(s) when we are unable to love our self. It continues with our acceptance of our powerlessness over people, places, things, substances, process’ that have injured us and everyone around us. Faith continues for many of us in recovery as we engage in good actions, see more and more truth and proof of our goodness and the goodness in the world and find a “power greater than ourselves”. With each step in our recovery, we weed out, scrape off another way that evil has perpetrated the good we are doing. It is a painstakingly slow assent, it is a life-long exercise and we know we never ‘arrive’. It is a journey that helps us grow out of mendacity and into truth, out of excuses and into responsibility.

As I said yesterday, I am aware of the past ways I lived this teaching in the negative and how attuned I am to ignoring this wisdom and warning of Rabbi Heschel’s. I also realize how much it has lived in me and how my father and grandfather instilled in me this sense of right/wrong, holy/unholy, and they taught me how easy it is to confuse one for the other. I am dedicated to helping my self and anyone else continue to grow along spiritual lines so we can stop living the first sentence above of Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Living Rabbi Heschel's Wisdom - A Daily Path to Living Well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 69

“Indeed the most horrible manifestation of evil is when it acts in the guise of good. “Such monstrous evil deeds could religion urge man to commit” (Lucretius). (God in Search of Man pg.370)

The wisdom of Rabbi Heschel’s words above are undeniably true, yet, they go unheeded and ignored by so many of us! We are in a constant state of struggle between what is good and what is evil and we are so unaware, so caught up in our ‘need to be right’ that we manifest evil while thinking we are doing what is good, right and what is God’s Will. We have struggled with this way of being for millennia and good triumphs eventually, otherwise we would have destroyed ourselves and the world long ago.

I keep pondering this dilemma daily, both in my own life and in the life of our world. I listen to people who decry the Respect for Marriage Act that was just signed into law for no reason other than they disagree with same-sex marriages as well as inter-racial marriages, even though they will not say the latter. I am listening to these “God-fearing believers” speak as if they are 100% sure of what God wants. We watch with horror the degradation and inhumanity that these “unrighteous believers” show to people who are not like them. Is it really their business whom someone loves and want to share their lives with? What satisfaction do they receive from denying the rights they enjoy to another human being?

While we claim we are just ‘standing up for God’ when we immerse ourselves in the words above, when we search our inner life, we will find that we are really ‘going down’ to our fears of not being in power, our insecurities and uncertainties about how to live. While LGBTQ+ are the main targets in the railing against same-sex marriage, this is no different than Hitler’s wanting to “keep Aryan blood pure”. It is no different than the fear of Black power that people have had in this country since it was founded. It is no different than “Jews killed Christ” and “Jews kill Christians for their blood which they bake into their Matzah”. It is no different than any other trope that has been used against anyone who is not a White Anglo Saxon Protestant. The evangelicals and religious right have taken these old ways of being to new lows and claim they are doing good by this ethnic, gender, racial cleansing they keep attempting to make happen. If this is not a manifestation of Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom above, I do not know what would be. I am at a loss to understand how people can engage in such hatred, such vitriol while going to Church, Temple, Mosque, Yoga, Meditation, etc. It is beyond me how we can keep looking for ‘bad guys’ outside of us without seeing “most horrible manifestation of evil is when it acts in the guise of good.”

It is time for all of us to get off of our soapboxes, stand down from our pulpits, take off the robes of self-righteousness, and look in the mirror, look into the soul of another human being and truly see what is inside of us. The world is in desperate need of everyone cleansing themselves of the evil that is disguised as good. The most horrible manifestation is how we make hatred of another human being, good. How we forget the terror and the destruction that such evil has brought in generations past is mind-boggling and dangerous. We are still hearing that Covid-19 was a hoax, we are witnessing the Nazi tropes being used over and over again. We see how Goebbels teaching of “if you repeat a lie often enough, people will come to believe it, and you will eventually come to believe it yourself” is alive and well in this moment, in this country, in the lives of so many of us. Our inability to look in the mirror, our inability to see the manifestations of evil we disguise as good is eating us up from the inside and many of us have become homo-sapiens rather than be human.

In recovery our first “searching and fearless moral inventory” is the hardest part of our journey. We come face to face with our self, with our immoral deeds, the lies we have told ourselves to make it okay to do such despicable actions that deny the dignity and humanity of another human being and our self. We begin to see the pattern of how we disguised these “most horrible manifestation of evil” as good and we feel the guilt of our actions. When we read this inventory to our self, God and another human being, we usually experience relief at no longer hiding from the truth, no longer needing to disguise our self, disguise evil nor disguise the good we have done as well. We learn to discern and tease out the evil from the good a little better and grow this skill throughout the rest of our living.

I tremble with awe and gratitude from the Grace God has shown me. Opening my eyes up to the ways I have disguise evil as good early on in my recovery has allowed me to realize when it is happening sooner and sooner. This awareness has even caused me to not disguise evil as well. It also has made me hyper-sensitive to these “most horrible manifestations of evil” and, when I have been loud in my calling it out, I have confused the good I am doing with the evil of the way I am doing it. I am guilty of this confusion and I am grateful that my ability to see these manifestations in my self and in another(s) has allowed me to be of service to people and to respond to God’s call/demand of me. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Living Rabbi Heschel's Wisdom - A Daily Path to Living Well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 68

“The great contest is not “between God-fearing believers and unrighteous believers.”(God in Search of Man pg. 370)

Immersing oneself in Rabbi Heschel’s words above causes us to ask ourselves to define “God-fearing believers” and “unrighteous believers”. To be God-fearing, I believe, is to live with trembling awe of being a partner of God, to be aware of our capacity and call to make our corner of the world better, to stay connected to what is good and holy, to think ‘what is the Godly action to take now’ and follow our soul’s knowledge as to the next right action. It is not to be afraid of being struck down by a vengeful force that wants to control us. The sages say:” All is in the hands of heaven except the awe of heaven”. We are in control of us, we are not automatons, we are not robots, we are not angels nor animals. It is imperative for us to stop using God as a weapon, as an excuse, as a clean-up for our unGodly actions. It is time for us to stop anointing people as our saviors and save our own selves. To do this, we have to take responsibility, we have to, as Rabbi Heschel teaches, “immerse ourselves in the thoughts of the Bible”, we have to stop being literal and put ourselves into the text, see the myriad of ways to understand the teachings and the actions that the Bible gives us and no longer ignore the gift of our intuitive mind, our soul’s call.

Yet, as we can see from what is happening and what has happened over the millennia, this way of being is perverted for the power of the “unrighteous believers. In reading some of the text messages from Republican Congresspeople to Mark Meadows after the 2020 election, we see people who want to use God as a weapon for their power, for their elevation, for their enslavement of people they see as their enemies. I am overwhelmed with grief and sadness that God is being used as a pawn and a club by these “unrighteous believers” who call themselves “God-fearing believers.” Immersing myself in Rabbi Heschel’s teaching above, I am experiencing his words as a cautionary tale to us. We have to be careful or we will easily turn from the trembling awe experience of connection with God to “God-fearing believers” and then to becoming “unrighteous believers.” It is a descent that seems seamless, it is a movement that seems logical to our rational minds. It is a way of being that gives in to our desire for power, prestige, wealth, certainty and control. Both “God-fearing believers” and “unrighteous believers” experience God as a tool, as a weapon, and make God into an idol.

God is infinite, unknowable, ineffable, yet we know that people, in our need for certainty and control, want to define, know and have the corner on God’s Word. Jesus spoke in parables, the Torah is to be understood in 70 ways, all of the translations from the original Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, Chinese, etc are commentaries based on the translators beliefs and prejudices. How can any of the “God-fearing believers” say they know what God wants? How can any of them declare people like Shabbtai Z’vi or Donald Trump as the Messiah? How can anyone say that Godliness comes about through ignoring the cries and pleas of the stranger, the poor, the needy? How can anyone state they are the ‘true Americans’ while denying refugees safe harbor-be they Jews from Nazi Germany, Cubans fleeing Communist Cuba, Central Americans fleeing for their lives, Syrians fleeing the chemical warfare of Assad, etc? How can we continue to dishonor the treaty we made with Native Americans in the 19th Century? How can we continue to treat people of color as 2nd class citizens? How can we continue to use Anti-Semitic tropes while proclaiming our love for Israel? We can do this when we falsely believe, when we deceive our selves with the lie of being “God-fearing believers” and accuse everyone else of being “unrighteous believers”!

Those of us in recovery are certain of one thing, we can never know God, we can only seek to understand God’s will for us. We know that the “power greater than ourselves” that is in charge sends us anonymous messages through people, through signs and through our soul’s knowledge. We are acutely aware of the dangers of being too sure of what God is telling us, of confusing our desires with God’s will, and of returning to a way of being that is incompatible with being a partner of God!

As I immerse myself in these words, I realize I am guilty of being an “unrighteous believer” at times.I have gone overboard in my zealotry and my desire to ‘be right’. I am embarrassed and guilty which gives me the strength to retreat from these false stands I have taken. It is difficult at times to separate my trembling awe of God to act Godly and my fear of being left out, unheard, irrelevant. This is a challenge that I face each and everyday. I know that I meet the challenge most days and there are times when I don’t. I agree with Father Greg Boyle that we have to erase the margins if we are to live with the trembling awe of being a partner of God. I also realize that I want to erase the margins because I have lived on the edge of what the “unrighteous believers” and “God-fearing believers” have determined to be acceptable and normal. I realize the threat that I pose to proper society, I realize the threat that all people in recovery pose to proper society, I realize the threat equality, freedom, seeing that each person matters poses to society. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Living Rabbi Heschel's Wisdom - A Daily Path to Living Well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 67

“The great contest is not “between God-fearing believers and unrighteous believers.”(God in Search of Man pg. 370)

Herein lies the issue that we are facing today as we have throughout history. Societal norms dictate an either/or way of being. We are either “God-fearing believers” or “unrighteous believers” according to the lines that society has drawn. People use God as an excuse, an instrument for the validity of their actions and cruelty. As Bob Dylan wrote “With God on Our Side” we can make everything we do right and good, even killing 6 million, venerating the traitors of the Confederacy, massacring Native Americans, enslaving Black people, engaging in Anti-Semitism, etc. We have seen how “God-fearing believers” have bastardized the name of God, the Word of God, Biblical principles and morality for their own benefit, for their own gain with no regard to what is true, what is good. We wrap ourselves in the ‘cloak of Godliness’ all the while practicing evil and idolatry.

