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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 55

“What is sin? The abuse of freedom. A failure in depth, failure to respond to God’s challenge. The root of sin is callousness, hardness of heart, lack of understanding what is at stake in being alive.” (Essential Writings pg 85)

Rabbi Heschel’s teaching of “the root of sin is callousness, hardness of heart” is so profound and so simple. I am hearing him call out to all of us to “circumcise the foreskin of our heart and be stiff-necked no more” as Moses teaches us in Deuteronomy 10:16. As a Jew, as a human being, I have to hold the horror of innocent casualties of the war against Hamas and terror along with the horror of the evil Hamas did on Oct. 7, the horror of the evil Hamas does by using civilians as human shields, by using schools, hospitals, Mosques as hideouts for their weapons, entrance to their tunnels, etc. When we are unable to hold two seemingly opposing thoughts, ideas, experiences in our being at the same time, we are being hardhearted, we are being callous, and, according to Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom above, we are engaged in the “root of sin”!

When our media presents only one side of what is happening, they are being callous and exhibiting a “hardness of heart” as well as promoting the same to us. When we talk about the hostages in the same vein as the prisoners being released we are being insensitive and showing a disregard for the truth. When we go along with negativity, when we support people who want to destroy some one else just because they are Jewish, Muslim, etc, we are exhibiting a “hardness of heart”. Yet, we continue to see ‘good people’ do this all the time. Listening to the rabid antisemites and/or anti-arabs without any pushback is another example of being callous because there is a blatant disregard for truth, for seeking solution where there is strife, for seeing every one as a human being. It doesn’t matter what ‘side’ one is on, when we don’t see the people on ‘the other side’ as human beings, we are being strangled by the “root of sin”.

This experience is not born of the conflict in the Middle East, it is not born in the conflict in Ukraine, it is not born in the conflict of the United States, the root of sin is born in our homes, in our schools, in our workplaces, in our communities, in our society. Callousness is a learned way of being, disregarding what is true and what is the next right thing to do comes from our upbringing, from our despair, from our witnessing callousness in another, from our bastardization of God’s challenge. When the far right believes it can dictate to a women her choices regarding her body, when they believe they can dictate to immigrants like their ancestors that they are less than human, when they follow Donald Trump and the Heritage Foundation who want to end our democracy and say they are constitutionalists, when they want to denigrate the poor, keep their white power and privilege and do it in the name of Christ, we see how powerful and enticing the “root of sin”, “callousness, hardness of heart” truly is. When we cannot see the horror of 3 friends being shot for no apparent reason other than they were wearing traditional Palestinian/Arab garb, we are being blind, we are practicing callousness, we have hardened our hearts. When we cannot see the suffering of the people in Israel over Oct 7, over the 75 years of being at war, fearing the suicide bombers, the rockets, the wars started by other nations/people. When we cannot see the frustration of the numerous times we were close to a 2-State solution only to have our ‘partner’ say no, we have closed our hearts to any other idea than the one we have, misguided, callous as it may be. When we aer unable to circumcise our hearts, when we are unable to end our being stiff-necked, we are not being “progressive” we are actually being regressive. When it comes to anti-semitism, both the far right and the far left are in agreement: It is the fault of the Jews! When we believe “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” we strangle everyone else with the “root of sin” we are perpetrating.

The only solution, as I hear Rabbi Heschel, as I understand the Bible, as I learn from all spiritual texts, is to follow a path of recovery, to join the Recovery Revolution. We all have the opportunity to begin each day with a prayer of gratitude for being alive, a prayer that recognizes the compassion and faithfulness God has towards us and in us. We all have the opportunity during the day to honor the gift of life we have today by being more compassionate towards another and ourselves, being more faithful to our inner life, our souls and the inner life and souls of those we encounter. We have the opportunity to be of service rather than demand we are served, to understand another rather than demand to be understood, to help another up from the pit of despair, from the hell of “callousness”, the strangulation of “hardness of heart”, from the “root of sin”. We can only do this when we are recovering our humanity, when we are recovering our ability to see the whole picture, when we demand of ourselves to engage in truth rather than disregard it, when we take our own inventory before taking another’s, when we rebuke a neighbor from love of their humanity rather than to make ourselves better. We have a choice each and every day: to grow in “callousness, hardness of heart", deepen our “root of sin” or “Choose Life”!

I have experienced and perpetrated “callousness and hardness of heart” even at times in recovery. Upon realizing it, I quickly seek to repair the damage and return to a place of compassion and being faithful. I have remained faithful to the principles of recovery, the “challenge of God” even when I have been unable to fulfill either fully. I also have experienced the “callousness, hardness of heart” of people around me, of ‘friends’, and it is tremendously painful. The “root of sin” grows so deep in some of us we are unaware of it and this is the greatest pain I experience, the people who have hurt me, abandoned me and are ‘righteous’ in their actions. I ask for forgiveness for the my own “callousness”. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 54

“What is sin? The abuse of freedom. A failure in depth, failure to respond to God’s challenge. The root of sin is callousness, hardness of heart, lack of understanding what is at stake in being alive.” (Essential Writings pg 85)

What is so difficult that we have a “failure to respond to God’s challenge”? We are in a world that seems to continually abuse freedom and have “a failure in depth”. Vladimir Putin scolds Israel on the death of “innocent” people, Hamas is celebrated as ‘freedom fighters’, Iran is put in charge of the UN Human Rights commission, immigrants are vilified in the United States and across the globe,  Donald Trump is the favorite of the Republican Party’s nomination for President in 2024, Joe Biden is excoriated for being a decent human being, etc. Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom above is a call to action and humanity seems to be missing in action, absent without leave.

Watching the news, reading social media gives me heartache and headaches. Listening to students on College Campus’ who march for the extermination of Jews and the destruction of Israel, hearing the xenophobic rants of Ben-Gvir, Netanyahu, and their allies in Israel, seeing how Qatar honors the leaders of Hamas, wondering where the billions of dollars given to Hamas and the Palestinian Authority go when their citizens are in poverty, all point to our “failure to respond to God’s challenge”, our “failure in depth” and we hear cheers for these actions. How sad, how dangerous, how depressing.

I believe the “failure in depth” comes from our love affair with vapidity. We seem to be unable to stay grounded in the foundations that God has given us, decency, morality, love, kindness, justice, compassion, truth. Our society has fallen in love with mendacity, deception and promotes the latest lie that sounds good, that makes our worst impulses seem holy, and bastardizes the word of God, the teachings of Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha, our holy texts. We witness and celebrate the liberation of our negativity with joy, glee and are willing to sacrifice our spiritual health for more likes on social media, for a promotion at our job, for a lawsuit that has little merit just to settle and get more for ourselves.

We, the People, have to “fail forward”, we have to learn from the “failure in depth” of our ancestors, of our selves and repair the damage to our inner lives, to our souls and to the inner lives and souls of people we have harmed. While we are overjoyed at the release of the hostages by Hamas, we are failing to hold them accountable for taking the hostages in the first place. We are failing to condemn the actions of Oct. 7 and blame the victims, Israel, for what is going on in the Middle East. Not one Arab country has condemned the actions of Hamas, Joe Biden is losing support among the progressives and young people for standing with Israel, for condemning Hams, for resisting the lure of terrorism, while the progressives in this country celebrate the terrorism of Hamas, abandon the Jewish people who have stood up for the downtrodden. I hear Rabbi Heschel’s call to us to end our love affair with “sin”, to end rejoicing in our “failure in depth, failure to respond to God’s challenge”. I hear his cry to us to return to our humanity, to being human in response to the failures of another. I am overwhelmed with his demand we return to the words and deeds the prophets have spoken to us.

We can do this! We can “fail forward”! We do this by demanding of our politicians and elected officials to be “government of the people, by the people, and for the people” once again. We have to demand our elected officials and politicians no longer pay attention to the special interests, to the lobbyists, to the false claims of people, to the idolators claiming to represent God’s will. We need to be more discerning in what we are teaching our children, we have to be more discerning in promoting truth rather than mendacity, we have to end our self-deceptions so we can discern the deceptions by another(s) and not buy into them. We have to look inside of ourselves and end the “cancer of the soul, the eye disease” of prejudice and hatred.

Every spiritual discipline has a remedy for our “failure to respond to God’s challenge”  our “failure in depth”. The remedy begins with a “fearless and searching moral inventory” as it is called in AA, it is called T’Shuvah in Judaism, confession in Christianity, “lifting the veils” in Islam, meditation brings this about in many Eastern spiritual disciplines. In other words, the Recovery Revolution begins in earnest for all of us when we are willing to look at the myriad of ways we have had a “failure to respond to God’s challenge”. We have “a failure in depth” because, prior to being a part of the Recovery Revolution, we have not looked beneath the surface, have not engaged in the work of maturing our inner life, not cared about our love affair with self-deception. The Recovery Revolution is how we “fail forward”, I believe, in whatever path we take to find our inner core of decency, our inner connection to the creative force of the cosmos, our inner connection to goodness, truth, grace, kindness, love and compassion.

I am aware of the many times I have been guilty of  “a failure in depth, failure to respond to God’s challenge” and I am deeply remorseful for allowing my false ego to overrule my soul’s knowledge. Immersing myself in Rabbi Heschel’s brilliance shows me how, at times, I have worked to save my face rather than serve God. I shudder at these thoughts. AND, I also know how often I “respond to God’s challenge” with Hineni, here I am. I am experiencing serenity (clarity) at the overwhelming experiences of delving deeply into my soul, into prayer to hear the call of God, the words of the prophets and act in concert with them. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark.

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 53

“What is sin? The abuse of freedom. A failure in depth, failure to respond to God’s challenge. The root of sin is callousness, hardness of heart, lack of understanding what is at stake in being alive.” (Essential Writings pg 85)

Immersing ourselves in these words of wisdom from Rabbi Heschel, looking at our world today, hopefully causes us great concern and a deeper look inside of our selves, a better connection with our souls’ calling. Rabbi Heschel’s definition is, for me, very timely as we face an election cycle, a war in the Middle East against terrorism that is funded and supported by Iran, a war in the Ukraine against abject aggression by Putin and his oligarchs, a call for the end of voting rights, civil rights, any and all rights of ‘the other’ by elected officials and those wanting to be elected/re-elected.

Rather than “proclaim liberty throughout the land and to all it’s inhabitants thereof”(Leviticus 25:10), we seem to be promoting the “abuse of freedom” throughout the land, the world. When terrorists are proclaimed as ‘freedom fighters’, when Hamas is allowed to dictate the conditions upon which the hostages they took on October 7 will be freed, when the worlds kowtows to the whims and desires of the leaders of Hamas in their rich enclaves in Qatar, when the world fails to recognize the torture and disdain the terrorists have for the people they are ruling as ISIS, Al Qaeda, the Taliban, Hamas do, and we call them ‘freedom fighters, we are abusing freedom, we are abusing the very foundational tenets of freedom. When we are silent witnesses to the abuses of power of Putin, the senseless killing of children, the outrageous capture of women and children by the Russian forces in Ukraine, we are abusing our freedom also. When we go along with the hatred being spewed by either party of our democracy, when we point our fingers at another  human being and/or group as the source of ‘the problem’ we are abusing freedom.

The “sin” we commit with our silence is overwhelming. The “sin” we commit with our support for “abuse of freedom” is devastating. The “sin” we commit with our hatred of Jews, Muslims, people of color, LGBTQ+, is painful. All “sin” comes from the “abuse of freedom” that we commit in our inner life, I believe. We have become so bereft in our inner life that we confuse the search for ‘inner peace’ with freedom, we are witnessing people who have come to believe in their own search for ‘inner peace’, their way, at all costs to another human being as right and good. These abuses of freedom, these sins will not stop until we acknowledge our “soul sickness” as the Big Book of AA calls alcoholism. This “, “soul sickness”, however, is not limited to alcoholics, it is rampant in every part of our society, it is infecting every human being in the world. It is the “sin” we have to deal with now or we will continue our “abuse of freedom” and our “sin” and pass it on to our children and to the “fourth and fifth” generations. We have failed to grow the spiritual resilience of our ancestors, the pioneers who braved much danger, elements, life itself, to give us the gift of freedom, the ability to be free and, instead, allowed this resilience to atrophy, repeated the same actions of the people our ancestors ran away from who were abusing them, who restricted them because of color, race, religion, creed, etc. How sad!

