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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 244

“We must learn how to endow “the good drive” with more power, how to lend beauty to sacred deeds. The power of evil can be consumed in the flames of joy.” (God in Search of Man pg. 385)

Two more paths to joy are found in the teachings of the first teaching of Chapter 4 of Pirke Avot, “Who is mighty, one who subdues their evil inclination” and “who is rich, one who is happy with what they have”. We all have within us the strength to “subdue their evil inclination”. “Subdue” comes from the Latin meaning “to draw from below” and one of the dictionary definitions is: “bring under control”. Contrary to popular belief, Ben Zoma, a 1st and 2nd century sage, teaches us that might does not come from the exercise of power over another individual, it doesn’t come from standing on the mountain top and beating our chests. Rather might comes from our ability to “bring under control” and “draw from below” the power of the evil inclination to “endow the “good drive” with more power.”

Living into Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom above, we acknowledge the pull of the evil inclination, we engage in a practice of prayer, meditation, study to recognize the deception of society in ‘rewarding’ power for its own sake, for ‘winning’ through hatred, authoritarianism, fundamentalism, and to examine our own self-deceptions that our egos and minds bombard us with. We then are able to use the power of our both inclinations to subdue/“bring under control” our negative inclination and use it for good. We are not being told to kill it, we are not being told to live in some fantasy nirvana, we are not being taught to deny our urges, we are being given a path to living in joy knowing we are bringing our disparate parts of our inner life closer togethers. When we are able to be mighty, when we use our inner strength to engage our negative/earthly inclination to do the next right thing, to serve one another, to speak truth to power,  we are living into joy. It is not impossible, it is not too tall of an order, it is a discipline we engage in through a slow and steady process. We have the sight, the insight, we have to need to engage with this part of our being a little more each day and we will find the joy Rabbi Heschel is speaking of.

Being “happy with what we have” is not about the material wealth or lack thereof in our lives, it is not about settling for less than we are, it is not about not growing and learning; it is teaching us, I believe, to actually and truthfully see who we are, what our talents are, what our gifts are, how we can serve self, God and the world around us. It is a dive into our inner life, a coming together of our two inclinations to serve our spirits, our souls calling. It is a path to enjoying who we are, no longer apologizing for being alive, not being imprisoned by the mendacity of society, no longer subjecting ourselves to the abuse because we are ‘different’. Rather we wear our ‘differences’, our uniqueness openly and proudly. The Talmud teaches that we all have infinite dignity and worth, no one is more  or less dignified nor worthy than anyone else, and each of us is a unique individual-similar and unlike anyone else. Reb Zuysa taught: “On judgement day if they ask me “why were you not more like Moses” I will be unafraid. If they ask me, “why were you not more like Zuysa, I will have no answer.” It is our duty to be more of who we are created to be, it is a path to true joy while not always being happy. It is a hard life that is in opposition to societal norms, mores. Just as Rabbi Heschel’s teaching above goes against “conventional wisdom”, so too do we have to let go of our inclination to follow the crowd, go along to get along; we have to stand for who we truly are, we have to find and live into our authenticity, our true selves. This leads us to joy, to “bringing under control’ our negative urges and is a daily discipline.

In recovery, we are taught that our recovery from our addictive ways is based on our daily spiritual condition. We need to continue to grow our surrender to truth, our letting go of the lies of our egos, rational mind, no longer seeing ourselves as ‘better than/less than’ ‘net worth=self worth’, etc. We get to nurture our “good drive” and live into the joy of using our “evil inclination” to endow our goodness with even more power, more strength, more wisdom, more acceptance, more truth, more love. This is “God-consciousness”, a “spiritual awakening/experience” that those of us in recovery get to and need to experience each day.

I live into these teachings, I do ‘bring under control’ my evil inclination for the most part, I transform it to serve the “good drive” a little more each day-not perfectly, I still allow it to control me at times. And, I am happy with who I am, I accept all of me and I see the truth of who I am and each day live a little more authentically than the day before. It isn’t pretty most of the time and it is me. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 243

“We must learn how to endow “the good drive” with more power, how to lend beauty to sacred deeds. The power of evil can be consumed in the flames of joy.” (God in Search of Man pg. 385)

“The power of evil can be consumed in the flames of joy” is a fascinating thought to me. We are, as we always been, witnesses to the the power of evil being joyous to those who engage in it, and this teaching of Rabbi Heschel’s takes this experience and turns it on its head. I hear Rabbi Heschel calling to us to delve into where joy comes from and having an authentic experience of joy. Joy comes from trust and faith in the goodness of the universe, according to some spiritual definitions, it is, I believe and in my experience is defined in Ethics of our Ancestors, a tractate in the Talmud, Chapter 4 Mishnah 1: Who is Wise? One who learns from everyone. Who is Mighty? One who subdues their evil inclination. Who is honored? One who honors everyone. Who is Rich? One who is happy with his beingness.(my interpretations).

The joy that comes from learning from everyone; is our ability to remain teachable, to stay right-sized, to be open-minded and to be humble. Since evil is the opposite of these ways of being, it is crucial to unpack and live into them in order to overcome “the evil drive”. When we are open-minded and teachable, we continue to deepen our inner knowledge of what the next right action is in each and every experience of living. We are unafraid to ask for help, to get advice, to bounce our thinking off of a trusted friend, guide. We seek out mentors and become mentors to another(s), we are aware of what we know and, just as important, what we don’t know. We let go of our need for certainty and realize the only certainty is being uncertain, we come to realize if we are 100% sure, we must be missing something.

Staying right-sized is the basis of our being humble. Being humble is not being lowly, it is not being ‘less than’, it is not being a doormat. Being humble, according to the Bible, as I understand it, is recognizing our inherent worth, embracing our unique talents and gifts and living out God’s call to us, living into the “divine need” we are created for and being a “divine reminder” for everyone we encounter, as Rabbi Heschel speaks about in his interview with Carl Stern. “Moses was the most humble of humans” we learn in the Torah and he was not a shrinking violet. Jesus taught “the meek shall inherit the earth” not because being meek is the same as timid, just as humble is not the same as denying who we are. Both of these descriptors remind us that being teachable, open-minded, right-sized and humble represent our surrender to God, our joining with the power of the universe in moving our world to being a more perfect place for everyone. These two descriptors bring us into the paradigm of joy, a way of being alert, aware, and responsive to the call of the Ineffable One, the call of our souls, the sublimation of our “evil drive” to enhance and move our “good drive” forward. The paradigm of joy doesn’t eliminate our “evil drive”, it consumes it, I believe, into the promotion of the “good drive”.

The challenge for all of us is to integrate our thirst for certainty with our acceptance of always being a learner and never ‘knowing it all’. We are so used to misunderstanding words and notions, going along with the ‘usual’ ways words are used, we miss the authentic experiences of joy that comes from living an integrated life, of living a life where joy consumes our false need for power, where joy consumes our mendacious need for control, where joy consumes our self-deceptions and desires to deceive another(s). Being wise, as defined above is a first step, it is a surrender to something greater than ourselves, be it God, Higher Consciousness, the force of the Cosmos, however you define this power. We move along the continuum of joy, from being ‘joyous’ for our evil actions/our ‘wins’ at the expense of another(s) towards our merging our will with God’s will, our egos with our souls, our rationalizations with what is for the greater good of self and everyone else when we begin and continue to move ourselves towards being wise.

Recovery is a very important path to becoming wise because it requires the surrender I write about above, it causes the “power of evil can be consumed in the flames of joy” to become a reality, at moments. And the more into recovery we are, the more these moments happen. It is not nirvana nor utopia, it is the daily slog of using our spiritual and religious texts and teachings to enhance our ability to be teachable, it is constantly learning new lessons, new insights from the texts we hold to be important and life changing, be it the Bible, the Big Book, Rabbi Heschel’s writings, St. Francis’ prayers and writings, etc. We all need to be in recovery to being wise. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 242

“We must learn how to endow “the good drive” with more power, how to lend beauty to sacred deeds. The power of evil can be consumed in the flames of joy.” (God in Search of Man pg. 385)

“To endow “the good drive” with more power” begins with immersing ourselves in our inner life and wrestling with the seemingly opposing forces of our intuitive mind and our rational mind, our soul and our rationalizations/calculations. The teaching above comes from the chapter titled: How to deal with the Neutral and I hear Rabbi Heschel calling to us to stop deceiving ourselves that we can be neutral about anything. While, “I don’t have a dog in this fight” is a common statement, Rabbi Heschel is asking us to look deeper inside and see how ‘neutral’ is harming us and those around us. The sentence attributed to Edmund Burke: “evil flourishes when good people do nothing” is playing loud and clear in our world right now, whether in the Ukrainian War started by Russia for no good reason and called a “territorial dispute” by Ron DeSantis, the “culture wars” the Republican Party is waging on voting rights, civil rights, “all men(people) are created equal and endowed with certain unalienable rights…, their attachment to racism/racist ideology and/or thinkers, their uncompromising certainty that they are right and that white is right.

All of the wars that are being fought in our political arenas, on the world stage, can be traced, I believe by living into Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom above, to our inability, unwillingness to engage in the inner battle to endow our “good drive” with more power.” Instead of seeking to “lend beauty to sacred deeds” we are calling the ugliness of conflict, the spewing of vile homophobic words and actions, the anti-semitic actions of painting swastikas, wearing swastikas, denying the Holocaust, calling ‘walking while black, driving while black’ a crime punishable by possible death, shooting people because they walk up to the wrong address, etc sacred deeds! This is how distorted we have become because rather than engage in the wrestling with our seemingly opposing forces we deceive ourselves that the bad is good, that hatred is love, that prejudice cures the “cancer of the soul” and makes our “eye disease” healthy. We see this lack of engagement in the actions of people who are on the other side of the spectrum, standing up for “the right causes” and then going along to get along with their neighbors, their ‘country club’ friends, etc. Some of the same people who stand up for the marginalized are members of exclusive clubs and blackball  anyone they don’t like/think is inferior to them and/or keep the fee structure so high most people can’t join; all the while patting themselves on their backs and one another’s back for helping ‘those poor people’.