We are at another inflection point in our country, in the world right now. Yet, so many “God-fearing believers” are confusing good and evil without any awareness of the evil they are creating, the decency they are defeating, the humanity they are crushing. These ‘good’ people are screaming at the top of their lungs, shouting down anyone who has a differing point of view, another response to what is happening, all for the ‘sake of heaven’ according to them. Tucker Carlson and his ilk decry ‘drag queens’ and don’t realize that Shakespeare had men dressing as women in his plays! People are venerating Jesus as the hero who crushes people, who discards people, who marginalizes people and one wonders if they have ever read the Gospels. These “God-fearing believers” are touting their rights to assault weapons while denying the rights of women to control of their bodies, their minds, etc. We are seeing Ron DeSantis deny people and children their right to be who they are, wanting them instead to be who he wants them to be. When “God-fearing believers” deny the Godliness and Divine Image in another, they are engaging in evil for their own power, their own agenda, their own fears, their own denials, not for the God.

We are in a crisis that is reminiscent of the American Bund, the Klu Klux Klan heydays, and that is to use governing as a weapon of hatred and denial. When the Republicans cheer Marjorie Taylor Greene for her outlandish hate speech, for her desire to ‘make America a bastion of hatred and inequality’ again, when Jim Jordan is lauded for ‘investigating enemies of our good country’ in the name of God and conservative values, when Kevin McCarthy is selling his soul for the title of Speaker of the House, knowing he doesn’t have any real power because he gave it away to the Freedom Caucus, we are in desperate straits, we are in the throes of self-destruction. Yet, these “God-fearing believers” will keep spouting their lies in the name of God, they will continue to exert their power and control, their hatred, their anti-semitism in the name of God and their followers will support them because they are “god-fearing believers” too! How sad and how scary.

Rabbi Heschel’s teaching above is a call to action for all of us. People who are truly “God-fearing believers” are aware of the insidiousness of evil that permeates and/or tries to permeate all of our actions. We are aware that our good deeds are not devoid of evil, that there is some self-interest in everything we do. We know that we serve God and not our selves, yet we are acutely aware of the difficulty in separating our self-interest, our self-satisfaction with our service to God, to decency, to one another. We know we have to be continually on guard to not point our fingers at anyone else without realizing our own errors, our own evil. We wrestle within our being each and every day, just as Jacob wrestled with his competing claims prior to meeting with his twin brother Esau, whom he had screwed over. We have to stop allowing the charlatans, the liars, the practitioners of evil dressed in white robes (a la Klansmen) from overtaking the good, the holy and the Godly.

In recovery, we speak of spirituality as for those who have been to hell and returned. We know what our self-deception and the deception of another(s) has wrought; evil, destruction, spiritual violence, inner turmoil, hatred and enslavement. We are saddened by our actions, we are desperate to make amends and change our ways, we are aware of our inability to be perfect, we know we are incapable of being all good. We also use this knowledge to minimize the evil that is embedded in the good we do, we own our agendas in our actions and we continue to be of service to God, to another(s) and to our  authentic self in our recovery.

I am constantly seeking the good and on guard against the evil contained in my actions. I know I am guilty of having evil in my actions and I do T’Shuvah upon my realizations of this truth, rather than compound the evil with my denials. I have learned that I cannot convince anyone of the truth of me, I cannot change the ‘rap sheet’ I have, some of earned and some unearned. I also cannot and do not deny my service to God, to people I meet, to people I love and I am unwilling to allow the evil that I experience to negate the good and the holy I have accomplished. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Living Rabbi Heschel’s Wisdom - A Daily Path to living well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 66

“The greater the man, the more he is exposed to sin. Piety is at times evil in disguise,, an instrument in the pursuit of power.” (God in Search of Man pg. 370)

Last night we were privileged to be with Rabbi Shmuly Yanklowitz, Rabbi Nissan and the combined communities of Temple Beth El and Valley Beit Midrash for a screening of the Documentary: The Jewish Jail Lady and the Holy Thief. Sitting with this combined community and with Rabbi Shmuly and all of the amazing work he does each and every day to promote a piety that is not rooted in ritual, rather in spirit and the call of the Ineffable One, we experienced the exact opposite of Rabbi Heschel’s warning. The reason this is important to me is because we get lost and adjusted to our negative experiences with the false piety of some of the Religious Leaders and Politicians who are promoting “evil in disguise” who want to use “piety… as an instrument in the pursuit of power”, as Rabbi Heschel warns of in his wisdom above.

We have seen forever how false piety has led to ruin, destruction, slavery, hatred, mendacity and conquering. The New World is a case in point. Spain, England, France were all going to bring Christianity to the ‘heathen Indians’, to the Aztecs, etc. They brought it here at the end of a sword, with rifles and bullets, with concentration camps called reservations, etc. It is believed that many of Columbus’ crew were made up of Jews trying to escape the Inquisition because of the false piety that “was evil in disguise, an instrument in the pursuit of power.”

What these ‘pious people’ then and now forget is the demands of the prophets to turn away from their false piety that serves only them and their pursuit of power. The prophets calling to these charlatans to end their misuse of God’s will and word for their own power-seeking and evil pursuits. Yet we are mired in their negativing and their power wielding ways. We are being called a Christian Nation and a new wave of Christian Nationalists is rising up to ‘take back our country’-forgetting that OUR country belongs to all the people, to the principle of separation of Church and State, to the principle of Freedom of Religion, Speech and the Press. All of these founding principles can and have been manipulated by these ‘pious people’ (of all faiths) and are being used “in the pursuit of power”.

Mike Pence and Mike Pompeo declare themselves for a “return” (false claim) to the US being a Christian Nation and Jews are clapping because they believe they are kin in their piety, it is a sign of the self-deception some people live under. While belief in God is important to and for many of us as a blueprint for living well, joining with these people who engage in “piety is at times evil in disguise, an instrument in the pursuit of power” is a recipe for disaster, for denying the freedoms this country was founded on to ‘those unholy heathens’ who do not bow down and worship these charlatans of false piety.

This is true not just in politics, it is happening in our daily living. Religious freedom is not a reason that Hobby Lobby should exclude birth control aids from their health insurance for their employees. Religious freedom is not a reason that a woman’s body and what she does with it should be a man’s purview. Religious freedom is not a reason to deny a person their own sexuality. Religious freedom is not a reason to misinterpret Biblical truths. Religious freedom is not a reason to enslave, to deny, to turn another human being into second class citizens. Yet, there are so many ‘pious’ people who wield their religion like a machete cutting down fruit. The brilliance of Rabbi Heschel above must give all of us pause and do our own T’Shuvah, our own personal inventory to see how our piety in any and all realms, our adherence to a fundamentalist viewpoint (extreme conservative or progressive) denies rights, freedoms and acknowledgements to/of another human being.

In recovery, we “continue to take daily inventory and promptly admit when we are wrong” in order to ensure that our piety and adherence to the principles of recovery, our principles of faith do not turn into false rhetoric, do not become “an instrument in the pursuit of power” and we do not go back to a way of living that is indecent, unkind, dishonest, etc. We are aware of the myriad of ways we have engaged in self-deception so our continued daily inventory helps us nip these destructive ways ‘in the bud’.

I have railed against this type of false piety forever. As a kid I saw that “the emperor had no clothes” and this has continued to this day. I have caused great turmoil because of the loudness and the crassness with which I have pursued and uncovered the false piety in the world and in individuals. I am not aware of when I have used my own piety as “an instrument in the pursuit of power”. I have used my passion, my beliefs, my ingenuity, my caring, love, and truth in my positions of power, just not piety. I have been aware of my flaws and my errors sooner or later and made amends/did T’Shuvah for them upon my awareness. I have been rebuked and accept the truth of what someone is telling me, even if I don’t agree with everything they say. I do this so I can stay right sized, I do this not to show my piety, but to live it. I am able to hear the call of another soul, to hear the call of my soul and to hear the demand of God because I continue to engage in my piety, my adherence to principles and clear out the falseness I am susceptible to each day. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Living Rabbi Heschel's Wisdom - A Daily Path to Living Well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 65

“The greater the man, the more he is exposed to sin. Piety is at times evil in disguise,, an instrument in the pursuit of power.” (God in Search of Man pg. 370)

In Iran, a man who was protesting against the Iranian Morality Police and their killing of Mahsa Amini was executed for “enmity against God”. In Israel, an orthodox person killed Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin for making peace which made him a traitor to God. In Saudi Arabia, Jamal Khashoggi was killed and dismembered because he wanted more freedoms and decency in the Kingdom. In America, mass shootings, bombings happen because people are defending the Bible. A woman’s right to choose is a sin against God, murder according to some religious people. All across the globe, religion is used to do evil, “piety is at times evil in disguise”!

I am fascinated as to how this has happened, I know it goes back to Greek mythology, to Hammurabi, continues through he Crusades and was a cover-up for the killing of Indigenous People in the New World because they were, after all, savages. Pious Christians believed it was within their purview to kill Jews because of the lie that Jews killed Christ. They would search out Jews to kill around Easter time so they could get revenge? Piety and power are a folio a deus, a lethal combination, as we have witnessed throughout our history and in our present day.

We have all witnessed ‘pious’ people who do the most unGodly actions, like lacking mercy, perverting justice and walking in their own paths rather than God’s. We have all watched in anger, horror, disgust as pious people like Pat Robertson blames 9/11 on the LGBTQ community, on ensuring equal rights for people of color and women, etc. We have witnessed the crowning of politicians by The Fellowship Foundation as a means of promoting Christ is a Lion, their own version of Prosperity Gospel, into the Government of the United States. We are watching a tremendous rise in Congresspeople who are supporting making the US a Christian Nation and Christian Nationalism is on the rise, as is White Supremacists philosophy.

All of these horrors are done under the cloak of religion. All of this lies and subterfuges are done under the guise of piety, with religious fervor and led by some of the biggest promotors of ‘the good book’, like Jerry Falwell Jr. who has been exposed as a charlatan, a liar, a man who has issues. We have witnessed the downfall of so many or these pious men like Jimmy Swaggart, James Baker and his wife Tammy Faye, et al. And still, people are willing to cede religious teachings and interpretations to these ‘pious’ people who practice evil in their disguise of Godly. We are in grave danger, as we have been for millennia, of allowing these pious saboteurs sabotage our Holy Teachings, blow up our pathway to Higher Consciousness, explode our hearing the call and demand of truth, love, kindness, mercy, justice and compassion that is constantly being sent from Mount Sinai, is the constant refrain of God daily.