We do have a choice, even now, even after the generations of “sin” passed down to us, even after our own “abuse of freedom”. As long as there is breath within us, we can choose to see our errors, we can “take the cure” for our “soul sickness”, we can repent and return to our basic goodness of being. Just as the people of Nineveh did in the Book of Jonah in the Bible, we too can change the course of our future by learning from our history, by clearing away the prejudices of our minds so we can hear our souls. We can cure the eye disease which causes our judgmental attitudes towards another human being, another group based on their religion, their nationality, the color of their skin, their sexual orientation, etc. We can and desperately need to end our “abuse of freedom” towards another, and, as importantly, end our “abuse of freedom” toward ourselves. We have to end our ‘need to be free’ at all costs, we need to end our belief that we can do whatever we want whenever we want. We are not free when we “do as we choose”, when we “do our own thing”, when we “go along to get along” when we adjust to “conventional norms and ideas”. We are not free when we do things just so we will be liked, because we are conflict avoidant. We are in desperate need of reclaiming the spiritual principles upon which freedom is based.

This is why we are so in need of joining the Recovery Revolution. Rabbi Heschel’s words, wisdom, teachings, brilliance are in sync with the principles of the recovery movement because both promote Spiritual Principles to live by. These are not platitudes, these are no esoteric ideas, these are real life solutions to the “sins” we commit daily, to the “abuse of freedom” we perpetrate upon our selves and another(s) each day. Living into the spiritual principles that are found in the Bible, in the Big Book, in the New Testament, in the Koran give us a freedom we have not known before. They give us the opportunity to fulfill the hopes and dreams of our ancestors who escaped terrorism, enslavement, authoritarianism, to come to America, to go to Israel, to change the ways of government throughout the world so people can live free.

I have abused my freedom at times, I am deeply remorseful for these abuses. I also know I confused my desires with the God’s call. I have, in my recovery, lived into the spiritual principles God gives all of us a little better each day and I live freer and spread more freedom. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 52

“It was through our failure that people started to suspect science is a device for exploration; parliaments pulpits for hypocrisy, and religion a pretext for a bad conscience. In the tantalized souls of those who had faith in ideals, suspicion became a dogma and contempt the only solace. Mistaking the abortion of their conscience for intellectual heroism, many thinkers employ clever pens to scold and to scorn the reverence for life, the awe of truth, the loyalty to justice. Man, about to hang himself, discovers it is easier to hang others.”(Man’s Quest for God pgs. 149-150)

Rabbi Heschel’s last sentence above is haunting. It is disturbing in its truth and simplicity. We humans have grown in technology, in medicine, in factual wisdom and in our ability to kill our spiritual and mental health over the millennia. Whether it is Putin in the Ukraine, Hamas in Gaza, Assad in Syria, the Ayatollah in Iran, we are witnesses to people who push the limits so far that their own death, figuratively and literally, are in danger so they instead start wars with another country, within their own country, and seek to kill their ‘enemies’. While Rabbi Heschel was speaking of the Nazis, the Russians, the Japanese, the Italian dictators, we see this today both in the dictators, the terrorists and in the ‘populist’ authoritarians who are on the rise across the globe today.

Abraham Lincoln said: “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure” and these words are as true today as they were in 1863. We witness the imprisonment of more people here in the US than in any other Western Country. We witness the senseless killing of people in mass shootings, in domestic violence, in police brutality, in everyday arguments and wring our hands, complaining about mental illness as the cause instead of looking to Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom above! The problem is our gun laws, the problem is our our unwillingness to see “all men are created equal”, the problem is a deep need to blame another for our ills and issues rather than be responsible, the problem is we erroneously believe if we can have power over another, we will survive and thrive. The problem is we have come “to scold and scorn the reverence for life, the awe of truth, the loyalty to justice.”

We are witnessing this civil war in Israel right now both internally and externally. Netanyahu was asleep at the wheel because he was/is more concerned about his power, his staying out of court, his not being responsible for his actions, than about the safety and security of the people of Israel. He is/was more concerned about the unacceptable actions of the settler movement than he is/was about the dignity of both Israelis and Palestinians. And, Hamas is a terrorist organization that cares even less about the people of Gaza than Netanyahu! I wish there was a civil war in Gaza, where the people of Gaza would rise up against Hamas for their own dignity, for their own freedom. I pray the end of Hamas in Gaza will signal freedom and dignity for the people of Gaza and the safety, security for the people of Israel bringing a peace that both sides deserve.

In America, we are also engaged in a civil war. We are being pulled in two opposing directions by the MAGA crowd and by the ‘progressive’ crowd. Neither one actually respects the dignity of all, neither one is seeking a spiritual solution, neither one is following Ben Franklin’s advice: “we all either hang together or we hang separately”. Both extremes are more engaged in their false beliefs and their ‘rightness’ than in being responsible, finding solutions for all, and healing the attacks on the dignity and worth of the people they are ‘fighting’. Be it Donald Trump and the Heritage Foundation or “the Squad” and the progressive movement, both have decided who they accept and who they reject, both have steadfast rules for treating anyone who is not “them”. We, the People, who believe Lincoln’s words, who believe God’s words, who follow the examples of the Prophets and Jesus, have to stand up and say NO to these people who want to hang us!

There is a solution to these problems: spiritual health, spiritual values, curing our “eye disease” and “cancer of the soul” called prejudice, ie the recovery revolution. This solution begins with seeing every person as worthy, reflecting the Image of the Divine we are all created in back to one another. Doing this allows us to respond with a resounding YES, HERE I AM, to God’s question; “Ayecha, where are you?” When we say YES, we begin to stop our descent into hanging ourselves. We end the need to hang one another, we no longer need to perpetrate anti-semitism, racism, xenophobia, religious wars, power grabs. We no longer need a ‘bad guy’ to feel good about ourselves. We no longer need to terrorize our neighbors into submission to ‘our way’ of being. We no longer promote false interpretations of the Bible, the New Testament, the Koran, etc. We no longer seek to destroy ourselves with our addictions to power, to wealth, to drugs, to escapism, to mendacity and to deception of self and/or another.

Recovery for me has been to find the solution, to find the middle path, to stand up for all people, to stand with Godliness, with decency, and live the spiritual principles of recovery, of faith, of all religious and spiritual heritages. Love, mercy, kindness, compassion, justice, reverence, and, most of all, seeking truth are the principles I and everyone in recovery practice each day, practice meaning we don’t always get there and we never leave the path of these principles. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 51

“It was through our failure that people started to suspect science is a device for exploration; parliaments pulpits for hypocrisy, and religion a pretext for a bad conscience. In the tantalized souls of those who had faith in ideals, suspicion became a dogma and contempt the only solace. Mistaking the abortion of their conscience for intellectual heroism, many thinkers employ clever pens to scold and to scorn the reverence for life, the awe of truth, the loyalty to justice. Man, about to hang himself, discovers it is easier to hang others.”(Man’s Quest for God pgs. 149-150)

“Mistaking the abortion of their conscience for intellectual heroism, many thinkers employ clever pens to scold and to scorn the reverence for life, the awe of truth, the loyalty to justice” is, to me, an apt description by Rabbi Heschel of what is and has been happening in our world today. Abortion comes from the Latin meaning ‘miscarry’ which is defined as ‘the failure of something planned’. We are subjected to the propaganda of people who have failed to live up to what their conscience and the moral conscience of the world. We are witnesses to and victims of so many “clever pens” which scold us when we show “reverence for life”, when we are in “the awe of truth” and exhibit “loyalty to justice”.

Whether it is Elon Musk and his band of anti-semites, his cohorts of authoritarians, or it is Donald Trump and his allies the Heritage Foundation and the Republican Party, or it is ‘the squad’ and their allies the progressives, or it is Hamas and their allies Iran and other terrorists, the use of the propaganda, the use of their “clever pens” have torn apart and deceived ‘the masses’ of what is “reverence for life, the awe of truth, the loyalty to justice”. Unlike the 1930’s when it was Germans who were willing to follow an authoritarian leader, we have peoples from many countries who are eager to follow authoritarianism, believing it will give the people power, certain that ‘their guy/gal’ will be good to and for them.

People who make up these masses are so far down the rabbit hole of deception and mendacity they are unaware of “the abortion of their conscience”, they believe it is heroic to support terrorists, both foreign and domestic. We are in a time where the educated “elites” who make up the Heritage Foundation have created an atmosphere and a way of being that denies freedom to anyone and everyone who is not a member of their group. They have a plan that is an “abortion of their conscience” which they validate by saying it is ‘christian’, they have ‘anointed’ Donald Trump to be their standard bearer in public while in private, their plan is for any and every Republican that wins the Presidency. While the masses believe defeating Trump is the goal, the real goal has to be defeating the lies, the deceptions of authoritarians, in re-awakening the moral consciences of all people, no matter what country, what color, what religion.

The people of Gaza who have followed the terrorists of Hamas, who have not risen up against these people who spend billions on themselves, on their hideouts, on their weapons while the people of Gaza suffer and blame the Israelis, have to share the responsibility of what is happening now. Yes, Netanyahu and his band of far-right zealots who are more interested in power, in shielding themselves from being held responsible for their crimes, who want to be ‘the strongmen’ who will save everyone, we witnessed the massive protests in Israel by a coalition of people who are willing to say NO to the overreach of Netanyahu and his allies. We witness the calling to account of their failure to protect the people of Israel from Hamas’s reign of terror.

The people of this country are also responsible for “the abortion of conscience” that is happening here as well. We, the People, have to stand up and say NO to authoritarianism on the right and the left. We, the People, have to stand up and say NO to these ‘intellectual cowards’ who are denying the “reverence for life, the awe of truth, the loyalty to justice.” One cannot have “reverence for life” and deny equality to any one group, use power to promote an agenda that excludes Jews and Muslims, Catholics and Buddhists, Christians and secular, and/or promote fascism in any and all forms. One cannot have “awe of truth” and say “my way is the only way”, ignore the plight of the poor and the needy, unwelcome the stranger, etc. One cannot have “awe of truth” and only see their ‘side’, their ‘way’, because we say God is truth and God is everything, we all have a word, phrase of God within us and when one of our voices is missing, one of our voices is silenced, truth is unattainable.

We, the People, need to join the Recovery Revolution! We need to begin to heal our Soul Sickness that is so apparent in our actions. We need to live into the Spiritual Principles of recovery, which are universal across all spiritual disciplines; love, truth, loyalty to moral principles, justice, kindness, caring for those who are less fortunate, being forgiving, charity in money and in judgement, being of service, seeing clearly what truly is, living in radical amazement, being accountable and acknowledging our imperfections, etc. We, the People, are capable of this.

On this Thanksgiving Day, I am grateful for being alive! I am grateful for the blessings I receive and have received. I am resentment free and forgiving of all, I ask for forgiveness from everyone. I am dedicated to the spiritual principles of living, growing my “reverence for life, awe of truth, loyalty to justice” more each and every day. I can respond YES I AM, to the definition of rich we find in Pirke Avot: one who  wants what they have. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark.