Engaging in the internal battle is helped by prayer when we use prayer, as Rabbi Heschel teaches, to raise up our inner life, to feed and mature our soul. We “endow “the good drive” with more power” when we engage in study of our Spiritual texts in order to better understand the ways our “evil drive” infiltrates even our best thinking, the ways our “evil drive” seems so logical, etc. We engage in prayer, study, meditation so we can learn how to hear our higher consciousness, our soul’s calling, our intuitive knowing better and stronger. We need to look at ourselves as we go about our day, from the moment of awakening with gratitude for being alive, being able to serve God, serve humanity, to meditating on the gifts and talents we have making a commitment to use them for good today a little more, making the corrections we need to for yesterday’s errors as well as amends to those we have harmed. We welcome the stranger, help the needy, feed the poor inside of ourselves as well as the people we encounter. We see our neediness not as weakness, rather as an opportunity to connect with a power greater than ourselves and with another human being who can help, we see the poverty of the spirit as well as the material and raise up our own spiritual poverty with community, we see the ways we have been unwelcoming to the parts of our self that we see as strange, how we try to hide from it and hide it from everyone else and we, instead, see how our ‘inner stranger’ is actually a gift from God that is our unique image of the divine and has a sacred purpose and beauty.

I am a grateful recovering Alcoholic and recovering criminal with a pure soul, as Rabbi Twerski taught me to say. I am grateful because without these addictions, I might never have engaged in the inner wrestling that has changed my life and continues to change it. I had the inner war forever, that’s one of the reasons I turned to alcohol for relief, I just didn’t have a way to resolve it, to deal with it, to “endow “the good drive” with more power” than the “evil drive”. Through living Jewishly and in recovery, I do with all my imperfections. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 241

“We must learn how to endow “the good drive” with more power, how to lend beauty to sacred deeds. The power of evil can be consumed in the flames of joy.” (God in Search of Man pg. 385)

On this July 4, 2023 as we celebrate 247 years since we left being subjugated to the King of England, since we declared “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Although the signers were themselves holding people captive as slaves and unable to see their incongruences, this is an imperfect example of Rabbi Heschel’s teaching above, I believe. They endowed “the good drive” with the power to know what is true and right in the God’s world, in the Spirit of the universe. They lent “beauty to” the “sacred deeds” of freedom, of liberation from tyranny, of the lies of false hierarchy. The writers and signers of the Declaration of Independence differed on different parts of it and what we have here is the compromise that could get passed and signed by the Continental Congress. It is an example of how to work together to begin a process since freedom is a journey and, while we call July 4, Independence Day, it is, actually Liberation Day. We liberated ourselves from King George and England, we were not yet (nor are we, unfortunately, now) free.

I am using the Declaration of Independence as an example because of the words and sentiments expressed by these words. “All men are created equal” was an outrageous term 247 years ago, as it is now for many people who are authoritarians and those who worship these modern-day King Georges. While they forgot they were treated black people as less than, they forgot that women were their equal as well, they endowed “the good drive” with enough “power” to not fight one another and acknowledge the truth that “all men(people) are created equal” by God, not by some fiat of humans. God endows us with “certain unalienable rights” and this statement, while not followed up with actions towards all, is how they moved their “good drive” forward enough to see truth, to state truth even though, as is the case with all of us, they couldn’t act on these truths for the good of all people.

We are still an “imperfect union”, we are still not moving the needle forward enough, we are still not endowing our “good drive with more power” to transform our “evil drive”. We are still deceiving ourselves and one another with the mendacious words ‘this is what Christ taught’, this is the will of God’, as we watch people in power use their power to subjugate anyone who is not ‘like them’. A twice impeached, twice indicted ex-president is leading the Republican Party polls for the nomination in 2024! Supreme Court Justice, Clarence Thomas, bases his rulings on “getting the libs”/revenge, another, Samuel Alito, thinks hanging with rich people who have cases coming up to the Court is cool and he doesn’t need to recuse himself even though he would reprimand a lower court judge for doing this, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Barrett all forgot their pledges under oath to not overturn precedents because of their religious/political bias’ and use their ‘understanding’ of the thoughts of the Founding Fathers to give the “evil drive” more power and call it “the good drive”. We are witnessing prejudice against LGBTQ+, black people, Jews, minorities and poor people from leadership in our government and, tragically under the guise of the Rule of Law! What is amazing is the amount of people who are being adversely affected by these charlatans, these authoritarians, these idolators who support them, who clap like trained seals at everything they do, who empower them to be more and more despicable; they are like the Egyptians who followed Pharaoh into the sea, the Germans who followed Hitler to death, etc.

Being in recovery is living into Rabbi Heschel’s words above, it is truly living into the words of the Declaration of Independence. Our recovery is “one day at a time” for the rest of our lives, I believe. It is steeped in learning how to “endow “the good drive” with more power” and “how to lend beauty to sacred acts”. The first “sacred act” for me and many of us in recovery is our gratitude for being alive today, which causes us to commit to “endow “the good drive” with more power” to do the next right thing, to live a life of decency, service, love, kindness, letting go of resentments, allowing the hurts, the betrayals, the errors we commit to serve as teaching moments instead of anger producing ones. We have committed to asking God for help, asking for and taking the advice of another(s) and being grateful for each and every day. We are committed to being one grain of sand freer each day through living the spiritual principles of recovery, of religion, of God and moving from a moment of liberation to the paradigm of freedom-no matter how shaky it may seem. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 240

“We believe that the ego can become converted to a friend of the spirit. “The evil drive” may become the helpmate of “the good drive.” But such conversion does not come about in moments of despair, or by accepting our moral bankruptcy, but rather through the realization of our ability to answer God’s question.”(God in Search of Man pg. 384/5)

“The realization of our ability to answer God’s question” occurs when we truly immerse ourselves in God’s words to us through our religious/spiritual texts and quests. Using the last three commandments, we find the questions and “our ability to answer” them.

The 8th commandment asks us to look at ourselves and find the areas of living where we steal. While most people see do not see themselves as thieves, it is essential to ask ourselves when do we steal from ourselves. We steal from ourselves through not giving ourselves credit for who we are, for not living our unique talents and gifts in everyday life. We steal from ourselves when we ‘settle’, when we go along to get along, when we deny our inner truths in favor of our rationalizations, when we continue to live in the mental cliches and notions that society, family, and ourselves find ‘easy’ and ‘normal’. We steal from ourselves when we are so immersed in our ideologies/‘clubs’ we are unable to see life from any other perspective, we are unable to learn new and different ways, we are afraid to be inclusive and we live in the physical, emotional, mental prisons of our own making.  We steal from another(s) in many of the same ways, we steal from another(s) by being lazy, by not sharing our truths, by not confronting evil and making evil seem good, by being exclusive and shutting people out, by forgetting the good another(s) has done and judging people by their last bad action.

The 9th commandment demands we stop “bearing false witness” against ourselves and another(s). It is a call to stop lying to ourselves, stop lying about ourselves, stop lying to and about another(s). We “bear false witness” when we deny our strengths and our weaknesses, when we blame another for our errors (as Adam did in the Garden of Eden story), when we refuse to admit our errors and call them good-using the “evil drive” to overpower our “good drive”. We “bear false witness” when we accuse another(s) of that which we are guilty of-the Goebbels style of living. We “bear false witness” whenever we are jealous of someone else and complain about our ‘bad luck’ or their ‘good luck’. We “bear false witness” when we engage in “senseless hatred” of one another and cause the destruction of freedom for someone ‘not like us’. While this term is usually used in racial/ethnic terms, we also participate in “senseless hatred” every time we ‘need a bad guy’ and when we practice exclusion of another(s) in our clubs, our identity politics, etc. We “bear false witness” when we bastardize the word of God for our own needs, desires, gains.

The 10th Commandment calls for us to remediate our errors of the previous commandments by acknowledging what we have and who we really are. It calls for us to stop coveting and start realizing, enjoying and living the life we have rather than the one we want. We respond to God’s call of this commandment when we lay down our defenses, when we join with one another to make our corner of the world better, when we no longer need to blame and shame another, when we are grateful in deed and word for the gifts we have received, when we bless rather than curse our neighbors and friends, when we make peace where there is strife, when we engage in conversation rather than warfare, when we stop “keeping those people out” and start inviting everyone in-when we acknowledge our “big table” as John Pavlovitz teaches, when we open our “big tent” as Craig Taubman does at Pico-Union Project, when we “erase the margins” as Father Greg Boyle has done at Homeboy Industries.

Ultimately, “the realization of our ability to answer God’s question” is what recovery is steeped in. We are recovering our realization and our ability to respond to what God wants rather than what we think we want/need. We “turn our lives over to the care of God” as an acknowledgement of our “realization of our ability” and we “practice these principles in all our affairs” is our action of responding rather than reacting. I, like everyone else, am imperfect in the actual responses and I, like so many of us in recovery, seek progress rather than perfection. It is painful when I am fail “to answer God’s question” because of my awareness of my ability and doing T’Shuvah-whether I am forgiven or not-allows me to grow and be one grain of sand better today than yesterday. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 239

“We believe that the ego can become converted to a friend of the spirit. “The evil drive” may become the helpmate of “the good drive.” But such conversion does not come about in moments of despair, or by accepting our moral bankruptcy, but rather through the realization of our ability to answer God’s question.”(God in Search of Man pg. 384/5)

Throughout history, humanity as denied it’s “moral bankruptcy” which makes Rabbi Heschel’s teachings so important. We are in the throes of “moral bankruptcy” today in our country and in the world. We are still suffering “moments of despair” from the pandemic, its aftereffects, because of our political turmoil, family turmoil, and our inability “to answer God’s question.”