We are not powerless over the “piety that at times is evil in disguise”. We do not, as many have, turn away from religion. We do not have to worship the evil that these pious people are spewing, we are not at the mercy of evil piety. We can and must stand up for what is right and good in our religious teachings, what is right and good in the philosophical teachings of Eastern Religions, what is right and good in the teachings of Higher Consciousness. We are able to stand up and reject the Christian Nationalists and the White Supremacists, we are able to vote these treasonous people out of office and impeach them from our courts. We are able to stand up and with the truly pious people who seek togetherness, who seek rapprochement, who seek to fulfill the words of the prophet: they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks (Isaiah 2:4); we are able make these things happen once we realize these ‘pious’ charlatans do not speak for God, do not speak in the name of religion, only speak in the name of their own power, their own greed, their own narcissism.

In recovery, we are well aware of the dangers of being too pious, too fundamentalist, too extreme in either direction when approaching life. We know we have to have a discipline to follow, a routine to live by and never engage in living routinely, never follow blindly our discipline. We are witnesses to the call of a power greater than ourselves and the response of the human spirit to be more than we ever believed possible. We testify to the wonder and awe of “living these principles in all of our affairs”.

I am in awe of truly pious people, people who live the principles of faith everyday. These people are not necessarily ‘religious’ and they are pious. They immerse themselves in the morality and decency from the Bible that has been adopted by societal norms and live into them. I am also aware of the people who hide behind their piety, to do evil. I have experienced both and, of course, been both. Each day, I am more and more aware of how I have used piety to be evil in disguise less and less over the years and how I have enhanced my using my piety to do good, to help, to serve. Very few of us are pious all the time without a tinge of evil, our challenge is to lessen those times and increase the times and ways we use religious teachings/higher consciousness to serve other than to be served. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Living Rabbi Heschel's Wisdom - A Daily Path to Living Well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 64

“The greater the man, the more he is exposed to sin. Piety is at times evil in disguise,, an instrument in the pursuit of power.” (God in Search of Man pg. 370)

The prophets of Israel called out how the ruling class kept getting greater and greater wealth and power which proves Rabbi Herschel’s teaching above. The more power, the more one is “exposed to sin”. The challenge here is the same challenge that Cain faced when in Genesis God said to him: “Sin couches at your door, it desires you much and you can master it”. Throughout our history, this challenge continues to be unmet by many of the ‘great men’. Prior to the flood in the Bible, we are told in Genesis Chapter 6: “Men of renown saw the daughters of men who were pretty and took as wives all that they chose”. Since the Bible was written/given at Mount Sinai, not much has changed and herein lies the trembling awe we all need to experience through immersing ourselves in the first sentence above.

Rabbi Heschel, along with Rev King and so many other clergy and people were calling out to us about the exposure to sin that people were subjecting themselves to each and every day through prejudice and fear, anti-semitism and hate while patting themselves on the back for their ‘I have a Jewish friend, I have a Negro friend, etc.’ We have seen throughout history what happens when people get to be greater and powerful without a sense of duty, a sense of owing, a sense of service and a sense of calling to care for those who are in need, those who are strangers, those who are poor. We become subjects of dictators, authoritarians, Tzars, and everyone is susceptible to falling into this trap as they gain some modicum of power, some recognition of fame, some taste/seat of power. Be they clergy who preach for their glory and not God’s, be they politicians who serve the special interests who have bought and paid for them, be they business people who believe they can do no wrong, even benevolent dictators fail to realize how much more sin they are exposed to as we climb the ladder of success.

We are seeing the truth of Rabbi Heschel’s brilliance above come to life in Supreme Court dealings. Justice Thomas is hearing cases where his wife has a stake and a claim to, where his wife has been outspoken about. Be it legal or not, this is a case where he should recuse himself and would demand a more liberal Justice recuse themselves, yet he has become so great in his role, in his mind, that he is not able to see “the greater the man, the more he is exposed to sin” in his own life. We watch how Jim Jordan has ‘rolled up his sleeves’ so he can investigate, impeach and impugn the integrity of good  people with whom he disagrees, all the while denying his role in a fiasco at Ohio State University. He is unable to see his own hypocrisy while pointing out the false hypocrisy of another(s). Kevin McCarthy is willing to sell his soul, his dignity, his integrity for the power of the Speakership because he has been exposed to so much sin, it has overwhelmed him. Mitch McConnell can criticize Donald Trump days after another one of Trump’s idiotic behaviors, yet when he could have impeached him, he said NO, if Trump is the nominee in 2024, McConnell will support him! Rob Schenck, the evangelical minister who worked so hard to influence the Supreme Court conservative Justices to overturn Roe, to support Hobby Lobby, and other conservative/controlling issues had an awareness of how great his exposure to sin was/is and is doing his amends out loud and teaching us how insidious greatness can be and how dangerous it is to be overexposed to sin.

We are being called by Rabbi Heschel to stand up for truth. Rabbi Heschel, Rev King, Rev Barber, Rabbi Shulweis, Rev Mark Whitlock, Pastor John Pavlovitz and decent good people in and out of power, in and out of the pulpit, in and out of the ‘C’ Suites of business and Institutions are calling to and for our souls so we can change the exposure to sin that we experience. We are being called to search our inner lives and find the subtle ways sin has infiltrated our way of being by disguising itself as holy. We have the examples of how easy it is to buy into the false gods of people who are in or want to be in power. We have the consequences of what happens when “evil flourishes” because “good men do nothing”  and we have the heroics of the prophets of Israel and our modern day prophets like Rabbi Heschel, Rev. King, Mother Teresa, et al. The call is for us to answer our exposure with more love, to rebuff sin with more service, to use our power to make our corner of the world better not just our own life.

In my recovery I am constantly on guard for the sin that I am exposed to, just as everyone else in recovery is. In retrospect, I realize how, at times, I bought my own press and acted in negative ways that I saw as good, my sight was blinded by my unawareness of my exposure to sin in the moment. I am sad and sorrowful for the actions I took while under the unwitting and unknowing exposure to sin that I was in. I also am aware of how often I exposed sin that was, at first, disguised as good/holy in my own being and the beings of another(s). I am also acutely aware of how unpopular this is, as Rabbi Heschel, Rev King, knew and Rev Barber is experiencing. I know hat remaining humble, remembering I get to serve God and humankind, constantly exposing the darkroom of sin to the light of goodness helps me live in wonder, awe and joy. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark.

Living Rabbi Heschel's Wisdom - A Daily Path to Living Well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 63

“The greater the man, the more he is exposed to sin. Piety is at times evil in disguise,, an instrument in the pursuit of power.” (God in Search of Man pg. 370)

These words make me tremble with awe and fear. The first sentence above is so true and we are usually so oblivious to this truth. It is scary to ponder the myriad of ways we all fall prey to our experience of greatness, to our experience of exposure to sin and how we succumb to both our greatness and our sins.

Each of us has within us greatness, each of us live our greatness out loud, even those who feel ‘less than’. Our insecurities, our foibles, our sureties, all lead us to either proclaim our greatness and/or proclaim our unworthiness. Both sides of this coin lead us to sin, because both are only one side of our beingness. When we are stuck in our insecurities, when we are trapped in our feelings of ‘less than’ many of us wear it as a badge of dishonor and this exposes us to the sin of unworthiness, the sin of never enough, the sin of not living our divine Image out loud. Many people revel in their victimhood and blame everyone else for their ‘lot in life’. When we only identify with our traumas, when we only identify with our insecurities, we expose our self to the sin of shame, blame, we give up our power and become enslaved to the names we call ourselves, the ‘place’ another(s) put us in and settle for table scraps rather than taking our proper place at the table of life. When we are in this ‘less than’ way of being, we are denying our infinite worth and unique dignity, thereby proclaiming that when we were created, God made junk! This way of being/thinking exposes us to sin.

Of course, on the other end of the spectrum, those who achieve greatness, those who achieve power, those who achieve stature are exposed to sin because it is easy for us to believe our own press. Great people have to be on guard against thinking they know what is right and good in any and every situation as this leads us to become more and more oblivious to what is good and what is not good. When we are living into our greatness, living into our power, we are susceptible to forgetting the truth of Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom above. As the Ramchal said in his forward to Path of the Just, precisely because something is true and everyone knows it, we become oblivious to it. When we are in power, be it as a parent, a child, a teacher, a clergy person, a politician, a businessperson, a doctor, etc; we have to be constantly aware of our increased ability to fall into sin.

Just as Moses was held to a higher standard because of his leadership position as were Aaron and Miriam, so too are we who are leaders, parents, bosses, medical professionals, government workers, judges, senators, Congresspeople. Yet, we are witnessing the results of what happens when great people are oblivious to the sin they are exposed to and the sins they succumb to. “Because I say so” is not an effective way to parent, it is not teaching anything, it is only exerting power for the sake of power and we see the negative effects this has had on our children throughout the generations. Yet, we continue to act this way, not realizing the sin of callousness and fear we are exposing our self to and exposing our families to. Children who rebel rather than individuate are unaware of the sins they are exposed to by their rebellion, they are seeking escapes from their situations rather than learning the tools to go through the essential pain of growing up. This has led to a drug epidemic that is roiling our people. Doctors who have bought into the lies of Big Pharma and helped to make us an “Addiction Nation” as Timothy McMahon King has authored, are oblivious to the sin their power as Doctors exposes them to and how they have veered away from their Hippocratic oath.

We are in need of taking the blinders off, we are in need of gaining insight to the sins we are exposed to each and every day-both in the world and in our own inner life, in our own inner dialogue, in our own thoughts. We are in need of becoming more aware and sensitive to “the more we are exposed to sin” each and every day. We need to stop believing the lies we are telling our self, we need to discover the myriad of ways we succumb to obliviousness and the soul-crushing patterns of knowing truth and living falseness.