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 50

“It was through our failure that people started to suspect science is a device for exploration; parliaments pulpits for hypocrisy, and religion a pretext for a bad conscience. In the tantalized souls of those who had faith in ideals, suspicion became a dogma and contempt the only solace. Mistaking the abortion of their conscience for intellectual heroism, many thinkers employ clever pens to scold and to scorn the reverence for life, the awe of truth, the loyalty to justice. Man, about to hang himself, discovers it is easier to hang others.”(Man’s Quest for God pgs. 149-150)

Today is the 60th Anniversary of the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, it is the day of the first day of any sign of real hope of getting all the Hostages out of the clutches of the terrorist Hamas group and out of Gaza. We need to stay engaged in the ideas and the principles President Kennedy charged us with, we need to re-energize the hope, the promise, the equality that President Kennedy, Dr. King, Bobby Kennedy, Rabbi Heschel and so many others brought to the world in the 60’s. “In the tantalized souls of those…” is as an apt phrase for our situation today as it was when Rabbi Heschel wrote it in 1943. To tantalize means to “torment”, ideals is from ideas, suspicion is distrust, dogma is “a set of principles laid down by an authority as inconvertibly true”, contempt is to believe everyone, something is beneath you, and solace means comfort. Using these definitions, this sentence above says: in the tormented souls of those who had faith in ideas, distrust became inconvertibly true and a supercilious attitude was the only comfort for them.

Just as it was the state of affairs of the world in the 1930/1940’s, it seems as if it is the state of our world as well. The myriad of people who claim to be people of faith, have faith in some ideal which is not Godliness, which is not the words of Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, etc. They are “tantalized souls” and suspicion has become their dogma, they suspect everyone but “their people” and they hold “their people” to intense scrutiny. The level of distrust, mistrust in these so-called ‘people of faith’ is so high, there is no way to communicate with them, there is no chance of finding common ground, there is no compromise to be reached. This is also true of terrorists, they are so set in their “ideals” there is no compromise. Both groups, unbelievably, want to to dictate terms of our surrender, want us to know it is “my way or the highway” and it takes an act of war for us to wake up and fight for truth, for freedom, for democracy, to “ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country”!

We have to realize and face the reality of the world we have created, we have been so enamored with ideals, with ideas, we have allowed the charlatans, the deceivers, the self-deceptions, and mendacity to creep into our understanding and reading of the US Constitution, US history, the Bible, the New Testament, the Koran, all to our ruin. “I think, therefore I am” by Descartes is the phrase of people who have “tantalized souls”, they are tormented by lies, by the deception of societal norms, because the Bible tells us ‘I am, therefore I can think’ and it then gives us the parameters within which to act so we can act our way into right thinking. The ‘people of faith’ who have been elected to serve in Congress have forgotten President Kennedy’s words promoting service, they have bastardized the words of the Bible to “care for the widow, the orphan, the stranger, the poor, the needy”. These people have made suspicion their dogma and take comfort in looking down at everyone else to such an extent they have anointed Donald Trump as their savior, they have signed on to the 2025 project, and they are attempting to end our democracy, end our freedoms, and rule forever. Sounds like the 1000 year Reich doesn’t it?

Today, we see the people with such ‘high ideals’, on our College Campus’, support terrorists as freedom fighters, believe the raping of women, the killing of children, the murdering of young people at a music festival, the taking of women, children, elderly, men are all good and righteous acts if done by ‘the oppressed Palestinians’. Yet, they don’t seem to realize they would not have the freedom to protest in Gaza, in the West Bank, in Egypt, in Qatar, etc. They seem to be willfully blind to the goal of the terrorists Hamas, exterminate Jews and disappear Israel. We have raised a generation of people to have distrust and mistrust in anyone and any idea that doesn’t go along with theirs. We have raised a generation(s) of people with the ideas of critical thinking gone completely haywire. They turn critical thinking into criticism of anyone who doesn’t agree with them, they have turned critical thinking into believing anyone who is ‘critical’ of ‘the ones in power.

The world needs recovery! We need to live by a set of spiritual principles because the world and all of us are suffering a “soul-sickness” as Father Martin teaches. We need to rededicate ourselves, as we gather around the Thanksgiving Table, to the spiritual principles of the Bible, to the actions God is demanding we take in order to save ourselves. As Father Martin says: “The result, then, of living these principles should be serenity, which is nothing more than Peace of conscience.” May we all find serenity(clarity) now! God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 49

“It was through our failure that people started to suspect science is a device for exploration; parliaments pulpits for hypocrisy, and religion a pretext for a bad conscience. In the tantalized souls of those who had faith in ideals, suspicion became a dogma and contempt the only solace. Mistaking the abortion of their conscience for intellectual heroism, many thinkers employ clever pens to scold and to scorn the reverence for life, the awe of truth, the loyalty to justice. Man, about to hang himself, discovers it is easier to hang others.”(Man’s Quest for God pgs. 149-150)

I am in awe of Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom, vision, and prophetic words. Writing this in 1938, expanded and published in 1943, his words echo today’s reality in chilling realness. We have come through a pandemic that is still being called a hoax by some people who want to ‘hang’ Dr. Fauci and the other scientists who gave us good scientific advice and developed cures for Covid-19. We witness the anger of people and their opposition to the different preventative techniques and paths that science gave us. Their belief that these were governmental controls on our freedom, we didn’t need them and we suffered needlessly is but one example of “people started to suspect science is a device for exploitation.”

Our governments have become “pulpits for hypocrisy” all across the world. The authoritarian/‘populist’ dictators say one thing and do another. Trump’s “I am your retribution” and other such statements are words to convince people of the hypocrisy of “the deep state” while being the “deep state” himself. Rather than stand up to the liars and deceivers, rather than stand up for truth, some in our government want to stand up for the liars and deceivers, the authoritarians and the hypocrites because it gives them ‘power’. We are witnessing a time, similar to the pre-civil war times as I learned about them, where some of our elected officials are not interested in upholding the Constitution as much as they interested in holding onto their own personal power. We are hearing and seeing actual fighting or threats of violence in the Chambers of Congress. We are hearing and seeing legislation being brought forth that limits Voting Rights, a woman’s right to choose her own health care, bargaining for the safety of our allies, and a witch-hunt to help Donald Trump get re-elected! George Santos is the extreme example of hypocrisy that the Republicans were wont to overlook until it became too extreme even for them. Yet, we have Marjorie Taylor Greene spreading lies and conspiracies about Jan. 6, 2021, we have Jim Jordon promoting baseless lies about President Biden, we have Tommy Tuberville preventing the promotions of our Military harming the readiness and morale of our volunteer Armed Services. We have ‘the squad’ promoting the extermination of Jews and the end of the State of Israel by promoting the words of the Hamas terrorist organization “from the river to the sea”, calling them ‘freedom fighters’ who killed innocents, riddled babies bodies with bullets, took hostages, glided into a music festival about peace with guns and mowed down over 300 young people! Is it any wonder that people see “parliaments pulpits for hypocrisy”?

While the first two bastardizations are terrible, I believe the third, “religion a pretext for a bad conscience” is the most devastating desecration of God’s Name that we engage in. As I listen to the ‘religious right’ of all religions, to the ‘progressive left’ of all religions, I am left abandoned, I am left alone, I am left in sadness for God. People like Mike Johnson who claim the Bible is their north star and offer legislation that will turn away the strangers, impoverish the poor and the needy even more, cut aid to the elderly, stand idly by the blood and calls of our allies, is it any wonder people refuse to believe religion has anything good to offer? When the Rabbis supporting the settlers teach it is okay to murder innocent Palestinians, when they are spreading venomous lies and denigrating the Image of God all people are born with, for their own political and power grabs, is there a question about their desecration of God’s Name-the worst sin in the Jewish tradition? When Hamas and the Palestinians refuse to acknowledge the rights of Jews and Israelis to the State of Israel in the ancient homeland of the Jewish People, when the Arab States, in the name of Allah call for the extermination of the Jewish People, is there any doubt as to their using faith as “a pretext for a bad conscience”?

We can learn from the failures of our ancestors, from the failures of our parents and our own failures. I believe Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob Smith learned from the failures of doctors, therapists, professionals, and their own experiences to form Alcoholics Anonymous. I believe Rabbi Heschel learned from the failures of Jewish History and world history to form his teachings on how to live well. We have the gift of their wisdom and the wisdom of many other ‘failures’. Just as Edison kept trying new ways with electricity, we have to “fail forward” in our recovery of science, government and religion to help us live well. We do this by engaging in the Spiritual Revolution that the Recovery Revolution promotes. We do this by coming out of hiding, by shining lights on our failures, on the failures and mendacity of societal norms that are unhealthy and unholy, repairing the damage of these failures and finding new ways to promote the benefits of science, government and religion.

I have “failed forward” for 36+ years. I am bewildered as to why the liars, like Hamas and individuals like Trump and those closer to home, are believed while my words, the words of the Israelis have to be “verified”. I realize the damage my lies prior to my recovery wrought and I work to repair the damage each day. I seek truth and do my best to live in truth in a world of lies and masks. I miss the mark and I continue to get up, make T’Shuvah and move forward. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 48

“The outbreak of war was no surprise. It came as a long expected sequel to a spiritual disaster. Instilled with the gospel that truth is a mere advantage and reverence weakness, people succumbed to the bigger advantage of a lie-“the Jew is our misfortune”-and to the power of arrogance-“tomorrow the whole world shall be ours”, “the peoples’ democracies must depend upon force.” (Man’s Quest for God pg. 149).

The last two phrases above, “tomorrow the world shall be ours”, “the peoples’ democracies must depend upon force” are so tantalizing to the ear and the hearts of racists and anti-semites, authoritarians and their followers. We hear echos of these themes, if not the same words, from people like Rick Santorum, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Mike Johnson, Itamar Ben-Gvir, Bezalel Smotrich, Elon Musk, and so many of both the ‘progressives’ on the left and the ‘conservatives’ on the right. Hamas and their partners, Hezbollah, Iran, Russia, Qatar, Saudia Arabia, etc don’t have the pretense of democratic rule, they are just authoritarians and/or terrorists, so they believe and work towards the first goal: “tomorrow the whole world shall be ours”.

The issue here, as I am hearing Rabbi Heschel’s call from 85 years ago in today’s context, in today’s world, is to learn from our errors of the past. There is a saying: “when someone tells you who they are, believe them”, both the ‘progressives’ and the ‘conservatives’ are telling us who they are: anti-semitic and only interested in their own race, hence they are willing to sacrifice, denigrate, all other races. The authoritarians are telling us who they are: hateful, bullying, destructive, terrorists. Why is so hard for the rest of us to believe them, just as it was difficult for Europeans and Americans to believe Hitler, Mussolini, Hirohito in the 1930’s?

Joe Biden has counseled Israel to learn from the errors of America following 9/11 and this is good advice. I would add the world should learn from the errors of the 1930’s and 40’s and not let the rampant anti-semitism and the lies, ‘half-truths’ of the media and the terrorists enhance what the goal of the potentially deadly for democracy coalition of ‘progressive’ anti-semites, ‘conservative’ anti-semites, and  Hamas terrorists with the authoritarians thrown in-the end of democracy, the return of theocracy and authoritarianism to Europe, to America, to the world.

There are adherents to the last two phrases above in Israel, in Europe, in America, some of the names mentioned above and a vast army of other people joining them. We cannot let them worm their way into our hearts and minds, we have to heed the words of the Bible, “don’t scout out after our hearts and our eyes because we will whore after them”(Numbers 15:39). We seem to be incapable, as individuals and as groups of heeding this wisdom, this command. We are constantly in danger of believing our own lies, we are constantly wrestling with our own self-deception to seek and find truth, seek and find a path of living that connects us to God, to decency, to one another for the sake of uplifting our brothers and sisters, not denigrating them.

