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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 288

“The prophet complained, “They never put their heart into their prayers, but howl away for corn and wine beside their altars” (Hosea 7:14). According to the Book of Proverbs (11:20), “they that are perverse in the heart are an abomination to the Lord.” Yet the prophet seems to have realized how hard it is not to be perverse, not to be an abomination.The heart is deceitful above all things, It is exceedingly weak—who can know it?”(Jeremiah 17:9) (God in Search of Man pg 391)

Today, August 28, 2023, is the 60th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech. Rev. King, Rabbi Heschel, and so many others “put their heart into their prayers” and while we remember their words, it is more important, I believe, to remember their deeds. They stood up against those who “howl away for corn and wine beside their altars” and we have to today as well. Rabbi Heschel’s quoting of the prophets above is validation for the war within, it is an acknowledgment of how we have struggled to be “wholehearted” in our living with and our loving of God, human beings, and ourselves. It is a struggle that is, as I understand Rabbi Heschel and the prophets today, a daily one and the teachings above are a call to action, not a call to despair.

Immersing ourselves in the wisdom above, we can realize the words and deeds of Rabbi Heschel, Rev. King and so many others who ‘fought’ for civil rights, who fought against prejudice and hatred, who sought to lead us to live the call of our “better angels” are our north star. We are descendants of the prophets, we are the inheritors of their wisdom, their actions, their love, their struggle. Just as Rev. King spoke about America: “When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men — yes, Black men as well as white men — would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” so too does the Bible remind us of the “promissory note” to which every person falls heir to; the 10 Commandments, the Holiness Code, T’Shuvah, Amends, etc. It is time for us to live up to and honor our inheritance and to do so means we have to struggle to overcome being “perverse in the heart”.

Rev. King went on to say: “In the process of gaining our rightful place, we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred…Again and again, we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.” Rabbi Heschel’s writing above and Rev. King’s words are reminders that while it is difficult to “not be guilty of wrongful deeds” it is possible and it takes struggling against our inner perverseness, our inner deceits, our inner desires to win, our inner desires for power, our inner desire for self-deception.

We are witnessing a myriad of people who “howl away for corn and wine beside their altars” and call this wholeheartedly serving God. We watch people leave our places of worship because of the mendacity, the duplicity, the “abomination to the Lord” our preachers, our ‘spiritual leaders’ our houses of worship have become. We are witnessing, as we have throughout the history of humanity, the “pious ones” bastardize God’s words, bastardize the words of the prophets, continue to play ‘three-card monte’ with us, try to deceive us, for their own good, for their own power, to please the ones with the gold, so many have “thrown the baby out with the bathwater” and left themselves adrift in a sea that seems to be ‘spiritual’ and often is as deceitful, perverse, as the institutions they left. In every area of living and working, from the pulpit to government, from the supermarket to the stock market, we have to say NO to the perverseness, the deceitfulness, the mendacity we worship today. We have to leave “bitterness and hatred” and meet “physical force with spiritual force” and we have to engage in this work today!

After living in deceit for many years, after being perverse, an abomination to family, to God, to friends, I had a “spiritual awakening” and changed course. I am not free of deceit and I am much freer than I was. I know that there are days when my bank of justice is overdrawn, I know there are moments when I do not cash the “promissory note” our ancestors wrote for us at Mt. Sinai, and I am saddened by these moments and days. And, they are only moments, days now not a lifetime nor a lifestyle for me anymore. I have cashed most of the “promissory notes” people have presented while working these past 34+ years and I engage each day in my inner struggle. I am sad when people decide to not struggle with me and I am in acceptance, I am in awe of those who struggle so well against the “perverse” and refuse to be “abominations”. I am grateful to Rabbi Heschel, Dr. King, my ancestors for showing me the way! 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 287

“Time and again the Bible calls upon us to worship Him “with all thy heart.” “Walk before me, and be wholehearted” (Genesis 17:1). “Thou shalt be wholehearted with the Lord Thy God” (Deuteronomy 18:13). “And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul, and with all thy might” (Deuteronomy 6:5). And yet it seems that the Biblical man was disturbed by the problem of whether man is at all capable of serving God wholeheartedly.” (God in Search of Man pg. 390)

The last sentence above is, I believe, at the heart of our issues today, as is true throughout our the human experience. Being “disturbed at the problem of whether man is at all capable of serving God wholeheartedly” gives us the opportunity to examine our actions, gives the challenge of maturing our inner life, and gives us a basis upon which to do our T’Shuvah/inventory on a daily/yearly spiritual exercise. Being disturbed is not a negative as I am hearing Rabbi Heschel, it is a chance to ask ourselves both difficult and appropriate questions as well as seek solutions to the challenge of the Bible. Understanding the call of the Bible, as Rabbi Heschel helps us hear it, means we are in the process of “serving God wholeheartedly” and the fact that “Biblical man was disturbed” means we are to ask ourselves the hard question: what does it mean to serve God wholeheartedly in this moment, in this situation. Asking ourselves this question leads us to serve God with everything we have in the moment, or not. It demands we make a choice as to whether to serve falseness, mendacity, be self-serving or to serve truth, authenticity, God.

In this month of Elul, this question helps us determine how our actions in the past year served God and served self-seeking. It also provides the opportunity for us to chart our course for the year to come. We need to be “disturbed by the problem” so we can “interfere” with our normal ways of living, so we can, as the Latin root teaches us, be”utterly disturbed” with our actions of half-heartedness, with our actions that were/are self-seeking and self-centered. Today and everyday we are being called upon by Rabbi Heschel, by Torah, by the prophets, by the Bible to live into the challenges that this day presents us with. We are called upon to leave the comfort of our everydayness, the comfort of our facades, the comfort of our self-deceptions and journey through the wilderness of truth, the inner work of service to God, the joy of wholeheartedly serving something greater than our own selfishness. Being disturbed helps us question ourselves to grow spiritually, to grow in our ability to further our journey to wholeheartedness, in relation to God,  in relationship with ourselves. We have become so used to the lies and deceptions of ourselves and everyone else that we have lost the ability to be disturbed by our “phoning in” our wholeheartedness towards God and towards caring for the needy, the poor and the stranger inside of us and in another(s).

Rabbi Heschel disturbs me always! He gives me new and different ways to understand how to live well, how to live into the greatness of being human. As he describes the words of the prophets for himself, he too gives all of us “a bad conscience”. The wonder and awe of his teachings, above and throughout his books and writing, is he demands we constantly seek to improve our humanity, we constantly grow in our connection to God, we consistently live the gratitude for life out loud and in our actions. We are so used to giving lip service to gratitude, to the principles of the Bible, we buy into the deceptions of people in power, in friendship, the deceptions of our religious leaders and the deceptions of self.

In recovery, we are constantly disturbed by our self-seeking, self-centered actions both prior to our recovery and those we still engage in. Just ‘not using’ (in whatever form ‘using’ takes) is just not enough. It is a start and an important first step, yet, we know that we have to “continue to grow along spiritual lines” and “we seek spiritual progress, not spiritual perfection”.

I am embarrassed by the times when I wasn’t disturbed, when I believed I was right, believed myself 100%! While I knew how imperfect I was/am, looking back through the lens Rabbi Heschel is giving us, I am acutely aware of my hubris, my lack of humility, my need to be right, etc. I am sorry to all who had to suffer my arrogance. While my wholeheartedness continues to grow as I grow along “spiritual lines”, I am proud of the myriad of times I sought counsel, I asked for opinions, I collaborated with people to find the best way to serve God and to serve people with my whole heart. Looking ahead, I am committed to be more wholehearted in my serving God and people through growing my inner life more each day. 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 286

“Time and again the Bible calls upon us to worship Him “with all thy heart.” “Walk before me, and be wholehearted” (Genesis 17:1). “Thou shalt be wholehearted with the Lord Thy God” (Deuteronomy 18:13). “And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul, and with all thy might” (Deuteronomy 6:5). And yet it seems that the Biblical man was disturbed by the problem of whether man is at all capable of serving God wholeheartedly.” (God in Search of Man pg. 390)

“And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul, and with all thy might” is the first sentence of the V’Ahavta Prayer following the Shema and, again, it is in the imperfect (future) tense, meaning something that has begun and is not yet completed. It is a seemingly impossible command! Loving God with everything we have calls for an abdication of false self, a complete surrender of shame, an acceptance of our infinite worth and dignity. It also calls for us to respect, honor and embrace every human being, immersing ourselves in  “love your neighbor as you love yourself”. While we will never achieve the totality of this command, we can move towards it more and more each day; which is the goal of every command, I believe.

The path to leaning into and living these words of The Torah is to honor the Divine Image we are created in, letting go of the facades and masks we wear to ‘protect’ ourselves from life’s sadness’ and tragedies, from our own inadequacies and imperfections. We have to end our seemingly incessant need to compare, compete with one and another, the conventional notion that putting someone else down makes us better, let go of the self-deceptions and mendacity that we engage in every day. Immersing ourselves in teachings of the Talmud that remind us we are all equal in ‘God’s eyes’, we are all in need of one another, we all bring unique gifts and talents to the world opens our eyes and reveals a path to living together in camaraderie, in service and in love.

Religion is becoming more and more obsolete for many people because our institutions do not live the words they preach. Religion speaks in the name of authority and perfection, harshness and obliviousness rather than guidance, compassion, love, imperfection and T’Shuvah/return. In Genesis Rabbah, we are taught that God makes new laws every day in the Heavenly Court while we seem to be stuck in laws and paths from over 2000 years ago. Religion needs to speak in the ways of the prophets, not in the ways of human power. Politics is turning people off and away because many politicians and states speak in the name of power for themselves rather than improving “government of the people, by the people and for the people shall not perish from this earth”.