In recovery, we adhere to the phrase “more will be revealed” and seek to uncover the lies we tell ourselves and become more aware and sensitive to the sins we are exposed to daily. We no longer deny our greatness so we can bathe in the waters of denial, we no longer surrender to our fears and our false egos. We engage in living more authentically each and every day by removing the barriers we have constructed that have led us to live out of proper measure and use our God-given/natural traits to harm self and another(s). In recovery, we seek to make amends to the world for our obliviousness to our greatness and our obliviousness to the sins we have been exposed to and succumbed to.

OY! I have so much inventory to write and ponder about the first sentence above! Immersing myself in these words of wisdom leave me in trembling awe. More tomorrow, God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Living Rabbi Heschel's Wisdom - A Daily Path to Living Well

ife Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 62

“It was not the lack of religion but the perversion of it that the prophets of Israel denounced. “Many an altar has Ephraim raise, alters that only serve for sin”(Hosea 8:11).”(God in Search of Man pg. 369)

Today is Pearl Harbor Day, 81 years ago we were attacked by the Japanese and brought into World War II. World War II was the result of the perversion of religion, the perversion of truth, the worshiping at the altar of sin/power. One would think that we would have learned from this decimation of land, countries, people and we seem to have not. Rabbi Heschel is, hopefully, disturbing our comfortable way of being a perversion, upending the mendacity of our belief we are worshiping at the altar of God, at the altar of Higher Consciousness, at the altar of truth. And, I fear that his words and wisdom will continue to go unheeded by so many of us.

We all find “altars that only serve for sin” to worship at. Be it our need to be right, our need to have power over another(s), our cancer of prejudice, our bastardization of freedom for all, our false interpretation of holy texts, etc, we find ways to pervert the truth and the love that we are born with. It is a difficult task to align ourselves with principles of truth, love, kindness, compassion and mercy when we are faced with opportunities to ‘get ahead’, pathways to riches, roads to blame another for our circumstances, and we need to tear down these altars we are worshiping at so we can stop living in the various fears that run our lives.

To do this, we have to begin with our self, our inner self, our authentic self. We have to return to our basic goodness of being and let go of our false needs. We have to discern what is an authentic need and what is an erroneous desire, what our inner truth is and what our inner gift is. In Deuteronomy, Moses address the whole Israelite people, from the chiefs of the tribes to the water carriers, teaching us that we all have a place and a calling, a gift and a demand that is no better nor worse than another’s, we are not judged by our job, by our social status, by our wealth. We are judged by our goodness, by our truthfulness, by our kindness, by our show of mercy, by our compassion. We are constantly being called upon to be human.

Yet, we are prone to surrender to our perversions of truth, to the persuasive perversions of truth by another(s). We are not suffering from a lack of direction, a lack of inner wisdom, a lack of spirituality, we are suffering from the perversion of all of these gifts. We are not in need of more knowledge, we are in need of using our inner knowledge more. We are not in need of more resources, we are in need of using our resources well. We are not in need of more______, we are in need of using what we have and who we are in service of another(s), in service of God, in service of our humanity.

We are unable to fulfill our authentic needs as long as we engage in perverting our authentic needs into desires for fame, fortune, power, irresponsibility, escape, etc. We are in desperate need of ending our perverted ways, our false and half truths, our eye disease of prejudice, our inauthentic need of needing a ‘bad guy’ to blame. We are being called upon to ‘circumcise the foreskin of our hearts” and to no longer give lip service to truth, to articles of faith, to closing the door on people who challenge us. We are being reminded of how easy it is to fall prey to falseness and to perversion. The people who yell the loudest about how “those people” are ruining our country and causing all the ills that befall us, are the true perverts, the real offenders that Rabbi Heschel and the prophets rail against. We have to stop listening to the loudest voices and begin to listen to the “still small voice” of God, Higher Consciousness that is inside of us.

In recovery, we put on “a new pair of glasses” as Chuck C teaches us so that we can learn to be in acceptance of what is. We learn to engage with our inner life, to see through our third eye, to acknowledge what is, what was and what can be and the path to travel to grow along spiritual lines. We learn to accept and welcome the stranger, to embrace the newcomer as our way of worshiping the principles of kindness and mercy. We learn to tell the truth to and about our self as a path to loving ourself and being compassionate with our self so we can do the same with another(s). In recovery, we are recovering our ability to be human once again.

The foreskin of my heart grows back when I am not careful and diligent about being open, being truthful, being aware of the perversions that I am capable of. I continue to rid myself of the lies and the inauthentic notions that creep up on me. I delve into my inner life each and every day to learn more, to be more authentic, to let go of the false needs that have defined me in the past. Each day I begin with gratitude and learning. Each morning I wake up excited for what I will learn today. Each day my soul wrestles with my mind and emotions so I can stay away from the “altars that only serve for sin”. Each day, I remember Hosea’s call to stop whoring myself, I remember what it says in the Book of Numbers: “don’t scout after your heart and eyes and whore after them”. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Living Rabbi Heschel's Wisdom - A Daily Path to Living Well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 61

“It was not the lack of religion but the perversion of it that the prophets of Israel denounced. “Many an altar has Ephraim raise, alters that only serve for sin”(Hosea 8:11).”(God in Search of Man pg. 369)

Living with Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom disturbs my conscience and, I hope, yours. The truth of his brilliance is unassailable and, when we take it seriously, we get to constantly see our actions, our inner life in the light of these truths. The sentence above is haunting because we are forced to see our actions in light of the perversions of action by ourselves and another(s).

Listening to the questions and statements of some of the Supreme Court Justices in yesterdays arguments about an anti-discrimination law in Colorado is an upsetting experience. I thought of Rabbi Heschel’s dismay when a professor from Berkeley said “the “natural population increase in Vietnam is larger than the number of people killed.”(Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity, Appendix II). He used this as an example of the dehumanization of humankind and Justices Alito and Gorsuch also used dehumanizing phrases to speak about humans and laws to ensure that there is not discrimination based on race, creed, religion, sexual orientation, etc. These Justices were trying to ‘be funny’ in comparing teaching about the laws of anti-discrimination to the ‘re-education camps’ of Communist China and speaking about black children wearing Ku Klux Klan outfits! What a perversion of our Constitution and the Bill of Rights!

One of the former Presidents of the United States calls for terminating the Constitution and members of his party are afraid to criticize him soundly and loudly. These same people speak about their love of flag and country, they call themselves conservatives who want to conserve and preserve the old status quo. They want to preserve white rule, they want to continue to ensure that white people have the power even though they are not in the majority, sound familiar? Again, these so-called libertarians are perverting the Constitution and Amendments that have formed this amazing experiment called democracy for their own gain.

It is not the lack of the rule of law that we are facing, but the perversion of it in our country and across the globe. Putin has tried to use ‘the rule of law’ to validate his invasion of Ukraine, Hitler tried to do the same with Austria and Czechoslovakia, we used it to decimate the native American population. We seem to be able to pervert so many of the good and holy foundations that are at the base of our existence with no apparent awareness of what we are doing.

The human need to validate doing the wrong thing is so powerful, it is blinding us to truth and to make the changes that Rabbi Heschel calls for in our inner and outer living. We pervert healing through Big Pharma’s need to make more and more profits. We prevent helping the poor and the needy through business’ belief that they serve their shareholders and not the public. We pervert politics through our belief that winning is all that matters. We pervert communal living by discriminating against ‘people not like us’. We pervert the words and brilliance of the Hebrew Bible by trying to clean up the bad actions of our heroes. We prevent the Gospels of Jesus by extolling power rather than kindness and compassion. We pervert the will of God by taking advantage of the stranger, the poor and the needy. We pervert our higher consciousness by using our rationalizations to assuage our bad actions. We are perverts in so many aspects of our living and we point the finger at another without realizing that three fingers are pointing back at us!

In recovery, we are constantly striving to stop perverting truth, kindness, compassion, mercy, and love. We are quite aware of our prior bad acts and how we did and/or tried to pervert everything we did to make ourselves right and not have to change. In our recovery, we seek to “practice these principles in all our affairs” and we know that recovery is not about a substance or process, it is about how we live in concert with our higher consciousness, our higher ideals, with our higher power.

For the past 34 years I have strived to not pervert that which is holy and good. I have stood up for the stranger and the needy, the poor and the orphan and I still know that perversion seeped into my actions whenever I got too full of myself. For this I am so sorry and I have spent these years working to sift out the dross of my being. I realized early on in my recovery and in my studies, the truth and wisdom of Rabbi Heschel’s teaching about “immersing ourselves in the thoughts of the Bible” which has led me to put myself in each and every chapter, see each and every character of the Bible in my reflection of my self and understand viscerally the ways the Bible gives us to rise out of the quicksand of perversion, selfishness, greed, mendacity and self-deception. This is how I am able to recognize and repair the perversions I still, unwittingly at the time, commit. This is the way I am able to use religion to enhance my living rather than use it to pervert my life and the lives of those around me. God Bless and Stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Living Rabbi Heschel's Wisdom - A Daily Path to Living Well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 60

“It was not the lack of religion but the perversion of it that the prophets of Israel denounced. “Many an altar has Ephraim raise, alters that only serve for sin”(Hosea 8:11).”(God in Search of Man pg. 369)

Rabbi Heschel’s teachings give us great insight into our self, into our motives and into our inner life. Our challenge is to read them, hear them in our souls and make the necessary changes so we can stop the perversion of religion, end the mendacity and self-deceptions that seem to rule us as individuals, families, communities, countries and our world. Yet, we seem to be incapable of this type of introspection, this path of change.

The prophets railed against the leadership, they called out the priests and the wealthy, they spoke to the people and no one truly heard. It is a wonder that their words are preserved and studied and it is a tragedy that the essence of their message still goes unheeded. One can hear the cry of Rabbi Heschel in all of his teachings and especially in the sentence above. We can  hear his incredulity at our inability to heed the ancient wisdom of the prophets, we can hear his deep sorrow that we are still perverting Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Eastern Philosophies, etc. Yet, we still turn a deaf ear to the cries of Rabbi Heschel, to the call of the prophets and find ourselves deeper in the morass of religious perversion.

There was an article in the LA Times yesterday about the NONEs, the people who identify as having no religion and vote democratic because of their morality. This is in contrast to the Christian Right movement that votes republican, usually. Both of these groups are guilty of of the truth Rabbi Heschel is speaking. Where do the NONEs think morality came from if not religion? Where do the Christian Right find justification in making the poor, the stranger, the needy into criminals and enemies in the Bible? Both are perverting the beauty, the wisdom, the kindness, the truth, the justice and the love found in our holy texts. Both groups and other groups as well as individuals have given into ‘group think’ and seek justification through perversion of religion, for their unholy actions, for their confounding of good and evil. Yet, many human beings continue to engage in such perversions to the ruin of us all.