To do this, we have to see how our society has moved from a co-operative to a waring, win at all and any costs society. We are not meant to “kill the competition”, we are not meant to “get ahead at any and all costs” , we are not meant to “just win, baby”. We are created dependent, we are taught to grow into inter-dependence, to make coalitions so that everyone is welcome. In the same chapter of Numbers, we are commanded to have “one law for the citizen and the stranger alike” in a few different ways. We are not to discriminate as we have in this country since our founding, we are not to treat Arabs different than Jews has Israel has done since its founding, we are not to “hate our brothers in our hearts” as Christians have towards Jews for millennia and as Arabs have done for over a hundred years. We are not to use force to convince people “our way is the best way”, we are not to use subterfuge to disguise our authoritarian and terrorist goals in order to dupe people who are willfully blind to truth.

One of the foundational principles of the Recovery Revolution is T’Shuvah, Inventory. We have to look at our past to see how we missed the mark and how we hit the mark, we have to see our imperfections, improve upon them knowing we are imperfect beings, repair the damage we have done through missing the mark and being proud of the ways we have hit the mark. These yearly and daily inventories keep us in line with the command from Numbers above:”don’t follow your heart and your eyes because you will whore after them.” We stop being whores looking out for our selfish immediate desires and we become servants of the good, the holy, and of one another.

I have been guilty of using the power of persuasion and the vulnerabilities of another against them. I did this throughout my ‘career’ as a conman and a thief. I did not care about the effects of my actions on another human being and I was blind to the damage I was causing. Only through joining the Recovery Revolution have I been able to see the damages and repair them, only through joining and taking my place in the Recovery Revolution have I been able to help another(s) let go of the lies Rabbi Heschel tells us of above. While I have also experienced my vulnerabilities used against me, I have learned to feel sad for the people who have to do this-they are pathetic and in need of divine pathos, Godly compassion. I have learned, the hard way, that willful blindness, self-deception leads to destruction and a daily inventory of the lies I tell myself leads us to wholeness. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 47

“The outbreak of war was no surprise. It came as a long expected sequel to a spiritual disaster. Instilled with the gospel that truth is a mere advantage and reverence weakness, people succumbed to the bigger advantage of a lie-“the Jew is our misfortune”-and to the power of arrogance-“tomorrow the whole world shall be ours”, “the peoples’ democracies must depend upon force.” (Man’s Quest for God pg. 149).

Immersing ourselves in Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom above and looking at our world today we are compelled to look at the “power of arrogance” that is ‘in vogue’ in our countries and in ourselves. We seem to fall into the arrogance of our paths, the arrogance of our thinking, the arrogance of our use of power by governments, by elected officials, by authoritarians, by each of us as individuals. It is both frightening, dangerous and sad. We are witnesses to this “power of arrogance” in our global world and we seem to be unable to stand up to it. This is true on both ends of the spectrum, extreme right and progressive left. Israel and it’s right wing government have flexed their “power of arrogance” muscles to the detriment of both Israelis and the Arab people under their ‘control’. Their attempt to take over the Judicial system, however, was met with protests, with a powerful NO by the Israeli people in an attempt to check their arrogance. Hamas, the Arab countries and people around the world who have supported their efforts with money to build tunnels, to build up their weaponry, to continue to NOT help their ‘own people’, to plan and applaud Hamas’ evil intentions and actions to “wipe out the Jewish people” are also prime examples of “the power of arrogance”. Hamas’ goal of “from the river to the Sea” is being supported by many around the world, including the United Nations, Russia, Iran, Qatar, and so many others. The difference between these two examples is no one is trying to check their arrogance, in fact, their arrogance is being applauded, while Israeli people constantly are checking the arrogance of Netanyahu and his band of cronies.

In the United States, we see the arrogance of both right and left as well who want their demands, their ways of exclusion, their ideas to reign without any compromises, without any pushback, because, in their arrogance, they believe they are right, they are the only ‘good ones’ and they have all the answers. The far-right ideologues truly believe they are the only ones who should have power, they are the only ones who believe in God, they are the only ones who ‘know’ what the framers of the Constitution had in mind. Their “power of arrogance” tells them that whatever means necessary to achieve their being in charge be it by force, by limiting voting to ‘their kind’, by passing laws that restrict the freedoms our founding fathers and mothers fought for is good and right. The far left/progressives believe the same way, they use their “power of arrogance” to make it “my way or the highway” not caring about seeing the nuances of life, being so sure of themselves(arrogance) they cannot entertain anyone else’s point of view. In their fight for inclusion, diversity, and equity they refuse to give anyone who doesn’t ‘toe the party line’ a voice! Their abandonment of the Jewish People, their calling of Israel as Nazis, their beliefs that mirror the beliefs of white supremacists are more examples of their use of “the power of arrogance”.

While it is easy and comforting to point our fingers outward, while it is true and holy to rebuke another, it is also true we have to first look inward. We have to look at our own individual use of “the power of arrogance”. We need to do an accounting of our own souls to find the hidden arrogance of our “indifference to the sublime wonder of living” as Rabbi Heschel teaches. We have to look inside of ourselves to seek out the arrogance of our own puffed up parts that block us from learning and being able to change our minds based on new information. We have to begin to change our inner arrogance that blinds us to the nuances of each and every experience of living. We have to stop being “adjusted to the conventional notions and mental cliches” of societal norms and live in wonder and radical amazement instead. We have to let go of our armor of ‘rightness’ and go to battle with our inner demons so we don’t meet the world as soldiers of arrogance, rather we meet the world as servants of God. When we do this, we will change the ways of our own governments, we will change the ways of our global world and, hopefully, “nations shall not lift up swords against nations”(Isaiah 2:4) instead we will transform our “power of arrogance” to the Power of Love.

The recovery revolution does this, in fact, I would suggest this is the very core of recovery. We say “let us love you until you can love yourself” to the newcomer. We seek to surround people with enough love so another human being feels safe in letting go of their armor of arrogance, releasing their hold on their “power of arrogance” so they can experience life on life’s terms, they can take in the love they are being showered with and they can see the possibilities they have for a new life, a self they will love and one that gives them purpose and passion.

I have been fighting the “power of arrogance” within me for the past 36 years. It is a constant battle because I have to keep myself open to new information, to new learning, to new ways of seeing and using the knowledge and truth I possess. While I have seen truths before another at times, I wrestle with myself to ensure that I don’t use the power of truth in arrogant ways. It is hard to put “the power of arrogance” in check and it is one of the struggles that enriches my life, it opens me up to new possibilities, new connections, new ways of hearing God, the prophets, my peers, and my loved ones each day. I am sorry for the times my passion was taken for arrogance because of my presentation and the reception of the person(s) in front of me. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 46

“The outbreak of war was no surprise. It came as a long expected sequel to a spiritual disaster. Instilled with the gospel that truth is a mere advantage and reverence weakness, people succumbed to the bigger advantage of a lie-“the Jew is our misfortune”-and to the power of arrogance-“tomorrow the whole world shall be ours”, “the peoples’ democracies must depend upon force.” (Man’s Quest for God pg. 149).

Reading Rabbi Heschel’s words from 1938 in light of today’s events is eerie and scary. We have not, it seems, learned from our history, distant and immediate, we have continued to promote “a spiritual disaster” in our everyday living, in our homes, in our communities, in our halls of justice and in our seats of government. This moment is not a call to theocracy by Rabbi Heschel, it is a call to all of us to heal our individual, group, national and global spiritual wounds, spiritual needs, connection to a power greater than ourselves/God/higher consciousness. We are in desperate need of spiritual healing, as I hear Rabbi Heschel’s call today, in order to end the truth he speaks; “the outbreak of war was no surprise.”

It is no wonder, given Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom above, that Israel is not believed in the current political extremist climate! While Israel has made many errors in its young political life, while powerful people in Israel have “succumbed to the bigger advantage of a lie”, they have also been under the constant bombardment of not only rockets and suicide bombers, they have been subjected to “the Jew is our misfortune” since they became a state! Jews all over the globe have been subjected to the lie “the Jew is our misfortune” for millennia and in recent years this lie has been promoted louder and louder.

It is a wonder to me that Hamas, a terrorist group known for evil, for lying, for treachery, is to be believed more than Israel, a democracy where protests against the government were happening just a shore 45 days ago. I cannot remember protests against Hamas happening nor being tolerated in Gaza, I cannot remember protests against Siri in Egypt being tolerated nor making change possible, the Arab Spring was a short-lived moment and, yet, we believe Hamas over Israel. We believe the lies and the propaganda being churned out by Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, Russia, and suspect anything and everything that comes out of Israel.

We are living in a time where the big lies overwhelm the truth, where and when the “truth is a mere advantage” not something to revere, when Elon Musk, the Henry Ford of our time, wants to determine what is truth, when Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, et al have convinced half of the United States to believe their lies and follow their evil ways to the detriment of the very people they are claiming to be “their retribution”. People who graduated from Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and other elite schools, like Ted Cruz, Ron DeSantis, Josh Hawley are deriding people like Joe Biden as elites, when Biden went to the University of Delaware and Syracuse Law School! We are living in a world where the lie is better than the truth and, as in Germany of the 1930’s and America of the 1930’s, people are willing to believe Musk, Trump, Bannon, DeSantis, et al as they were to believe Henry Ford, Father Coughlin, Charles Lindbergh, et al!

Being a person who seeks truth, who knows one has to see the whole picture, distinguish nuances is considered weak. People like Joe Biden, like Rabbi Heschel, like Dr. King, are not welcome in today’s polarized world-just ask Rashida Tliab, who calls Israel out for genocide(which is not at all what is happening), believes everything the terrorists Hamas say, threatens to defeat the leader of her own party and, along with Ocasio-Cortez, Omar and others want to see the destruction of the state of Israel, want Israel to live with terrorists 200 yards from their borders, and, want Jews to donate to their campaigns.

We are in a precarious state right now, we are in need of a revolution! We, the People, have to join the Revolution of Recovery. We are being called by the moment, by Rabbi Heschel’s teachings, his experiences, to stand up against the lies. We are being called to heal our spiritual maladies, to end our dependence on lies, on power, on polarization, on mendacity. We are needed to grow into “the souls we were created to be” as Thomas Merton teaches. God is demanding we end our drunken stupors of power, of mendacity, of blaming, of scapegoating, of denial. In an article for the Jewish Heritage in 1971, Rabbi Heschel wrote about the “epidemic of drug addiction” and “perhaps this will wake us up to discover we have gone the wrong way”(Jewish Heritage, vol.13 no. 3 (Fall 1971)). The Recovery Revolution is a celebration of finding our way again, it is recovering our spiritual corpus callosum, the bringing together of our inclinations to serve something greater than ourselves; TRUTH. We are members of a ‘tribe’ that seeks to be of service rather than being served, people who seek spiritual growth rather than ‘getting over’, we enjoy a renaissance of belonging rather than fitting in. We seek truth because we are acutely aware of the destruction that our lies bring, we are healing the “eye disease, cancer of the soul” of prejudices and we welcome everyone into our revolution. We know we are not perfect and never will be, we know we can be one grain of sand better today than we were yesterday, we know that love, connection, truth, reverence are our weapons against the scourge that almost killed us and has killed so many people. We are aware of “the wrong way” we have gone in the past and we seek new roads to freedom, to kindness, to fulfillment of our spirits. Please join Rabbi Heschel and the rest of us. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 45

“The Almighty has not created the universe that we may have opportunities to satisfy our greed, envy, and ambition. We have not survived that we may waste our years in vulgar vanities. The martyrdom of millions demands that we consecrate ourselves to the fulfillment of God’s dream of salvation.” (Man’s Quest for God pg. 151)

As I immerse myself in the last sentence above, and in all the words above, I am overcome with resolve, resilience, pride, joy, awe and gratitude. I also am wondering how we find ourselves in the mess we are in, how we have ignored the myriad of wisdom from our Holy Books, our history, our prophetic leaders like Dr. King, Rabbi Heschel, and all the spiritual leaders before and since!