“Where are you”, the first question God asks in the Bible, still resounds in the universe, is still being asked by God and we humans are still hiding! Like Adam and Eve, we use our knowledge of good and evil to shame another(s), blame another(s), unwelcome the stranger, ignore the poor and the needy, mistreat anyone who is ‘different’ than we are. Rather than realizing and accepting “our ability to answer God’s question”, we deceive ourselves and one another as to what God’s questions are!

Immersing ourselves in the last 5 of the 10 Commandments and taking/making them personal, we hear God’s call and questions to us: How are we murdering our souls and the souls of another(s)? What are we doing to uplift our spiritual life, how are we honoring our spiritual knowledge and the spiritual knowledge of those who we see as “not like us”? We have an opportunity to engage the energy of our “evil drive” in the pursuit of living well, of helping another(s), of mastering the negativity as God taught Cain. Rather than emulate Cain, isn’t it time for us to emulate Moses? Isn’t it time to accept our ability to rise above our pettiness and pride, our need to conquer and destroy the spirit, the ‘will’, the lives of those who are different than us by divine design? Isn’t it time to accept and live into our “ability to answer God’s question” by curing the “cancer of the soul” we suffer because of our prejudices, our fears, our need for certainty and our need to win?

The 6th Commandment tells us not to commit adultery, not to prostitute ourselves. Prostitute comes from the Latin meaning “offer up for sale”, in the Book of Numbers, we are told not to commit adultery/prostitute ourselves by “scouting out after our heart and our eyes which we will whore after.” God’s call question here, I believe, is to not “offer ourselves up for sale” anymore because of expediency, in order to “get ahead”, “be accepted”, gain power/gain access to powerful people, etc. Rather than act as the Priests of Israel and Judea did prior to their destruction, we have to ask ourselves how we are ‘selling out to the highest bidder’. We get to ask ourselves how we are so selfish and self-centered that we are willing to dig ourselves deeper into the well of despair, continue to engage in moral bankruptcy all the while deceiving ourselves and another(s) that we are answering God’s question, that our manipulation of spiritual truths is ‘for the greater good’ and ‘for god’. The small “g” I use here is to denote that selling of ourselves for some idolized version of God we have created to feel good about ourselves.

The 11th step of AA commits us to living a life of constant growth in our awareness of God’s question, consistently growing in “knowledge of God’s will”. God is not parochial, God is not the possession of any one spiritual discipline and/or religion. God cries when the Egyptians are drowning because, as the midrash teaches, God says: “My children are dying, my children are dying”! “Continued to seek through prayer and meditation” is the beginning of the 11th step and commits us to grow along spiritual lines, to increase our capacity  to realize our “ability to answer God’s question” and stop our self-deception. Our recovery is steeped in “the realization of our ability to answer God’s question” and our need to continue our search for new ways to do this.

I have been guilty of almost murdering my soul and the souls of another(s). I have been cast as the “outsider”, “the other”, “the chaos maker”, etc. I have been vilified for being me so someone else can be their false self! I have also helped to save my soul, the souls of many, I have answered God’s question to me: “Where are you, by saying Hineni, here I am-and when I have been wrong, “promptly admitted it”. I have, for the most part, not sold out, not given in to despair, not manipulated the spiritual truths and wisdom nor deceived another(s) for my sake, in my recovery. I continue to grow my “ability to answer God’s question” through this blog, my prayers and my actions. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 238

“We believe that the ego can become converted to a friend of the spirit. “The evil drive” may become the helpmate of “the good drive.” But such conversion does not come about in moments of despair, or by accepting our moral bankruptcy, but rather through the realization of our ability to answer God’s question.”(God in Search of Man pg. 384/5)

The last sentence above describes a basic truth that we have known forever, yet, most people forget and/or are willfully blind to. While “moments of despair” and “accepting our moral bankruptcy” are very important experiences in our spiritual journeys, they are not the moments of conversion. They are the moments of awareness of our need to make the conversion that Rabbi Heschel is calling us to and they don’t make the conversion happen. These “moments of despair” and “accepting our moral bankruptcy” can and should make us aware of seeking “to answer God’s question” and they are not the answer nor are they our “realization of our ability to answer God’s question.”

Affirmative Action is, I believe, a remedial response to the racism, the exclusion of black people from our institutions of higher learning. It is and has produced more equity and equality in the admissions process of our Colleges and Universities. It has educated white people about the effects of our exclusionary past, it has changed attitudes as well as attitudes of many who were willfully blind to the ways exclusion has ravaged our morality, our spirits and our progress towards living well. It is a ridiculous statement from these ‘good christian folk’ to say we have or should have a “colorblind” society. Since God created us in so many different colors with a myriad of spiritual paths, not recognizing our differences and celebrating them, not learning from and with black, asian, hispanic, Jew, Christian, Muslim, Buddhists, etc is an affront to God and ignoring one of “God’s question”: Ayecha, where are you and MiHu, who are you. Does this decision also end “legacy” admissions, does it end “paying to get in with large donations”? Will it end Brown v Board of Education? Will it pave the way to teach the rewritten history of white men as Ron DeSantis is doing in Florida? Will any religion be allowed or only Christianity since these same people believe America is and should be a “Christian Nation”?

We are in desperate need of the “realization of our ability to answer God’s question” today as we have always been. The decisions by the Supreme Court in overturning precedents, in promoting a way of being that harkens back to our darker days of history, all point out our moral bankruptcy, our ignoring history, causing more “moments of despair” for people who are not White Anglo Saxon Protestants(Christians). These decisions and the actions of those in Congress who believe Trumps statement about “good people” who chant “Jews will not replace us”, who spout the ‘party line’ that Jan.6 was a peaceful demonstration of patriotic Americans, are all “moments of despair” and examples of “our moral bankruptcy”. These are not political decisions, these are not about adhering to some religious tenet, these are decisions and actions that go against our spiritual nature, that feed our “evil drive” and make “our ability to answer God’s question” almost impossible to achieve. We are in the throes of leadership who are co-opting people to follow them through feeding their “evil drive” and promoting “the evil drive” as the “good drive”-the most mendacious and deceptive activity of humankind. While their mendacity is ‘understandable’ what We, the People, have to do is end our self-deception and stop allowing our “good drive” to “be a helpmate” of our “evil drive.”

In recovery, after our “moment of despair”, our acknowledgment of powerlessness, then we “come to believe that a power greater than ourselves can restore us to sanity.” Once we realize that we need help and seek that help from the Spirit of the Universe, we turn our lives over to this Spirit to guide us and direct us, we travel into the depths of our being and clean out the schmutz and reveal the beauty and bright shiny light of our souls. For the rest of our lives, once we are in recovery, we are constantly seeking and responding to “God’s questions” through prayer, meditation, action and service.

“The realization of our ability to respond to God’s question” has been with me since the end of 1986 when I surrendered to God’s will rather than my own ego. It was not in despair that this happened, it was in a “moment of clarity”. I have been responding “to God’s question” to the best of my ability and I know there have been times when I misheard “God’s question” and was blind to what was needed from me by another(s). I continue to hone my “ability to respond” to the call of people and God that call to me daily. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark   

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 237

“We believe that the ego can become converted to a friend of the spirit. “The evil drive” may become the helpmate of “the good drive.” But such conversion does not come about in moments of despair, or by accepting our moral bankruptcy, but rather through the realization of our ability to answer God’s question.”(God in Search of Man pg. 384/5)

In the New York Times on June 28, 2023, Tish Harrison Warren writes about “a consistent ethic of life”. While I don’t agree with her and Cardinal Joseph Bernardin that “a “whole life” ethic entails a commitment to life “from womb to tomb”, I do agree in our necessity to have “a consistent ethic of life.” In order to accomplish this way of being, we have to stop separating and bifurcating our ethics, our morals, our spiritual/religious into ‘personal’, ‘business’, ‘religious’, ‘political’, categories. This separation and bifurcation is an example of how “the evil drive” subverts “the good drive”, how “the ego” is the enemy of “the spirit “without our awareness. Many ‘good people’ live in these and other separations unwittingly, they are aware of these categories and believe it to be ‘the way life is’, instead of bringing “the ego” into a friendship with “the spirit” and making ““the evil drive” become the helpmate of “the good drive””.

In Jewish literature, the Talmud, we learn of the necessity of “the evil drive” in Tractate Yoma 69b. It tells the story of imprisoning “the evil drive” for 3 days and they could not find a fresh egg! Our “evil drive” is not our enemy, it is given to us by God to motivate us and to work under the guidance and direction of our “good drive”, yet when we are living a bifurcated and separated life, “the evil drive” controls “the good drive” and we buy into this self-deception, we wrap ourselves in some cause, some charity work, some ideal and live the lie that we are in control, that what we do is good and right. This is the cunning of “the evil drive”, this is how “evil flourishes when good people do nothing” because we believe we are doing something. We are doing something, giving our “evil drives” more power and enhancing the very “evil drive” that we speak against. This is happening in our religious communities, our political parties, our business’, our families, our communities, our world. We need to heed Rabbi Heschel’s call to us to stop giving “the evil drive” so much unchecked power!

We do this by looking within ourselves and seeing the areas of incongruence, the paths we take that lead us away from living an integrated, “consistent ethic of life”, knowing that life is not consistent, following the lead of the Rabbis who take God’s commandments and apply them to today’s living-not to live in the past, rather to continually expand and contract as necessary the basic foundational underpinnings of living well.

“The evil drive” gives us hope that we can accomplish the ‘impossible’ by becoming “the helpmate of the “good drive.”” In the Torah we learn about Pinchas’ zealotry and many people see this as a good thing, as ‘the way to be’. Yet a close reading, immersing ourselves in the text, can make us aware that Pinchas was going to be the High Priest anyway upon the death of his father Eliezer, his ‘reward’ is actually God helping him tame his unchecked “evil drive” and make it serve his “good drive” by helping people return from their own errors, perform the rituals of sacrifice(drawing near) for the community and the individual. Rather than rewarding zealotry, God helps Pinchas reign in his “evil drive” and use it to serve the people, not himself. We all have the opportunity to do this for ourselves with the help of a power greater than ourselves, with the help of teachers and guides. We all can be like Pinchas and make “”our evil drive” become a helpmate of “the good drive.”” We can all live a “consistent ethic of life.” We are able, we have the examples, we have the teachers and guides, are we willing?

Willingness is a hallmark of recovery. Our recovery is dependent upon our willingness to change, our willingness to accept teachers and guides, our willingness to hear the call of our “good drive”. We grow into living “ a consistent ethic of life” because we are willing to “practice these principles in all our affairs.” We know our imperfections, we “seek progress not perfection.” And we find joy and connection by being the same person, no matter the role we are in.

I am Pinchas in zealousness and in service. I live “a consistent life ethic” because I don’t separate nor bifurcate my ethics. I can’t cast someone away and tell them I still “love them” like I did before recovery. I have to be open to doing T’Shuvah and accepting the T’Shuvah of another, I have to be forgiving towards another(s) and myself. I am living “a consistent ethic of life” because I know we are all imperfect and we all can return. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 236

“We believe that the ego can become converted to a friend of the spirit. “The evil drive” may become the helpmate of “the good drive.” But such conversion does not come about in moments of despair, or by accepting our moral bankruptcy, but rather through the realization of our ability to answer God’s question.”(God in Search of Man pg. 384/5)

The goal of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and all spiritual disciplines is to make “the evil drive become the helpmate of the good drive.” As Rabbi Heschel is teaching us, “such conversion does not come about in moments of despair”. It also does not come about from the performance art of empty rituals, not does it come about from a grandiose vision of ‘the one true spiritual discipline’. Nor does it come about from an ‘instant conversion’, we are not ‘saved’ by one act, we are not able to make our “evil drive become the helpmate of the good drive” by sheer force of will. We make this happen through allowing our prayers, our meditations, our taking the next right action change our inner lives, through changing our ways of thinking, through seeking truth and standing up for truth, through sublimating our desires to what our souls know to be true, correct and acting accordingly.

Many ‘religious’ people seem to be constitutionally incapable of converting their egos to be “a friend of the spirit”. Often times, they are unaware of how the “evil drive” becomes the dominant force in their lives because it is disguising itself as “the good drive”. We witness this phenomenon and participate in this phenomenon whenever we are pointing our fingers at another group and labelling them as “the other”. We witness this bastardization whenever one religion engages in making another spiritual discipline ‘the wrong way’. We participate in this masquerade when we ignore the plight of the stranger, the poor, and the needy making them the cause of the ills of our world, as some ‘religious’ people have done with blaming everything from 9/11 to mass shootings on LGBTQ+ people. We participate and support this disguise of “the evil drive” when we are willfully blind to the basic commandment to “love your neighbor as you love yourself.” We participate and support this disguise when we are unwilling to have a conversation with those we disagree with, when we agree with the vilification of people who are being accused of wrongdoing without the benefit of the doubt, when we betray friendships and forget the good people do and define a person by what we have been told and/or perceive as their last bad action.

We are in a grave spiritual and moral crisis today. We are in a crisis of faith, a crisis of morality because we wrap ourselves in the flag, in our ‘religious’ bastardizations, in our ‘religious’ rituals and call ourselves good without taking inventory, confessing the exact nature of our errors, doing T’Shuvah in order to fulfill Rabbi Heschel’s teaching: “the evil drive may become the helpmate of the good drive.” His use of the word “may” is demanding we do the work to make this happen, he is calling out to us to learn from history how ‘good’ people stood idly by the bloods of their neighbors, how ‘good’ people engaged in atrocities against their fellow people in the name of ‘racial purity’, in the name of scapegoating the Jews in Europe in the 1930’s and 1940’s, as well as throughout history up to and including today. He is reminding us to stand against the “cancer of the soul” that prejudice against people of color causes, stand up against the denial of basic freedoms like voting rights, stand up against the subjugation of women and their bodies to the whims of men, stand for and with Godliness, stand with those who do justly, love mercy and walk in God’s ways-not the false ways “the evil drive” has convinced so many to follow.

Recovery is a spiritual path that helps us live into Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom above. We begin our journey by surrendering our false egos, not completely at first of course, and begin to believe we can change, we can transform from a being whose “evil drive” dominates everything we do to a person who, little by little, is making our “evil drive become a helpmate of the good drive.” The pathways to make this transformation take many forms and involve a deep dive into our inner life, our actions, and a commitment to change the paradigm we have been living at.

I struggle daily to fulfill Rabbi Heschel’s vision and teaching above. I have been accused of being too ego driven and, at times, I have been. Yet, through these past 35+ years I have made my ““evil drive” become a helpmate of “the good drive” much more often than not. It is hard work that is constant and joyous! God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 235

“We believe that the ego can become converted to a friend of the spirit. “The evil drive” may become the helpmate of “the good drive.” But such conversion does not come about in moments of despair, or by accepting our moral bankruptcy, but rather through the realization of our ability to answer God’s question.”(God in Search of Man pg. 384/5)

Rabbi Heschel’s words above remind me that both ego and spirit come from God, so we can use them in concert with one another as well as having them at war with one another. We have the ability to choose how they relate to one another. At issue, I believe, is our willingness to strive to being a whole person, not one that compartmentalizes our traits, our different roles, our personal life from our business life, our religious/spiritual life from our daily life, etc. Most people live bifurcated and compartmentalized lives, wearing, as Rabbi Heschel teaches elsewhere, masks that hide our true face. We engage in facades out of protection, out of fear, out of uncertainty that keep the our egos more distant to our spirits instead of them becoming “converted to a friend of the spirit”.

With the growing anger, resentment, fear of ‘the other’ we are witnessing a greater split between our egos and our spirits. With the false need to be perfect and right, we are participating in growing the split between these two entities. Hearing the calls of religious, spiritual, political, societal, and familial leaders to ‘get ahead at all costs’ we learn to imprison and tamp down our spiritual nature in favor of our egotistical ‘needs’, we become people who can wave the flag of virtue, freedom, God while destroying the spirit, the dignity, the essence of another person. Humanity has, forever it seems, been unable to sustain living with both spirit and ego, where the ego becomes the friend and helper of ‘doing the next right action’ just because it is the right thing without fear nor favor, without worrying ‘how is it going to look’, without ignoring the needs of another because of our egotistical needs.

Our world has changed greatly since Rabbi Heschel wrote these words, unfortunately for the worse. Rather than listening, heeding, his words above, rather than learning how “the ego can become converted to a friend of the spirit”, we are using the ego to discriminate, to deny the dignity of anyone we see as a threat, we use the ego to deceive another(s) into believing our version rather than seek truth, our egos accept the deception of another(s) to the point we turn on our friends, we turn on the people who have helped us, we ignore truth to feed our egos and the egos of people like McCarthy, Trump, DeSantis, et al.

Yet to think only political hacks are the ones I am speaking of would be an error. All of us need to do the work so “the ego can become converted to a friend of the spirit”. We all have our prejudices, we all “need” to feed our egos at the cost of our spirits, hence the malaise that hovers over all we do, hence the mental anguish that is so prevalent in our country, in our cities, in our families. Robert Kennedy Jr. is wrong to blame vaccines and other such lies that he perpetrates for the ills of our society, it is his ego that is getting in the way of hearing his spirit, unlike his father, who 55 years ago was assassinated for doing the work of converting his ego to be a friend of his spirit and the spirits of all people. Every individual needs a “program of recovery” for their egos and spirits to become friends again, to work in concert with one another, to rise above the masks and facades society promotes and say YES to living as a whole human being, YES to living from our souls, YES to living a life of integration.

This is what we in recovery seek, find and hone-living with ego and spirit as friends and co-workers, focusing both on the same goal-service and love. We are aware of our imperfections, we are aware of our past history where ego and spirit were enemies, and we strive each day to bring them more into harmony, more integrated, more connected so we can live with more joy, more truth, more harmony with all people, more love.

I have been working on this teaching for the past 35 years, making great strides and then falling a few steps back. I have watched the egos of people override their spirits to the point of death, physical and spiritual. I have also experienced  and witnessed the truth of Einstein’s statement: “Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.” Whenever I am told and/or realize that my ego has taken over, I return to Rabbi Heschel’s teachings, Einstein’s thoughts, and do my T’Shuvah and find ways to change. I live in much more joy when they are friends rather than combatants, when they have a conversation with one another rather than a war of wills. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 234

“As said above, one of our problems is to endow virtue with vitality. Sin is thrilling and full of excitement. But is virtue thrilling? Do passion and virtue go together?” (God in Search of Man pg. 384)

The Latin root of virtue is “merit, valor, moral perfection” and valor’s Latin root is “be strong” while the Latin root of vitality is “vital”. Endowing our meritorious actions with strength and realizing the vital nature of being virtuous is a great challenge, it always has been and, it seems, we have not learned the lessons of our ancestors nor history in pursuing actions that are in sync with being in partnership with God. Sin, missing the mark, however is a “guilty pleasure” that so many of us pursue with the strength, vitality that Rabbi Heschel is calling on us to pursue the next right action with!

We are in the throes of another era that is bastardizing virtue, that is selling us on the idea that our “guilty pleasure” of the pursuit of power, the domination of one group over another, the enslaving of a group of people for our pleasure is actually virtuous! We are witnessing people engage in willful and unwitting actions that go against doing “the next right thing”, who are unable to deal with their own guilt(the Latin root of sin), who blame another for their errors, who falsely proclaim their virtue and being misunderstood. We are watching, some of us in horror, as elected officials use the Bible, use spiritual traditions to validate their sin, their willful actions of making some people less than human! We are hearing in our Churches, Temples, Synagogues, Mosques religious leaders extol these actions in the name of God, country, their own power, etc. Our own negative natures, our baser drive is being appealed to by these actions and words, we seem to unable to rise above our baser drive to our virtuous, higher self in the onslaught of them. Hence, we unwelcome the stranger, we ‘get in bed’ with people who want to destroy us, like the Christian Nation people, we embrace those who have the same ‘enemy’ even though these same people hate us, we believe the lies of ‘the one’ who can save us from all the ills, ‘the one’ who is fighting for us, being persecuted for us, all the while ‘the one’ is out for her/himself only! We find it exciting to be “on the inside” with the haters who say they are lovers, the thieves who say they are protecting us, the power hungry who proclaim they are simpatico with us!

We are failing to be in truth with ourselves and one another. We are afraid to be virtuous because being moral, taking actions that bring us merit, staying strong for what is good and right, holy and serving God doesn’t bring instant fame, doesn’t bring instant results and we have lost the ability to appreciate our inner life and how these actions enhance our living, allow us to grow and mature our spirits as well as meet the daily challenges we encounter with grace, dignity, kindness, truth, and love.

The root of thrilling, from Middle English, is ‘to pierce, to penetrate’. We are being called upon by Rabbi Heschel to allow “the next right action” to penetrate our hard shell of false ego, the protective shield of mendacity, the willful blindness of self-deception that we have constructed, that society has taught us to build. Endowing “virtue with vitality” is the path forward for all of us, it is the path to wholeness, holiness. It is the path that our religious and spiritual disciplines show us and it is the path we have to return to. Not the path of the people who are bastardizing spirituality for profit and power, not the path of the people who are falsifying the words of our religious texts, rather the path of virtue, the path of meritorious behaviors, the path of truth, the path of kindness, the path of service. We have the power to follow this path, we have the spiritual insight to see the truth and reject these false calls of virtue at the cost of our humanity. We have to engage in piercing the veil of duplicity, the glare of deception, the shade of deflection and allow the truth to penetrate our minds, allow our spirits to override our false egos, our rationalizations, the untrue desires of our hearts and minds.

This is the essence of recovery! We are constantly seeking to change from our deceptions and the penetrations of sin, of mendacity and allow a path of spirituality, a path of wholeness, a path of imperfection, a path of joy, of service, of oneness penetrate us instead. We engage in a life-long journey, knowing there is no ‘there’ there, to be one grain of sand better each day. We have found and continue to find joy, maturity, learning and connection each day as we actively engage in rejecting the lies of our past and having the truth of spirit penetrate our daily living. It is a daily struggle for me and I know that goodness is piercing my soul, my mind, my actions at least 51% each day. I wrestle within myself and I continue to learn new meanings of the virtues I know to be true and good. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 233

“As said above, one of our problems is to endow virtue with vitality. Sin is thrilling and full of excitement. But is virtue thrilling? Do passion and virtue go together?” (God in Search of Man pg. 384)

We are in the throes of the problem Rabbi Heschel describes above: how “to endow virtue with vitality.” So many people are tired of doing the next right thing, it seems. Many of us watch with indifference what the prophets called atrocities, the everyday ignoring of how to help one another, how to live in truth, love, kindness, mercy, forgiveness, compassion. We are witnesses and/or participants in “getting ours”, ‘sticking it to the other person’, ‘winning at all costs’, etc. What seem to fail to realize is the cost of these actions to our spiritual, moral and emotional living.

When people in power send immigrants to other States with false promises, when people in power defend the indefensible acts of ‘their leader’, when everyday people blindly follow and agree with the lies and deceptions of these ‘leaders’, falsely believing these mendacities, we are witnessing and/or participating in grave spiritual injuries. Racism, anti-semitism, promoting false claims of what the Bible says, scapegoating a group, blindly following people because they are appealing to our lowest selves, are all assaults on our spirits. When these assaults come from self-proclaimed ‘spiritual/religious’ leaders, from elected officials, they carry even more weight, they cause some of us to go against our best interests and the call of our souls and of God. Because so many people fail to “endow virtue with vitality”, it is easy to commit these spiritual and moral injuries and injustices upon another(s), upon a group who is not like us, upon a world desperate for relief. Watching in horror as people abuse their power, abuse their ‘followers’, deny freedom to another(s) because they are slaves to their emotions, Rabbi Heschel’s words above are a call to action, a call to change, a call to save our self, our souls, our neighbors!

“Sin is thrilling and full of excitement” is both true and false. Sin would not be so alluring if it wasn’t thrilling and full of excitement, of course, and there is a tremendous rush that comes from “getting over”, a false sense of power and control that comes with disobeying and causing spiritual, moral injuries to our ‘enemies’. There is also a great deal of worshiping of authoritarians who proclaim it is good to sin, a great deal of agreeing with clergy who promote “hate your neighbor”, “suspect your neighbor”, in the name of God, of Christ, of Mohammed. There is a ‘high’ that comes with spreading and believing these mendacious words, there is a ‘high’ that comes with acting on the bastardizations of spiritual and moral truths, while doing the next right thing seems boring, seems stupid to so many. Of course, the authoritarian Pharaoh’s people are following enslave their followers and cause them to build false altars, worship them instead of the Ineffable One, and lead them into an Egypt of their making and, by the time people are aware of their circumstances, they are so spiritually bankrupt and spiritually injured, they don’t realize how narrow their lives have become. This is the ‘playbook’ used by Pharaoh in the Bible and it is the ‘playbook’ these charlatans/power-hungry, self-centered ‘clergy’ and ‘leaders’ are using today. As Pete Seeger asks: “when will we ever learn?”

Anne Frank wrote in her diary: “It’s really a wonder that I haven't dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.” As I immerse myself in her words and Rabbi Heschel’s words above, and in the ways I live my life since I began my recovery, I know them to be true, I use them as an antidote to the feelings and pull of “sin is thrilling and full of excitement.” I am a person who lived in the excitement of sin, the ‘joy’ of getting over, the ‘high’ of being the ‘smartest guy in the room’, the one who made fun of the people who lived virtuously and never ‘got ahead’. Of course my path led me to jail and prison, to alcoholism and loneliness, to spiritual injuries that I believed would never heal nor would I ever be welcomed back into ‘mainstream’ society. Yet, when I had my spiritual awakening, when I made the choice to turn back (do t’shuvah) to decency, to virtue, I found a drive and a thirst for doing the next right thing that equaled and has now surpassed the excitement and thrill of sin. I wake up each morning excited for what I will learn, how I can be of service, what virtue I can infuse with vitality for my self and for another(s). I am so anxious to live in virtue, I readily admit my errors, I heal the spiritual injuries I caused to myself and those that are perpetrated by another(s), I hear the mendacity of the Pharaoh’s of today, and I continue the slow journey to the Promised Land that was begun so long ago. It is a slog at times and healing my spiritual injuries is worth it! God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 232

“It is not by the rare act of greatness that character is determined, but by everyday actions, by a constant effort to rend our callousness. It is constancy that sanctifies. Judaism is an attempt to place all of life under the glory of ultimate significance, to relate all scattered actions to the One. Through the constant rhythm of prayers, disciplines, reminders, joys, man is taught not to forfeit his grandeur.” (God in Search of Man pg. 384)

These words of Rabbi Heschel are haunting me and, I hope, everyone. How “not to forfeit his grandeur” seems to have become obsolete in today’s world, in our country, in our homes. Yet, it is an imperative, a call, a demand of Rabbi Heschel to all of us. Rabbi Heschel was respected and loved, heard and followed by people of all faiths in his lifetime and yet, so many of us have forgotten his call, his actions, his teachings and his wisdom in our daily actions. We quote him, there are books written about him, we extol him, and we are not really living into the wisdom and brilliance of both his words and his example of how to live in and with grandeur.

We need to become “full-grown” human beings, not completely “full-grown” as we will always be imperfect, yet we need to grow up and recognize the grandeur of our humanity. We have to, as Rabbi Heschel teaches elsewhere, be human. This begins in our homes, in our families, in our schools, in our playgrounds. We have to stop seeing an opponent as our enemy, we have to end the incessant call to ‘kill the umpire’, be afraid of the stranger, ignore the poor, disdain the needy.

In our families, we have to begin this process of becoming “full-grown” by acknowledging the individual worth of every member of the family. We have to stop trying to make our family members over in our image and honor the Image of God they are created in. By acknowledging the individual spirit and essence of each family member, we give one another the space to grow in their own unique grandeur and honor the unique grandeur of the other members of our family units. Of course we have to teach and help one another grow in decency, kindness, truth, love and we have to speak to one another in ways they can hear, not the ways we want them to. We also have to listen to the soul needs, the moral needs, the intellectual needs of one another in order for us to grow and help them grow as well. When every member of the family knows they matter, we have a strong spiritual, intellectual, and moral foundation that grows as we grow, we are less susceptible to the deceptions of self and another(s), we become disdainful of mendacity, we seek to honor our grandeur, we seek to acknowledge and honor the grandeur of everyone we encounter. No longer are our siblings our rivals, they are our teammates. No longer do we see ‘outsiders’ as ‘coming to get us’, we see them as human beings who are on the road to grandeur with us.

In our religious institutions, we need to use our rituals, prayers, disciplines to enhance the grandeur of the individual as well as the community. We do this by immersing ourselves in the drive to becoming “full-grown”. Using our foundational texts, we study, relate and discuss our ‘heroes’ and their examples of both self-deceptions and grandeur. We learn how “love your neighbor as you love yourself” becomes the foundation for our growing into being human. We use the commandments not as things to do, to fulfill, rather as the pathways for growing into our authentic selves. We don’t use our religion as a weapon against anyone else, we don’t proclaim that ‘our way is the one right way’, instead we are joyful for the music that sings to us and the music of our soul that finds harmony and “home” in the religious/spiritual practices we are part of.

The challenge, of course, is to be strong enough to ward off the bombardment of mendacity, needing a “bad guy”, blaming, shaming of another(s), the pull of the authoritarian, the ‘savior’. I grew up in a home where each of us were seen as individuals by our father, we learned from our grandfather how to live without rancor, hatred and yet, I fell prey to forfeiting my grandeur for quite a while, over 20 years. I am sad that it took me till I was 37 to truly understand the paths of grandeur my father had taught me. His was an imperfect life and one of grandeur, my grandfathers were not rich, did not live in glorious splendor and they did not “forfeit” their grandeur. Judaism, a program of recovery, the examples of my ancestors, the teachings of Rabbi Heschel and so many others, along with Harriet and Heather have helped me be more “full-grown” in these last 34+ years and I work hard to not “forfeit my grandeur” each day. I pray we all continue to recapture our path to grandeur, to love, to kindness, to forgiveness and to truth. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 230

“It is not by the rare act of greatness that character is determined, but by everyday actions, by a constant effort to rend our callousness. It is constancy that sanctifies. Judaism is an attempt to place all of life under the glory of ultimate significance, to relate all scattered actions to the One. Through the constant rhythm of prayers, disciplines, reminders, joys, man is taught not to forfeit his grandeur.” (God in Search of Man pg. 384)

Each day we have reminders and joys, we have sorrows and trials, and when we “stand firm” in the “flow” of life, in the ups and downs of living, we can learn how “not to forfeit our grandeur.” The choice is made clear by Rabbi Heschel’s teaching above. There are countless examples of people who have, through “prayers, disciplines, reminders, joys” learned “not to forfeit” the grandeur that is inherent in being human, in being a “divine need, divine reminder” as Rabbi Heschel teaches us in other writings. The issue for all of us humans is whether we are willing to accept the responsibility of our grandeur, whether we are willing to choose to “stand firm” in the “flow” of the “reminders, joys” or whether we will keep ignoring the calls to us of “Ayecha”, where are you, whether we will continue to repeat Adam and Eve’s error of hiding and blaming, living in the shame of disobedience or use our trials, sorrows, reminders, joys as opportunities to immerse ourselves more in our prayers, in our disciplines, “stand firmer” in the “flow” of the introspection and inner life maturity that these bring. It is a choice that has faced humankind forever and, it seems, with each generation it becomes more and more important to “choose life” rather than death, to choose awareness rather than obliviousness, to choose “standing firm” in the “flow” of growth rather than retreating to ‘the good old days” and retarding the march of progress.

Grandeur comes from the Latin word for grand which means “full-grown, great”. It denotes a splendor and magnificence, an impressiveness. In Hebrew the word is Tifferet, the ‘place’ in the Kabbalistic chart where wisdom and understanding meet, it is, in my understanding, our gut instinct, our souls’ knowledge. Yet, we humans continue to ignore our own grandeur, our souls’ knowledge for the sake of reason, for the sake of getting ahead, for the sake of power, and Rabbi Heschel’s words are easily ignored, discarded, argued against by these seemingly overpowering enemies of grandeur. We have come to understand grandeur as beauty rather than see the magnificence of being human, the impressiveness of service God, the splendor of introspection, change, growth. We are witnessing a resurgence of anti-semitism, racism, senseless hatred, authoritarianism, hubris, fear-mongering, in our country and our world. We are constantly hearing one person/group blame another for the ills of the world instead of recognizing the awe, wonder, grandeur of every human being. Rather than “stand firm” in the “flow” of living, rather than “stand firm” in the “flow” of learning, rather that “stand firm” in the “flow” of our spiritual and religious disciplines, many have decided to close the canon, decide they know ‘the only way’ to serve God, to serve our Constitution, etc. Hence, we have Supreme Court Justices accepting large ‘gifts’ from wealthy donors and then ruling on cases where they are involved or interested by-standers. We have Congresspeople deny the truth of Jan. 6, we have these same people spending time, resources, money to persecute their enemies, which are anyone not ‘drinking the Kool-Aid’ of MAGAism.

Yesterday, we went to the Reagan Library and experienced the traveling Aushwitz exhibit. While we learned new things about this horrific time and place, we also were educated as to how it could happen, how it is happening even now. The exhibit is an exhausting experience both because of the subject and the enormity of the exhibit itself. It reminds me of the work to be done, it reminds me of how easy it is “to forfeit our grandeur” and how important it is to keep telling the stories of those who did forfeit their grandeur and the heroism of those who refused to. We have been watching “Shiny, Happy Faces”, about the IBLP, religious people who are training the next generation to only see the grandeur of men, to deny freedom and truth to everyone else, to become the backbone of the legal system, our political system, business in order to make the US a “christian nation” that, of course has no relationship to Christ’s teachings! We are witnessing the outpouring of support for Donald Trump and even those who now are calling him out, somewhat, they support his policies of unwelcoming the stranger, making being poor a crime, and seeing the grandeur of themselves and “their kind”. We have to call an end to this way of being, we have to use the myriad of examples of heroism shown by “Righteous Gentiles” during the Shoah. We have to honor our own grandeur and that of everyone by “standing firm” in the “flow” of God’s Will. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 230

“It is not by the rare act of greatness that character is determined, but by everyday actions, by a constant effort to rend our callousness. It is constancy that sanctifies. Judaism is an attempt to place all of life under the glory of ultimate significance, to relate all scattered actions to the One. Through the constant rhythm of prayers, disciplines, reminders, joys, man is taught not to forfeit his grandeur.” (God in Search of Man pg. 384)

In Rabbi Heschel’s interview with Carl Stern, found in the appendix to Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity, he teaches: “The role of learning is decisive. First of all, the supreme value ascribed to learning and learning being a source of inspiration, learning being the greatest adventure, learning being a source of joy, and, in fact, learning for the purpose of discovering, of the importance of self-discipline; the realization, namely, that a life without discipline was not worth living.” This teaching reminds we are never finished, we always have something to learn, we must continue to “stand firm” in the “flow” of learning and discipline. We have to continue to discover new, different, truths about ourselves and life in general.

We hear the terms ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’ often in describing people’s orientation to life. Neither one precludes the truth and wisdom of Rabbi Heschel about learning and discipline. In fact, ‘conserve’ comes from the Latin meaning “to keep together” and ‘liberal’ comes from the Latin meaning “free”. “Standing firm” in the “flow” of keeping together the wisdom and experiences of our ancestors while continuing to learn, grow, and discover new ideas and new applications of what has already been learned is of supreme importance “not to forfeit” our “grandeur”. Even though the terms ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’ are thrown out as negative epithets, they actually go together quite nicely and are necessary to our learning, in my opinion. In fact, as I experience Rabbi Heschel’s teachings, he was able to integrate both into his writing and his living.

Without being in “the constant rhythm” of a daily discipline of learning, of discovering, we become, as Rabbi Heschel also says in his interview with Carl Stern, “I would say there is nothing stale under the sun except human beings, who become stale.” When we use labels to define ourselves and/or another human being or group of human beings, we become stale, we leave our discipline of learning, we leave a basic truth of all spiritual and religious disciplines; we always have to be open to new discoveries, new truths of what our disciplines have for us. When we stay stuck in the conventional wisdom rather than being in wonder and radical amazement, we stop our learning, we stop our ability to discover, we cease to grow, and we become stale which leads us to fall into authoritarianism, stuck in old ways that do not honor our spiritual thirst for learning and growing, that cause, what Maimonidies calls, soul sickness. In our soul sickness we turn truth upside down, we see evil as good, believing we are always correct, we stop growing our inner life and our discipline turns into a weapon against anyone who doesn’t “do things our way”.

Living into Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom above pushes us to stop our staleness, stop our misuse of terms, end our need to “forfeit the grandeur” that accompanies being a person who “stands firm” in the “flow” of learning, in the “flow” of our spiritual and/or religious disciplines. The hubris to believe that we, finite humans, can know everything that the Infinite, the Ineffable, calls to us each day is unbelievable as we learn from Rabbi Heschel. In Genesis Rabbah, a commentary on the book of Genesis, we learn “every day, God makes new law in the Heavenly Court”! Since God, the Ineffable One, learns each day, what is stopping us from emulating this attribute of God? We have stopped “keeping together” the goal of our founding fathers, the goal of the Bible, which is to keep learning, adjusting our ways as more is revealed to us through our immersion in our prayers and disciplines.

In recovery, we know that “old ideas availed us nothing”. We are so aware of our need to continue to read the Big Book of AA so we can learn and relearn the wisdom of our founders, Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob Smith, the wisdom of the people who’s stories are found within. We are acutely aware of our need to continue to learn and grow, to “stand firm” in the “flow” of our journey of recovery, accepting that we are never “there”, that “we trudge the road to happy destiny”. We know we cannot do this alone, we cannot do this without a discipline of learning, of prayer, of meditation. Just as Jews keep reading the Torah each year, make new laws because of new inspirations from our learning, those of us in recovery are constantly seeking to learn how to “keep together” and grow the “free” spirits we have become. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 229

“It is not by the rare act of greatness that character is determined, but by everyday actions, by a constant effort to rend our callousness. It is constancy that sanctifies. Judaism is an attempt to place all of life under the glory of ultimate significance, to relate all scattered actions to the One. Through the constant rhythm of prayers, disciplines, reminders, joys, man is taught not to forfeit his grandeur.” (God in Search of Man pg. 384)

Immersing ourselves in the last sentence above is, in my opinion, crucial to our being able to “rend our callousness”. Rhythm comes from the Greek meaning “to flow”, constant comes from the Latin meaning “stand with, standing firm”. Rabbi Heschel is calling to us to “stand firm” in the flow “of prayers, disciplines, reminders, joys” that will teach us how “not to forfeit” our greatness. While this is a simple solution to what ails humanity, it ain’t easy to do.

Standing firm within the flow of prayers, as I am experiencing Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom today, means we have to be involved in our prayers, not just say them. It means we have to engage with prayer so we can change our inner lives, we can strengthen our spirits in order to overcome the rationalizations and desires of our minds. While reason is essential to our being human, I hear Rabbi Heschel calling out to us to mature our reasoning powers with the truth and wisdom of our souls/spirits. As we are witnessing today as we have in every generation, reason can be corrupted, it can be used to gain power, make enslaving people a ‘good thing’, bastardize the principles of the Bible, cause us to make good bad, and bad good. Reason without the guidance of the spirit corrupts us. In the third paragraph of the Shema, a centerpiece of daily prayer in Judaism, we are reminded to not “scout out after our heart and our eyes, lest we whore ourselves after them.” This prayer comes from the Bible, it is a description of the challenge of humanity, the experience of our ancestors in the desert, in Egypt, in Canaan, which we are warned against repeating. Yet, we seem unable to learn and implement this and so many other lessons of the Bible, of prayer.

Rabbi Heschel teaches us: “Prayer may not save us, it will make us worthy of being saved.” This teaching, along with the last sentence above, demands of us fidelity with our prayers, it demands of us to immerse ourselves in prayer so we can change our hearts’ desires, so we can truly Shema, listen, hear, and understand the call of God, the call of our souls, the call of truth, the call of justice, the call of love, the call of kindness, the call of mercy, the call of compassion, the call of God. Standing firm in our prayers, being in the flow of what our prayers are calling us to do, taking a “leap of action” based on the prayers we are saying, as Rabbi Heschel says, no longer reciting prayers and immersing ourselves in them, is what I believe Rabbi Heschel is teaching us.

Being in the flow and standing firm/standing with may seem to be contradictory to some, yet they are both necessary in order to truly have prayer change us. Prayer is not about petition, it is about introspection, it is not about fulfilling a commandment, it is about opening ourselves up to understand the call of the commandment, the call of God, the call of our neighbors, the call of truth, etc. Yet, we continue to use prayer for our self-aggrandizement, for power, for domination instead of surrender. Standing firm in the flow of prayer means we are not moving from and allowing ourselves to be carried forward to being more human each day, it means we are surrendering our will and our lives to a power greater than ourselves, it means we are changing our vision of living and bringing  into focus the next right action that moves us forward in our journey to wholeness and holiness.

In recovery, prayer and meditation are crucial. Many of us begin each day with prayer and meditation, be it formal prayer, like a rosary or a minyan, or private prayer, speaking the words on our hearts, without listening, hearing and understanding the response from our souls, our inner life, God, these are only half-measures. We, in recovery, know that “half-measures availed us nothing”, so we continue to immerse ourselves in prayer and meditation in order to live better each day, live with gratitude, be of service, do the next right thing.

This blog, for me, is part of my prayer and meditation routine which I never do routinely! I stand firm in the flow of my prayers and I see how far I am away from the shore of disbelief, how far I am from the horror I was prior to my beginning this journey of T’Shuvah. I am also aware of how much farther I have to travel and am unafraid of my errors, as the saying goes, judge me not for where I am but the distance I have travelled. Through standing firm in the flow of my prayers, I have come a long way, baby!:) God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 228

“It is not by the rare act of greatness that character is determined, but by everyday actions, by a constant effort to rend our callousness. It is constancy that sanctifies. Judaism is an attempt to place all of life under the glory of ultimate significance, to relate all scattered actions to the One. Through the constant rhythm of prayers, disciplines, reminders, joys, man is taught not to forfeit his grandeur.” (God in Search of Man pg. 384)

“To relate all scattered actions to the One” is the goal of all spiritual traditions. The issue for all of us is to acknowledge our “attempt to place all of life” and know that we have to keep checking in with our self, with another(s) to ensure that our attempts are truthful, they are not self-serving, they are not power grabs and they truly represent the call and demand of the Ineffable One. The realization and truth Rabbi Heschel is passing on to us is hard to digest for many of us; our actions are scattered, our lives are patchwork quilts of actions, reactions, truths and mendacities, deceptions and self-deceptions, radical amazement and rationalizations, wonder and taking things for granted. Judaism and all spiritual disciplines/traditions give us pathways to lesson the reactions, mendacities, deceptions, rationalizations and taking things for granted as well as paths to enhance and increase our actions for good, our truth seeking and living, our awe, wonder and radical amazement.

We are witnessing today what the prophets railed against at the time of the destruction of the first Temple and the decimation of the 10 tribes, which we say have been lost. We are experiencing the lies of people who proclaim to speak in the name of God, in the name of Jesus while actually speaking in their own name, in the name of power, greed, control. Many religious leaders are using their faith as clubs, as weapons of self-aggrandizement, power, control and fear. In Hebrew the word for fear also means awe! Fear is not about punishment, it is the precursor to awe, it is what can propel us to witness the awesomeness of life, it is also what can stop us from experiencing same. We have to choose to bring our “scattered actions to the One”, rather than trying to hide the ones we don’t like, rather than trying to hide/rationalize the ones we use for our greed, power, need to be right. This statement also points out our need to continue to take self-inventory, to continue to look at our actions daily, weekly, etc and see how they are serving our authentic self, our soul, the souls and authenticity of another(s), and the One. I hear Rabbi Heschel calling us to account to ourselves, to look at our attempts to “do justly, love mercy, walk humbly with God” in all of our affairs.

To relate, from the Latin means “brought back” and in the Hebrew the word is the same word as to tell a story, to regard. Rabbi Heschel is teaching us we need a spiritual discipline (and there are many one can use) to bring ourselves back “to place all of life under the glory of ultimate significance” and to regard all of our “scattered actions” as impacting the One as well as ourselves and another(s). What a fearful thought, what an awesome idea, what a wondrous gift! We can and must use our spiritual traditions to be brought back to serving the One, to serving another(s), to serving our true selves, we must begin to relate and regard our actions as part of the patchwork that is our life. Rabbi Heschel teaches us that our lives are works of art, which I take to mean that we can repaint the canvas at any time, whenever we see our actions are not reflecting “the glory of ultimate significance”, whenever they are not regarding the guidance of the One, we can change, we can redo, we can be forgiven for our errors and forgive another(s) for theirs and forgive ourselves. This is in direct conflict with the ‘normal’ way of people including religious leaders and followers who insist they are doing the will of Christ, Adonai, Allah, etc when they are lying, cheating, enslaving, abusing truth, people, and the One.

I am guilty of trying to use self-will as God’s will. I am guilty of rationalizing behaviors of myself and another(s) because I did not want to face the errors of my actions. I have, however, in the past 35 years, been aware and make T’Shuvah for these actions, I have stopped denying the errors of my ways when I have realized them and/or they have been brought to my attention. While this way of being has been used against me, seen as a vulnerability, I have found it to be a strength that gives me the courage to face the fear of living and see the awe of it more and more often. I know my imperfections, I acknowledge them daily, especially as Rabbi Heschel provides a constant reflective mirror to me. I also know my actions are overwhelmingly geared to the “glory of ultimate significance” and they come together in my relating them “to the One.” This life is hard, it is not pretty all the time, it is a life of vulnerability and hurt, yet, it is joyous, glorious, satisfying, loving, fulfilling, full of wonder, awe and radical amazement. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 227

“It is not by the rare act of greatness that character is determined, but by everyday actions, by a constant effort to rend our callousness. It is constancy that sanctifies. Judaism is an attempt to place all of life under the glory of ultimate significance, to relate all scattered actions to the One. Through the constant rhythm of prayers, disciplines, reminders, joys, man is taught not to forfeit his grandeur.” (God in Search of Man pg. 384)

Rabbi Heschel’s teaching above about Judaism as “an attempt to place all of life under the glory of ultimate significance, to relate all scattered actions to the One” is a call to all of us, Jew and non-Jew, to stop worrying about our status, our power, our false egos and pride. I hear him demanding us to return to the Ineffable One and surrender all of our egocentric actions so we can experience glory, experience connection, live on a continuum of moving towards “rend our callousness” and use our character traits “in proper measure” as Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz teaches.

Watching the documentary, “Shiny happy people” yesterday and learning about IBLP was scary, sad and an example of people using God to increase their callousness not “rend” it. The people of IBLP truly believe they are ‘doing God’s work’ while enslaving women and children to serve themselves, not God. They are, as we have heard before and from many people, seeking to make the United States “a Christian Nation” which is NOT what the founding fathers sought! Enshrined at the same time as the Constitution was the Bill of Rights, the first of which speaks to freedom of religion. The separation of government and religion, was not to say religious tenets have no place in governing, rather, I believe it is so no one religion can enslave everyone else to their way of being.

When we “attempt to place all of life under the glory of ultimate significance” we are surrounding to the truth of “You Matter”, we all matter and every action we take is important, meaningful and either retards or progresses our goal of experiencing the “glory of ultimate significance”. We get to make this choice every day, every hour, and Rabbi Heschel is calling to us to wake up, to stop ignoring the essence of what Judaism is, what all religious and spiritual disciplines are. He uses the word “attempt” which reminds us of our fallibility, our imperfections, our folly of perfection. The use of “attempt” also leaves open the door to other paths which “place all of life under the glory of ultimate significance” because there is no “one size fits all” in how we live, how we serve, how we be free and how we encourage another(s) to be free in their own ways. Bringing “all of life under the glory of ultimate significance” does not give us the power to determine what “ultimate significance” is for everyone, it doesn’t give us the right to dictate how every person is supposed to do this. As the Jewish tradition teaches us, each of us is unique and has our own path, our own corner of the world to repair, our own garden to till, nurture and grow, so we all have to “place all of life under the glory of ultimate significance” in our own way.

Rabbi Heschel is again teaching us the importance of surrendering our ego, surrendering our need for power, for omnipotence, for ‘knowing the only way’ to “place all of life under the glory of ultimate significance”. Glory can be defined as praise, in Hebrew it is the same word for beauty, in the Kabbalah, it is the blending of kindness and restrictive power. I am hearing Rabbi Heschel calling to us to look at our actions before and after we take them through the lens of: Is this action praiseworthy, is this action an actual praise of God, is this action a blending of strength/proper use of our individual and collective power and kindness? Doing this, asking these questions before and/or after our actions will help us learn and further our march towards fulfilling the words of acceptance we spoke at Mount Sinai, the words of gratitude and praise we cried out at on the other side of the Red Sea. This action will further “Man’s Search for Meaning” as Viktor Frankl teaches us.

In recovery, steps 4-10 remind us and teach us about the significance of our actions. They give us the perspective and the lessons to help us determine not only how we did not “place all of life under the glory of ultimate significance” they help us see where we did and how we can moving forward. My experience with prayer and meditation, with inventory and T’Shuvah, with this daily writing continues to help me move forward in the quest Rabbi Heschel is teaching us about. I continue to learn and grow, I continue to be remorseful for my missed opportunities, I continue to ask the questions above and surrender falseness, mendacity, and self-deception so I can bring my disparate actions together in service of God. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 226

“It is not by the rare act of greatness that character is determined, but by everyday actions, by a constant effort to rend our callousness. It is constancy that sanctifies. Judaism is an attempt to place all of life under the glory of ultimate significance, to relate all scattered actions to the One. Through the constant rhythm of prayers, disciplines, reminders, joys, man is taught not to forfeit his grandeur.” (God in Search of Man pg. 384)

Rabbi Heschel gives the problem and the solution in all of his writings and especially in his teaching above. To “rend our callousness”, we must act in ways that sanctify life and we must be consistent with these actions. We have become addicted and adjusted to the callousness that we call ‘religious’, ‘god’s will’ (small g to denote this deity is actually idol worship), ‘good for our country’, ‘stop those people from taking our jobs’, ‘stop those people from grooming our children’, ‘stop those people from controlling the media, the banks, etc’. We have become so addicted to and adjusted to callousness that the Southern Baptists Church has thrown Saddleback Church out of its conference for having women pastors! “An ultraconservative faction with a loud online presence is going further, pressing for ideological purity and arguing that female pastors are a precursor to acceptance of homosexuality and sexual immorality.”(New York Times, 6/13) Isn’t this a little ridiculous? Yet, because of our addiction and adjustment to callousness, this type of thinking, rhetoric, mendacity is permeating our sanctuaries, our offices, our business’, our government, and seems to be a prime example of “self-will run riot”, which is what we in recovery call any actions that go against God’s call to “do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with God”.

The only solution, as Rabbi Heschel so simply tells us, is a “constancy that sanctifies”. Sanctify means to “set apart, to make morally right” and in Hebrew the word used is “Kadosh” which is translated as holy and means “to elevate, to set apart, to connect”. I am hearing Rabbi Heschel is calling us to make a constant practice of acting in ways that are morally correct, that elevate us and those around us, that set us apart from the animals who have no free will to choose, and to connect to one another in love, mercy, justice, kindness, compassion, concern. We have to improve our actions of sanctifying our self, our souls, our inner lives so we can improve our relations with one another. We have to remember that EVERY human being is created in the Image of the Ineffable One, EVERY human being includes women, LGBTQ+, People of Color, Jews, Muslims, those of no religion. We have to improve our actions and raise them up to honor the inherent dignity that every human being possess’, to recognize every human being as a reminder of the divine, as a fulfiller of a divine need. We have to take the next right action to never think of our selves as ‘better than’ or ‘less than’ anyone else because God created us and “God don’t make no junk” as a bumper sticker says.

It is time, way past time actually, for us to detox from the joys our callousness gives us, it is time to recognize the sanctity of women, who are ‘good enough’ to bear and raise the children of the Southern Baptists’ but not good enough to pastor to them in their times of need, in their times of joy? We have to change our ways, we have to begin a program of recovery from the callousness that oozes from our pores, yes, even the ‘good people’ have callousness within them. We all need to surrender our grip on the callousness we have become adjusted to, we have to admit our powerlessness over our acting out in callous ways all the while trying to disguise them, deny them, etc. We need to believe that God, not the false idols that many religious and non-religious people have made and call God, can and will restore us to sanity. This sanity comes from our souls, it is a meeting of our souls with our minds, our emotions where these latter two entities have votes, they can no longer veto what we know deep in our hearts, our guts, our ‘bones’. Then and only then can we truly be consistent in acts that uplift instead of put down, actions that raise up our beings and serve God as well as the people around us, people we know and those we don’t.

I am suggesting that we begin to engage in a path of recovery for how we live. I have surrendered my callousness as it rears its ugly head and it has made me more vulnerable and more open to the love and the disdain of another(s) persons. I keep choosing to focus on the love rather than the disdain,  choosing to elevate my actions one grain of sand a day, choosing to live in God’s ways instead of society’s. I choosing to “practice these principles in all my affairs” as the 12th Step declares, I choosing to live in justice, love, kindness, compassion, mercy, and truth. I make the choice to keep learning and rooting our my callousness each day so I can live in freedom and joy. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 225

“It is not by the rare act of greatness that character is determined, but by everyday actions, by a constant effort to rend our callousness. It is constancy that sanctifies. Judaism is an attempt to place all of life under the glory of ultimate significance, to relate all scattered actions to the One. Through the constant rhythm of prayers, disciplines, reminders, joys, man is taught not to forfeit his grandeur.” (God in Search of Man pg. 384)

We are witnesses and participants in a march towards more callousness and anger, more hatred and less compassion, more blaming of another and less taking of personal responsibility. We are extolling callousness, anger, blame, mendacity as a “rare act of greatness” these days, much to the horror of some/many and in direct opposition to the wisdom of Rabbi Heschel. Our “everyday actions” are not rending our callousness, it seems as if they are hardening the callousness on both extremes. Anytime one takes an extreme position, one becomes hardened to hear anyone else’s opinion, take any other facts and/or ways of seeing what is into account. The extremes belie radical amazement, they become callous to wonder, to awe, to the plight of people not like them. We see this in our political world today, as we have since Newt Gingrich and company, we see this in fundamentalist religious sects, we see this in business dealings, we see this in our Supreme Court which  is working hard to undo the hard-fought freedoms some of us marched for in the 1960’s, some died for in those years and in subsequent years, be it racist attacks, LGBTQ+ attacks, or mass shootings at schools, synagogues, churches, nightclubs, dance halls, business’, etc. We have become so callous, there are people who believe carrying a gun in the open, without a permit, without training, is part of the 2nd Amendment and there should be no background checks, no regulation-when asked if what he would give up to make life better, a ‘person’ answered: ‘my wife, yes; my kids, maybe; my gun,NEVER!’

And, as always, we have to look inside of ourselves to see our own callousness, our own mendacity, our own extreme positions that harden our hearts. We all have a Pharaoh inside of us, the Biblical stories teach us about the archetypes that live within us, and we have the choice to decide how to respond to these inner archetypes. As the Native American story goes about a grandfather teaching his grandson about the two wolves who are at war within him, the one we feed is the one who wins. We have had a steady diet of callousness, hatred, blame, mendacity throughout humankind’s history. We have to ask ourselves which “everyday actions” are feeding our Pharaoh, which “everyday actions” are feeding the Moses within us. Which “everyday actions” feed greed and envy, competition and comparison, which “everyday actions” feed our sense of oneness with all people, seeing the similarities in all of us and welcoming the differences as God-given?

We have the power to decide and to choose whether to be Pharaoh or Moses for ourselves and, by extension, for another(s). We have, as I am hearing Rabbi Heschel’s demand and call to us, the obligation to choose to feed our Moses, to “Choose Life” as the Bible commands us. We make the choice of how to use our power to be grateful and open to people and/or how to decimate people we have used and abused and are no longer needed by us every hour. We are practicing our callousness in the ways we treat the people who helped us achieve some status on the way up, with reverence or disdain, we are practicing our callousness in the ways we relate to the world around us, ‘let me get mine’. We practice our goodness in the ways we greet people, the ways we leave the door open for reunification as God does for each of us, the ways we welcome, feed and care for people who are in need, who are poor, who are strangers as Abraham taught us. We are making the choices to “rend our callousness” and to expand our callousness with each action we take.

AA is 88 years old, Judaism is 3000+ years old, Christianity is 2000+ years old, some Eastern disciplines go back 4000+ years, and all deal with the problem of our callousness, how to mitigate the Pharaoh inside of us. I have wrestled with this issue forever, even before I was aware of the war within me. My recovery has been and is dependent on how I fight for the Moses within me, how I let go of the callousness and the anger, the greed and envy, the sadness and the blame heaped upon me by another. I have to be responsible for my part, I just don’t have to be callous towards myself by accepting everyone else’s part, everyone else’s blame. I am sad and dismayed at the callousness I have experienced and the callousness I have perpetrated. I do it less each day, I have more compassion each day. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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