Religion is spiritual at its essence and one of the perversions is to separate the two.

Many people differentiate between spirituality and religion and this too is a perversion of religion, as I experience both. As one of our teachers, Rabbi Jonathan Omer-man, explained, spirituality enhances religious life and religious life enhances spirituality when we are engaged in both without our need to pervert either one. When we are ‘being spiritual’ there is a religious overtone to this way of being because we are acting in accordance with our higher consciousness, we are participating as partners of God, we are bringing our best selves to improve our standard of living and the standard of living of everyone around us.

We have perverted religion in so many ways as Rabbi Heschel teaches. One of the ways is through what Rabbi Heschel calls religious behaviorism, where our behaviors and rituals take the place of inner devotion and are devoid of meaning. When we are so concerned with getting the ritual correct we miss the opportunity for our inner being to be changed and for it to grow. We become automatons and follow the rules by rote rather than immersing ourselves in the Mitzvah, the commandment. This is exactly what the prophets denounced and, 2000+ years later, we are still following the example of what led to the destruction of the Temple and the wandering of the Jewish people. All faiths and spiritual disciplines have a very vocal minority that want to continue in the perversion of religion/spirituality while believing they are the “true keepers” of the faith!

In recovery, we know one of our character traits that is out of proper measure is our ability to pervert truth, to claim adherence to spiritual principles and to God’s will all the while really just doing what we want and wrapping ourselves in the cloak of spirituality and God. This is why we are constantly seeking to have the self-deception and mendacity removed from our being and “trudge the road to happy destiny”. It is a slog at times because we are so accustomed to our lies, to our perversions of truth, perversions of religious and spiritual principles it takes great awareness to acknowledge them and let them go.

I have been hyper-aware of the perversion of religion and been accused of doing this throughout my Rabbinate and recovery. I have to admit that there have been times where I was guilty and I did/do my T’Shuvah and get one grain of sand better each day/time. I also know that my immersion in text and in life, in religion and in spirituality is authentic and different than anyone else’s. I realize the prophets were not telling the people nor are they telling us that there is only one way to worship God, one way to fulfill our calling, they were saying stop doing the ritual perfunctory and put one’s soul into the actions. I am grateful for the teachings of Rabbi Heschel that help me be more me, not perfect person, each day. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Living Rabbi Heschel's Wisdom - A Daily Path to Living Well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 59

“Even more frustrating than the fact that evil is real, mighty and tempting is the fact that it thrives so well in the disguise of the good, that it can draw its nutriment from the life of the holy. In this world, it seems, the holy and the unholy do not exist apart, but are mixed, interrelated and confounded. It is a world where idols may be rich in beauty, and where the worship of God may be tinged with wickedness.”(God in Search of Man pg. 369)

Immersing oneself in these words, hopefully, causes all of us a great deal of angst. The prophets railed against the truth of the last sentence above. Yet, even today, we are not horrified by our the fact that our “worship of God may be tinged with wickedness”. We celebrate this truth, unfortunately, and we are either oblivious to this truth or willfully blind to this truth.

Being a student of history, Rabbi Heschel is telling us to, as God told Abraham, “lift up your eyes and see”. He is speaking to everyone who wants to believe that they are pure in their worship of God, pure in their religious behaviorism, pure in their self-righteousness. Rabbi Heschel is reminding all of us to not be so sure of ourselves, not be so quick to pat ourselves on the back for standing with God and take a serious inventory of our actions, our motives and our self-deceptions.

We are in a grave crisis of faith today, as we have been throughout the ages. Yet, it seems as if we haven’t learned from our history nor have we grown closer to what God is demanding of us, to be human. We are worshiping lies, deceptions, wickedness in so many ways, they are too many to count. We are believing that God wants us to punish people who are different than we are, we are believing God wants us to spread rumors and innuendos about people who are not of ‘our tribe’. We are believing the deceptions of another(s) as permission to treat people who are, supposedly, different than us like the Egyptians did, like the Romans did, like the Tzars did, like the Nazis did. We are worshiping authoritarians and following their leads and calling it godly.

There is no place in the worship of God for not caring for the stranger, for not helping the needy and for treating people as less than human. The founding fathers of the US knew this and went against their truth when they decided that Blacks were 3/5’s of a person. Peter Stuyvesant went against this truth when he discriminated against Jews, our government went against this truth with their immigration quotas and we, the people, continue to deny this truth with our treatment of immigrants on an inhumane level. Yet, we continue to wrap ourselves in Flag, Country and God all the while tinging our worship with wickedness and being willfully blind and/or oblivious to this truth.

Watching what is happening in the world and in our country brings great sorrow and anguish to people of faith who work hard to not tinge their worship of God with wickedness. It is heartbreaking to see the lies, the cruelty with which we treat one another and pass this off as being ‘good christians, good jews, good muslims’! Yet we continue to do this. In fact, the people whose “worship of God may be tinged with wickedness” are the loudest at pointing out everyone else’s flaws, they accuse everyone not like them, not of their ‘tribe’ of the very crimes they engage in daily. For all of our ‘advancement’, for all of our technological and scientific progress, we are woefully stunted in our spiritual life. We seem to be unable to end our idol worship, we seem to be unwilling to stop tinging our worship with wickedness, we seem to revel in our thirst for power and are unashamed to use God’s name and bastardize God’s way for our own aggrandizement.

In recovery, we let go of our need to be sure of our selves. We become WHO we are meant to be: willing, honest and openminded to new ideas, to the truth of spirit and to living the principles of faith and the principles of God. We are so aware of our willful blindness and our obliviousness through our inventory and our daily practice of spiritual growth. We know we have to let go of our need to control and our need to force another(s) to our way of thinking. We have to pray for the clarity and the compassion to greet all people with kindness and love.

Living with this wisdom of Rabbi Heschel causes me great angst and great hope. I know how easy it is for my “worship of God to be tinged with wickedness” and I strive each day to remove a little more wickedness from me. I will never be 100% pure in what I do each day, I will never be free of ego and my negative inclination. I have and continue to use  both of these powerful energies to serve God more than to serve me a little more each and every day. I do not see another(s) as less than me nor here to serve me, I am aware that each and every human being has infinite worth and dignity and is different than me, by design. This truth allows me to celebrate the differences and join with another(s) to make our corner of the world a little better today than it was yesterday. It allows me to rise above my horror and sadness, my helplessness and powerlessness to make changes in me, assist another(s) to make changes in themselves so we can all “worship God” with a little less wickedness. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Living Rabbi Heschel's Wisdom - A Daily Path to Living Well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 58

“Even more frustrating than the fact that evil is real, mighty and tempting is the fact that it thrives so well in the disguise of the good, that it can draw its nutriment from the life of the holy. In this world, it seems, the holy and the unholy do not exist apart, but are mixed, interrelated and confounded. It is a world where idols may be rich in beauty, and where the worship of God may be tinged with wickedness.”(God in Search of Man pg. 369)

The last sentence of this piece of Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom may be the most chilling of the entire paragraph. Rabbi Heschel is reminding us of the biggest challenge to our humanity, to our living a life that is compatible with being a partner of God. How do we live in “a world where idols may be rich in beauty” and still stay faithful to God, to truth, to love, to kindness, to justice, to compassion?

We are being confronted, as we have always been confronted, with idols that disguise themselves as being holy, that confound us by looking so beautiful, so rich in meaning, and so appealing in their seductiveness. We are constantly being bombarded by the messages our minds want to hear, that our conform to our hearts’ desires and they lure us into actions that are antithetical to God’s will, to decency, to equality, to freedom.

We have put people and ideas on pedestals and come to worship them rather than find ways to fulfill the ideas/paths of ethical living that comes from our Holy Books, be it Torah, New Testament, Koran, Eastern Philosophy, etc. We live the words of the philosopher Tevya in Fiddler on the Roof: “when you’re rich they think you really know”. We are no longer following God, spirit, higher consciousness, we are following the idols of wealth, power, prestige and beauty. Look at how many ‘stars’, celebrities have been born because of instagram, Facebook, tiktok, and other social media sites. We no longer are interested in following the great minds of our time, the wisdom of our ancestors, we are too engaged in following the idols of wealth and beauty, the idols of power and prestige. We are so interested in following and becoming these idols that we sell our souls to get our “five minutes of fame”.

We are so obsessed with beauty, with riches, with power, with idolatry that we seek to deny and defy truth when it is spoken. We are willing, as we see each and every day, to follow what is shiny and fun rather than focus on what is good and needs to be enhanced. Our media follows the flashy news of negativity rather than the dull news of decency. Our schools teach us how to get ahead and be successful through money and fame, not how to be successful at being human. We have let go of the seeking to separate the holy and the unholy, we have let go of discerning the evil from the good. We are more interested in what is ‘cool’ than in what is right. This is not a new problem, as I stated before, it has, however, reached a level where our freedoms are in grave danger. 

We are so blinded by the beauty and the riches of today’s idols that we see good where there is horror, we defend evil in the face of kindness, we care for the rich and the mighty rather than the poor and the stranger. We are so deaf as to be unable to hear the call of the needy and instead hear the call of mendacity and deception. We are so engaged with the idolatry of worshiping beauty, riches, power and prestige we step on the people who we need to do the work we are unwilling to, we trample on the freedoms of anyone who gets in our way and defend our actions by saying we believe in a god that rewards beauty, riches, power and prestige otherwise ‘those people’ wouldn’t be in such straits. We continue to worship at the altars of the idols who believe anti-semitism is good, racism is just, white christian nationalism is the only way!

The major way of being that we recover in our recovery is truth, justice, kindness, love, compassion. We are acutely aware of our need to believe in a power greater than ourselves in order to live in recovery. We know our best thinking got us to a depth of despair and deception where we were engaged in life-taking rather than life-giving. We were living as animals thinking of our self only and what we wanted/thought was good for us. We worshiped at the altar of self and followed the idols we made and called this faith and godliness. Our recovery is based on the principles above and God is whom we worship. We keep removing blinders and ear wax that block us from hearing and seeing what truly is and what we can/need to do to serve a power greater than our self.