Taking Rabbi Heschel’s words into our beings can help us to recognize the sacrifice of our ancestors, from the founding fathers till now, to create an imperfect union of democracy. While they displaced Native Americans in the cruelest of ways, they imported slaves from Africa and treated them abominably, they also rebelled against the authoritarian, unjust rule of King George. People gave up their lives so we can be ‘free’. Yet, time and time again as we see throughout our history, there have been people who want to exploit the “martyrdom” of our heroes, known and unknown, from the Revolutionary War, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution’s writing, etc. We have seen fights in Congress over slavery, we have the scars of our Civil War still raw some 158 years later, we have the need and desire of “the South will rise again” playing out so loudly, so cruelly, in our politics today. We have the very thing our founding fathers were afraid of: religious interference/theocratic government; rearing its ugly head in this very moment, thank you Mike Johnson et al. While our founding fathers were not prophets, they were influenced by the prophets, and so many died to ensure the founding of this nation “of the people, by the people, and for the people” that it is criminal that we have stopped honoring the “martyrdom of millions” that have fought to both keep us free and make us a “more perfect union.”

Since we are all immigrants to America, at one time or another, the courage of our ancestors to make the journey to America, especially before modern modes of travel, is awe-inspiring, shows amazing resolve and resilience, and is a source of pride for all who recognize their heroism. They came here to dedicate (consecrate) themselves to the “fulfillment of God’s dream of salvation”, God’s call for each of us to find our proper place, God’s promise of deliverance and redemption(salvation). Yet, we seem to be squandering their gift, their inheritance faster than it can be replenished. Rather than being joyous, rather than being awed, rather than being grateful, we seem to have adopted an attitude, a way of being that has entitlement at its core. We seem to be unable/unwilling to repay/pay forward the gift our ancestors gave us by coming to America. As Dr. Stephen Marmer, MD, said in 1990, “ We have used up the moral capital of our ancestors”, and we seem to be unable to replenish what we have used up. America, for many of our ancestors, was “the Golden Medina”, the land of gold-not just because of financial opportunities, rather and, I believe, more so because of the opportunity to live freely, to live in a democracy. Yet, time and time again, we have witnessed the authoritarians at our gates, the desire of the rich and powerful to overrule what so many died for, what our ancestors risked everything in crossing over to America for. Our entitlement has led to a decrease in our gratitude, in our awe, and in our resolve and resilience which has, once again, put our nation, our freedom in a perilous state.

The solution is in Rabbi Heschel’s last sentence, I believe. When we “consecrate ourselves to God’s dream of salvation”, when we dedicate ourselves to something greater than our selfish desires, our erroneous belief in our ‘being right’, to our push to have “that strongman” bully everyone else so I can have mine, then we can honor the “demands” of “the martyrdom of the millions”. We are in a terrible state right now, people are allowing their latent anti-semitism to believe everything that terrorists are saying! Just as people allowed their latent racism to believe everything that white supremacists and southerners say about people of color, just as ‘good christians’ allow their prejudices to believe everything bad said about people of another faith. This is the cancer of the soul we face, this is the root of our desecration of God’s Name, of the “martyrdom of millions”!

Join the Recovery Revolution! This is the Dao, the way that, like the Torah, has many different paths, has many different understandings and branches to it. When we join the recovery revolution, we begin to replenish the moral capital we have squandered, we begin to pay forward our gratitude for what we have, we live into the abundance life gives us, we fulfill the words of the sage, Ben Zoma, when he asks “who is rich”, “one who wants what he has/is happy with what he has”. In recovery, we do not settle, we appreciate, we honor, we tend the soil of the garden we are here to care for. We use all of our talents and gifts to improve the life of another and ourself. We dedicate ourselves to our redemption and we help the redemption of all who cross our paths. We reach out to deliver people from the hell and the torment of their internal and external prisons to a life of hope, joy, “happy destiny”, In recovery, we rejoice at the success and accomplishments of another without any envy or jealousy. We are so focused on ‘how can I help’ that we forget, at least momentarily, ‘what’s in it for me’! I have been a part of this revolution, I understand and live Torah and Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom as my guiding light in this revolution. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 44

“The Almighty has not created the universe that we may have opportunities to satisfy our greed, envy, and ambition. We have not survived that we may waste our years in vulgar vanities. The martyrdom of millions demands that we consecrate ourselves to the fulfillment of God’s dream of salvation.” (Man’s Quest for God pg. 151)

“We have not survived that we may waste our years in vulgar vanities” hopefully, causes us to take a pause and do an accounting of the way we are living. While this was originally written in 1938, it was updated in 1943 and modified for publication in 1954. Rabbi Heschel is, of course, speaking of “the martyrdom” of both the soldiers who fought and died in WWII as well as the 6 million Jews murdered by the Nazis and the millions killed in the Concentration Camps and innocent civilians killed by the bombings and battles it took to defeat Germany, Italy, Japan. He was seeing the forgetfulness of humanity and the willful blindness of people so they could ignore the horrors and ‘go on with their lives’, I believe.

This has been the way of humankind forever, unfortunately. We go through life-changing world events and then, in our search for certainty, in our desire to not learn from past failures/mistakes, we believe we can ‘just pick up where we left off’. Yet, so many soldiers came back changed from WWII, for Korea, from Vietnam, from the myriad of wars and skirmishes in the Middle East, the 2 Gulf wars, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq without the rest of us helping them to recover from these traumas, with most people thinking, including the soldiers themselves, ‘lets just move on’. So, we have watched history repeat itself, we have witnessed terrorists become ‘freedom fighters’, we have ignored the root causes of the wars and conflicts believing we can just return to wasting “our years in vulgar vanities”. How sad, how treacherous, how demeaning to those who survived and those who died. It is time for all of us to end our desire to “waste our years in vulgar vanities”, to cease and desist from our engagement with self-centered and selfish goals to ‘get ours’, our denial of the rights of every person to live free from terror, our need to enslave another people, our belief that if we can put someone else down we will seem better, the “win at all costs” mentality which permeates our world view.

We see the subtlety of this way of being in the ways the Congress of the United States is operating; what it takes to fund the government, how some of the members of Congress refuse to do their job to help the poor, the needy, to welcome the stranger, to send aid and comfort to our allies in their fight for their own freedom from the terrorists of Russia, Hamas, Iran, ISIS, etc. We see how they fight with one another over stupid shit, how they “waste their years” in Congress “in vulgar vanities”. They are not “humble servants” here to aid and serve the greater good, they are selfish, “vulgar” people kissing up to their wealthy donors and shitting down on every one eel. They could care less what their constituents want, what they need, they only care about their getting elected and holding power so they can line their own egos and pockets. This is true for our many members of our government and governments all over the world.

It is time for us to face truth, to face ourselves, to look at the “man in the glass” as the poem says. We have the power, the urge, the spiritual strength to end our “vulgar vanities”, we just have to surrender to something greater than ourselves. This is the issue: Are we willing to serve the Almighty, are we willing to serve the universe, are we willing to serve the spiritual needs of ourselves and everyone else? Are we going to continue to wrap ourselves in the cloaks of ‘self-righteousness’, the cloaks of ‘we are the only ones who are right’, the cloaks of ‘needing to blame another and make everyone who doesn’t think the way we do bad’? Are we going to put up with Trump’s calling anyone who doesn’t agree with him “vermin”? Are we going to allow the Freedom Caucus to hold up our governmental business? Are we going to allow Tuberville to hold up the necessary Military appointments for his own right-wing craziness? Are we going to stand idly by while Hamas puts out false propaganda and blame Israel for the war in Gaza? Are we going to only call for a cease fire by the Israelis again while the hostages are not seen, nor checked on, not returned? Are we going to abandon the people who have stood by us so we can feel good about ‘helping the underdog’ who have allowed terrorists to rule them, to speak for them with their rockets, who have denied them any help while making themselves rich and famous in Qatar? There are a myriad of “vulgar vanities” we seem to “waste our years in.”

Recovery is the solution, the revolution we need in this moment. Just as the Bible, the New Testament, the Koran, the Tibetan Book of the Dead and the Living, Confucius’ teachings were all revolutionary, we need to re-join the revolution of recovery, spiritual recovery. Whether one’s recovery is based on the Biblical teachings of the prophets and Moses, Jesus’ Gospels, Mohammed’s revelations, Buddhist teachings, AA spirituality, being rebels for service, being a rebel for the sake of a power greater than ourselves, being rebels who see the dignity, worth, uniqueness of every human being, is the goal. These paths entail a deep look inside ourselves, a decision to no longer “waste our years in vulgar vanities”. Living a life of faith, of spirit is letting go of our need to be right, our need to live in hierarchies, our need to be ‘king of the world’-that job is taken by our Higher Power/God. I have been a rebel for most of my life, prior to recovery I rebelled against everything and in my recovery I rebel for the greater good, for the sake of another, for caring for me and you. Isn’t it time to honor the Martyrs who made it possible for us to live free? God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 43

“The Almighty has not created the universe that we may have opportunities to satisfy our greed, envy, and ambition. We have not survived that we may waste our years in vulgar vanities. The martyrdom of millions demands that we consecrate ourselves to the fulfillment of God’s dream of salvation.” (Man’s Quest for God pg. 151)

Rabbi Heschel is calling all of us to account! While it is easy to point the finger at another human being, another group of people, we have to first, as I hear Rabbi Heschel this morning, look at ourselves. Each of us has to engage in an accounting of our souls and answer the question we are being asked: how are we engaging in satisfying “our greed, envy, and ambition”? We have created a society where these negative attributes have taken on a life all their own. We hide behind our ‘righteousness’, our ‘goodness’, our ‘fulfillment of self’ while engaging in self-centered actions. We manipulate what is true, good, right for our own needs/benefits. We live inauthentic lives and call our selves good. This has been true throughout the history of humankind and we are witnessing this mendacity over and over again in our society, in our countries, in our neighborhoods.

The war against the terrorist organization, Hamas, has become a cause celebre for the left and the right. It has, once again, exposed the underbelly of antisemitism that never seems to leave the consciousness of the world and people. While the numbers being quoted out of Gaza are all from Hamas, while the reports from journalists are probably true with the caveat that they cannot report the whole truth or they will be killed by Hamas, the world and the media report them as absolutely true. While many of the marchers for ‘free Palestine’ may have very good intentions, they are unaware, hopefully, of the antisemitic phrases they are using, they are unaware, hopefully, of the aid and comfort they are giving to terrorists, to Iran, to Russia, to authoritarians across the world. This is not a war between Judaism and Islam, this is not a war against a powerful Israel against a poor downtrodden, oppressed minority, this is a war against terrorism, this is a war against evil, this is a war against the “greed, envy, and ambition” of Hamas because Israeli society has flourished while they have siphoned off the money being given to the people of Gaza for their own purposes, because the leaders of Hamas live in luxury in Qatar, because the leaders of Hamas, the Palestinian Authority have lined their pockets instead of building rich, wonderful, caring societies for their people. Yet, the people of the world seem to be missing these truths because of their “envy” of Jews.

In our own country, we are witnessing the “greed, envy, and ambition” of Donald Trump and his band of merry people. When the Republicans fail to call out his fascist talk, when they refuse to condemn the people around him like Stephen Miller and the other architects of his authoritarian ideology, when they go along with the Heritage Foundation’s ideas of a takeover of our democracy in order to put an authoritarian, theocratic government in it’s place, they are examples of taking the name of God in vain, taking the opportunities we are given to improve our world and help one another and using these opportunities for their “greed, ambition” because of their “envy” of authoritarian rulers of past eras. We are witnesses to the denigration of democracy, the fall of freedom, the toppling of a “government of the people, by the people, for the people”. Instead of heeding the words of Abraham Lincoln, they are engaged in denigrating them by working hard to ensure these sentiments, the cause so many Union soldiers died for does “perish from this earth”!