It is impossible to speak of religion, of politics, of democracy, of freedom when we love ourselves, our images, our power, our status, more than we love God. Without “Love your neighbor as you love yourself” as the guiding principle, as Rabbi Akiva taught, we cannot say we love God! Yet, we keep up the facade in our institutions of higher learning, of religion, of government that we are ‘serving God’, ‘following what Jesus wants’ when we deny voting rights, when we deny the dignity of choice to and for women, when we seek to rule rather than govern, when we ego along to get along, when we ostracize people we disagree with rather than learn from one another, when “winning is everything” and we do anything and everything to ‘win’. Rather than live into the words of the prophets, rather than celebrate each day that we “were brought out of Egypt”, we ignore the words and seek to become the new Pharaoh who “did not know Joseph” and who does not know Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Lincoln, etc.

In recovery, we are aware of our incomplete beingness and we “seek to improve our conscious contact with God” every day. We “practice these principles in all our affairs” knowing practice is not perfection. In my Elul inventory, I realize the myriad of ways I deceived myself over the years prior to recovery and I broke the hearts and spirits as well as the trust of those who cared for me and loved me. I have made my amends and I continue to live these amends by healing my self and helping people heal themselves. I am aware of the times in recovery when I thought I was loving God with everything and, as it turns out, I was loving me more-I thought I was taking actions in the name of God and they were for my own sake more than God’s or another’s. I am sorry for these harms. I realize that I also deceived myself through my need to be accepted, loved and bought into the mendacities of another”s which, again, did not serve God. I also know I did serve God by loving my neighbor as myself and this helped so many people. 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 285

“Time and again the Bible calls upon us to worship Him “with all thy heart.” “Walk before me, and be wholehearted” (Genesis 17:1). “Thou shalt be wholehearted with the Lord Thy God” (Deuteronomy 18:13). “And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul, and with all thy might” (Deuteronomy 6:5). And yet it seems that the Biblical man was disturbed by the problem of whether man is at all capable of serving God wholeheartedly.” (God in Search of Man pg. 390)

Being wholehearted with God has proven, over the millennia, to be difficult! The story of Jacob teaches us that our intentions, while important do not necessarily lead us to this state of being. Jacob’s promise, Jacob’s intentions to be wholehearted with God begins with him making a deal, after he has acknowledged that “God was in this place and I, I did not know it”. He gives us insight and a teaching as to our relationship with God; rather than it being covenantal, it is conditional/transactional. We keep ‘making deals’ with God, we keep wanting to be shown/given something before we commit and even then, we are constantly asking/demanding a quid pro quo from God. We ‘pray’ to God for x and if we get it, we give thanks and are committed to serving and being “wholehearted with the Lord Thy God” for the moment, until we want/need something else. We have forgotten the teaching of the Kotzker Rebbe: “Where do you find God? Wherever/whenever you let God in.” While we give lip service to this command, we seem to not be able to sustain it. Instead, we engage in so many actions and say it is ‘what God wants’, we lie to ourselves and everyone else in order to feel good about the evils we perpetrate, the negativity we promulgate, the power we seek and wield for our own sake, not for God’s.

We witness this in the ways people in power have, throughout history, said they are doing “God’s Will”, from the Pharaohs in Egypt to the Kings of Israel/Judea to the Holy Roman Emperors, to the politicians in our country today. Listening to them speak of their deep devotion to God, to their wholeheartedness in serving God while they do everything they can to keep out the stranger, to harass the poor and the needy, to deny people their God-given equality, their God-given infinite value and dignity is infuriating to many of us and for many of us we ‘drink the kool-aid” and believe our prejudices, our ‘getting ours’, going against our self-interests and God’s interests is holy. We seem to be wholehearted in our worship of idols, rather than being “wholehearted with the Lord thy God”.

The difficulty of living into this command is apparent with the Rabbis of old; they found ‘clean-ups’ for Jacob’s behaviors in their commentaries and they teach us in the Talmud to “nullify your will before God’s will so God’s will becomes your will.” The Rabbis knew that senseless hatred is/was the destroyer of community and the antithesis of “love your neighbor as you love yourself”, yet they engaged in it under the guise of power, needing to be right, and through the self-deceptive belief that they were serving God and their opponents were not. This is not to denigrate the Rabbis of old, this is to point out to us how difficult it is to live into being “wholehearted with the Lord Thy God”. We are called upon to take some action, in olden times it was bringing an offering, to draw near to God (sacrifice) and today, we do T’Shuvah, Prayer, and Tzedakah to draw near to God, as ways to engage in the introspection necessary to let go of our deceit, our mendacity, our false egos so we can “be wholehearted with they Lord Thy God.”

In recovery, we call this surrender; turning our will and our lives over to the care of a power greater than ourselves, admitting our powerlessness over people, places, things, praying for the clarity to “accept the things we cannot change” and the clarity to see we have “the courage to change this things we can”. We engage in looking at ourselves daily-seeing how and when we served God wholeheartedly and how and when we were actually serving ourselves wholeheartedly and lying to ourselves by calling this service to God.

Each day, not just during Elul, I ask myself: “Whom am I serving, God or my inauthentic self?” I do this so I can catch myself quicker when I am serving inauthenticity, falseness, mendacity. I have used loudness, crassness, at times to get a point across to help another and, at times, to indulge myself and my caricature of myself. Looking backwards I see that many times when I said my actions were for the sake of heaven, they were for my sake 51% and God’s only 49%-I am sorry for these times. Looking back I also see how often my actions were at least 51%+ for God and <49% for me and I am filled with gratitude to God. I wrestle each and every day to “be wholehearted with God”, knowing the language is in the imperfect tense, so it and I am works in progress. 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 284

“Time and again the Bible calls upon us to worship Him “with all thy heart.” “Walk before me, and be wholehearted” (Genesis 17:1). “Thou shalt be wholehearted with the Lord Thy God” (Deuteronomy 18:13). “And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul, and with all thy might” (Deuteronomy 6:5). And yet it seems that the Biblical man was disturbed by the problem of whether man is at all capable of serving God wholeheartedly.” (God in Search of Man pg. 390)

Rabbi Heschel’s words above gives everyone pause, hopefully. The Bible’s call “to worship Him “with all thy heart” and to “walk before Me, and be wholehearted” in all our affairs seems to have eluded humankind since the beginning of time. Taking a deep dive into these words and the meanings they convey during this month of Elul gives us the opportunity to review when we have been “capable of serving God wholeheartedly” and when we haven’t. Separating our self-centeredness from our service is a difficult exercise for most of us. While we wrap ourselves in our ‘piety’ often, we quote Scriptures, we quote spiritual texts, we quote Rabbi Heschel often, leaning into the words, living the meanings behind the words has proven much more difficult.

“Walk before me, and be wholehearted” are words ‘spoken’ to Abraham and they give us a glimpse into God’s belief in humanity. We are capable of doing this, we are capable of walking before God, doing the next right thing on our own, we are capable of being wholehearted in all of our affairs. Yet, it seems we have fallen short of, as we say in recovery, “practice these principles in all our affairs”. When we use this command as a yardstick and a question into our behaviors, our actions of this past year, we give ourselves the opportunity to do T’Shuvah, to return to our true self, to repent for our inauthentic ways of being, to repent for our hiding our whole heart, to have a new response to “situations that used to baffle us”, to return to honoring our “intuitive mind” and returning our rational mind in its proper place, as a servant to God, to our intuitive mind. We are, as we have always, engaged in an inner war between walking before God and being wholehearted and thinking we are God and being hidden, having our own agendas, spreading mendacity and deception in our wake.

Herein lies our challenge: are we willing to let go of our false egos and serve our God-Image, serve the divine need we are created for, be a reminder of God in order to make our corner of the world a little better than we found it? In order to do this, we have to let go of our false selves, we have to stop wearing the myriad of masks we keep in our closets and put on each day, we have to stop living in silos, being different depending on the ‘role’ we are playing in any given hour, day, week, etc. We are being called by God to “be wholehearted” to “walk before me” and yet, we seem to be substituting our needs as God’s needs, we seem to be walking before the idols we have made rather than worshiping God, we seem to be more interested in being wholehearted in our duplicity in order to “get ahead” than serving God. We are witnesses and good at seeing the duplicity of another, we are good at witnessing the idolatry of another(s), and we seem to “go along to get along”, we scream LIAR when confronted by people who are being “wholehearted”, by people who seek “righteous justice” as we were told to practice in last week’s Torah Portion.

There is a solution, however. Let’s all go back to basics, let’s all go back to immersing ourselves in our own truths, let’s all go back to using this month of Elul to begin again to fulfill God’s call. We can do this when we make a decision to “turn our will and our lives over to the care of God, as we understand God” as the third step of AA suggests.

I have bastardized “walk before me” by thinking I was the “me” at times in my life and I realize my “stinking thinking” at those moments. I live and lived wholeheartedly in all my affairs, I have never be a spectator in my life, and while this is a good trait, again I have used being wholehearted to ignore God’s call and substitute my false ego and my rational mind for God’s voice and I am sorry for these moments as well. I also know how these bastardizations have happened, I was scared of being me, I was scared of being rejected, I was scared of being left out, etc. I know I was scarred by the death of my father and didn’t not want to go through that pain again, so, at times, I put up my armor and my shield to save me from this pain. Today, I am able to withstand the rejections, I stop and ask “which me is seeing, talking acting”; the false one, the masked one or the authentic me that is walking before God? Using Rabbi Heschel’s words to review life is difficult and exhilarating, painful and freeing. 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 283

“Self-examination was not inaugurated by analytical psychology. Austere soul-searching is an essential feature of piety, and the pious man is prone to suspect that his reverence and devotion may be furtive attachments to selfish purposes.” (God in Search of Man pg. 390)

On this 5th day of Elul, these words of Rabbi Heschel seem very appropriate. Given the times we are living in, the ways in which some wrap themselves in the Flag, in the Bible, in the New Testament, in the Koran, in Eastern Philosophical texts, these words are crucial for us to realize the importance of “austere soul-searching”. The Rabbis knew we needed this, not just to be ‘pious religious people’, rather to be able to be servants of God, to fulfill the unique purpose we were given as a birthright, to be an authentic human being who’s dutifulness is never rote, is never for the sake of optics, etc.