I sit here writing this and am guilty of being part of the “world idols may be rich in beauty”! There have been times, in my recovery, where I participated in worshiping the idols of beauty and riches, power and prestige. I even see the lies and self-deceptions I used to do this, I do T’Shuvah for this every day. I know most of my recovery is rejecting these idols, most of my recovery/daily living and teaching is about stripping away the lies and self-deceptions, uncovering the deceptions of another(s) so we all can see truth and I have not whitewash my idol worship by saying they were for the greater good. One can never sell out to idolatry for the greater good, in fact this is exactly the type of message we give our selves so we can practice this idolatry. I am stopping and I pray everyone else does also. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Living Rabbi Heschel's Wisdom - A Daily Path to Living Well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 57

“Even more frustrating than the fact that evil is real, mighty and tempting is the fact that it thrives so well in the disguise of the good, that it can draw its nutriment from the life of the holy. In this world, it seems, the holy and the unholy do not exist apart, but are mixed, interrelated and confounded. It is a world where idols may be rich in beauty, and where the worship of God may be tinged with wickedness.”(God in Search of Man pg. 369)

While we will never get “pure” in either our thoughts or our actions, this is left to the realm of the Angels I believe, we can and, I believe, must begin to improve our awareness of what is holy and what is unholy. We can and need to be aware of how we mix these two modes of being together and how we easily and subtly move from one to the other. As with everything in life, we have to become aware before we can change, we have to acknowledge the true challenge before us prior to being in the solution.

The beginning of our awareness begins with our letting go of our self-deceptions, the lies we tell ourselves to make our self feel good/better about our self and believing the deceptions of another(s). As Rabbi Heschel teaches, “self deception is a major disease”. When it is in the political sphere; Hitler comes about, Putin becomes a hero to White Christians, elections here become stolen and people put partisanship above caring for the stranger, the needy, the poor, etc. In this sphere, we can bring down individuals and countries through our need to lie to our self and to believe the mendacity of another(s). We are witnessing politics as war and have since the mid-1990’s, we are witnessing our court system, from the Highest to the lowest, become pawns of political and religious rhetoric rather than stand for the rule of law and the holiness of our Bill of Rights and Constitution. We have to be aware of our actions and the motives behind our actions in this realm in order to separate the holy and the unholy. We have to end the interrelationship between holy and unholy in our politics so we don’t lose this shaky, beautiful, frustrating and bright star called Democracy, that our ‘forefathers brought forth on this continent”.

This confounding of holy and the unholy never happens in the political sphere if not for it happening in the personal sphere of life. In the family we watch how parents will say “do as I say not as I do” which causes consternation and sets up ones deception receptors as ‘just the way life is’ and ‘everyone lies’, etc. We teach our children to lie and hide, to deceive and to believe/go along with our deceptions and wonder why they lie, hide, steal, from us. We teach them it is okay to deceive to protect the “family honor”; it is okay to be unholy to protect the “family honor”; it is okay to cheat in business/work to “get ahead of the competition”, etc. All of these ‘normal’, accepted deceptions we teach and practice and wonder why the holy and unholy are confounded? How far have we grown as human beings since the days of the Roman Coliseum? How do we continue to deceive our self about our spiritual growth when we continue to use religion to separate us from one another? How do we continue to believe the lies of those who tell us that our unholiness is for the the greater good? How do we follow the leader who is so flawed and so anti what our spiritual and religious texts teach us about being human tells us to? How do we continue to defend practices that marginalize people when “all men are created equal” and we “are engaged in a great civil war” for the soul of community and family?

In the personal sphere it is not okay to blame parents, teachers, religious and political leaders for our own self-deceptions, our own mendacity, our own desire to be deceived. It is time for each of us to take responsibility for our giving in to our unholiness, for our mendacity, for our glee at taking over for someone else, for causing the downfall of another so we can ‘get ahead’. We have to do a daily inventory of the lies we are telling ourselves at night and see how the lies are leading us to confuse “the holy and unholy”, more each day. We have to find the kernel of truth in these lies that make them so believable and so powerful for us and begin to let them go so we can see clearer each and every day. It is a process that is never finished and the more we engage, the more we can live into the holiness we are and the holiness we bring.

In recovery, we “continue to take personal inventory and promptly admit when we were wrong”. We have lived in the mixed-up space of unholy/holy and it drove us to drink! We found ourselves so far out of the realm of being human that we had to come back to the holy/unholy way of living and this is what our recovery is truly all about: separating the holy from the unholy and living more holiness in our everyday actions. We know that “deception of others is rooted in deception of self”.

I have been writing the lies I tell myself and counsel everyone to do the same. When I get away from doing this for too long, I find myself waist deep in mendacity, self-deception and this has led to despair, errors and being too blind, arrogant to see what was and what is. I am jolted back to seeing the lies, the deceptions of another that I believed and the self-deceptions and lies I have told myself. It is exhilarating to see truth and devastating to see the subtler ways I deceive myself. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Living Rabbi Heschel's Wisdom - A Daily Path to Living Well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 56

“Even more frustrating than the fact that evil is real, mighty and tempting is the fact that it thrives so well in the disguise of the good, that it can draw its nutriment from the life of the holy. In this world, it seems, the holy and the unholy do not exist apart, but are mixed, interrelated and confounded. It is a world where idols may be rich in beauty, and where the worship of God may be tinged with wickedness.”(God in Search of Man pg. 369)

Rabbi Heschel is reminding us to be careful and to never be so sure of ourselves, of our rightness, of our righteousness because “the holy and the unholy do not exist apart”. Yet, we find ourselves, so often, believing in our rightness and unable to hear any argument that is in opposition to what we think, what we believe. So many of us are so sure of our ability to separate the holy and the unholy and this surety, as I am immersing myself in Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom, is exactly what makes the holy and the unholy be “mixed, interrelated, and confounded.”

Confound comes from the Latin meaning “to pour together, to mix up” and one of the Hebrew words is babel, as in the tower of Babel story in the Bible. Because we have the two inclinations, as I have described earlier, the ‘good/divine’ inclination and the ‘evil/earthly’ inclination, the pouring together and mixing up of the holy and the unholy seems natural, instinctive. By this I mean, without a rich inner life, without a deep dive into our soul’s natural way of being, our minds and our desires will confuse and confound us into believing in the rightness of our actions, of our beliefs, of our surety. This mixing  up, this pouring together of the holy and the unholy is at the root of our problems/challenges to make the prophet’s words: “Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore”(Isaiah 2:4) a reality.

Abraham Lincoln in his Gettysburg address said: “a new nation dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war…”. While that was true then, it is still true today. In fact, it has been true for the entire history of humanity! Because we confound, mix up, interrelate the holy and the unholy, we are constantly at war with this basic principle of faith: every soul is precious to God, every soul is a Divine Image, every soul is a Divine reminder. The civil war that Lincoln spoke about so eloquently, is not only between people, it is within each one of us.

We have to engage with God in Search of Man not by searching for God, rather by searching for our true self. We have to engage each and every day in the search for our inner truth, for our connection to our authentic beingness. We have to stop confusing our rationalizations, our desires, our earthly desires for power, prestige, property, etc with our divine need for connection, with our divine calling to make peace with one another, to find our similarities and respect our differences. We have to engage in a spiritual discipline that allows our earthly power to be subject to our goodness. We have to cease and desist from our need to be right and engage in our need to be in connection and in covenantal relationships with one another.

We cannot do this when we are confusing the “holy and the unholy”. We cannot do this when we pour together our FOMO (fear of missing out) with our fear of being powerless. We have become subjects to and of the liars, the charlatans, the powerful by believing they like us, they are like us and they understand us. How can anyone else understand me unless we understand ourselves? How can we subject my self to another’s power until we know and understand our own power? How can we be connected to another until we are connected to our self? This is the root cause, I believe, of the holy and unholy being “mixed, interrelated, and confounded”! Nothing will change until we go to the root of the challenge, our inner life. This is the challenge I hear Rabbi Heschel calling us to, this is the demand of God that Rabbi Heschel is articulating for us in these words in this reading, on this day, in this year.

In recovery, we realize we have “undergone a profound alteration in our reaction to life;” and we are aware that we would not be in recovery without the aid of “inner resource which they presently identify with their own conception of a power greater than themselves”(Herbert Spencer-Appendix II Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous). Each and every day we are engaging with our inner life, we are engaging in the struggle between our soul’s knowing and the rationalizations of our intellect and the desires of our emotions. In recovery, we never get it perfect, we are aware of how easy it is to mix up the “holy and unholy”. We no longer hide from the challenge and we are quicker to heed the call and the demand to distinguish one from the other.

OY! How often do I confuse holy and unholy is like asking how often do I think, how often do I speak, act, etc. Yet, over the years I have seen the difference more and more, I have come to know when I am confounding myself and another, as well as God by mixing them up. I am able to distinguish one from the other in subtler ways and, while not always understood by another(s), I am unafraid to take action on the holy and respond to the challenge and demand Rabbi Heschel is articulating above. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Living Rabbi Heschel's Wisdom - A Daily Path to Living Well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 55

“Even more frustrating than the fact that evil is real, mighty and tempting is the fact that it thrives so well in the disguise of the good, that it can draw its nutriment from the life of the holy. In this world, it seems, the holy and the unholy do not exist apart, but are mixed, interrelated and confounded. It is a world where idols may be rich in beauty, and where the worship of God may be tinged with wickedness.”(God in Search of Man pg. 369)

The more I immerse myself in Rabbi Heschel’s words and the more I see the horror of human beings sink to our lowest selves, the more I experience the trembling, sadness, grief, fear Rabbi Heschel is conveying through his words and teaching. 10 years after learning of the death of most of his family, 10 years after first seeing and hearing of the almost complete mass murder of a people because of their faith, skin color, etc, 10 years after the almost complete annihilation of a city and its citizens from the Atomic Bomb, he is witnessing the same evil come alive and flourish through the same people who supported Fascism and Hitler 20+ years earlier! We are witness’ to this same animalistic, Apeman stronger than you, hate you for the color of your skin, hate you because you are a Jew (Jews will not replace us chant is alive and well), hate you because you have more than me, hate you because I deem you less than me behaviors and attitudes and so many people who can help stop this are not because hatred serves their purpose, they believe.

When we hear people invoke their faith in the service of anti-semitism, dropping bombs on innocent children, discriminating against someone because of the color of their skin, believing women are inferior to men, spewing out their evil speech in service of their prejudices, we are witnessing how evil “can draw its nutriment from the life of the holy.” I watch the news, read the blogs, see the tweets and am appalled and I am beginning to understand the way it all happens. Because of the human desire to be deceived, which is what Eve portrays in the Garden of Eden story and Adam is a willing participant in the deception, we want to believe this evil that draws power and ‘rightness’ from the ‘holy scripture’. We want to believe the deception of another(s) so we can be ‘on the right side’ of things when judgement day comes. We want to deceive ourselves into believing that God doesn’t love the widow, the poor, the orphan, the stranger and the needy. We want to believe the lies of the people who say “the rich are loved by God more and therefore everyone should follow them and when God loves you poor people because of your service to the rich, you too shall be redeemed and enriched” and other such bullshit from the ‘prosperity gospel’ of the charlatans purporting to be god’s True Messengers. To many people, it seems good that we separate the wheat from the chaff, the good from the bad; recognizing the bad are everyone who doesn’t fall into lockstep with the ‘party line’-sort of what Stalin, Hitler, Putin, Xi, Orban, Jim Jordan, etc have said and are saying.

Hmm, maybe it is time for leaders and followers to seek truth rather than popularity. Maybe it is time for us all to stand up and march to our capitals and demand we live the moral, ethical, legal and spiritual principles that are implanted within us, that we learn from the Declaration of Independence, the Magna Carta, the Constitution, the Torah, the Talmud, even Hammurabi’s Code. Maybe it is time for us to wrestle with the best ways in our day, in our time, in our situation to put these principles into practice. Taking a page from the Talmud, knowing that there is more than one way to live our principles and using them for evil, using them to deceive, using them to tempt another into doing evil is not one of them. Hmm, maybe it is time for all of us to rise up and say NO to the lies of Fuentes, NO to the silence of the GOP leadership, NO to the lies of big business, big Pharma, small people who lie to get by. Maybe it is time for all of us to look in the mirror and see how we are bastardizing the holy in favor of our own gains, in favor of expediency, in favor of getting along.

In recovery, we are so sensitive to our ability to disguise evil, to use the holy to feed the evil ways we used to practice. We know evil so well because we were to a greater and/or lessor degree practitioners of exactly what Rabbi Heschel is warning us about in the first sentence above. We search out each and every day our subtle ways of evil and take contrary action to what we think we can/should do in these situations because we are aware of how cunning and baffling evil is, we are aware of how real, strong and tempting evil is, and we know how easy it is to deceive ourselves into believing it is actually for the greater good. In recovery, we work to stay hyperaware of anything that even smells like evil and run away from these actions.

I am hyperaware of my ability to disguise evil, I am hyperaware of the ability of another(s) to disguise evil and I realize that many people are not aware of the wisdom and teaching of Rabbi Heschel above. I have been quick and loud in pointing it out about someone else, something else and I work to be as quick and loud with myself and about myself. While nothing will ever be done with 100% good, as I/we are not perfect, I strive to always make sure the evil doesn’t get too much nourishment and stays as small as I can make it and I let people know what my agenda is and work hard to serve the agenda of the WE instead of just the agenda of me. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Living Rabbi Heschel's Wisdom - A Daily Path to Living Well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 54

“Even more frustrating than the fact that evil is real, mighty and tempting is the fact that it thrives so well in the disguise of the good, that it can draw its nutriment from the life of the holy. In this world, it seems, the holy and the unholy do not exist apart, but are mixed, interrelated and confounded. It is a world where idols may be rich in beauty, and where the worship of God may be tinged with wickedness.”(God in Search of Man pg. 369)

Dr. M. Scott Peck, a psychiatrist and author, defines evil as “using the vulnerabilities of another person against them”. Using this definition, it could be clearer and more pointed as to the “the fact that evil is real, mighty, and tempting” for each and every one of us. We live in a culture of ‘one up-man/women-ship’, where anything goes as long as you win, Goebbels’ belief that we should accuse another of that which we are guilty of is rampant, Roy Cohn’s belief to never admit anything, never be wrong is prominent in our political, business and personal lives. These ways of being are tearing the fabric of democracy, of humanity and of goodness apart. I believe one of Rabbi Heschel’s concern in writing this passage, as well as the rest of his teachings, is that we have, can, do, and will bastardize so many good things and turn them evil without even realizing it. We will fall prey to those who bastardize good for their own assent to power and their desire to hold onto it at any and all costs to another(s).

We see this daily in the political rhetoric and the pundits who cover them and give the bastardization of good, the real, mighty and tempting evil that people are putting out so much air time, the rest of us don’t know what is true and what isn’t true. Our vulnerabilities in wanting to believe another person, our need to be connected to people, our faith  being true and real, also set us up for becoming part of the evil that is real, mighty and tempting. We have all ‘gone along to get along’, the people working for the Sackler Family, the administrators at the FDA, the doctors who accepted the lies of Big Pharma, all were/are part of the evil that is the Opioid Crisis! These good, outstanding citizens caved into the pressure, the money, the “offers they couldn’t refuse” and perpetrated a grave evil that has resulted in millions of people dead over the past 40+ years. Now, we are supposed to believe the same people who caused the problems, Big Pharma and Doctors, that with more pills, they can ‘cure’ a person. Lets use LSD, Ketamine, Suboxone, etc to cure the problems of addiction-and we are buying into it, we are jettisoning spiritual recovery for a quick-fix medical answer from the same people who caused the problem. I support harm reduction, I just don’t believe the panacea that the quick fixes in any area of living promise.

We see this using the vulnerabilities of a person against them when we listen to J.D. Vance, Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, etc rail about those Elitists from the East, forgetting to mention they went to Yale, Harvard, etc. When the crowds are shouting LOCK THEM UP, not realizing the liars and cheats are the elitists, the rich, the powerful who are leading the chants. Donald Trump does not know what it is to watch one’s mother try and figure out how to put food on the table and pay the rent while taking home $55-60.00/week in 1966! The advertising business is built on finding a persons’ weakness/vulnerability and exploiting it in order to get us to buy ___. It works! While it doesn’t seem harmful, it is exactly this type of evil that is so “real, mighty and tempting” that “thrives so well in the disguise of the good”.

We all are guilty of participating, initiating, enhancing, engaging in evil. We are all part of the problem and until we admit this, there is no long-lasting solution. In viewing history, I believe our inability to come to terms with our participation and engagement in evil is how we keep finding new ways to hide from it, we are making new disguises and masks for evil in order to fool ourselves! This is, I believe, the reason we have never really had a solution to the evil of war, to the evil of ‘needing to be #1, of the evil to take advantage of another’s vulnerabilities, of the evil to wield power for our own sake rather than for the sake of another(s)/for the sake of God. We can and must change this is we are to evolve into the beings we are created to be, if we are going to stop learning “evil from our youth”.

Recovery is based in “acting our way into right thinking and feeling”. Recovery is a behavioral modification way of living. It is not perfect, it is a progressive path to living one day at a time a little better than the day before. It is a path of two steps forward and one step back, it is a path of plateaus and leaps, it is a path of constantly moving forward in our quest to live one grain of sand better each and every day. It is a way of being that helps us uncover our lies and self-deceptions, our going along with the crowd to do evil.

T’Shuvah is the basis of my path of recovery, along with the 12-steps. Each day is a challenge to uncover the evil that “thrives so well in the disguise of the good” in my thinking, acting and living. It is very challenging which is why a daily inventory is crucial for me and sometimes it takes me a while to realize the evil I did believing it was for the greater good! God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Living Rabbi Heschel's Wisdom - A Daily Path to Living Well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 53

“Even more frustrating than the fact that evil is real, mighty and tempting is the fact that it thrives so well in the disguise of the good, that it can draw its nutriment from the life of the holy. In this world, it seems, the holy and the unholy do not exist apart, but are mixed, interrelated and confounded. It is a world where idols may be rich in beauty, and where the worship of God may be tinged with wickedness.”(God in Search of Man pg. 369)

This paragraph is so full of wisdom, caution, learning and thoughtfulness that I am going to spend a while on it. Beginning with the first part of the first sentence, “evil is real, mighty, and tempting” is something that we have to first acknowledge to be true. I am defining evil as ‘acting in opposition to God, acting in opposition to what is good, kind, just, merciful, truthful, loving, etc. Many people want to accuse another human being of being evil, many people want to denounce an action as evil, and they are not in the awareness of how real evil is, they use it as an adjective rather than a noun, they use is as an adverb rather than a verb! Rabbi Heschel is teaching us, once again, that evil is both a noun and a verb as well as an adjective and adverb. Without this recognition, we will find ourselves pointing our fingers elsewhere and not noticing the evil that is real, mighty and tempting in each of us.

Jewish Tradition speaks of two natures/inclinations that every human being has, the “good/divine” inclination and the “evil/earthly” inclination. I learned about divine and earthly inclinations from Rabbi Harold Kushner and I believe they are better descriptors. Jewish Tradition also says, “the good/divine inclination is good and the evil/earthly inclination is very good!” What a paradox for all of us, how can “evil/earthly” inclination be very good? Because the evil/earthly inclination is, as Rabbi Nachman bar Samuel bar Nachman says the name of Rabbi Samuel bar Nachman: “were it not for the Yetzer Hara (evil/earthly inclination), a man would not build a home, or marry a woman, or have children, or engage in business(Genesis Rabbah 9:7). When we believe that someone else is evil and someone else is wrong, when we go to paint another as the source of all evil, the source of everything bad, we are deflecting from looking at our own misuse of our evil/earthly inclination! We are projecting our own evil actions onto someone else so we can feel good about our self. Every spiritual discipline, every religion acknowledges “that evil is real” and we all possess the capability of being evil, as Christ says: “let he who is without sin/evil, cast the first stone”.

We also deny the strength of evil and the temptation for evil because evil also gives us power, we believe. We have seen throughout history how evil has tempted good people to do very bad things. After watching the “U.S and the Holocaust” documentary by Ken Burns, one is able to see how anti-semitism led America to halt the immigration of Jews seeking asylum from Nazi Germany and Eastern Europe leading to their death in a myriad of ways in Concentration Camps, being shot in the streets, burned in pits, dying in the forest, etc. While most people would not call Breckinridge Long evil, he was. He allowed people to die needlessly and had a cabal of willing people to go along with and carry out his prejudice. We are guilty of falling into the temptation and might of evil with our treatment of people who are not like us, ie, our prejudicial attitudes towards African-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, Jews, Muslims, Irish, Italians, etc. We have made the stranger feel unwelcome here in America for a very long time, in direct opposition to the words on the Statue of Liberty. While many of us have not actively engaged in this evil, we have been either indifferent to it, passive about it, and/or went along with it so we could get along.

The evil Rabbi Heschel is speaking about, in my opinion, is so insidious it goes unnoticed. It is the evil that we perpetrate each and every day in the ways we talk about another person, another group, the ways we are going to “kill the competition”, the path to “getting higher ratings than anyone else”, the demonizing of someone else, some other group in order to feel good about our self, our group. Our need for power and fear of losing it leads us to evil actions and becoming evil. We are easily tempted to evil as God says in Genesis 8:21, “the inclinations of the human are evil from their youth”, yet knowing this we blame our own evil on another, we wrap ourselves in the false flag of nationalism, of liberty, of conservatism, of liberalism, etc so we can deny the truth of God’s statements in Genesis and our own real-life experience of our selves!

In recovery, we are on a mission to turn our evil inclinations away from satisfying them and gratifying them with joy and glee. Our mission is to use the energy of our evil/earthly inclinations to create new ways to be of service rather than use old ways of demanding, stealing, intimidating another(s) to be of service to us. We engage with our inclinations to resist the temptation and the seemingly magnetic pull of evil to serve it and, in contrast, use our evil/earthly inclination to serve the good.

I have turned from serving my own evil/earthly inclination over these past almost 34 years while not losing the energy, sight, creativity and power of my yetzer hara. I am not perfect and I have indulged my evil/earthly inclination too much at times and these times have been fewer and farther in-between! God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Living Rabbi Heschel's Wisdom - A Daily Path to Living Well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 52

“Modern man may be characterized as a being who is callous to catastrophes. A victim of enforced brutalization, his sensibility is being increasingly reduced; his sense of horror is on the wane. The distinction between right and wrong is becoming blurred. All that is left to us is our being horrified at the loss of our sense of horror.”(God in Search of Man pg. 369)

The last sentence above is the as terrifying as the previous three if not more terrifying. Are we “being horrified at the loss of our sense of horror”? I think this is a very serious and open question for each and every individual and we have to ask our self how we and where we have lost our sense of horror. When I would pass the homeless Vets encampment by the VA Cemetery in Los Angeles, I was horrified at the ways we treated the people who fought for our freedoms, the people we sent off to war as innocent young people and brought them back with physical injuries, moral injuries and spiritual injuries and then left them to live on the streets? How can one not be horrified? Yet, so many people have blamed the Vets themselves as they do with all of the homeless, ‘it is their fault’, ‘get a job’, ‘stop using drugs and alcohol’, ‘take your medication’, etc. is our response ignoring our responsibility for and in making this problem. As Rabbi Heschel teaches: “in a free society, some are guilty, all are responsible.” We have shirked our responsibility by blaming someone else for whatever is ‘wrong’ in our world. We have stopped “being horrified at the loss of horror” because we blame someone else and thereby take no responsibility for the problem nor the cure! How horrifying is this?

I heard a Congressperson say the other day, “I am elected by my district to do what is in their best interest AND in the best interest of the country.” These are the words of one who realizes how callous we have become to catastrophes, how our “sense of horror is on the wane”. When I listen to people blaming the victims, as some are doing in the latest tragedies-‘what were they doing there anyway’ ‘those drag queens are groomers so if people were there they were groomers or being groomed’, and other such poppycock from people. While it is true that people shoot people, no one is horrified that we have had over 600 mass shootings in the United States this year? No one is horrified enough to take action about any real gun control. In 2018 there were more registered guns in the US than people in the Census! When we add in the illegal guns, OY! Yet, we hear from legislators, from the NRA, from Clergy that owning a gun is a good thing, shooting innocent animals on a ranch is fun, it is a right in our Bill of Rights, etc. While the founding fathers did not want the states to feel totally at the will of the federal government so we did not set up another scenario like with King George in England, they certainly did not mean for people to carry a gun in order to shoot anyone they felt like! Nor, since we have meat processing plants now, do we need to use a gun to kill animals for food. Yet, we make excuses for not stopping the proliferation of handguns because we have ceased to be horrified by what is going on in our country, we have become inured to horror, blind to the brutalization, and so callous we are not even aware of the catastrophes that happen all around us.

We no longer have to be dull and boorish, we no longer have to be callous and insensitive, we no longer need to stop being horrified by what is happening all around us. We need to wake up, we need to heed these words of Rabbi Heschel and we need to end our descent into evil. We do this by no longer using the vulnerabilities of another person against them, we no longer blame the victim, we no longer blame ourselves for caring, we no longer take advantage of another person just because we can. We stop exploiting people for our own gain, we stop deceiving them and climb out of our self-deception. We engage in living life with wholeness, kindness, goodness, and spread these principles throughout our daily activities.

As we say in recovery, living by spiritual principles, one day at a time we continue to grow and move closer to a truer way of being. We practice the principles of decency, kindness, holiness, truthfulness, honesty, open-mindedness, justice, acts of loving-kindness in all of our affairs. We follow the words of the Prophet: “Love Mercy, do Justly and walk in the ways of God”. This is our response to the negativity and evil we perpetrated on people before we came into recovery, before we discovered that we are responsible and we are capable.

I have been ill for the past couple of days so I have been inside watching TV and I am horrified by what has happened and the responses by some. I am heartened by the response of the heroes who came to the rescue, including law enforcement. I have been horrified at what is happening for a long time, I have been watching callousness, brutality and reduced sensibility be validated by godless imposters who wear the cloth of clergy, I have watched in horror the lies from leadership about why doing something about the proliferation of guns will not help, I have been totally struck silent by the lies of the dull and the boors that almost 50% of Americans believe. I keep writing, I keep speaking, I keep praying, I keep sending money and other support to places that are attacking our societal ills with loving kindness. I know everyone reading this attacks our societal ills in your own unique manner and I am grateful for this as well. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Living Rabbi Heschel's Wisdom - A Daily Path to Living Well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 51

“Modern man may be characterized as a being who is callous to catastrophes. A victim of enforced brutalization, his sensibility is being increasingly reduced; his sense of horror is on the wane. The distinction between right and wrong is becoming blurred. All that is left to us is our being horrified at the loss of our sense of horror.”(God in Search of Man pg. 369)

As we celebrate Thanksgiving today in light of the latest shooting in Va., it is time for us to stop lying to ourselves and one another about what is right and what is wrong. We have been blurring the distinction between right and wrong for the millennia and we have to stop engaging in this mendacity, in this idolatry. We can no longer call ourselves free people, decent people, people of faith while blaring these lines for our own benefit. The Gun Lobby, the people spewing hatred and lies about the elections, about another person’s sexual orientation, religion, etc are attempting to blur this distinction between right and wrong so they can stay in power, they can have control, they can be #1 in the land. How sad, how sick, how horrible. Yet, we continue to buy into the lies of these charlatans, we continue to give them the ‘cover’ of free speech. Riling people up to commit gun violence is not free speech-it is inappropriate speech. Re-writing history so the Native Americans look like the villains when we were taking their land, re-writing history to make it look like the slaves traders from Africa were doing the African’s a favor by enslaving them, is so beyond the pale and, yet, Ron De Santis and Greg Abbott are selling this horse manure and millions are shoveling it into their psyche!

What are we grateful for? Are we grateful that our “sensibility is being increasingly reduced:”, that we are becoming more and more callous to these mass shootings, some put the number this year at over 600 so far this year! Are we grateful that we can escape from the horror of our actions and the actions of people around us by sitting with family and friends today and have an oasis in the midst of the chaotic goings on in our world today? Are we grateful for blaming the Jews for killing Christ and sending space lasers to cause the landslides in Malibu as Marjorie Taylor Greene says. Are we grateful for blaming Muslims for all the problems we are facing today? Are we grateful we can blame LGBTQ+ for a myriad of catastrophes? Are we grateful that can blow off our sense of horror by blaming our actions, the actions of blurring right and wrong on someone else!

What are we grateful for? Are we grateful for our ancestors who, since Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue, risked their lives so we can live free? Are we aware of the horror of American First and their defeat during the WWII? Are we aware of myriad of people who believed the words on the Statue of Liberty and, because they had courage and hope, we are living in America? It ain’t perfect and, we are better than most other countries. I am an American and my father fought in WWII, he never really spoke about it, and on Thanksgiving, he was always grateful to be an American. Are we grateful enough to be an American that we take on the responsibility of caring for those “yearning to breathe free”? Are we grateful enough to be an American that we open our doors to another human being like the doors were opened for our ancestors? This is where the distinction between right and wrong is getting the most blurry. We have forgotten to return the favor, repay the debt that was taken on by our ancestors when they arrived on these shores, we are all immigrants, we are all strangers, we are all needy and we are all poor, this is our heritage, this is the roots of our being able to be an American so who are we to deny this same opportunity to another person in need, another person “yearning to breathe free” as our ancestors were?

What can we be grateful for? We need to be grateful for our ability to discern right from wrong, we need to be grateful for the many gifts we have been given, the most precious of all being freedom, living in a country that believes “All men are created equal” and extending this to women as well. We need to be grateful for our ability to let go of and take off our hard-skinned shell that we have kept on out of fear of being hurt, we need to be grateful for connection and love that we share with one another. We need to be grateful for our ability to sing praises to God, to people, to sing the song of our own soul in a country that gives us the sound stage which to do this. We need to be grateful for our desire to make our corner of the world a little better than when we found it, we need to be grateful to be able to live without brutalizing another human being anymore.

In recovery and in my life in recovery, I am grateful beyond words for the gifts I have received. Some of these gifts are the gifts of returning to family and friends after being callous and brutalizing, the gifts of love and connection with people I have been able to help and touch, the gifts of being the brother I always could be, the uncle I was wanting to be, the son my mother needed me to be, and the father Heather wanted and needed. Also, I learned how to be a husband and how to love unconditionally from Harriet Rossetto. I am grateful to Rabbi Heschel for impacting my life in ways I can’t even express and I am grateful for and to all of you for reading and being on this journey with me. God Bless and Stay Safe, Rabbi Mark