Looking inward, we have to look at our own deceptions, both of self and another. I hear Rabbi Heschel call to us to end our senseless hatred of one another, our needless “greed”, our “ambition” that is out of proportion, and our ridiculous “envy” of someone else. We all are created equal, we all have infinite dignity and worth, we all have a unique purpose. There will always be people richer and poorer than any one individual in monetary wealth, there will always be bosses and employees, yet, as the Bible teaches, “all of us stood at Sinai”, all of us stood on the precipice of the Jordan River preparing to enter the Promised Land, from the heads of the tribes to the water-dweller. We all have a stake and a place in life, we all have a talent/gift to bring to the world, we all have love to give, aid to share, and a goal to attain. “The Almighty” has created a universe where we can all find fulfillment, all find our place, all be connected, all enjoy the fruits of our labor, all can be free of terrorists-domestic and foreign, bullies-in our neighborhoods and politics, and of our “greed, envy, and ambition”.

“For our group purpose there is but one ultimate authority-a loving God as He may express Himself in our group conscience. Our leaders are but trusted servants; they do not govern.”(2nd Tradition of AA). This is the response of Recovery to the “greed, envy, and ambition” Rabbi Heschel is speaking about. In recovery, whether it be in a meeting, in a family, in our work, we are constantly sifting through our negative attributes of “greed, envy, and ambition” to seek counsel from “a loving God” through conversations, mentorship, learning with another person/people. We take the mantle of “trusted servants” and wear it in all of our affairs. We know that we can no longer try to be “ruthless in business” and kind at home because the split grows and grows till we become ruthless in all of our affairs! We seek guidance and wisdom from outside of our own minds, we connect with other souls and learn new and better ways to deal with life on life’s terms. This is one of the ways we carry on the Revolution of Recovery! God Bles and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 41

“The conscience of the world was destroyed by those who were wont to blame others rather than themselves. Let us remember. We revered the instincts but distrusted the prophets. We labored to perfect engines and let our inner life go to wreck. We ridiculed superstition until we lost our ability to believe. We have helped to extinguish the light our fathers had winded. We have bartered holiness for convenience, loyalty for success, love for power, wisdom for information, tradition for fashion.” (Man’s Quest for God pg. 150)

The last three phrases above are very disturbing to me, and I hope everyone! Rabbi Heschel, like the prophets, is a very disturbing human being to me. He disturbs complacency, he disturbs societal norms, he disturbs our consciousness and our conscience. His words and teachings, in the tradition of the prophet Amos: “let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream”(Amos 5:24). We, the People, have to decide if we are going to heed his wisdom, his tradition, his love or are we going to continue to barter these away?

We are so stuck in our own needs, our own self-importance, our own need to be right, that most of us are unaware of how we barter “love for power, wisdom for information, tradition for fashion.” We have become so willfully blind that we cannot see the differences, we refuse to see the nuances, we have polarized our world, our faith to such an extent it would be unrecognizable to the prophets, to the Rabbis, to the Desert Fathers, to Moses, to Jesus, to Mohammed. Yet, we continue to declare the ‘rightness’ of our actions in their names! How sad it is that we are so lost, so blind, so ensconced in mendacity that we are unable to engage in love, wisdom, and tradition.

We are in the midst of a war in the Middle East, in the Ukraine, and the war is for the survival of all of us. It is not a war about territory, even though it is made out to be, it is not a regional war, even though people want to make it out to be so they can stand back while the world comes apart. It is a war for the survival of freedom, for the survival of imperfect goodness over terrorism and power. It is a war for the primacy of wisdom and the end of believing information from tainted sources and the end of believing in the lies of those who proclaim their ‘love of the people’ when their endgame is power over these same people and riches for themselves. The war in the Middle East, the war in Ukraine is a call to stop bartering away our spiritual principles, to end our insatiable desire for power, for information, for the latest fad, to stand up for what is right and true-freedom to be who we were created to be, freedom to fight terrorism and mendacity, freedom to distinguish between truth and fiction, to distinguish between evil and the tragedies of war, to distinguish between standing with and for Godliness and standing with the myriad of terrorists like Putin, Hamas, Iran, and those in our own country and across the globe who use their power to treat the poor, the needy, as “less than human” and bar the stranger rather than welcome them. Instead of ransoming for the captives, those in power who proclaim their love of their neighbors, who claim to be cruel in the name of their idols which they call god, all terrorists try to take everyone who is not them, everyone who is not ‘in the club’ captive with their wars-figurative wars with their powers to legislate, and literal wars as we see how Putin and Hamas/Iran have done in Ukraine and Israel.

We, the People, have to call out our elected officials to stop bartering away our declarations we made in 1776, end our bartering away of the love of country and people we made in 1787 when we wrote the Constitution and the Bill of Rights as well as the introduced the idea that more amendments were going to be needed. We, the People, have to call out to our religious leaders to stop their oneupmanship, to end their beating of their chests and their “fire and brimstone”, “God will punish you”, “we are doing God’s will” when they are only instigating and promoting prejudice, mendacity, and spreading these cancers of the soul. We, the People, have to end our reliance on bartering and get back to our basic goodness of being.

While AA wants to remain above the fray as to opinions on outside issues, which is a good idea, recovery is the answer as I am hearing Rabbi Heschel today. In order to end our bartering, we have to recover the essence of tradition-a dynamic path of living that holds dear the basic principles of love, kindness, compassion, rebuke, justice, freedom, welcoming the stranger, caring for the poor, the needy, ransoming the captive, etc and never doing it in the same exact manner as has been done before. We have to recover our basic need to be loved and to love, our search for wisdom not just regurgitate information and call them facts. Recovery is the revolution we all need to join! In recovery, we love the newcomer(stranger) until they can love themselves, we all interpret and engage with the Big Book in our own understanding (ala 70 faces of Torah), we all work with one another to be one grain of sand better today than we were yesterday, many of us begin our days with gratitude for being alive, like prayer. We are constantly seeking to return to our authentic self and live along spiritual principles.

When I stopped bartering love, loyalty, holiness, wisdom, tradition for my self-centered needs, I began my recovery. I still fall prey to bartering on occasion and I am blessed to be rebuked by another, disturbed by Rabbi Heschel, and/or called to account by a power greater than me(sometimes my wife and/or my daughter). Living a life disturbed by Rabbi Heschel gives me the gift of living a life of love, kindness, justice, no more bartering and truth. I am a rebel and have joined Rabbi Heschel’s revolution! God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark.

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 40

“The conscience of the world was destroyed by those who were wont to blame others rather than themselves. Let us remember. We revered the instincts but distrusted the prophets. We labored to perfect engines and let our inner life go to wreck. We ridiculed superstition until we lost our ability to believe. We have helped to extinguish the light our fathers had winded. We have bartered holiness for convenience, loyalty for success, love for power, wisdom for information, tradition for fashion.” (Man’s Quest for God pg. 150)

Having immersed ourselves for days in this paragraph, we come to the last phrases and delving into how we have “bartered… loyalty for success, love for power, wisdom for information, tradition for fashion” can help us see a future way of living that is more authentic to the call of our souls, to becoming “the self we were created to be”, and living in harmony with all people.

Rabbi Heschel is calling to us to stop deceiving ourselves as to what we are doing, bastardizing our basic goodness of being, our foundational principles and paths for momentary gain. He is lifting the veil of mendacity under which we all seem to be viewing our ways of living, our principles, the principles of the Bible, etc. We all have been party to and witness’ of what happens when we deceive ourselves that our success is being loyal no matter how we achieve this success. We all have been party to and witness’ of bartering our principles in one area of living in order to gain support, monetary success, in another area. We all know how our government works today where everyone in their respective party is supposed to go along with the party line, toe the party line no matter what their constituents need, no matter what is true and right, no matter the stakes. Liz Cheney is a perfect example of what happens when an elected official goes against the party line-she was ostracized, defeated in her re-election bid by the Republican Party. Democrats supported Rashida Tliab’s right to promote extermination of Jews and destruction of Israel as a way of being loyal to ‘the party’. We have come to deceive ourselves/barter away our loyalty to the Founding Fathers who never believed the Constitution they wrote was written in stone, who set up amendments for the purpose of changing, who knew the ways would have to be constantly re-defined and understood in each proceeding era, by being “strict constitutionalists” which is another term for achieving their own selfish goals rather than what is best for all.

In the Bible, Numbers 15:39, we are taught: “do not scout out after your heart and your eyes which you will whore after”. As individuals, we have transgressed this commandment, this principle so often. This is a very personal instance of trading our loyalty to principles for our momentary and monetary success. Think of the myriad of people any of us have betrayed so we can “get ahead”. Apple did it with Steve Jobs, Synagogues have done it with their spiritual leaders, institutions do this with their leaders and the employees backstab one another in order to “get ahead”. Business engage in spying on one another, “killing the competition”, lying about their achievements, not mentioning the risks, not taking responsibility for their actions which harm, all in the name of success, all to serve their ‘higher’ goal of winning. We do this in so many areas of life and it begins with how we decide to live personally, how we choose to either “scout out after our hearts and eyes”, give in to our baser desires whether they are good for us or not, or we choose to stay loyal to our authentic selves, stay loyal to higher consciousness, stay loyal to God’s call. We have become oblivious to the need to constantly making this choice, to being aware  of the myriad of disguises selfishness, success wear so as to confuse us as to what is good and right, what is bartering “loyalty for success” and harming our inner lives, harming our world.

There is a solution, of course. It calls for us to strip away the false exterior, the deceptive armor we have put on, to let go of our facade of strength and ‘rightness’, to engage in an authentic Chesbon HaNefesh, an accounting of our souls personally, communally, country-wide. We need to “go back to the drawing board” and look at the foundational principles of our way of living. What do we value? Do we value life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? Do we value that all people are created equal, all people are created in the image of the Divine? Do we value the call to welcome the stranger, care for the needy and the poor, the widow and the orphan? Do we value the health and well-being of everyone? Or do we just pay lip service to these values and do what we want so we can ‘get ours’? With Russia’s attempt to grab Ukraine, Iran’s attempt to destroy Israel and exterminate Jews through its proxies, the polarization here in our country, the Anti-Semitism and hatred spewed throughout the world right now, it feels like we are at a tipping point, again. We need a revolution- we need to revolt against our pursuit of “success” at the cost of being loyal to decency, kindness, and the other values listed above.

Recovery is just such a revolution. In recovery, we welcome everyone, we love people without any reciprocity until they can love themselves and pay it forward. In recovery, we take responsibility for our actions, good and not good, improving the good and making amends for the not good ones. We continue to take this inventory every day so we don’t drift off our path, off the path of goodness, kindness, etc. We stay loyal to the principles even when it means calling someone out on their behavior and their self-deceptions. In recovery, this makes us popular, it makes us feel whole and connected. I have stayed loyal to people and principles in my recovery, sometimes that loyalty has not been reciprocated and I stay loyal to the principles. I continue to be responsible for my side of the street and work to keep it as clean as possible. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 40

“The conscience of the world was destroyed by those who were wont to blame others rather than themselves. Let us remember. We revered the instincts but distrusted the prophets. We labored to perfect engines and let our inner life go to wreck. We ridiculed superstition until we lost our ability to believe. We have helped to extinguish the light our fathers had winded. We have bartered holiness for convenience, loyalty for success, love for power, wisdom for information, tradition for fashion.” (Man’s Quest for God pg. 150)

In Pete Seeger’s song, Where have all the flowers gone, he asks a question: “when will you ever learn”. Reading and rereading the last sentence of Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom above brings this question to the forefront of my mind. Rabbi Heschel’s words, sentences, teachings call out to our morality, our spirituality, our actions. He is demanding, in his kind, quiet voice, the same changes that the prophets before him demanded and, like the Israelites of old, we seem to be unable to heed his words, unable to take in his wisdom and put his demands, actually God’s demands and humanity’s demands, into action!!