Immersing myself in the teaching above, I am struck with Rabbi Heschel’s message of never taking one’s “piety” for granted. I hear him reminding us to stop thinking too much of ourselves, to not believe our own press, to never be ‘holier than thou’ when dealing with ourselves, another, and/or God. Rather than be like Moses who denied doing anything wrong throughout the Bible, Rabbi Heschel is calling out to us to not be so sure of our actions/motives, to not be too self-aggrandizing and self-congratulatory regarding our accomplishments, to not puff up our chests and try to get medals for our “reverence and devotion” because we may be more reverent and devoted to our egos than we are to God, to decency, to ‘doing the next right thing’.

We, here in America and in Israel, as well as across the Globe, are facing choices that call for us to return to the examples of our ancestors, to the guidance of our ancestors and end our need to be so “pious” and to stop our outward declarations of our “piety”. As soon as people tell you what God wants, they are “furtive attachments to selfish purposes”! Each of us is created unique and in the Divine Image, each of us has a word of God to bring to fruition in our own quirky manner, ergo: no one of us knows exactly what God wants from all of us except to “welcome the stranger, care for the needy, the poor, etc”. When ‘religious men’ state that some people are 2nd Class citizens, they go against the Divine command to “have one law for the stranger and the citizen alike”. When these same ‘religious men’ proclaim the value of slavery, white supremacy, anti-semitism, anti-muslim, etc, they are engaged in spreading the cancer that is eating up their soul to the rest of us. When they proclaim their allegiance to God, to the Flag, to the State, and they exclude groups of people, when they seek to have authoritarian rule rather than abide by democratic norms, they are failing to follow God’s command to: “Proclaim Liberty throughout the land and to all the inhabitants thereof”(Lev.25:10). Yet, we are watching the ”pious” proclaim the “piety” in their actions that go against the ways of God in favor of “selfish purposes”.

People such as these and their followers, their adherents give lip-service to “austere soul-searching” rather than do their own Chesbon HaNefesh, their own accounting of their soul. While this has always been the case, reading the Bible, the prophets, gives us the long history of this type of person, it is time for us to stop doing it ourselves, we have to banish these “false prophets”, we have to “circumcise the foreskins of our hearts” so we can hear the words of God we were born with, so we can live our unique purpose and make the world a little better than we found it, or at least do everything we can to make this happen..In recovery as in Judaism, we set aside time each day for inventory, for “austere soul-searching” and for making our amends as well as being grateful for the good we have done, and expressing gratitude for the help we have received during the day. We remind ourselves of a few truths while doing this daily “soul-searching”: we are not in this for ourselves, we can’t do it alone, we will never achieve the perfection we mistakenly believe we should attain, and we have to live an authentic, transparent life.

In looking back over the years, I know my achievements/actions have had a tinge of “selfish purpose” at times, I cannot say that my ego wasn’t involved in my daily living. I do know my ego most times served God, a greater good than “furtive selfish needs”. In my recovery, I wasn’t furtive, I am pretty ‘out there’. I am deeply devoted to service, to serving God, to being open and I have indulged myself by being a caricature of my self at times. I am sorry for the times when my ego overrode being of service and I am sorry for the times when I allowed callousness and harshness to blunt the message God gave me to deliver at birth. 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 282

“Self-suspicion looms as a more serious threat to faith than doubt, and “anthropodicy”, the justification of man is today as difficult a problem as theodicy, the justification of God. Is there anything pure and untinged with selfishness in the soul of man? Is integrity at all possible? Can we trust our own faith? Is piety ever detached from expediency.?” (God in search of Man pg. 390)

Suspicion comes from the Latin meaning “mistrust”, and Rabbi Heschel’s use of this word regarding ourselves, asks us to look inside and see how much we actually trust ourselves and how our trust in our inner life/in our soul impacts how we are living. The questions he is asking are to help us see how aware we are/are willing to be about our actions, our motives, the integration of our inner and outer lives. While it seems a negative viewpoint from Rabbi Heschel to some-as I was discussing with a couple of people last night- I find his words to be uplifting in helping us be more introspective and aware of the areas we are living with integrity and the areas of life in which we are not.

The last sentence above, hopefully, stops us in our tracks! Piety is associated with reverence, “a belief or point of view that is accepted with unthinking conventional reverence", and comes from the Latin meaning “dutifulness”. Expediency comes from the Latin meaning “putting in order” and is defined as “the quality of being convenient and practical despite possibly being improper or immoral". Given Rabbi Heschel’s belief in the words and ways of the Prophets, his deep religious fervor for God, for Truth, I hear him calling to us to examine our selves, especially during this month of Elul, and as ourselves how we can claim to be Hasids(pious) when we twist the words of Torah, the words of God, the examples of the prophets, the actions our ancestors took that were wrong and taught to us to show us what happens when we choose expediency, when we live in ways that are “unthinking, conventional” and we show “reverence” and deference to mendacity, self-deception, deception of another(s), etc.

On Yom Kippur Day, we read from the Book of Jonah, an interesting choice by the Rabbis. The people of Nineveh, the King of Nineveh, the most power-hungry city in its time, all hear the words of the prophet and they engage in T’Shuvah, they engage in self-examination, they engage in purposeful actions and change their thinking and future actions. We today seem incapable of following their lead. We hear of the perfections of Biblical Characters, we read in commentaries ‘clean-ups’ of their bad behaviors, we suspect their motives and we are told we are wrong, we just are spiritually elevated enough. We listen to the exhortations of religious/spiritual leaders that promote “conventional, unthinking” and demand “reverence” to what is “convenient and practical” and we either go along with them blindly, walk away because we don’t want anything to do with God, higher power,  and/or walk away because we know they are charlatans.

In recovery, we know that pointing the finger at someone is a sign to us, to look at the 3 fingers pointing back to us. While it is not wrong to point out to someone their veering off the path of their recovery, it is also important to look at the ways we are drifting off the path as well. We are aware that “piety” can never be “unthinking, conventional”, not as a spiritual discipline/practice. We know that we can no longer do things because they are “convenient and practical” they have to be deliberate and purposeful. Our recovery inventories continue to help us live into the maladjusted, impractical, deep thinking, and inconvenient ways of wonder and radical amazement!

Continuing my own examples of Elul, I am painfully aware of when expediency and piety were so attached I didn’t see them as separate. I am aware of the times, I went along with people and actions that we “improper and immoral” because it was “convenient” and self-serving. While this was more prevalent prior to my own recovery in 1988, it has happened in my recovery. While fighting the ways of the world, when I was confronted by people in these past 34+ years, at times I was unable to see their point of view, I was willfully blind and deaf to their calls and I am deeply remorseful for these times. Looking back, each time was a result of my own suspicions that needed to be an inner journey and inventory which I made an outer finger-pointing; always getting me in more spiritual distress and angst. I am also aware of the many times, I have chosen to be “maladjusted to notions and cliches” in order to “have an authentic awareness of that which is” and experienced the consequences of these actions as well. I am proud of being a Hasid, especially a Hasid of Rabbi Heschel’s and I pray I do his words, teachings, God’s words, teachings, justice each day. 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 281

“Self-suspicion looms as a more serious threat to faith than doubt, and “anthropodicy”, the justification of man is today as difficult a problem as theodicy, the justification of God. Is there anything pure and untinged with selfishness in the soul of man? Is integrity at all possible? Can we trust our own faith? Is piety ever detached from expediency.?” (God in search of Man pg. 390)

Both words, trust and faith,  in Latin and Hebrew have similar meanings, leading me to understand Rabbi Heschel’s question in a new light. How does our “self-suspicion” make our faith/loyalty/fidelity untrustworthy? How does our “self-suspicion” lead us to suspect some people and believe some people? On the macro level, how does our “self-suspicion” lead us to not trust ourselves, to “trust our own faith” when we don’t trust ourselves fully nor most people? We are seeing this play out on our political scene. Bidenomics has helped the country come back, albeit not as quickly as some people would like, from the devastation of the pandemic. The Republican majority in the House of Representatives has used their majority to attack specious rumors that they know are not true, rather than pass legislation that the majority of the people want. State Houses have tried to, and in many cases have, passed abortion bans that are draconian rather than seek to improve the lives of the poor, the stranger, the needy and both entities do this as ‘religious’ people. Even though they go against basic tenets of both Jesus and the Hebrew Bible, the “trust (their) own faith” as given to them by charlatans, idolators, false prophets and even proclaimed Trump a “messiah”! These actions and ways of being make it hard for anyone to trust faith, to engage in religious and spiritual disciplines with any fervor, with the desperation needed to change our evil/suspicious ways.

On a micro level, all of us are being enjoined, as I am understanding Rabbi Heschel today, to see how our “self-suspicion” begs the question: “can we trust our own faith?” Beginning with the question what do we trust, what are ‘staying strong in, what lies that we tell ourselves are we staying so strong in that we cannot change, cannot have our minds changed, are unwilling to face truth because of our holding on to “alternative facts”? What causes our “self-suspicion” and how can we use faith to overcome our tendency to “suspect thy neighbor”? In evaluating our selves, in doing our inventory over the past year(s), looking at our suspicious natures and those we suspect of ‘wrong-doing’ it seems important to look at our own suspicions of ourselves, to see when we did things because we trusted in the wrong principles, when our “evil drive” was camouflaged and we believe we are/were acting from a Godly place when we were actually being idolatrous. At Mount Sinai, God asked for our pledge, our ancestors made this pledge for themselves and for all of us and it is up to us to stay “strong” in our “belief” and stay in fidelity to the original response: Na’aseh V’nishmah; we will do and then we will understand. Rather than following the call of our soul, we have been engaged, for millennia, in following the call of our rational minds, of our suspicious minds, which has led to wars, destruction, divorce of mates, of children, of parents, of commitments. Rather than making and honoring our covenants with God and one another as taught to us in the Bible, Koran, New Testament, etc, we fall into our suspicious rational minds and call it faith, call it fidelity, call it strength- how sad, how idolatrous, how crushing to our well-being.

How do we begin, you might ask, so I will begin with my own inventory on this topic: As a criminal I suspected myself so much, I couldn’t trust the people who had my best interests at heart and instead trusted people who had their own agendas seeking me to serve them. I was so “self-suspicious” that I didn’t recognize this truth and, in fact, I turned everything upside down. I stayed loyal, kept fidelity with and was strong in my conviction that people who wanted me to do things to serve them were actually the ones who ‘got me’ and I was so upside down because of my “self-suspicion” that I could tell truth from fiction, alternative facts from real ones. I have made amends to the myriad of family, friends who I could find and donated to Tzedakah for the ones I haven’t been able to find. I say here and now: I was wrong and I am sorry for any and all hurt I caused from my “self-suspicion” which led me to suspect the people I could have/should have trusted. In my recovery, I have found that my “self-suspicion” took the form of sadness and anger when people hid from me, when they came for my help and then tried to kill themselves. My passion for life, which is real, became mixed up in my suspicion of people who hid and this led to bad actions, mean actions on my part, I realize. I did not see this before and I am profoundly sorry for those whom I hurt and I know my intentions were good and they don’t matter when the  actions are not good. Please accept my T’Shuvah, my amends and 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 280

“Self-suspicion looms as a more serious threat to faith than doubt, and “anthropodicy”, the justification of man is today as difficult a problem as theodicy, the justification of God. Is there anything pure and untinged with selfishness in the soul of man? Is integrity at all possible? Can we trust our own faith? Is piety ever detached from expediency.?” (God in search of Man pg. 390)

Today is the first day of Elul, yesterday was Rosh Hodesh Elul and the 30th day of Av. It is 3 weeks and one day since we commemorated the destruction of the Temples and, as we observe 3 weeks between the breaching of the walls of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar and the destruction of the Temple, we observe these 3 weeks since the 9th of Av as a time of healing and introspection as to our part in the destruction, not just of the Temple, rather how we have retarded the work of creation we were created to fulfill and how we have advanced our purpose, our mission, our work.

Looking at the second question above and using it in our Chesbon, our accounting of our soul, of ourselves is a deep dive into who we are, the lies we tell ourselves and the way we need to be to serve our mission, our purpose, to serve God and to serve our corner of the world and make it a little better than when we found it. “Integrity” is comes from the Latin meaning “intact”. The Hebrew is “shlaemute”, wholeness. Immersing ourselves in Rabbi Heschel’s question: “Is integrity at all possible” we find, again, a both/and response. Integrity is possible and it is hard, it is not a constant for anyone except the spiritually elevated, even the Dalai Lama speaks of his anger issues, he laughs at himself, however which shows his humanness and his wholeness. Yet, we find so many people setting themselves up as having the ‘utmost integrity’ while deriding everyone else who disagrees with them. We see this mendacity in tribalism, in populism, in any and every form of grouping that is dependent upon a ‘high priest/warrior king’ as leader and this leader is given the power to determine what we think, what we say, what we believe.

As a nation, our integrity is being retarded. While we have never kept intact the words of the Declaration of Independence: “all men are created equal and endowed with certain unalienable rights…life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”, we are in a state where scared white men are speaking of the goodness of slavery for the slaves, banning books like Maus, Diary of Anne Frank, Toni Morrison’s books, anything that speaks of the ills done to slaves, to Native Americans, etc-anything that would make them question themselves, admit their errors to themselves, is banned or ignored. We are very far from being intact as a nation and the reason is because we are not intact as individuals! We are broken people whose brokenness is being played out as anger, as “godly”, as ‘we are the saviors and warriors of Christ’, except the Christ they speak about and worship has no relationship to the Christ in the Bible, just as the ruling party and Netanyahu have no relationship to the words of the Prophets nor the lessons of the Hebrew Bible! Yet, these broken people who try so hard to convince themselves by convincing us how together they are, how they are fighting for the ‘little guy’, how ‘they are our retribution’ have bought their bullshit, they have drunk their own juice and are bringing us to the brink of disaster, just as the priests, royalty and wealthy did at the time of the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple.

“Is integrity at all possible” is the question before us as part of our “accounting of our souls”. While Trump, Netanyahu, Giuliani, Cruz, McCarthy, Greene, Jordan, et al want us to believe they are the paragons of integrity, as do many of the progressives, like Bernie Sanders, the Squad, et al, I believe it is only when we can acknowledge our both/and; our separation and connection with God and human beings; when we can see the ‘errors of our ways’ and the good we do; when we stop seeing ourselves and one another with myopic vision and see the whole picture of self and another-good and not so good; we are in integrity. We are intact as human beings because we see our whole self, fulfilling the Latin definition and the Hebrew definition of integrity.

In using this question in our accounting, we have to determine when we were split and how we fed our split nature. We have to delineate our tunnel vision and how/when we wear “a new pair of glasses”. There are many other ways to respond to the question of “when have we acted with/without integrity?” In looking back on the past year, I realize when I worry about the past or the future, I am not intact and when I live in the moment, when I seek to not blame anyone for my own errors, I am more intact with my whole being. 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 279

“Self-suspicion looms as a more serious threat to faith than doubt, and “anthropodicy”, the justification of man is today as difficult a problem as theodicy, the justification of God. Is there anything pure and untinged with selfishness in the soul of man? Is integrity at all possible? Can we trust our own faith? Is piety ever detached from expediency.?” (God in search of Man pg. 390)

As we celebrate and acknowledge the new month of Elul in the Hebrew/lunar calendar, hearing Rabbi Heschel’s questions above give us a path to using this month as the Rabbis intended-look at ourselves without the usual filters of ego, self-centeredness, self-deception, self-suspicion, and be responsible to and for our actions, the false selves we portrayed and the authentic souls we are. Rabbi Heschel’s questions are calling to us to see reality, to understand, in my experience of his teaching today, that purity is not the goal, the souls of each us wrestling with our selfishness, our instinct to go with the rational mind over the intuitive one, our need to be right, our desire to deceive another(s) and ourselves, to live in suspicion of self and just about everyone else. This is the month to delve into our way of living a suspicious lifestyle. It is so important to acknowledge most of our suspicions are projections, we are going to get them before they get us. We project onto another what we would do and in those moments, we are not allowing our souls to override our rational, lower thinking and logic. In those moments we are fulfilling Einstein’s fear of worshiping the rational mind and forgetting the intuitive one(soul).

“Is there anything pure and untinged with selfishness in the soul of man”, I believe that we will never achieve this goal, I do believe we can work to lessen our selfishness and our self-centeredness, we can increase our “take the next right action for its own sake” mentality the more we allow our spiritual life, our inner life, our intuitive mind to ‘run the show’. Herein lies the challenge for all of us, allowing our souls, our intuitive minds, our connection to a power greater than ourselves be the guiding lights of our actions, of our living and of our loving one another. When we seek to lessen our selfishness, increase our desire to take the next right action and serve something larger than ourself, we are taking actions with a little more purity than we had before. Again, perfection is not the goal, as I hear Rabbi Heschel speaking to me. In Pirke Avot, Rabbi Tarfon says: “It is not our job to finish the work and we are not free from engaging in it.” Let’s take this month of Elul, when the cosmic forces of compassion, truth, kindness are so strong, as I learned from Rabbi Jonathan Omer-man, and do our inner work, our truth speaking to our self, allow our rational mind to hear and take in the truth that our intuitive/soul mind knows.

Our political world is in desperate need of this type of introspection, it is so far off the rails our democracy is still in danger of being taken over by authoritarians, not just Trump but McCarthy, Greene, Jordan, DeSantis, Pence, Christie, et al. We are witnessing selfishness, self-centeredness, suspicion of another, lack of integrity (as evidenced by the debt-ceiling deal and now the threats about the budget deal), and the practice of mendacity disguised as piety, the inability of people to keep their word because all they care about is what is expedient in the moment and call this faithfulness to principles-no matter how idolatrous those principles are! Will any of the people, the guilty and the responsible ones, aka enablers, ever stand up and admit their errors, ask for forgiveness, change their ways? Unfortunately, I think not and this is what is so sad about reading Rabbi Heschel’s call to us from almost 70 years ago!

In recovery, we do a complete inventory and then continue to “take personal inventory and promptly admit when we are wrong.” Beginning today, I would like to suggest we all do a Chesbon HaNefesh, an accounting of our soul, using the questions that Rabbi Heschel’s writing brings up for me daily. Today’s writing is: 1)How have I been less selfish, lived with more integrity, and stayed faithful to spiritual principles, God’s will this year? 2)How have I been selfish (the same or more), been more split and less faithful to spiritual principles, God’s will this year? I have witnessed my split more this year than I have in the past. I have been selfish when I have felt bad because FOMO, I have been more split when I have shunned people who reached out to me, I have been less faithful to my spiritual principles when I have been suspicious of people because of their past actions and not giving them the benefit of the doubt, not looking for, and where appropriate, seeing the change in people. These ways have lessened, I am happy to say and I have been more open, more welcoming, less suspicious and more forgiving in this year. I pray the people who harmed me live well, I stay true to loving more and doing what I say, I am less self-deceptive and better able to see, experience, hear the light and 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 278

“Self-suspicion looms as a more serious threat to faith than doubt, and “anthropodicy”, the justification of man is today as difficult a problem as theodicy, the justification of God. Is there anything pure and untinged with selfishness in the soul of man? Is integrity at all possible? Can we trust our own faith? Is piety ever detached from expediency.?” (God in search of Man pg. 390)

How can we seek to justify God? God is the Ineffable One, the Infinite One, the One without end, and yet, humankind, in all of our hubris, our ‘need’ to understand so we can ‘believe’, seek to justify God’s existence, etc. We do this so we do not have to be responsible to something greater than ourselves. We do this so we can set ourselves up as ‘godly’, as the ‘one true representation of God’ and your suffering is either a sign God loves you, or a sign God doesn’t love you-depending on whom you are listening to, which charlatan in robes, cloaked in oil which they claim has anointed them God’s representatives and we invest such power in. All the ‘where was God in the Holocaust, why does God let bad things happen to good people, etc’ are paths to justifying our wrong doings, giving into our baser desires, allowing us to “suspect thy neighbor” and do harms in the name of ‘self-care’. Truly, who are we to justify God, we should be grateful to God, humbled before God, servants of God, partners with God, etc.

As usual, Rabbi Heschel is disturbing me this morning and every morning with his wisdom and teachings. The only way I can justify myself and humankind, I am seeing today, is to fulfill God’s will instead of mine, to “nullify my will before God’s will so God’s will becomes mine”(Pirke Avot 2:4). Our justification as human beings comes for our surrendering to God’s will, to “do justly, love mercy, walk humbly in God’s ways”. Yet, we have so much hubris that we expect God to walk in our ways, we demand mercy for ourselves and give none to another(s), we decide what justice is-ensuring that what is just for ourselves doesn’t apply to anyone ‘not of our kind’-hence the justice for the rich and the rest of us. We witness and participate in these God-denying, idolatrous actions daily and we say nothing, we do nothing to change ourselves, our systems! Instead of being descendants of the prophets, we are acting like descendants of the Greeks and Romans, both civilizations were destroyed and did not make the transition to modernity. Yet, we would rather use our minds to justify our idolatry, our inhumanity, our fear-mongering, our inappropriate use of power, than justify our existence as partners with God, as tillers of the soil, as keepers and growers of God’s Garden-our world. Rather than use the sayings and commandments of the Bible to help us grow, we are using the words of the Bible to have rule and dominion over one another.

We are so deep into self-loathing that we continue to find ways to justify our existence by not justifying God’s. We keep seeking a world where God is not necessary, through science, religion, logic, psychology, etc. Yet, the Surgeon General considers loneliness to be a major disease today. Loneliness comes from a disconnection from one another -usually attributed to the Pandemic, which only made the truth of what has been happening for a long time clear to ‘the powers that be’. Loneliness is a spiritual malady! It is a look into the vapidness we have been living within ourselves and this vapidness reflects our loss of living with meaning and purpose, it reflects our suspicion of everyone around us, it reflects a deep belief of being unloveable and unable to live in covenant with God and/or another human being. Because of the lies of the Greeks-humans can attain perfection- we find ourselves on the merry-go-round of not good enough and the best there is, we can do anything with impunity(Trump, his minions, the Republicans in the House of Representatives) and you have to follow our rules-authoritarianism. Maybe it is time to heed Rabbi Heschel’s words and accept God’s Will, justify our existence by doing God’s will and living together in a loving interdependence with God, with one another!

In recovery, we justify our existence by “turning our will over to the care of God” in our 3rd step. This is the culmination of our entering recovery (as opposed to abstinence); the surrender process. Surrendering our will to God’s will, surrendering our “need to be right” to our need to connect, rekindling a belief and commitment to a power greater than ourselves, are necessary if we are to move into our inventory, our process of taking off the blinders we have been wearing and seeing what we have done that isn’t good and what we have done that is good. After we surrender, we clean house so we can once again justify our existence through service and decency. It is the 29th of Av, tomorrow is the new month of Elul, the time for us to do our inventories, to surrender to truth, to God, and make our amends and our resolutions to do better, to enhance the good we do, will you? 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 277

“Self-suspicion looms as a more serious threat to faith than doubt, and “anthropodicy”, the justification of man is today as difficult a problem as theodicy, the justification of God. Is there anything pure and untinged with selfishness in the soul of man? Is integrity at all possible? Can we trust our own faith? Is piety ever detached from expediency.?” (God in search of Man pg. 390)

In the second half of the first sentence above, Rabbi Heschel’s calling to us to understand and change our suspicious ways! Our “self-suspicion” leads us to doubt everything, to believe only ourselves and people who say what we want to hear, people who agree with us. Hence, the need for people to watch Newsmax, Oan, Fox (not)News, and listen to Steve Bannon, Alex Jones, White Power people like Nick Fuentes, and become radicalized. People in America, especially white men, young and old, are being radicalized at alarming rates, because of their self-suspicious natures which leaves them open to the lies of charlatans, the allure of authoritarians who ‘identify’ with and make themselves ‘popular’ while being the real elites that they are railing against. “Self-suspicion” is “a more serious threat to faith”, to freedom, to truth “than doubt” and we are watching this truth play out in real time.

It is harder and harder to justify humankind when we live in this self-suspicious manner. There is no truth that we can agree on, we can’t even agree on what freedom is, what the US stands for, what it means to be a “nation of immigrants”, as JFK wrote about. Donald Trump and his co-conspirators and his enablers continue to rape and pillage our country rather than be responsible and uphold their constitutional duty. The Big Lie and all the ‘little lies’ that have been told and are being told, the weaponization of Government by the GOP, now as it was during Nixon, the Harvard, Yale, and Ivy League graduates that purport to ‘care about the little guy’ while berating ‘those liberal elites’ with lies, innuendos, trying to whip up their followers to do physical harm to ‘those enemies’ as they did on Jan. 6th, 2021 while stealing from their followers, while making them suspicious about someone else so Trump, et al can pick their pockets, are making this country a war zone, rather than a democracy! When we witness the horror of mendacity, the crime of the Big Con, the criminal conspiracy that the GOP participates in, the cover-up of Gingrich(a serial philanderer and the beginner of this weaponization and hatred of fellow elected officials), and McCarthy(“I will sell my soul to be Speaker and bow down to Trump and his mobsters at any and all costs), being joined by the lies of Ted Cruz(I will kiss the ass of someone who took off after my father, my wife, my family in a cruel and dishonest manner) and the silence of McConnell and the rest of the Republican leaders, we see how difficult the “justification of man” can be and is.

Our religious leaders are woefully inept as well and this, for many, brings about the difficulty when the justification of God is brought up. How can God anoint Trump and his minions to bring about redemption when all they do is bring about chaos? How can these ‘religious leaders’, ‘men/women of God’ go against everything the Prophets cried out about and say they are the ‘true messengers’ of God’s will? How can they purport to represent and teach what Jesus wants when they go against his basic precepts? How can anyone believe in God when God is being represented by liars, charlatans, people out for their own power, people who are so self-suspicious they are empty inside, people who fake their empathy and collect their money? This issue that Rabbi Heschel called us to look at and solve/change, is staring at us today on steroids and we still hear the lies and mendacity of our political, religious, communal leaders!

Recovery is the anti-dote, it is the healing agent for self-suspicion through the healing power of truth, the healing power of confession, the healing power of God and of our fellow travelers. We no longer seek to justify our bad actions, we are committed to justify God’s faith in us, as many Jews and others in recovery are grateful for in our morning prayers. We no longer seek to justify our lies and our treachery, we ask for forgiveness and we make living amends through our actions which are contrary to those we use to practice. Rather than being part of a conspiracy to ‘get ahead at any and all costs’ anymore, we are part of a group that seeks to “grow along spiritual lines” and “practice” spiritual “principles in all our affairs”.

It is hard to let go of our self-suspicions! T’Shuvah is the solution that God has given us since the days of the Bible; seeing my part, growing from my experiences, making amends for my errors and being joyous at the good I have done, all help me stay in the solution to lessen my self-suspicions which lessen my suspicion of everyone else. 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 276

“Self-suspicion looms as a more serious threat to faith than doubt, and “anthropodicy”, the justification of man is today as difficult a problem as theodicy, the justification of God. Is there anything pure and untinged with selfishness in the soul of man? Is integrity at all possible? Can we trust our own faith? Is piety ever detached from expediency.?” (God in search of Man pg. 390)

Rabbi Heschel brings us face to face with ourselves in his teaching above, he is, as he usually does, speaking truth to power-not just powerful leaders, not just wealthy people, but to the power we all have to choose self-suspicion, to falsely justify our suspicious minds and ways, and to justify our regulating God to the Church, the Mosque, the Synagogue. Just prior to this sentence, Rabbi Heschel reminds us of the power of evil to camouflage itself, to hide itself and our suspicious ways make us partners with evil, help hide evil from ourselves in plain sight, and imbue evil with more power, with more logic, with more rationalizations.

In our political world we are witnessing and participating in the self-suspicious evil and its dangers when we make moral equivalence between Trump and his crime gang/crime family and Joe Biden; we seem to not question Jared Kushner’s 2 Billion dollar deal with the Saudis, nor his selling of his New York building that wasn’t worth much for a profit to Qatar, I believe. Our willingness to just believe the lies of Fox ‘News?’, NewsMax, OAN, etc is an indicator of how deep into suspicion we have fallen, how unaware of the evil that blindly following and/or believing lies causes and promotes. The same is true on the other end, just going along because it fits into the “self-suspicions” we hold dear. This is a recipe for disaster, for promoting evil and for being part of the cover-up of that evil.

Jews have promoted suspicion in our questioning of people who want to convert, Shammai, a famous Rabbi prior to the Common Era, when asked to convert someone “while he stood on one foot”, chased him away, which many Rabbis and congregations still do, making it difficult for someone who wants to join with the Jewish people. Rabbi Hillel, his counterpart, on the other hand, when confronted by the same person, instead of being suspicious, he was welcoming and told him: “The main principle of Torah is what is hateful to you do not do unto another, all the rest is commentary-now go study.” Ruth, was a convert and she was the great grandmother of King David and her conversion was simple: Wherever you go, I go, whoever is your people is my people, whoever is your God is my God, to paraphrase her words to Naomi, who told her to stay home in Moab. Yet, today, with all of our suspicious minds, we reject people at first who want to be part of and, we reject one another because we are suspicious of their ways of being Jewish. How sad we are unaware, willfully blind, and/or just so suspicious that we let evil flourish in our own midst, within the Jewish people, within our Synagogues, within our homes. I fear for Israel with the Ultra-Orthodox trying to take over, with their outlandish and unholy suspicious natures destroying the democratic state and Israel becoming an authoritarian state run by people who, with all their ‘studying’ are unable to hear the call of the Prophets, “do justly, love mercy, walk humbly with God”.

Our faith, as Rabbi Heschel is indicating to me today, is dependent upon our letting go our our self-suspicious natures, letting go of our ‘rationalizations’ of evil and promoting the evil that is hiding in plain sight. Doubt doesn’t impede faith, in fact, I believe doubt enhances faith. God is so ineffable, that God can handle our doubt and understands humans are incapable of 100% surety, without doubt we wouldn’t learn more, and doubt presupposes a fact already known-God exists, God loves, God is ineffable. Suspicion, on the other hand, prevents true ‘devekut’- true connection and union with God, with another human being. Because of our self-suspicions, we suspect everyone else, we are waiting to be screwed over, we want to make everyone else bad and wrong so we can be in the right and have power. Our self-suspicion retards our living, yet we believe we are using it to move up the ladder!

In recovery, I have found it imperative to heal my self-suspicion and believe in my inner worth, believe my inner truth, and know I have so much more to keep learning. My belief in my soul causes me to keep maturing my soul, seeing where I still have to ‘grow my soul’ so I am never 100% sure I am right. Surety leads to separation from God and a bastardization of faith. I keep open to learn new and see clearer and trust my self a little more each day as well. 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 275

“It is the new perception of evil that drives man to despair. For what is ghastly about evil is not so much its apparent might as its cryptic ubiquity, its ability to camouflage.” (God in Search of Man pg. 390)

God in Search of Man was published in 1955 and Rabbi Heschel’s teachings stand the test of time, in fact, I would say they were/are prophetic. He is so concerned with evil, with integrity, with faith, and gives us a roadmap to our inner life, to our ability to question ourselves, and too many of us ignore his wisdom, his concern, his care for each of us as individuals and for humanity as a whole.

Our integrity is directly linked to our ability to perceive evil in ourselves, to be humble and seek out the self-centered, self-serving aspects of our actions. While every good action serves us, serves God, serves another, when they are done for our self-centeredness, they easily turn to the “cryptic ubiquity” of evil. Cryptic comes from the Latin meaning “hidden” and ubiquity’s root is “everywhere”. Rabbi Heschel’s use of these two terms together teaches us to seek and find the evil that is hidden everywhere, that is ‘hiding in plain sight’. Yet, too many of us are willfully blind to this truth, we are too lazy to ask ourselves the right questions.

Rabbi Jonathan Omer-man, z”l, taught me (and many others) “what is the question this experience is the answer for” and I began to realize that I had to right answers to the wrong questions. When we are not asking ourselves the ‘right’ questions, we will add to the “cryptic ubiquity” of evil even when it seems we are doing the good! Our inability to question ourselves, to ask the right questions for this moment, to realize that our experiences are not answers, rather they beg certain questions from us is at the root of adding more evil to the world rather than adding more good. This is not to say that anyone is all good nor all bad, it is to remind us to not be smug, not be so certain, not be so impervious to outside opinions and suggestions when it comes to our actions, our thoughts.

We are living in a time where certainty reigns, where humanity’s quest for certainty and our fear of the unknown is so great, we listen to the false prophets, we turn our will and our lives over to ‘the supreme leader’, rather that to God, rather than to listening to and responding to the calls of our inner life. The evil that is hidden everywhere, that we willfully ignore is running rampant in our time, possibly more than in any other time in the history of humankind. We have become so afraid of living in truth, so scared of truly seeing ourselves and maturing our inner life, we ‘go along to get along’ even when we are going along with evil, even when we see the error of our ways. Defend, defend, defend is the way of our world, no matter what the issue is. We are engaged in a battle for democracy, for faith, for religion today, as we have been before, because so many people are willing to believe lies, mendacity, deceptions of another and give in to our own self-deceptions

As we approach the Hebrew month of Elul, the time when we are to take an inventory of our year, a Cheshbon HaNefesh-accounting of our soul, Rabbi Heschel is calling upon us to uncover the hidden evil that we have perpetrated ‘in the name of good, in the name of being conservative, in the name of being progressive, in the name of doing nothing. For me, Rabbi Heschel is demanding a T’Shuvah for all the “cryptic ubiquity” that I/we have engaged in. He is telling us that our very way of being depends on our taking off our blindfolds, “lifting up our eyes to see” as God tells Abraham in Genesis, reaching into our inner life with courage and desire to serve God, not idols, to fulfill the calling we were created for, and to live in truth. We have to make a decision to root out the hidden evil within us, the hidden evil that is everywhere around us, to be like the boy in The Emperor’s New Clothes and say what is, not what everyone wants to believe. We have to take back the words of Christ, Mohammed, Moses from our Holy Texts that the charlatans, the perpetrators of this hidden evil, have stolen and bastardized.

In recovery, we constantly are searching for our part in every interaction, the good and the not good that we do. We have the experience of spreading the hidden evil, adding to it from our times prior to our decision to live differently. While we are not perfect, each day we seek progress in our war with our own hidden evil, with our own self-deceptions. We are asking ourselves more of the right questions so we wind up with the right answers. Each day we root out some evil we were unaware of through prayer, meditation, growing our inner life and connecting to, learning from another human being. 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 273

“The self-suspicious man shrinks from the light. He is often afraid to think as he feels, afraid to admit what he believes, afraid to love what he admires. Going astray, he blames others for his failures and becomes more evasive, smooth-tongued, and deceitful. Living in fear, he thinks that ambush is the normal dwelling place of all men.”(God in Search of Man pg. 389)

The last sentence above is, unfortunately, the path many people take, now and throughout history. The fear of FOMO, the fear of one another, has overtaken human beings for the millennia. So many of us live from these fears and act out accordingly. Rather than live in “both/and” most people live in “either/or”. In the latter, we are in win/lose mode, my way or the highway thinking, success/failure beliefs. In the former, we realize that both success and failure, my way and your way, are part of being human and winning or losing doesn’t define us, in fact we never ‘lose’ because we are always learning. In “both/and” we seek to communicate, relate, make connections with people from our souls in order to learn, grow and not need to be right.

Yet, “either/or” thinking is the paradigm most people live at. In this paradigm, “living in fear, he thinks that ambush is the normal dwelling place of all men”, is true, and people in this mode of being describe the world as a dangerous place, they believe ‘they are out to get me’ and join with like-minded people to fight against “those people”. Hence the popularity of Donald Trump, the going along with Republican legislatures and Governors who relish and embrace authoritarianism. People living in this fear, living in “self-suspicion”, living into “suspect thy neighbor”, are hypersensitive to any and all perceived slights. They look for validation of their suspicions, their conspiracy theories and believe the lies of “pizzagate”, the lies that all democrats are pedophiles, the 2020 election was stolen, ‘big brother is listening in’, ‘the deep state is out to get them’, etc. They join with other conspiracy theorists, they will follow Q, they will believe and clap at the lies Trump, et al promote because they have “fear of missing out” syndrome as well. Living in “either/or” thinking makes ambushing everyone else a smart, survival technique, a way of being that is logical (in a twisted way), and a “societal norm”. Rather than promote ideas and solutions, our political parties are more interested in trashing, ambushing their opponents! While they proclaim that “God is on their side”, in reality, we are witnessing the desecration of God’s Name, of God’s will, a bastardization of the Bibles, Koran, etc.

It is not just in the political realm we witness the bloodbath “either/or” thinking and acting brings, we witness it in business, in sports, in our personal lives. Business engage in espionage against their competitors because they have to be #1 or they are a failure. The advertising, the promises, the small print disclaimers, the Super Bowl ads, all try to make (fill in the blank) “the best” and the “only true/right choice” in a myriad of industries. In our families, we witness the pushing and shoving to be #1 child, #1 in the class, #1 in sports, etc. We are so interested in making our children ‘the best’, there are parents who do their homework, who call the schools when their child doesn’t get a ‘good enough’ grade (an A or A+) to have the principals change the grade and discipline the teacher! Have you gone to a kids sporting event lately and heard parents berating the coach, the umpire/ref for their kids ‘failures’? In “either/or” thinking, people do not see progress, they see winners and losers, and if their kid is ‘a loser’ then this reflects on the entire family! In the workplace, people take credit for another’s work, they step on one another so they can ‘climb to the top’. Being a mensch, a decent human being, is laughed at by people living in the “either/or” paradigm. Because of their own fears, their own inadequacies, people living in “either/or” truly believe they have to ambush, abuse, cheat, lie, steal to ‘get ahead’ and, why not, everyone else does it!

In recovery, we are recovering the truth that Spirituality and religion have always known-live in the “both/and” because our “either/or” thinking has led to self-deception, to self-doubt, to self-harm, to self-deprecation, etc. Our eyes become wide-open to the destruction and pain we caused ourselves and another(s) by living in “either/or”, ‘get them before they get me’ thinking. We choose to embrace the paradoxes of life, we choose to open our minds to the ideas and wisdom of another(s), be they contemporaries and ancient sages, philosophers and spiritual guides/leaders, mentors and parents/siblings. Letting go of the “ambush” mentality, letting go of suspicions allows us to breath in the truth of living, it allows us to deal with pain, loss, not being #1, realizing how we ‘miss the mark’ in ways that promote our growth in being human. It is not easy and it is simple, the more I engage in “both/and”, the more responsible, joyous and free I am. 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 273

“The self-suspicious man shrinks from the light. He is often afraid to think as he feels, afraid to admit what he believes, afraid to love what he admires. Going astray, he blames others for his failures and becomes more evasive, smooth-tongued, and deceitful. Living in fear, he thinks that ambush is the normal dwelling place of all men.”(God in Search of Man pg. 389)

The experience of self-suspicion, suspicion of another(s) is universal and historical. While it seems to be embedded in our DNA, it is a learned behavior. As I delve into my own suspicious nature and actions, I am understanding the phrase “the inclinations of humans are evil from their youth” found in Genesis 8:21 in a new context. Because we learn how to be “self-suspicious” and we learn ‘perfection’ is the goal/winning, when we go “astray” we have to “blame others for our failures.” There is just no other way to be able to live with ourselves, there is no societal norm that welcomes imperfection, that rewards truth telling, doing T’Shuvah, being responsible for our errors. While parents, teachers, political leaders, Rabbis, Priests, Nuns, Imams, Cantors, Monks, etc will tell us to be honest, to always tell the truth, their examples are less than exemplar in this area! They teach us with their actions how to hide, how to cover up, how to blame someone else, how to lie, how to deceive through omissions. Standing up for what is right, like the Prophets, like Rabbi Heschel, like Dr. King, like Dr. Barber, for no personal gain, doing the next right action purely for the sake of God, of humanity, of being able to live with oneself, seems to be a lost art for most of us. Yet, this way of being, the opposite of blaming, the opposite of evasiveness, the opposite of glib and smooth-talking and the opposite of deception are within our grasp. We can change, because unlike leopards, humans change ‘their spots’ all the time, this is called growing and maturing.

We have to begin by calling out what is not right in our world, what is anti-human, what goes against the teachings of Jesus, of Moses, of Mohammed, of God. One cannot “love thy neighbor like their self” without loving oneself! We stop blaming and take responsibility for our imperfections. Rather than try and kill our “other self”, we learn how to make friends with the parts of us we have denied, bringing together our divine and earthly inclinations, as Rabbi Harold Kushner, z”l, taught me and so many others. Once we stop blaming another(s) for whatever we are perceiving to be ‘wrong’ with us, we begin to understand and appreciate our progress rather than our failure, we do our inventory, our Chesbon HaNefesh, accounting of our soul, and see where we have done well in areas that we beat ourselves up for not ‘being perfect’ in prior years. We begin to realize our ability to learn from, repair and have new responses to situations and ways of being that used to be our Achilles heel. We realize we no longer have to be deceptive, we no longer have to ‘sell’ a false version of events, and we no longer have to evade truth, evade God’s call, evade faithfulness to principles, evade our command to “welcome the stranger, care for the poor and the needy”.

The news yesterday was distressing and joyous, the fires in Maui, destroying Lahina, are so sad and scary-so many lives lost, injured, and impacted in a myriad of ways we have yet to know and understand. Ron DiSantis ‘firing’ a duly elected prosecutor because he disagrees with her politics, her choices, so he doesn’t believe in an Independent Judiciary, which speaks volumes about what he would do as President-a very scary thought. DiSantis is a made up person who is the textbook example of Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom above and how he can be considered for continuing and protecting our democracy, our constitution is beyond me. The Republican Party has decided that the Confederacy was right, we should make anyone not like us (white, male, Anglo-Saxon, protestant) slaves that serve us- “those people” being anyone who is Black, Asian, Jewish, Latino, Muslim, women, etc. Yet, my home State of Ohio came through- they stopped Republican attempts to hamper democratic methods of change, they repudiated a bill that would have made a ballot measure protecting Abortion and Women’s Reproductive Health Care impossible to pass. YAY Buckeyes!

My experiences in recovery help me to be less evasive, less blaming, and going astray less and less over the years. I am in sync with my imperfections, I don’t beat myself up for my errors in judgement and actions. I know that I am doing the best I can in any given moment and my practice of T’Shuvah, doing a 10th step daily (or so) and a Cheshbon HaNefesh(4th step) once a year, keeps me growing, learning and more accepting of my imperfections and those of everyone else. I no longer suspect myself of ill intent, I no longer suspect myself of hating someone in my heart, I no longer blame anyone else for my choices and actions. I continue to grow along spiritual lines, continue to practice God’s principles in all my affairs to the best I can in the moment. 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 272

“The self-suspicious man shrinks from the light. He is often afraid to think as he feels, afraid to admit what he believes, afraid to love what he admires. Going astray, he blames others for his failures and becomes more evasive, smooth-tongued, and deceitful. Living in fear, he thinks that ambush is the normal dwelling place of all men.”(God in Search of Man pg. 389)

Leaning into the 3rd sentence above reminds me of Rabbi Heschel’s teaching in the introduction to the last book he wrote, A Passion for Truth: “To live in both awe and consternation, in fervor and horror, with my conscience on mercy and my eyes on Aushwitz, wavering between exaltation and dismay? Was this a life a man would choose to live?” Rabbi Heschel’s teaching “going astray he blames others for his failures and becomes more evasive, smooth-tongued, and deceitful” was not heeded then and we have come to ‘improve’ our blaming, our evasiveness, our smooth-tongued has become sharper and our deceitfulness is on steroids! Living in awe of Rabbi Heschel’s mercy, awe, fervor, exaltation, his hope, his actions for good, his covenantal relationship with God, with goodness, his commitment to the words of the prophets motivates us, hopefully, to emulate, to learn from and to take action on his life’s work: service to God and service to one another, ie being more human. My consternation comes my blindness, wittingly and unwittingly to “going astray” and blaming “others for” my “failures. It comes from being blamed by others for their failures. I am in awe of Rabbi Heschel’s ability to live in the tensions he lists in the quotation above.

We are so addicted to perfection, we are so engaged in our facade of always ‘looking good’, we are so concerned with power and our hold on it, we are so in need of control, we have forgotten our humanness, our imperfections that are God-given, we have forgotten the stories and lessons of the Bible. Because we are unable/unwilling to do T’Shuvah-translated here as repentance, return, new response- we continually hide from our selves, from our errors, from our ability to improve and do better one grain of sand each day. We would rather blame another for whatever goes wrong, for our failures, than learn from them, than be responsible for them because we are afraid of seeing our true selves and living authentically. This fear comes from being shamed by society for our failures rather than using them to grow, to ask for forgiveness, to return to our souls, our spiritual homes, and/or to have new responses to the situations that we will find ourselves in over and over again.

The ‘popularity’ of Donald Trump and the Republican Party is an example of how low we have sunk in our fear of being real, in our fear of following the examples of King David, Jacob, Judah, and the Israelites in the Desert to turn back to God, to turn back to their authentic nature, which includes fears, imperfections, and learning. Rather than accept responsibility, Trump, the MAGA crowd, the Republican Party have made blaming everyone else into a death match, they are in a MMA fight with truth and responsibility as their opponents and they are out to prove that power gives them the strength and right to lie, blame, become more evasive than the people Rabbi Heschel saw in the 1950’s, and do all of this smooth-tongued deceitfulness in the name of God, when really they do all of this in the name of themselves whom they have made into idols, authoritarians, false gods.

In recovery, the 4th step we take is: “Made a fearless and searching inventory of ourselves”. Prior to being in recovery, we all had PhD’s in “going astray” and blaming everyone else for our failures, being evasive was our normal MO, deceit was at the core of our speech, our actions, our everything. Even though we may have had ‘feelings of love’ we were incapable of acting loving. We are aware of our ability to deceive ourselves and another(s), we are aware of our smooth-tongues and how their sharpness cuts into the souls of people around us, and we know we have to admit our failures so we can learn and grow. We also know that we have to see the good we have done, the basic goodness of being that is implanted in us by God at birth, and doing our “searching and fearless moral inventory” clears a path to our souls that we had blocked prior to our recovery.

I, of course, have a PhD in “going astray, he blames others for his failures”. My recovery is rooted in returning to God, returning to my rightful place, returning to my basic goodness of being, returning to belonging in the world one grain of sand each day. I understand Rabbi Heschel’s awe and consternation. I am grow more each day in accepting responsibility for my errors more each day and I am learning to accept the blame another puts on me and discern my part, be responsible for it, and feel sad that they have to hide from themselves. 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 271

“The self-suspicious man shrinks from the light. He is often afraid to think as he feels, afraid to admit what he believes, afraid to love what he admires. Going astray, he blames others for his failures and becomes more evasive, smooth-tongued, and deceitful. Living in fear, he thinks that ambush is the normal dwelling place of all men.”(God in Search of Man pg. 389)

Rabbi Heschel is pointing us towards the path to leave “the hysteria of suspicion” with his teaching above. We have to move into the light rather than shrinking from it. Societally and individually, we need to let go of our fear of being seen for who we are, living in to the call of our souls’ that we were born with, and let go of our need to look perfect, always be right, and accept our proper place in God’s Garden.

In the first two sentences above, we learn that our current “hysteria of suspicion” is an age-old challenge. We are so concerned with “what will the neighbors think” we are constantly contorting ourselves into whatever ‘image’ we are told is acceptable. Because we are “afraid to think as he feels, afraid to admit what he believes, afraid to love what he admires” we live as chameleons. We are waiting for someone to tell us how to think, what to believe and what is loveable! This is one of the root causes of our dissatisfaction with everything, our disbelief in people, our xenophobia, our power hungry self-seeking actions.

We are witnessing what our suspicious natures have done to our children/younger generations. We are witnessing what happens when one “shrinks from the light”, it all becomes dark, we begin to believe the lies we tell ourselves, we engage in deception and mendacity with people, we buy into the deception and mendacity of ‘our people’, and we become slaves to our fears. In our slavery, we make ourselves taskmasters over ‘those people’ who don’t go along with us, we seek to dominate them with our lies, with our deceptions and seek to make them as unfree as we feel because of the fears Rabbi Heschel lists above. Our children have developed a myriad of ‘mental issues’, they have become so dependent they don’t know how to make their bed, their parents start them on anti-depressants, anti-anxiety, ADHD meds at the earliest possible ages. The fable, “The Emperor’s New Clothes” is no longer viable in our world because as soon as a young person (or anyone) points out to “the self-suspicious man”, their falseness, they/we are bombarded with hate emails, hate tweets, hate trollers and, in our horror, the response by some young people is to commit or try to commit suicide! Some of our religious institutions, our Clergy, our spiritual leaders of all disciplines have succumbed to their own suspicious natures, are “self-suspicious” people and preach a gospel, a way of being, a dogma that is in direct opposition to the light they claim to be leading us to. Rather than seek to bring themselves and everyone else into the light, into letting go of their self-deceptions, their mendacities, people in power of any kind, from parents to bosses to elected officials, preach about taking up arms (in a metaphorical and literal sense) against these charlatans who are pulling up the window shades and letting light and truth into our world, into our daily activities, using the Bible(s), the Koran, Eastern Philosophical works as their proof that light is important, that with light we can allay many of our fears.

The recovery movement is based in truth, it is based in spiritual principles which are immutable, which have at their roots: “love thy neighbor”, you are not your worst mistake, constant self-checkins, share with another so one always has a different perspective, surrender to a power greater than oneself, self-love, letting go of self-suspicion, come out of hiding, and living in the light. Recovery stresses our imperfections not to shame, rather to acknowledge, normalize and accept our human condition of imperfection. We are always going to “miss the mark” and we have a way back, we have the wisdom and teaching of the prophets, of Bill W and Doctor Bob, Rabbi Heschel, Rev. Niebuhr, and the wisdom of so many other spiritual teachers and guides.

Immersing myself in the wisdom above, I am aware of the times I shrank from the light and I am sorry. I also know that in my recovery I have not done this too much, I have let myself speak the truth that I know, been willing to admit when I am wrong, make T’Shuvah, allow another to not accept it without being angry, accept the T’Shuvah of another easily, and most of all, think what I feel, admit what I believe, and love who and what I admire. I have had and continue to have great spiritual guides, Rabbi Heschel being one of them of course, and I continue to “grow along spiritual lines”, “practice these principles in all my affairs” and “improve my conscious contact with 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 270

“The hysteria of suspicion holds many of us in its spell. It has not only affected our understanding of others but also made us unreliable to ourselves, making it impossible to trust either our aspirations or convictions.” (God in Search of Man pg. 389)

We have to change our inner life, as I am understanding Rabbi Heschel’s words above. It is time for us to break out of our addiction to “the hysteria of suspicion” and our being “unreliable to ourselves”. Yet to do so takes a willingness to live in the nuances of life, to live into the both/and of life and to surrender to the Ineffable power of the Universe. Today is the 20th day of Av in the Hebrew Calendar, 11 days since we commemorated our part in the destruction of the Temples and other catastrophes in Jewish History that happened because we forgot our allegiance to the Ineffable power of the Universe, we stopped living a life of recovering our essence, we no longer cared about the earth and all its inhabitants, and we no longer “proclaimed freedom throughout the land and to all its inhabitants thereof”! We commemorate the 9th of Av to remind us to engage in our inner work so we learn from our history rather than repeat it and we look inside of ourselves to root out “the hysteria of suspicion” that seems to rule us.

We are also 10 days from the new month of Elul, the time to do our inner accounting of the soul and repair the outer damage and the inner damage we have done to another(s) and to ourselves since last Rosh Hashanah. While we are taught to do T’Shuvah every day, this month is a time for us to look at our year, our life with a microscope that tells us where we missed the mark and where we did well. Both are crucial to having an opportunity to view the entire picture of who we are. Once we see ourselves in totality, we are able to see the choices we have made, the ways we have been unreliable and the myriad of ways we have been reliable. We are able to witness our connections and service to human beings and the people we have cut ourselves off from. We are also able to discern the actions we have taken and see where our suspicious minds pushed us into actions that were inappropriate and where our souls warned us of danger so we did not take inappropriate actions.

Letting go of our “hysteria of suspicion” allows us to be in “radical amazement” much more often. It allows us to see the newness of the moment, gives us the opportunity to be human and make free-will moral choices, Rabbi Twerski’s definition of what makes us humans different from animals. It is a hard road to recovery, especially given the bombardment of negativity in our political world right now, the blaming and comparing happening in our churches, temples, mosques, etc, the marginalizing of “those” people, whoever “those” people are in the moment. It is also difficult to be in recovery from “the hysteria of suspicion” because there were not enough people who were suspicious of the Nazis, there are not enough people who are suspicious of the special interest groups, there are not enough people who are suspicious of the Heritage Foundation which is promoting fascist, authoritarian policies.

We have to let go of our suspicious minds, the “they are out to get me” mindset, the ‘good guys/bad guys’ as well as the myriad of deceptions and mendacities being promoted today. We have to mature and grow our spiritual core, our soul’s essence, our ‘knowing in our kishkas/gut’ and trust them more so we can begin to accept our spiritual reliability, make our decisions and choices from our inner core and know we can trust our selves, our authentic selves. We all need a spiritual program that we can live into so we are trustworthy to ourselves. We need to follow the spiritual principles laid out in the Bible, the Korah, in Buddhism, and other spiritual disciplines not the lies that religious and spiritual leaders may spread for their own sake, because they are in their addiction to “the hysteria of suspicion” and, joining with the authoritarians in governments, want to be close to power. Reading and immersing ourselves in the Prophets, in Rabbi Heschel, in the Bible(s), in Jesus’ words and deeds, etc make it impossible to stay mired in the lies of the authoritarians, the mendacity of the Heritage Foundation, and our addiction to “the hysteria of suspicion”!

I have been engaged in leaving this addiction, as you can see from my earlier writings. My blindness, willful and real, makes me very sad and taking this time to leave my suspicious mind and listen more to my discerning spirit is daunting and exhilarating. Whether people will accept my T’Shuvah(amends) is none of my business, my commitment to making more and better free-will moral choices from a place of clarity is. 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 269

“The hysteria of suspicion holds many of us in its spell. It has not only affected our understanding of others but also made us unreliable to ourselves, making it impossible to trust either our aspirations or convictions.” (God in Search of Man pg. 389)

The second sentence above is empirically true, we have seen it happen throughout history, we are witnessing it happen right now. We have become so suspicious of everyone else we are failing to realize the inner suspicion we carry, we act from and how suspiciousness of our self has impacted the entirety of our living. From our political realm to our spiritual realm to our personal realm, suspicion rules. We are suffering deeply from an inability “to trust either our aspirations or convictions.”

We have gotten to this point because we have relied too heavily on societal norms, we “stand idly by the blood of our neighbor” and we are so spiritually immature we have no true sense of our need for one another, our unique gifts that are to add to the world, nor how to be in truth with ourselves. We understand another(s) through the lens of suspicion, through the lens of ‘what do/can I get from this person’, ‘what’s in it for me’, etc. We are not seeking to give freely what we have, we are not willing to “judge each person with the scale weighted in their favor” as Pirke Avot 1:6 teaches us. Instead, we have come to, as Rabbi Heschel says, “suspect thy neighbor”.

In a strange way, we are fulfilling the commandment to “love your neighbor as you love yourself”, however. Because of “the hysteria of suspicion” has “made us unreliable to ourselves”, our love for ourself is tainted with suspicion, it is overwhelmed and affected by our inner suspicion that we have forgotten how to love ourselves, how to “clean our side of the street”, how to admit our errors and our guilt, etc. We, instead, continually blame another(s) for our miscues, for our wrongdoings, we have come to internalize Goebbel’s teaching: “accuse others of that which you are guilty of”. We are seeing this and have seen this occurring forever and especially with Trump and his followers and his minions in the Republican Party. McCarthy, Jordan, Greene, Gaetz, et al keep accusing the Democrats, the Biden’s, Pelosi, even the Capital Police of wrongdoing rather than hold the rioters, the Trump Cabal accountable! We see this in families, as youngsters deny wrongdoing when caught and blame another person, another family member, because of their inner suspicion that if they admit to making an error, this means they are an error. We have come to confuse making a mistake with being a mistake. We confuse the good, innocent, helpful intentions of another person as a statement of our being incapable. We have adopted the erroneous thinking of society that we are supposed to be perfect and if we are found to have imperfections, we are bad, we will be rejected, we will be banished.

In our religious and spiritual realms as well as our political realm now, we either put our Clergy and gurus on a pedestal that they can never stand on or we tear them down, humiliate them, reject them for their errors. Our inner suspicion causes us to suspect the wisdom, the teachings, the assistance of our spiritual and religious leaders because we can point to their incongruences, so we ‘throw the baby out with the bath water’. For us clergy, spiritual guides, we are so aware of our inner battles, our imperfections and we know the expectation of those we serve, we continue to hide our flaws, we ‘go along to get along’, ie keep our jobs/income, we even abandon our friendships when they are no longer convenient and conducive to our goal of hiding. This is true not just for clergy and spiritual guides, it is true for all people. Our being “unreliable to ourselves” causes us to continually hide, lie, wear masks, put up facades and send people when they are real, imperfect, etc because of our fear of being found out and we send them away to wander in the wilderness of ignorance of their ‘crimes’. For most of us, our inner suspicions are buried so deeply, we are unaware of them and we continue to believe we are acting from our ‘higher place’ and we are ‘doing what is best’ for our country, our business, our family, our institutions, our selves.

“The deception of others is nearly always rooted in the deceptions of ourselves” is a quote from Bill W in AA literature. It serves as a constant reminder and guide for our daily “personal inventory” which, those of us in recovery, engage in daily. While it may take time to root out “the deceptions of ourselves” when we do, we promptly admit our wrongs, we do what we can to repair the damage, and, in my experience, we find ways to be forgiven, reconnect except with people who are still “rooted in the deceptions” of themselves. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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