Barter comes from the “old French” meaning “to deceive”. While English has defined bartering as “exchange”, using the French meaning may better describe what we have done and what we are doing. We have deceived ourselves into believing that convenience is holy. We are continuing to bastardize holiness for our own convenience, for our own selfish, self-centered satisfaction. We see this happening in all areas of living; political, economic, religious, personal. Politically, we see the contrast in the War with Hamas, the War against terrorism. Israel is fighting for its very existence, it is fighting to root out terrorism, to end the constant worry about rockets coming from Gaza, to end the fear of infiltration and murder, rape, hostage-taking by Hamas terrorists funded by the Arab world, especially Qatar and Iran. Benjamin Netanyahu is a bully who wraps himself in a false cloak of holiness with his oppressive, authoritarian policies while giving immense power to “religious” right-wing zealots. His inability to safeguard the border with Gaza is because of his need to satisfy these zealots. While he talks very tough, he deceived the people of Israel and Jews across the globe with this ‘tough talk’ while, like Nero, fiddled as Israel was in turmoil. Hamas and the rest of the world have backed Israel into a corner in a no-win situation because the world allows itself to be deceived, to have “bartered holiness for convenience”; no matter how often Israel dropped leaflets, no matter how often Israel suggested people leave Northern Gaza, the bombing was going to created collateral damage that would be used against Israel and Jews worldwide.

We see this in the demonstrations that immediately blamed Israel for Hamas’ day of terror, for Hamas’ rape, killing, invading, and hostage-taking! The world is being deceived and is engaging in self-deception by not condemning Hamas, by not demanding of Qatar to bring the Hamas leaders in their country to trial, by not helping to root out terrorism no matter where it is found. Glorifying the Hamas cowards who glided into a music festival about peace and began killing, raping, and taking hostages is another example of how people have “bartered holiness for convenience”. This happens because we want to make things easy and we are too used to 10-second sound bites rather then delve into the essential meaning of what is happening, what is truly holy. We want to make ‘simplify’ everything rather than see the simplicity and beauty of the complexity of life. Joe Biden’s response is a contrast to the mainstream anti-semitism, Jew-Hatred, blaming the victims we witness around the globe. He is calling for humane treatment of Gaza civilians while standing with Israel. He doesn’t let his personal feelings for or about Netanyahu alter his personal conviction and his morality to do the next right thing, to stand against terrorism, to stand for holiness. He is not willing to deceive himself nor the American people into believing there are any ways to defend Hamas, that there are any good reasons to support the terrorism of Oct. 7.

We have a choice today and every day, in this moment and in every moment, the Bible tells us to: “Choose Life”, choose decency, choose to care for the stranger, the widow, the poor, the needy, the orphan. Israel has not always done this, Netanyahu has “bartered holiness for convenience” because he is a crook and he doesn’t want to be held responsible-sound familiar? He has deceived the people who believed his rhetoric and his promises of safety and he has been found a liar, he empowered the worst of religious zealots who do not heed Rabbi Heschel’s words, they do not act on the teachings of the prophets, they are addicted to their lies, to their power, to being authoritarians and there bastardization of our Holy Texts.

Kristallnacht happened yesterday and today 85 years ago, it is still happening today; to Jews, to minorities, and we have to make good on the sacrifices of our ancestors-Never Again! We have to recover our holiness, we have to stop deceiving ourselves and everyone else that we are being ‘holy’, we are being ‘faithful to God’, following the dictates of the Bible, New Testament, Koran, etc. with our lies, our self-serving interpretations, our “prosperity gospels”, etc. We have to recover the joy of liberation from the narrow place called Egypt, the narrow places of deceit, and recover the dedication of “Na-Aseh V’Nishma”, we will do and then we will understand when we accepted the 10 Commandments at Mt. Sinai. We can do this when, following the example of people in recovery, we act our way into right thinking and feeling because our thoughts and our feelings oft lead us astray as we are warned: Don’t scout out after your heart and your eyes lest you whore after them. Lets stop bartering our holiness for convenience and return to the goodness of being we are created for, return to living the life our self was created for. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 39

“The conscience of the world was destroyed by those who were wont to blame others rather than themselves. Let us remember. We revered the instincts but distrusted the prophets. We labored to perfect engines and let our inner life go to wreck. We ridiculed superstition until we lost our ability to believe. We have helped to extinguish the light our fathers had winded. We have bartered holiness for convenience, loyalty for success, love for power, wisdom for information, tradition for fashion.” (Man’s Quest for God pg. 150)

Religion is not superstition-full stop! Yet, because of our need to live in an “either/or” way of being, we seem incapable of holding two thoughts at one time in our being. Because of the divorce of science and religion, around the time of Galileo, I believe, these two crucial ways of relating to the world have become locked into a contentious battle. Neither of these disciplines are antithetical to one another, yet humans in their need for superiority, have made them so. Some scientists have labeled religion “superstition” and some religious people have labeled science “blasphemy”-neither are true and too many people have bought into these deceptions and we find ourselves locked into a war. This war is also an internal war, we find people who ‘choose’ sides deny the truths of the ‘other side’. This divorce of science and religion has fueled a war of words and actions; to the point where people are unable to discuss, appreciate and find common ground. Rather than seek to learn with and from one another, we are witnesses to and participants in a ‘straw-man’ issue.

We are in desperate need “to believe” in something greater than ourselves. We are in desperate need to “honor our mothers and fathers” by brightening “the light our fathers had winded”. Yet, we seem to be hellbent on “evidence-based” thinking and “blowing out the candles of light”. Herein lies our challenge: how to live into and accept the hypothesis’ and proofs of science and the truths of the Bible and the prophets. They are not antithetical, they both come from a power greater than ourselves, they are both true. Religious/spiritual living has evolved from the very “light our fathers had winded” as has science! While “evidence-based” is called ‘scientific’, it doesn’t take into account the resilience of the human spirit. While our education system, both secular and religious, engages in either “evidence-based” or “biblical” methods, neither takes into account the wisdom of proverbs 22:6: “Teach each child(person) according to his way” or the wisdom of Hillel (paraphrasing here): “speak to each person in a way they can understand”. We are not in need of more dividers, we are in need of more acceptance.

Our need to depend on the “evidence-based” theories of today negates the test of time, the foundational aspects of how we have survived and thrived to last this long on earth. Humanity has fought with one another in a false struggle to prove Darwin’s theory-the survival of the fittest- while denying the truth that the Bible screams at us to “care for  and welcome” the stranger, the poor, the needy, the widow, the orphan-the least among us. This is not to decry advances in science, in knowledge, it is to decry throwing “ the baby out with the bathwater” way of modernity. We have a rich tradition of seeking truth, we have a mandate to understand the Bible in all of its “70 faces”, which demands “rigorous honesty”, it demands “radical amazement”, it demands living in “both/and”. As we have seen throughout the past, when one ‘group’, scientific or religious, goes to great lengths to deny the whole picture, when one group stakes their very existence on the denial of any other ways of learning, of seeing the world, we have a very skewed world. When religious people want to deny the scientific advances in medicine, in climate, in a myriad of meeting life’s challenges, we see people die needlessly, we see people suffer immeasurably, for no good reason. Who do these people think gave our scientists the spirit, wisdom and drive to make the wonderful advances we have achieved if not God? When scientists, rationalists, humanists, have to laugh at those of us who have religious and spiritual beliefs, we see people suffer from depression and despair, people rebel against the “conventional notions and mental cliches” that rule this group of people, we are witnesses to the wars, the cruelty, the addictions that have created more divisions between people, we have seen the destruction of “am I my brother’s keeper?”, the destruction of “love your neighbor as you love yourself”.

There is a solution, however. We have to enhance “the light our fathers had winded” through seeking harmony, through turning “our will and our lives over to the care of God, as we understand him”(3rd step of AA). Scientists like Einstein believe in a power greater than themselves, scientists have sought the source of energy that keeps the world afloat forever. People of faith have sought God, as they understand God, as a source of energy, a source of spirit, a source of morality. Whether the Bible was written by God and/or divinely inspired is immaterial, whether one can “prove” the veracity of the biblical sites and people is of no consequence, because the validity of the Bible is unquestionable, the “light our fathers had winded” has survived till today, the Jewish people have survived till today, our connection with “a power greater than ourselves” has continued to today. This connection is the beginning and end of recovery-full stop!

I have spent the last 36 years fueling the light my father and grandfathers had winded. I spent many years prior to recovery trying to extinguish this same light. Thank God I was unable to extinguish their light, unable to extinguish the light of my soul. This is the challenge for everyone, to live in the light of the “both/and” our ancestors “had winded”. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 38

“The conscience of the world was destroyed by those who were wont to blame others rather than themselves. Let us remember. We revered the instincts but distrusted the prophets. We labored to perfect engines and let our inner life go to wreck. We ridiculed superstition until we lost our ability to believe. We have helped to extinguish the light our fathers had winded. We have bartered holiness for convenience, loyalty for success, love for power, wisdom for information, tradition for fashion.” (Man’s Quest for God pg. 150)

I shudder to think of what Rabbi Heschel would be thinking and saying about our world today! Rabbi Heschel, in my opinion and in the opinion of many, was a prophet for us, just as Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was a prophet. While we quote their words, we invoke their memories, we seem to distrust their words and actions by not heeding them, by not imitating their actions. Rabbi Heschel’s words above, are as true and urgent today as they ever been.

We have worked so hard “to perfect our engines”, be they our cars, our tools, our filmmaking, our music, our printings, our internet, etc, while we “let our inner life go to wreck.” We continue to externalize our living, we continue to seek to achieve wealth, power, perfection, while we allow our inner life to go to rot, to go to seed. It is so depressing, so despairing to witness the myriad of ways Fascism, Christian Nationalism, Fundamentalist Religious Zealotry, have overtaken our political system. It is infuriating to witness the myriad of ways mendacity and deception have overtaken truth, overtaken the words, the deeds of the Bible, the prophets of old, the teachings and actions of Rabbi Heschel, Dr. King, the teachings and actions of people like Father Gregory Boyle of Homeboy Industries and John Pavlovitz. Our medical system, in its drive to perfection, has lost the personal touch of our family doctor knowing each of her/his patients giving way to impersonal referring out; our spiritual leaders are taught to refer people to ‘professional therapists’ rather than help congregants and seekers to find the answer to our basic questions: “what is the meaning and purpose of my life?”

Rather than engage in the work of our inner life, rather than “recover our passion, discover our purpose” as Harriet Rossetto changed the motto of Beit T’Shuvah to, we have been bombarded with negativity, told that our jobs, status, money, power, define us. Rather than take seriously that all of us stood at Sinai, all of us are created in the Image of God, all of us have infinite dignity, we seem to be repeating the errors of our ancestors who built The Tower of Babel. We use language to confuse one another, we use the Internet to spread disinformation, to support racism, anti-semitism, hatred of Muslims, LGBTQ+, Asians, and to spread hatred and anger.

Isn’t it time for us to stop our reliance on our new “evidenced-based” solutions and return to the lessons and teachings of the basis for our morality, our systems of justice: The Bible, the Prophets, their disciples like Dr. King and Rabbi Heschel? Isn’t it time for us to call out the so-called ‘religious people’ who preach hatred, who preach a hierarchy of holiness, live like they are the best and only people who ‘know what God wants’ while actually engaging in idolatry, while bastardizing the words of Jesus, Moses, Mohammed? Isn’t it time to return to a way of being that grows our inner life, that helps us deal with the issues of our time respecting the infinite dignity and worth of every human being? Isn’t it time for us to end our dancing with terrorism on every level; in our politics, in our religious institutions, in our business, in our homes Isn’t it time for us to end the mendacity of hate political advertising? Isn’t it time for us to end the deception of the religious charlatans who claim ‘my religion is the only true one’? Isn’t it time for us to end our self-deception of believing ‘we(me and my people) are the only ones who know the truth’?

We have a path of healing the wreck of our inner lives. We have a way to end our senseless hatreds, our negative self-talk, our mistrust of the prophets of old and the prophets of our time. We have leaders and teachers, we have the power to disobey the “conventional norms” or society. Rabbi Heschel gives us a solution; live in Radical Amazement, “the state of maladjustment to words and notions, is, therefore, a prerequisite for an authentic awareness of that which is.”(Man is Not Alone pg.11). The conventional notions and mental cliches we have bought into, the ways of Henry Ford with his Protocols of Zion, his despicable treatment of the workers who made him wealthy and powerful, the insanity of Elon Musk, Donald Trump, the Federalist Society, the Heritage Society, the Progressive Left, etc, have “let our inner life go to wreck.” It is time for us to revolt, it is time for us to rebel against these lies, these liars, these charlatans! It is past time to hear and live into Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom and teachings, it is past time to follow the examples and leadership of Rev. King-“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”

The path is recovery! We are in desperate need of recovering our inner lives, recovering our basic goodness of being, recovering our passion for justice, love, kindness, compassion, for spiritual growth. We have the AA steps, the Bible, the mitzvot, the Koran, the Gospels, the Eastern spiritual disciplines which all lead us to a rich, vibrant, inner life, a ‘resurrection’ of living from the inside out, of hearing and heeding the call of our souls. While we will never “arrive”, we can keep growing and making progress along spiritual lines. We can do this. This is my daily challenge and I keep moving one grain of sand towards this goal each day. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 37

“The conscience of the world was destroyed by those who were wont to blame others rather than themselves. Let us remember. We revered the instincts but distrusted the prophets. We labored to perfect engines and let our inner life go to wreck. We ridiculed superstition until we lost our ability to believe. We have helped to extinguish the light our fathers had winded. We have bartered holiness for convenience, loyalty for success, love for power, wisdom for information, tradition for fashion.” (Man’s Quest for God pg. 150)

Rabbi Heschel’s first sentence above is as true today as it was when he first spoke it/wrote it! We are in dire need for “the conscience of the world” to be rebuilt, to be rebuilt as the Bible, the prophets have imbued us with, have given us examples of, have reminded us of our purpose in making the world a little better than when we found it, a little better because we are here. The generation that fought against senseless hatred, unchecked power, rampant greed, in Europe and in Asia gave to us a world they believed would learn from what happened in World War II. Yet, today we have Holocaust deniers, rabid anti-semitism, senseless Islamaphobia, fear of the stranger, hatred of anyone we feel threatens our hold on power, terrorists who claim to be ‘freedom fighters’ and people willing to believe the mendacity and deceptions of so-called leaders. Many of We, the People, have become willfully blind to the lies of these so-called leaders, these people who traffic in conspiracy theories, who are “wont to blame others rather than themselves” and follow them down into the tunnels of self-deception, hatred of ‘the other’, blaming the Jews, the Arabs, the LGBTQ+, the Blacks, the Asians, etc for all of the ills of society. Never once do these followers of the deceivers look inside of themselves, never once do these pathetic people hear the call of God “Ayecha, Where are You” nor do they answer “Hineni, here I am”. We are living in a time where most people are pointing their fingers at everyone else, calling out the incongruities of everyone around them, that don’t agree with them, rather than look inside of themselves.

Whether it is Netanyahu in Israel who continues to shirk his responsibility for what happened on Oct. 7, in Israel, who continues to blame everyone else and be bellicose in his denials and his ‘strongman’ attitude, or it is Donald Trump who also is bellicose and blaming of everyone who opposes his lies and mendacity by calling them “thugs, insane, leading a witch-hunt, etc” or it is Putin in Russia who jails his political opponents for calling out his lies, his thievery, or it is the Iranians who fuel, feed, financially support Hezbollah, Hamas, and other terrorists around the world-they all use the same playbook-blame everyone else, wear down the people of conscience, confuse people with lies so the truth becomes indecipherable. This is a ‘winning’ political strategy, as long as one can convince people of the ‘truth’ of their deceptions, of them mendacity, one can gain political office, one can bastardize the principles of Christ, the teachings of Mohammed, and the examples of the prophets, including Moses.

How is this possible, one might ask. It happens because We, the People, have not learned the lessons for our ancestors from Biblical times till now. We have become so enamored with our own sense of progress, our erroneous belief that we are so ‘advanced’ from the time of antiquity, that morality is so imbued within us, that we don’t need to learn from the prophets, we can put words in Christ’s mouth, we can deny the truth of the Hebrew Bible and our need to see the imperfections of our heroes, etc. We have let go of the teachings that are the foundation of our moral, judicial systems, we have jettisoned truth in favor of feelings, in favor of hiding, in favor of running away from looking in the mirror! We have forsaken God, we have forsaken the spiritual courage of our ancestors in coming to America, we have come to believe in the myth of freedom rather than the truth of it. While many of us “Proclaim Liberty throughout the land and to all its inhabitants thereof” (Lev. 25:10), we have not made it our ‘battle cry’, we have not made liberty a reality for all people of our land. We have singled out different ‘minorities’ for scorn, for blame, for prejudice. Even the word ‘minorities’ is a misnomer because we are all, supposedly, Americans, yet we find ways for “the conscience” of our country to be “destroyed by those who were wont to blame others rather than themselves”.

We do have a solution, however. It is called Recovery! We need to recover not only our sobriety, our clear-eyed, clear-headed vision and thinking, we need to recover our spiritual essence, our connection to our ancestors, our commitment to goodness, decency, living God’s will, “turning our lives over to the care of God”. There are millions of us who have ‘returned from the dead’, come back from our destruction of our own consciences, had a rebirth of spirit and re-learned the lessons of our ancestors, committed/re-committed to living life along spiritual principles rather than the principles of mendacity, greed, prejudice. As Harriet Rossetto says: “You don’t have to be an addict to be in recovery.”

While my conscience was never completely destroyed, prior to my being in recovery which happened before I stopped drinking, it began in prison thanks to Rabbi Mel Silverman, z”l, it was so buried under blame and shame I could not access it. It was also buried under the fear that change wasn’t possible and no one would believe my change. T’Shuvah and the Bible, AA and Spirituality gave me hope and I have continued to regain my conscience through the bombardment of negativity and mendacity, through my own self-deceptions and the abandonments and being used by another(s). Each day, I am blessed to regain a conscience that allows me to live a life that is compatible with being a partner of God, as Rabbi Heschel teaches. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

living rabbi heschel’s wisdom - A daily path to living well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 36

“We cannot dwell at ease under the sun of our civilization as our ancestors thought we could. What was in the minds of our martyred brothers in their last hours? They died with disdain and scorn for a civilization in which the killing of civilians could become a carnival of fun, for a civilization which gave us mastery over the forces of nature but lost control over the forces of our self.” (God’s Quest for Man pg. 150)

“How can I pray when the deaths of 1000’s of innocent Vietnamese are on my conscience” Rabbi Heschel asked in his interview with Carl Stern. I am thinking about this statement and what is going on in the world, in our country, in our communities. What would Rabbi Heschel say? I am not sure and I believe he would point out the difference between America’s War in Vietnam as self-serving and from a puffed-up, prideful place of John Foster Dulles, Robert McNamara, et al-not a war for the survival of America. Israel is in another fight for it’s life, a fight to kill off the people who are dedicated to the extermination of the Jewish People and the end of the State of Israel. While the citizens of Gaza may be innocent, they are at least culpable because they have been able to “dwell at ease” with Hamas as their leadership! While we have proof of Hamas Terrorists celebrating the killing of Innocent Jews at a music festival, in their homes, on their streets, as “a carnival of fun”, the vast majority of Jews do not experience the death of civilians as “a carnival of fun”-true some Jews do, as evidenced in videos from one IDF person-however this is not the norm! I believe Rabbi Heschel would be mourning the deaths of the innocent civilians in Gaza, and crying out for the return of the Hostages, mourning and crying over the killing of Jews again just because we are Jews. I believe he would be seeking a solution to this problem and call on all of us to rise to our higher selves-fighting terrorism, fighting prejudice, standing for and with freedom, hearing the call of the prophet: Nation shall not lift up sword against Nation nor shall men learn war anymore.”

Here in the United States, I watch in horror as I hear the insanity of the right and the left in Congress, on our streets, on our College Campus’, in our halls of Academia, in the rallies for Donald Trump, at the rallies led by Rashida Tlaib, Ilan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, et al supporting terrorists! I have come to the realization that I am unsafe in America, I am unsafe in the world because I am a Jew, because I am a centrist, I am a thinker who seeks truth, ie the whole picture; I seek to understand and realize the nuances in every situation, I don’t believe we can make informed decisions without seeing the nuances, the whole picture. I am unsafe in the Democratic Party because they don’t want people who seek to stand for spiritual principles and be willing to engage in give and take to uphold these spiritual principles. I am unsafe in the Democratic Party and in America because I am unwilling to go along with mendacity, with supporting Terrorism, with ‘conventional notions’. I am unsafe in America and in the Democratic Party, of which I have been a life-long member of, because they are afraid to call out Tlaib, Omar, Bush, et al for their terrorist threats to Joe Biden and the rest of the Democratic Party, saying they will not support the Democratic Nominee for President unless he bows down to Terrorists, to Terrorism, to Hamas! How sick and sad we have all become, how far from the Kennedy Democrat I was in the 1960’s up until now.

And of course, the Republican Party, the Republican Jewish Coalition, who ‘stand with Israel’ are not willing to stand for democracy in Israel, in the Ukraine, to give aid and much needed money to rebuild Gaza and help its citizens without trying to aid and help the rich in this country! Rather than a democracy, Mike Johnson and his cronies are seeking to enshrine the plutocracy/kleptocracy they began under Donald J Trump. Even the Republicans who are ‘never-Trumpers’ support the demise of the IRS collection bureau unless they are collecting from those who can least afford it. The idea that the rich, the plutocrats and the kleptocrats should pay their fair share of taxes is ridiculous to the Republicans in the House of Representatives and they are willing to not give aid to Israel, to Ukraine, to rebuild Gaza - all the while proclaiming their love and loyalty to Israel and to democracy!

What all of this has in common is we are being bullied, governed, oppressed by People of the Lie, the name of a book by M.Scott Peck. Hamas, their supporters, Qatar who hides the leaders of Hamas and has given them Billions of Dollars in extortion money knowing what they are using it for, attacking Israel, enriching themselves and not helping the people of Gaza, the rest of the Arab world who have refused to renounce terrorism against Israel for fear the terrorists may attack them, the people in Congress who see their seat at the table as a way to bully and oppress anyone who doesn’t agree with them- all are “People of the Lie” and We, the People, have to vote them out, have to find ways to silence them, reveal their mendacities and subordination of rights, of freedom, of truth to their constituents, here and abroad.

We, the People, have to recover our “control over the forces of our self” and we have to recover the pain and empathy of senseless hatred, senseless terrorism, senseless murder as we witnessed on Oct. 7. We, the People, have to recover “control over the forces of self” so we can stop our selfishness, our self-centeredness, and remember to care for the widow, the orphan, the stranger, the poor and the needy. We, the People, have to recover “control over the forces of self” so we can ensure everyone has a living wage, everyone has access to health care, everyone has choice over their bodies, everyone is given the Infinite Dignity that all everyone deserves as a birthright because we are all created in the Image of the Infinite One. These are basic principles of recovery, of Judaism, and We, the People, have to recover these principles inside of each of us.

I am still agitated, I keep “control over the forces of self” better now than I have in the past. In fact, because I could “lost control over the forces of self” I found myself abandoned and sent out of the place I had helped to create and build. I also know there was a different way to handle the situation, it did not have to end the way it did-yet it did. I am not shirking my responsibility, I have been in recovery to have “control over the forces of self” and I know mendacity, hiding, “people of the lie” push me over the edge. I never want to lose my outrage for “people of the lie” lest I go back to hiding, lying! At least I am aware of the work that is in front of me. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark