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Living Rabbi Heschel's Wisdom - A Daily Spiritual Path for Living Well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day75

“Man is what he thinks. Man dwells where his mind dwells. What is intellectually irrelevant is imprisoned in Temples and has no access to our minds. We repeat cliches; we remember platitudes.” (Essential Writings pg. 87)

We have ‘improved’ on Rabbi Heschel’s words above, we have decided that truth is “intellectually irrelevant” if it doesn’t fit our ideology, if it doesn’t fit into our false memories, if it doesn’t go along with how we want to see the world, etc. We have become enamored with “alternative facts” and we shut our minds and our souls off to what is true and what is real. Hence, we have shut our minds and our beings off to the calls and demands of God, the call of decency, kindness, mercy, justice, love. All of these have become ‘contextual’, as evidenced by the upsurge in anti-semitism, Islamaphobia, racism, and other prejudices that are so prevalent in society today.

Even our religious institutions, our institutions of higher learning have “imprisoned in Temples” what is “intellectually irrelevant” to them. Rather than immersing ourselves in the words and teachings of the Bible, the Koran, the New Testament, we take words and phrases out of context and make them intellectually relevant to the bias’ we have. Rather than delve into “what is the next right action”, rather than “walk humbly with God”, rather than “do justly and love mercy”, we go about our business of competition, comparison, with bastardizations of these truths. Rather than seeing the “both/and” of life we live in an “either/or” state which we use to ‘win at all costs’, even when the cost is to our spiritual health and well-being.

Our fascination with ‘intellectually relevant’ has become an obsession to be right. We are so afraid of uncertainty we lie to ourselves and to everyone else in some fantasy that we outsmart death, outsmart one another in order to prove certainty exists. Our “Temples” have become prisons of this phenomena as well. So many religious leaders and religious institutions are more concerned with their longevity than they are with the truth. So many therapists, life coaches and spiritual counselors, are so concerned with making a living they continue to help people stay in their care rather than helping them to deal with the truth of uncertainty, rather than helping them discern truth, justice, mercy, love, kindness, and connection to a “power greater than themselves”. Too many people and institutions have made a decision that they are greater than, or should be greater than, any other power in the universe.

Society has harmed us greatly by it’s command to become adjusted to “conventional notions and mental cliches”. The demand to “go along to get along” is not just prevalent in one area of society, it is even prevalent in the supposed  rebellions against these “conventional notions and mental cliches”. We are witness’ to how the women who were raped and killed in Israel on Oct. 7th and raped and treated so poorly in captivity by Hamas have not been championed by the woman’s movement, by the Un, by ‘the progressives’; rather they have been ignored, blamed, and vilified for being oppressors! Because it is “intellectually irrelevant” to some ‘progressives’, Israel, all Israelis, all Jews are ‘the oppressors’ and so whatever happens to them, even at the hands of terrorists, is coming to them and ‘the progressives’ cheer the torture, the murders, the rape, the hostage-taking by the terrorists organization Hamas as ‘righteous’ and the terrorists have become ‘freedom fighters’.

It is “intellectually irrelevant” to many people that Donald Trump and his MAGA cronies who want absolute power like the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society, CPAC, the Evangelicals who want a Christian Nation, the America First people, Steve Bannon, Mike Johnson, Lindsey Graham lie, cheat, try to steal an election, want the demise of our democracy. It is “intellectually irrelevant” to most of the other candidates for the Republican Presidential nomination as well. It is “intellectually irrelevant” to many democrats that Joe Biden has helped our country, cares about democracy, stands with allies, fights against tyranny, seeks bi-partisan compromises, cares for the poor, the needy, the stranger, the widow and the orphan as the Bible demands of us. It is “intellectually irrelevant” to people that vaccines work, they save lives, they are developed by people to whom God has given the talent and the spirit to work to prevent unnecessary deaths.

In recovery, we unlock the “Temples” which have imprisoned our minds, our souls. We are in the daily exercise of allowing what is called “intellectually irrelevant” and is, in actuality, truth and wisdom, prophecy and demands from God, to fill our beings and we are letting go of our “old ideas” which we thought helped us and in reality failed us. We are constantly seeking to know God’s will better, to be better human beings, to live lives of service and truth, justice and mercy, responsibility and forgiveness. We see the wreckage of our past from imprisoning our souls, from locking up truth, from shutting down learning and we commit to not repeat these patterns. We aer committed to truth, to learning, to progress, and to live life on life’s terms-not the terms we want to dictate. This is the recovery revolution.

Living without bullshit, living responsibly, has its costs, seeking truth and calling out the lies that have become imprisoned in our “Temples” is dangerous and it is the only way I can live and ‘face’ God, face you each day. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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Living Rabbi Heschel's Wisdom - A Daily Spiritual Guide to Living Well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day74

“Man is what he thinks. Man dwells where his mind dwells. What is intellectually irrelevant is imprisoned in Temples and has no access to our minds. We repeat cliches; we remember platitudes.” (Essential Writings pg. 87)

I sit here amazed, awed, and saddened by Rabbi Heschel’s words above. HIs knowledge of the human condition is so broad and smart, so exacting and eviscerating at the same time. I am, as always, disturbed by his demands, his teachings, his truthfulness, his ability to go to the heart of the challenge before us, as he says, “to be human”! His words evoke Einstein’s quote: “the intuitive mind is a gift, the rational mind a servant, we have forgotten the gift and worship the servant.” Another Einstein quote also comes to mind: “great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.”

Both Rabbi Heschel and Albert Einstein know the limitations of the mind in human beings as well as the way we have come to worship the mind since at least the time of the Greeks of antiquity. We have so identified with our minds, as I am understanding Rabbi Heschel’s words above and Einstein’s quotes, that we identify ourselves in a very narrow way, we have come to believe that our thinking defines us and we work hard to push away ‘alien thoughts’. While “alien thoughts’ can be and are, at times, dangerous, the ‘alien thoughts’ I am hearing Rabbi Heschel and Albert Einstein speak of are the thoughts for which our rational/logical thinking cannot handle. Rabbi Heschel is also speaking to us about our inability to have our minds opened and changed once we ‘settle’ on a place to put them. “Just put your mind to it” is a common refrain when someone says “I can’t do this”, It is not my place, my way”, etc. Rather than go beyond the limitations of our minds, the rut of the neural pathways that have galvanized our thinking around an idea, a concept, a person, anything, we stay stuck in the space our minds tell us to be in, we are committed to defend our thinking no matter what evidence is shown to change it. In the political world we accuse people of ‘flip-flopping’ when they change their position based on new information.

I am a little stuck in Rabbi Heschel’s teaching above and the words of Einstein this morning because they give me wings, they validate my experience, and they demand a response from me/us. How narrow is our living? How narrow is our thinking when we limit ourselves to “the servant’s” demands rather than use “the servant” to enhance and carry out the ideas, the thoughts, the vision of our “intuitive mind”? How desperate is our way of living when we define ourself and another(s) by what they/we are thinking, how boring is it to never travel anywhere new because our mind is so comfortable in where it is dwelling now? Yet, humanity seems to have trouble going beyond the rational, the logical, and we witness the “violent opposition” to “great spirits” “from mediocre minds”. Rabbi Heschel was opposed and by much of the Jewish Intellectual world for much of his time at JTS as the stories go, he was vilified by people for his involvement in the Anti-Vietnam protests, for his civil rights work, because they thought he should just ‘stay in his place/stay in his lane”. Rev King and John Lewis come to mind regarding “violent opposition from mediocre minds” as well as Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney-the three young men killed in Mississippi because they were signing people up to vote. We witness it today with Bibi, with Trump, with Putin, with the far right and the far left, this violent opposition to new ideas, new ways of seeing things. Once they have become entrenched in an idea, ie “stolen election”, “Trump is the real president”, “Jews are oppressors”, “from the river to the sea”, “Hamas are freedom fighters”, etc-they hold on to their thinking and defend it with everything they have and nothing is going to change their minds nor change where there minds are comfortable dwelling.

We have to hear the demands of Rabbi Heschel, of Albert Einstein, of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., of the Prophets, of the Bible, and begin to respond to them with open minds and with open souls, hearts. We have to become more interested in seeking truth, going on a treasure hunt to find more of the picture, be in radical amazement and wonder rather than gibe in the mediocre minds of another and even of our selves. We are blessed with the capability to hear the call of our souls, to use our intuitive minds for good, for exploration, for apprehending the mystery of the universe, and we have to grow this capability, we have to engage with it, not repudiate it in the manner Einstein tells us we are doing.

The war in Israel is a war that needs to fought after Oct. 7th and it does not need to be fought the way Bibi and the Far Right coalition running the government are fighting it. They are stuck in their thinking and is causing great immorality in the West Bank and in Gaza. They are putting on lies and deceptions because that is the way their minds think, they lie about what the Torah teaches and they use God as weapon and justification, all the while knowing that God commands us to ‘treat the stranger well” and “love your neighbor as you love yourself”. God doesn’t issue these commands because this way of being comes naturally, it is exactly because God, the Torah, knows how “men think” that we have to be commanded to do the opposite. This is why it is imperative to join the Recovery Revolution. While most people associate recovery with drugs and alcohol, it actually began with the Torah, with the Bible and has continued to be promoted through different ‘holy’ texts since including the Big Book of AA! Bill Wilson’s stories, Einstein’s words, Rabbi Heschel’s teachings are all continuations and variations of the Bible’s call, God’s demand for us to be human and that means going beyond our thoughts and the narrow paths of our minds. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 73

“Man’s sense of injustice is a poor analogy to God’s sense of injustice. The exploitation of the poor is to us a misdemeanor; to God, it is a disaster. Our reaction is disapproval, God’s reaction is something no language can convey.” (Essential Writings pgs 86-87)

Again, Rabbi Heschel’s words in the last sentence above should make us question ourselves. In today’s world, in today’s political, social, religious climate, we seem to have no reaction to nor any “sense of injustice”. We have let go of truth as our barometer, we have decided to jettison facts and we seem to have decided to go along with whatever “alternative facts” that meet the narrative we have created. Be it the ways we treat the poor, seeking to cut off the programs that help lift them up, the criminalization of homelessness by arresting the unhoused, putting people seeking entry into the United States by knocking at our borders into detention, we make up stories that ‘those’ people are threats to us and we do it under the ‘cover’ of “law and order”.

In an article in the LA Times yesterday by George Skelton, a survey showed that only 37% of the people in California  believed we have a responsibility to do anything about the fighting in Israel, 20% of young Americans believe the Holocaust was a myth and another 30% are not sure whether it is a myth or not! How is this possible? How has our educational system failed us so badly? How has the lies of Holocaust deniers online, through social media overtaken truth and facts so boldly and so corruptly? Where is the outrage about terrorism, where is the outrage regarding “ethnic cleansing”? We can’t even register “disapproval” in today’s world when injustice occurs. Yet, many of these deniers, many of these liars claim to be ‘people of faith’, people ‘who stand for truth’.

Be it Rudy Guiliani, Alex Jones, Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, Roger Stone, Mike Flynn, Donald Trump, they all promote these lies and so many others. They are a cancer on our country, they are a cancer in our system, they are a cancer that spreads and is metastaticizing throughout the body politic, the body religious, the body social in the United States and beyond. Yet, so many people are blasé about this fact, so many people laugh off the calls for authoritarianism, even welcome them and they are people of faith, people of conscience, Jews, Christians, Muslims, Blacks, Latinos, LGBTQ+; so many of the people who will be adversely affected by these charlatans, by these authoritarians!

Rabbi Heschel’s teaching above is so crucial for us right now. We have to change our attitudes, change our belief in the lies we tell ourselves, the deceptions we buy into and end our reliance on mendacity, on the masks we wear, on the false ‘facts’ that are being spread like wildfire. When 50% of young Americans either are not sure the Holocaust happened or sure it didn’t, we are in trouble. When so many people believe that Hamas is an organization that cares about the people of Gaza and/or the Palestinian people while taking the billions of dollars in aid given to them and spending it on weapons, tunnels and to fuel an opulent lifestyle in Qatar, Turkey, etc, we are in trouble. When people believe that Trump, Netanyahu, Orban, Putin, Abbas, et al care about them and want to take care of them, we are in trouble. “God’s reaction is something no language can convey” and we keep ignoring “God’s reaction”. Our ignorance is not in favor of disapproval, rather we seem to be approving of the injustice being done in our name and this is tragic.

Isn’t it time for our elected officials to hear the call from Sinai-“Justice, Justice, your shall pursue” or in another translation, “Righteousness, Righteousness you shall pursue”? Isn’t it time for the Supreme Court to heed this call and stop taking gifts from wealthy people because “bribes blind the eyes of the righteous/wise”? Isn’t it time for Thomas and Alito to leave the Supreme Court because their ‘justice’ is just another name for “exploitation of the poor”? When one has an agenda that has to be served above all facts, all truth, all arguments, one has lost all sense of right and wrong, one has lost all connection “to God’s sense of injustice” and one has lost the qualifications to sit in judgement, I believe. When we, as a country, have so poorly educated our youth so that 50% believe or may believe the Holocaust is a myth, when people are calling terrorists ‘freedom fighters’, when people are unable to see the deaths in Gaza as tragedies, we are in grave danger of losing our ability to be human.

The recovery revolution is antithetical to these lies, to these perversions of truth and facts. It is a way of being that seeks to hear “God’s reaction… that no language can convey”. We seek to hear it with our soul, we listen to the call of God, the call of decency, the call of justice, the call of righteousness with the ears of our souls, of our inner lives. We begin to see the world clearer and better with the help of our “third eye”, the “eyes” of our souls. We are deeply committed to seeing our part in all aspects of life, we seek to “practice these principles in all our affairs” and we are willing to admit our shortcomings, our ‘missing the mark’, and repair the damage so we can change. We are not stuck in some misguided dogma, some artificial facade anymore. We are taking off all of our masks, we are shedding the clothing of mendacity and deception we were living in and we seek truth and stand for righteousness, justice and love.

In these past 35 years, with the help of many teachers and loved ones, I have come to hear God’s cry in a way “that no language can convey” and have often responded with my own cries, my own ‘anger’, my own distress. I refuse to dumb life down, I continue to seek the Both/And of each situation along with the nuances. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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Living Rabbi Heschel's Wisdom - A Daily Spiritual Path for Living Well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 72

“Man’s sense of injustice is a poor analogy to God’s sense of injustice. The exploitation of the poor is to us a misdemeanor; to God, it is a disaster. Our reaction is disapproval, God’s reaction is something no language can convey.” (Essential Writings pgs 86-87)

Immersing ourselves in the second sentence above, hopefully, causes us to look at the ways we are living. While Rabbi Heschel’s words above are in themselves an indictment of humanity, I am not certain that “the exploitation of the poor is to us a misdemeanor” at all. Throughout history we have witnessed this “exploitation” and most of us have done nothing about it! Watching and hearing the different debates going on in the Congress about “entitlement” programs and the constant onslaught against the rights of women, people of color, the ways we are treating “the stranger, the needy, the poor” in light of Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom, should cause us to review our actions, change our thinking and act in accordance with God’s will-not the will the idolators and charlatans, the will of the ‘humanists’.

We have acted unjustly towards the poor because we can, we have exploited minorities because we can, we have turned “a misdemeanor” into felonies and disasters all the while extolling our allegiance to God, claiming to do this in the name of Jesus, because of the teachings of Moses, in accordance with Mohammed’s words. This is the disaster we have created, it is not God doing anything mean to us, it is not God’s wrath that caused 9/11, it is not the call of Allah that made Oct.7th into another “Day of Infamy”. These disasters are the logical consequences of our not taking seriously what is just and what is right in ‘the eyes’ of God. It is us not using the teachings, the wisdom, the experiences of our ancestors to learn, to grow, to repair, to “do justly, love mercy and walk humbly with God”.

We are, once again, watching as people in power, elected officials wrap themselves in the warped understandings and bastardizations of the Torah, the New Testament, the Koran to satisfy and defend their actions of injustice. Be it the Holy Roman Empire and the Spanish Inquisition, the progroms of Eastern Europe, the killing of Indigenous People in North America, the enslavement of Black people from Africa, the killing of priests and ministers because they spoke out against the kings off their country; we know from our history of our desire to act unjustly and make excuses and spread mendacities to make it seem like we “do justly”.

This is a prime example of the war within, the battle between what our soul knows and our mind says, what our heart desires and our inner life calls out to us. Be it Mike Johnson or Mark Borovitz, this war is constantly being waged inside and the true “people of faith” are the ones who follow the call of their souls, who seek to grow and mature their inner lives so they can overcome the urge to “scout out after our heart and our eyes and whore after them” as it says in the 3rd prayer after the Shema in Jewish daily prayers. In Judaism, prayer is not petitionary, it is a look inside of ourselves, it is to discern what is happening in our inner life, it is, in Rabbi Heschel’s words, “to praise, to sing, to chant. Because the essence of prayer is a song and man cannot live without a song”(Interview with Carl Stern). We each get the opportunity to sing our unique, particular song-the one God has placed in us- each and every day. Yet, so many people use prayer, use ‘faith’, misuse the words of God to stifle the song of another human being, to crush the windpipe of another group, to deny even the God-given, necessary song of justice of another human being. This is, perhaps, the greatest “misdemeanor” we commit towards one another as it leads to a belief that we can do injustice to one another with impunity.

In recovery, we revolt against the ‘status quo’ of injustice. We are so attuned to our own acts of injustice because of our doing a “thorough and fearless moral inventory”, we have reversed our way of being desensitized to injustice. We have changed courses, we go against the grain of societal norms which tell us it is okay to ‘cheat on our taxes’ to ‘let the buyer beware’, etc. Instead, we return to a way of being that is promoted in the Bible-the seller is responsible to disclose defects, cheating anyone is cheating everyone, injustice towards one is injustice towards all. Rev Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech describes the change that occurs in recovery: (my children) “will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” In recovery, we seek to improve “the content of our character” and grow our commitment to “do justly”, our review of our day each evening, keeps us current and allows us to spot the beginnings of injustice, the beginnings of prejudice, the beginnings of immoral actions.

Rabbi Heschel’s teachings over these past 35 years have caused me great disturbance, they upset me each and every day-in a good way. I am sorry for the times I have acted like the people I describe above-not doing justly and trying to make like I was. I am sorry for the moments when I didn’t call out injustice louder and demand different actions from a place of fear of losing support/funding for Beit T’Shuvah. I am sorry for not hearing the rebukes of people who were trying to help me sing my song better and encourage another to sing theirs stronger. I am grateful for the myriad of people whom I helped to learn and sing their own songs, I am grateful for Rabbi Heschel constantly being in my ear and my soul to push me to “do the next right thing”. I am grateful that injustice is a disaster to me, not just a “misdemeanor”. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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Living Rabbi Heschel's Wisdom- A Daily Spiritual Discipline for Personal Growth

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 71

“Man’s sense of injustice is a poor analogy to God’s sense of injustice. The exploitation of the poor is to us a misdemeanor; to God, it is a disaster. Our reaction is disapproval, God’s reaction is something no language can convey.” (Essential Writings pgs 86-87)

Rabbi Heschel’s first sentence above shatters the sense of ‘righteousness’, our sense of ‘holier than thou’, our sense of ‘being faithful’ that so many people wrap themselves in because of their attendance at a house of worship, their ‘adherence’ to the commandments, their ‘pious’ way of being and their ‘using' the Bible as the basis of their way of living. I put these words in quotes because the people who claim to be so ‘god-fearing’, so ‘pious’, actually believe they are equal to God or Christ, Moses or Mohammed, in the ways they mistreat the poor, the myriad of ways they promote injustice, the use of their power to close the door on the stranger, ignore the needy and make being poor a crime rather than an opportunity to aid and to serve.

We are witnessing the loss of “man’s sense of injustice”, we are watching, some of us in horror, as our inhumanity towards one another is creeping up to the standards of Nazi Germany, Mussolini’s Italy, and the evil of the Axis powers. Yet, we make excuses for these old ways of being that we have freshened up with perfume and new make-up. When aid to Ukraine and Israel, who are in fights for their existence, is held up by Mike Johnson’s sense of ‘biblical justice’, his belief he is ‘doing what God wants’, we are seeing injustice. When 6 Supreme Court Justices with no oversight, no recourse, can decide that a woman’s health is to be decided by the State instead of the woman herself, a blow to the woman’s personal freedom, and use the Bible that never speaks of abortion, this injustice is considered just by the majority of the Court and the Anti-Abortion faction. Yet, when the government decided to give relief to the poor students in the form of forgiveness of their Student Loans, this same Court ruled in unjust! How insane is this, the Anti-Abortion who are ‘pro-life’ believe a person who, after their trial is adjudicated, and new evidence points to their innocence, should still be put to death, because as the late Justice Scalia said, he had due process and his innocence has no bearing on the punishment!!

The injustice of Oct. 7th seems to have been forgotten by so many, in fact on Oct.8th, the demonstrations were calling the savagery, the rape, the killing of children and women, the parachuting into a music festival celebrating peace and love, all were done by ‘freedom fighters’, by martyrs and heroes of the ‘Palestinian people’. Since then, the deaths from the war that Hamas declared upon Israel on Oct.7th are horrific, they are so sad-the innocent ones because the totals given by the ‘most truthful’ Hamas health Authority, don’t differentiate between Hamas terrorists and innocent Palestinians. Yet, the world doesn’t seem to accept the injustice of Hamas, the injustice of Iran, the injustice of Hezbollah, the injustice of the Houthis in Yemen. Rather, they focus on the injustice of war, the injustice of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, which to be truthful, Bibi and his gang have been unjust towards our cousins, the Palestinians. The Israeli government has not followed the commands of the Torah that the far-right religious zealots claim to adhere to. I ask the people who chant “from the river to the sea” how is this justice for Israelis?

We are in grave danger of losing our “sense of injustice” and it worries me. We have come up with so many ‘clean-ups’ for our actions, so many defenses for our ‘bad behavior’, so many delays in ‘doing the next right thing’, so many distractions from holding the perpetrators of injustice accountable, it is scary and it is dangerous. What we continue to call God’s wrath, what we continue to say is “the angry God of the Old Testament” is, in actuality, “God’s sense of injustice” being revealed, I believe. Moses breaks the tablets, Jesus points the finger at those who belittle the lepers and the poor he breaks bread with, Mohammed speaks of the infidel, could all be manifestations of God’s trying to get us to pay attention to the injustice we commit, the injustice we ignore and the injustice we are indifferent to. Isn’t it time for us to actually live into the principles of justice? Isn’t it time for us to be a nation that acts on the phrase “Liberty and Justice for all”?

Acting in ways that are just, that are decent, that are caring is the only way most of us are able to stay in sobriety and the only way to be in recovery! We regain our sense of right and wrong, we “turn our lives over to the care of God”, we seek to discern God’s will for us and we know that any and every act of injustice is another affront to our souls, to our recovery and to God. Hence we do an inventory each day, a 10th step, so we can be aware sooner of our unjust actions, repair the damage before it becomes overwhelming and change our ways and our thinking that took us down the path of injustice. Service, caring for the needy and the poor, welcoming the stranger are crucial to our recovery and invaluable in our climb out of being unjust to a new sense of what justice truly is.

After 20+ years of being unjust, these past 35 years have been dedicated to acting in ways that are just, that are compatible with being a partner of God, and I haven’t always gotten it right. My grandparents had a ‘spidey sense’ of injustice-probably because of their experiences in Ukraine and Poland, my father was loud and argumentative with anyone he perceived as being unjust, my brothers and sister have stood for the poor, the needy and the stranger all their lives and, for the past 35 years, I have done the same. Today is 35 years of continuous recovery and I am grateful for the sense of justice and injustice I have been imbued with. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 70

“God is always concerned. He is personally affected by what man does to man. He is a God of pathos. This is one of the meanings of the anger of God: the end of indifference!” (Essential Writings pg. 86)

The word “pathos” comes from the Latin meaning “suffering, grief” and the English definition is “something that evokes pity, sadness”. As I immerse myself in the last two sentences above, I hear Rabbi Heschel calling out to us to live into the suffering and grief God experiences from our actions towards one another. I hear him demand from us an end to our indifference, an end to our inability to treat one another as Divine Needs, Divine Reminders!

Our indifference to the ways people are treated, the ways we seek to ‘win’ at all costs, our indulgence in mendacity and deceptions, our inability to have rachmones, compassionate pity, for one another provokes “the anger of God”. Not an anger that is like ours, where we want to ‘get even’, not an anger that blinds us to what is, rather an anger that gets our attention, an anger that comes from a deep love of humanity, a righteous anger. Just as the “prophet’s angry words cry”, so too is God’s anger a cry out to us to change, to care, to be concerned, to end our indifference, end our attraction and engagement in the “evil of indifference”.

How do we bring about “the end of indifference”? This is the question that has haunted humankind forever. How do we end our misbelief that we are not our brother’s keeper? How do end our love of deception and enslavement of another person, people? How do we cure the deafness of the call of those in need, the people who feel like “strangers in a strange land”? The solution begins with prayer, with T’Shuvah, with a serious look in the mirror.

I have been studying the Morning Blessings with Rabbi J.B.Sacks for the past several months. We have yet to finish the 15 prayers we say each morning and I believe in these verses, in these prayers is a solution to “the anger of God”! The first prayer is gratitude for the rooster being able to discern the difference between day and night. This discernment is also granted to us, yet we seem to lack the ability to apply discernment to our daily lives. We continue to mix up what is good and what is not good, we continue to mix up what is holy with what is profane, we continue to mix up what is concern and what is indifference, we continue to mix up what is Godlike and what isn’t. We mix these things up because we refuse to take our proper place in life, we forget that we are divine needs, we are here to make our corner of the world a little better than when we found it, we are not here to puff ourselves up, we are not here to lord over another, we are not here to control and dominate another human being. We are not here to call evil good, destruction creation, being off-key harmony, ignoring the poor, the needy, the stranger as Godly! These and so many other ways we take are paths of indifference and this provokes God’s care, God’s love and God’s concern.

When God’s care, love and concern are provoked by our actions, “the anger of God” is not to punish as I hear Rabbi Heschel this morning, rather it is to wake us up! It is God’s call to us for us to participate in “the end of indifference!” This “anger of God” is a call of love for us to return to the call of our soul, to end our total reliance on our mind’s rationalizations, to stop our buying into the ‘logic’ of societal norms, to look inside of ourselves and heal the “evil of indifference” that has overtaken our inner lives. One of the greatest experiences of love is being able to say NO, to ask ‘are you aware of what you are doing’, to demand that one lives decently and kindly. These questions, our ability to say NO, comes from love even though they are delivered, at times, in anger. This anger is not personal, rather it is an anger that comes from love, from fear of another person losing their humanity, maybe even losing their lives.

The solution to our indifference and to God’s anger is to hear the call of our souls, to heed the call of God, to end our need to be #1 and to accept our proper place in the world. We need to end our search for Nirvana, for Utopia and live lives that are meaningful, that are helpful, lives which exude gratitude for being alive as the Modeh Ani prayer expresses, lives wherein we continue to take our own inventory and see where we have done well and not done well each and every day, make our amends where needed, end our reliance on false status and stature, return to the words of the prophets, the words of Torah, the words of Bible expressed in the stories of how our archetypes did well and where and when they screwed up. The solution is to join the Recovery Revolution! In recovery, we are not recovering sobriety, we are recovering our essential humanity. We welcome the stranger, we help the needy, we feed the poor, we extend dignity to all. In recovery, we imperfectly live by spiritual principles and seek to discern God’s will for us and not give into our selfish desires. We embrace one another with love, we embrace humanity with concern, with truth, with kindness, with justice. We know we are neither better nor worse than any other human being and we “suffer” with those who are still stuck in old ways and we have compassion and concern for them.

My anger, as I have said, over the years of my recovery, has not been selfish for the most part. My anger was/is not about my needs it is about the indifference of human beings towards one another and towards truth. I can’t “stand idly by” and I have expressed my anger in ways that put off a lot of people-because of my fears, my rage at indifference, at evil. For the inappropriate ways, I am sorry-I am not sorry for not being indifferent. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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Living Rabbi Heschel's Wisdom - A Daily Spiritual Path for Living

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 69

“God is always concerned. He is personally affected by what man does to man. He is a God of pathos. This is one of the meanings of the anger of God: the end of indifference!” (Essential Writings pg. 86)

Rabbi Heschel’s teaching, in the second sentence above shatters the protective shield we all put on to hide from the cruelties we perpetrate upon one another. “He is personally affected by what man does to man” is the theme of the entire Bible, from Adam hiding, to Cain lying, to Jacob deceiving, to the Pharaoh’s hard-heartedness, to the stubbornness and ingratitude of the Israelites. The prophets never came to complain about the sacrifices that were not done ‘properly’, rather they came to rail against the way the rich, the powerful, the priests and the kings treated the people. Jesus didn’t worry about the rituals in the Temple, he cared about the widow, the orphan, the stranger, the poor, the needy, the lost. King David’s military victories were like nothing when he was selfish and sent Uriah to be killed because King David did wrong and had to make himself ‘feel’ better. Nathan the Priest called him out for this behavior and, to his credit, King David admitted his sin, repented and did not lash out at Nathan for telling the truth.

Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom, teaching above is him being our Nathan the prophet, Nathan the advisor, Nathan the truth teller. Yet, most people choose to ignore this truth, choose to re-enforce their protective shields and armor with lies, with rationalizations, with purposeful misinterpretations of Holy Texts, etc. We seem to be afraid to confront the truth and wisdom of Rabbi Heschel above because it would lead to us having to change our ways. Just as the Israelites, the people of Judea refused to take in and truly hear the words of Isaiah, Amos, Hosea, Jeremiah and the rest of the prophets, we also refuse to listen to the wisdom and truth of Rabbi Heschel, Rev. King, and other spiritual leaders who are calling on us to repent!

We have come to be a species that buys into, what I call, the lower logic of “survival of the fittest” and “might makes right”. On this 7th day of Hanukkah, while the story of the Maccabees winning the war is celebrated, the theme of Hanukkah is about light, it is about increasing the light in the world, it is increasing the light in our own souls, it is about increasing our spiritual strength and resolve in order to not give into the reasoning of our lower logic and, instead, rise to meet the aspirations, the call of our higher logic, our spiritual knowing. To do this, we have to allow the words of Rabbi Heschel, the teachings of the Bible, of Jesus, of Mohammed, of the myriad of spiritual warriors who have preceded us and those who are in our midst today to shatter the walls we have built up, to hear the call of the Shofar and, instead of trying to make the walls of Jericho, come down, allow the walls and the armor surrounding our souls, surrounding our higher logic to fall and be able to truly see what we are doing to one another and hear God’s concern and respond to it, rather than hold onto to the armor in fear of being naked in front of God and one another.

The religious zealots, who are constantly bastardizing God’s words and God’s will, the non-believers who are sure we should just “eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we shall die” are two sides of the same coin. Probably nothing I write will penetrate their armor. My words, my goal in living Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom and teachings is to help the rest of us summon the courage of the prophets, the heroism of Rabbi Heschel, Rev King and their contemporaries to stand for Godliness, to stand for spiritual principles, to stand against hatred, senseless and indiscriminate death, deception and mendacity. We can do this, we can learn from our ancestors, we can summon the courage and the strength to honor their gift of life in America, life in a free country. This means we have to stand up for the rights of everyone, stand against the fascists, the Christian Nationalists, the haters, the deceivers, the mendacious ones in our Congress, in our Media, in our homes and communities. We have to have discussions based on facts, on truth, not on “alternative facts” nor untruths. Having different points of view, arguing for a way of being that is different from one another, all of these are hallmarks of the gift God gives us-our own experience of God, of Torah, of the Bible-we just can’t use the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, the Bible as a foundation to lie, cheat, steal, exert selfish power over one another, buy the Judges (Clarence Thomas, Sam Alito), or destroy our ‘enemies’. We can change our ways, we can take off the armor, we can march in truth, in unity, in justice, in love, in mercy and, just like the walls of Jericho, the walls will come down-if and only if, we immerse ourselves in the way of God and be “personally affected by what man does to man”!

The first 35 years of my life I was “personally affected” at times and it did not help me take off the armor because I knew I was different than most people, it did not help me put down the shield I put up after my father’s death and my abject loneliness. God awakened me to the truth of my existence in 1986, around this very date, and my old life was shattered, the walls were non-existent, they were a rubble at my feet and I got the opportunity to build a new life without the walls, without a shield to ‘protect’ me. Instead, I have worn the shield of God’s love, I am embedded inside the “fence of Torah”, I am surrounded by the walls of the Recovery Revolution! I am affected by what I do to another, what is done to me by another, and what “man does to man”. Each morning I am grateful for life, each day I do the best I can to make life better for the people I love, the people I know and “the stranger who dwells in our midst”. I take to heart that God is affected and this means my love and my gratitude is expressed by how much I care, how much I do to help another human being. Never perfect and always progress-God Bless and stay safe, Happy Hanukkah, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 68

“God is always concerned. He is personally affected by what man does to man. He is a God of pathos. This is one of the meanings of the anger of God: the end of indifference!” (Essential Writings pg. 86)

There is much discussion as to the validity of the first sentence above! Many people believe that God is too distant, too ‘busy’ to be concerned. Many people believe God is so hidden that God has ‘washed His hands of us’. Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom above comes to refute these lies. In 1968, in his introduction of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to the Rabbinical Assembly of Conservative Judaism, Rabbi Heschel said: “Martin Luther King is a sign that God has not forsaken the United States of America. God has sent him to us.” I believe Rabbi Heschel and his teachings, brilliance is also a sign that God hasn’t forsaken us as well. Rev. King, Rabbi Heschel, the prophets, all of the disciples and students of these people and so many others before and after them are the proof that “God is always concerned.”

Yet, it is not enough to just acknowledge God’s concern, many charlatans, many idolators do this as well. When Donald J. Trump is hailed as the messenger of Christ, of God, we witness the bastardization of Rabbi Heschel’s teaching. When the name of God is used to oppress the poor, unwelcome the stranger, imprison the needy, control women, enslave people of color, engage in Islamaphobia, chant “Jews will not replace us”, support, defend, celebrate terrorists who rape, kill, take hostage, innocent men, women, children at a concert, in their homes, just because they live in Israel, just because they live in Ukraine, this is the antithesis of Rabbi Heschel’s teaching. When people who support white supremacy, use anti-semitism as an excuse to debase people and we applaud them, we are falling into the trap of the idolator, the web of the deceiver, the well of mendacity. We have to call out the deceivers, the idolators and never go along with “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”, as Bibi Netanyahu did with Hamas because they were against the Palestinian Authority!

We learn that God cries when the Egyptians were drowning in the Red Sea, saying “My children are dying, My children are dying”. We learn that God cries every night because “My children are in exile”. In the Bible, we learn often that God cares about the widow, the orphan, the stranger, the poor, the needy. God considers each person as important, as holy, as worthy; so much so that God promises God’s wrath upon those who take unfair advantage of them. God teaches us to ransom the captive, to redeem our own people, to care for one another, to treat the women we take captive in war with concern and care. God teaches us to care for the corner of the garden that we are privileged to tend. The entire Bible is God’s book of love, care, concern, and desire to be in relationship, in a covenantal relationship with humankind. Yet, we use it as a club instead of a love story, we use it to have rule and dominion over one another, to set up a hierarchy of people so we can ‘have our own way’. There is nothing in the extremes that is Godly, there is nothing in the far right nor far left agenda which mirrors “God is always concerned.”

How have we gotten here, one may ask. We have forgotten the wisdom and teaching of Rev. King, Rabbi Heschel, Elie Weisel, Martin Buber, the Rabbis, the Desert Fathers, Christ, Moses, Mohammed! We have not only forgotten their wisdom, we have bastardized their teachings to suit our selfish, narcissistic desire for power. This happens because people are lazy, we don’t study the Holy Books, we don’t study the myriad of literature that speaks to our need to be concerned about truth, justice, mercy, kindness, love, etc. We have forgotten the words of the prophets for the sake of the words of Tik Tok! We believe the words of Putin, of Iran, of Orban, of Trump over the words and thoughts of the US Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, Biden, Kennedy, Bush, Reagan!

We are susceptible to the deceivers because we have not let go of our own self-deception. We are willing to go along with “on advice of counsel” rather than speak truth, rather than act with compassion, rather than see the nuances and grey of any and every experience. We are willing to be told to follow, to believe the liars, rather than think for ourselves because thinking for ourselves, going against the majority could leave us stranded, alone and without people of courage to ‘have our back’. We witness this with Liz Cheney and, yet, she is sought after as a speaker, as a teacher, as a true patriot. While most of the people she speaks with in the media are diametrically opposed politically, all of us are in awe of her willingness to stand up for democracy, for freedom, for the rule of law. Liz Cheney’s example is not too far from the rest of us, we have to have the same courage, the same dedication to truth, to justice, to mercy, to love so we can overcome our willingness to believe the idolators, the charlatans, the mendacious ones.

This is one of the principles of the Recovery Revolution! God is concerned so we have to be. God is calling out to us so we have to respond. In recovery, we realize we suffer from a “soul sickness” and the only way to heal is to see a physician of the soul, a person who wants to know our soul and can reflect it back to us. We know we can heal because others before us have and we lean on their wisdom, the suggestions to help us begin to heal our “soul sickness”. We are constantly seeking to be more responsible, more helpful, more receptive to the needs of another(s), let go of our self-deceptions and end our buying into the mendacity of another. Integrity, acceptance, clarity, grace, truth, love are some of the pillars of our healing self and we live them gusto and dedication. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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Living Rabbi Heschel's Wisdom - A Daily Spiritual Path towards Living Well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 67

“The prophet is a person who suffers the harm done to others. Whenever a crime is committed, it is as if the prophet were the victim and the prey. The prophet’s angry words cry. The wrath of God is a Lamentation. All prophecy is one great exclamation. God is not indifferent to evil!”(Essential Writings pg.86)

The last two sentences above hold an idea that has perplexed human beings forever. People who want to deny the existence of God claim that God is indifferent to evil, they point to the myriad of atrocities that have occurred over the millennia and ask “where was/is God”. Yet, people of faith claim that God is in the salvation, God is in the redemption of the oppressed, God responds when we call out to God, God sends prophets to remind us of what the solution is as we learn in the different Psalms. Rabbi Heschel is calling out to us to not give in to despair, not give in to the lies of those who want to defeat us, those who want to deny our faithfulness. They know there is strength in our faith, strength in our adherence to the words of the prophets, and they want to render us weak as the Philistines did with Samson.

Our situation today is even more perilous than in earlier times. People of false-faith, charlatans who use the worlds of the Bible, the words of the prophets, the words of Christ, Mohammed, Moses to lure unsuspecting people who want to believe to believe in lies, practice idolatry, become “indifferent to evil”. This is in direct contradiction to Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom above, in direct violation to the words of the prophets, and, unfortunately, very believable to so many people who willingly go into the slavery of idolatry and lose their freedom, their goodness, their ability to discern truth from lies, fact from fiction.

During Hanukah, we say a prayer, “Blessed are You, Adonai our God, Sovereign of all, who performed wondrous deeds for our ancestors in days of old at this season.” This prayer is to remind us that the deeds performed for our ancestors, the miraculous defeat of the Greeks, the miracle of the “oil”, were not one-time events. I believe we celebrate Hanukkah, we celebrate Passover, we continue to receive Torah on Shavuot, we sleep in the Sukkah, we rejoice on the Day of Atonement, in order to recapture the faith, the spirit, the energy God imbues us with to carry on, to live decently, to leave our indifference and be involved in the world, bring goodness, stand up against evil, and be worthy of being descendants of the prophets.

It is time for us to, once again, to live into the miracle of Hanukkah-the victory over the idolators, the victory over the Jews who remained indifferent to the words of the prophets and the calls of God. In Jewish lore, the first Temple was destroyed because of the people not treating the widows and orphans, the poor, the needy and the strangers well. The Second Temple was destroyed because of senseless hatred between people. We are experiencing both of these phenomena today in the United States and across the globe. Yet, we are remaining indifferent, we are standing idly by the bloods of our brothers and sisters, we are saying that God is indifferent to the calls of the captives, the cries of the poor and the stranger, the tearing of the garments of those whose loved ones have died from war, famine, et. LIES, LIES, LIES, these are all lies said by the people who have their own agenda-be it those who are willing to “die in hell” like Ron Reagan, or those who twist the words of the prophets and of God like Mike Johnson, the Ayatollah, Hamas, Ben-Gvir, Smotrich, et al.

God has imbued all of us with the knowledge of good and evil, God has imbued all of us with the discernment to ferret our the lies we tell ourselves and the ability to rise above our self-deceptions and the deceptions of another. God has given us the command to never be indifferent, God continues to send prophets and teachers to us, which I believe Rabbi Heschel is both! He is not teaching us something we do not know, he is reminding us of what is in our soul, in our hearts, in our mouths which we have willingly chosen to forget, willingly chosen to remain blind to.

The fate of the world is too precarious to leave to the control of those who believe God is indifferent to evil, that they can say one thing and do another, they can deceive us forever. We, the people, have to use the words of God, the call of the prophets, the teachings of our spiritual traditions, the wisdom of Rabbi Heschel and Rev. King, the Dalai Lama and Thich Nhat Hanh, Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob Smith, Martin Buber and Harold Shulweis, Father Greg Boyle and John Pavlovitz to name a few. The Recovery Revolution is a spiritual revolution, a spiritual path that honors the words of the prophets and of God. It is a path upon which we honor the last sentence above: “God is not indifferent to evil”. We know the evil that God is not indifferent to because we have practiced it, we are repentants, we are redeemed by God’s love, care, kindness, wisdom and by God opening our eyes to see truth, to see the future, to see what is good and how to achieve it. The recovery revolution is based in spiritual principles, that begins with our surrender to a higher truth, God wants us, God needs us, we are better than our worst actions and we can no longer remain indifferent to the evil we have done nor the evil we see around us. We are recovering our humanity through cleaving to the teachings of the prophets, God, the wisdom of teachers who give us paths to travel down in our own way. The teachers above, and so many more, all have one thing in common: they are “not indifferent to evil” as they live into the call to be “Imitatio Dei”, Godlike. Lets all root out the evil in us, leave the comfort of deception-self and another(s)- and join with God in lifting up the oppressed. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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Living Rabbi Heschel's Wisdom - A Daily Path to Spiritual Growth

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 66

“The prophet is a person who suffers the harm done to others. Whenever a crime is committed, it is as if the prophet were the victim and the prey. The prophet’s angry words cry. The wrath of God is a Lamentation. All prophecy is one great exclamation. God is not indifferent to evil!”(Essential Writings pg.86)

Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom and teaching above is crucial for our understanding and imbuing the Bible, the prophets, and God. Lament comes from the Latin meaning “weeping, wailing”. “The prophets angry words cry” gives us a new and different understanding of the importance of their words, the importance of their actions and a deeper understanding of what it means to witness the bastardization of God’s will, the unraveling of good in the world by twisting the words, the will and the intention of God’s direction, and the pain it causes one to see the destruction of spiritual norms, spiritual wisdom, and morality.

We are in need of more prophets, or descendants of the prophets as Rabbi Heschel defines us. We are in need of being a “reminder of God”, we need to dedicate ourselves this Hanukkah to fulfilling the “divine need” we are created for a little more. Yet, until we can have the angry “cry” of the prophets, we will continue to stand idly by while the charlatans, the terrorists debase the word of God, the teachings of Christ, the way of Mohammed, the spiritual program of Eastern Philosophies, etc. The prophets are wailing and weeping as they scream at us to stop being indifferent to the suffering of any and all people. Their cry is louder than the cry of those being harmed because their wailing is powered by a divine voice, their weeping comes from the “fire in the belly” that defines their compassion, their clear-sighted vision of what is right and good as well as their seeing the wrong and the evil.

This is the greatness of Rabbi Heschel, he is a descendant of the prophets, he is, in my estimation, a prophet himself. Just as he described Martin Luther King Jr. as proof that God had not abandoned the United States of America, Rabbi Heschel is proof that God has not abandoned the Jewish people. Along with so many people, Jewish and not Jewish, who claim Rabbi Heschel to be ‘their Rabbi’, he inspires us to raise our voices, pray with our feet, our actions, and cry as the prophets did. These cries, while they come from weeping and wailing, are not cries of helplessness. These are cries that call for action, that call for repentance, that call for change, for kindness, for truth, for love. Yet, we hear that the Old Testament is a book that depicts an “angry God” and “angry prophets”. How sad that people buy into these lies for the sake of being sheep that live in indifference.

Listening to the cries of the people of Gaza, listening to the cries of the people of Israel, listening to the cries of the families of the hostages, listening to the cries of Jewish students on Campus, listening the the cries of people who are constantly put down, used and abused, listening to the cries of farmworkers, should make us all respond with “the prophet’s angry words cry”. We need to seek solutions and, in reality, it is the same solution for all. Rather than criticize Joe Biden for vetoing the Ceasefire resolution in the UN, which is historically anti-semitic since 1967 like Ocasio-Cortez is doing, we should be calling on Qatar to stop funding the terrorists, to hand over the leaders of Hamas who live in luxury in their land. We should be demanding that Hamas leave Gaza, that they stop their torture of both the people of Gaza, the hostages, and the people of Israel. We should be crying angry words to Netanyahu for his betrayal of the Jewish people, the Israeli people. We should be crying angry words to the leaders of College campus’ across the nation who are not educating our young to see the whole picture, who are pushing an agenda (conservative/progressive) that is one-sided. We should be crying angry words to our Congress that seems incapable of finding solutions to the problems we face in America today-gun violence, anti-semitism, racism, voter suppression, mendacity in the highest echelons of government.

Listening to the cries of people who have been shunned for speaking truth, listening to the cries of people who stand up and speak truth to power and are ostracized for it, listening to the myriad of people who take up “the prophet’s angry words cry” way of being and being exiled for it, has to make the rest of us angry and cry out at the injustice we witness and participate in. When we have more people in jail and prison than any other nation, when our criminal justice system as well as our civil justice system is so heavily weighted by racism and money, we have to wail and weep over our betrayal of the Biblical dictate to judge each case on its own merits. We have to speak out and speak loudly because it is apparent the people in power have turned a blind eye and a deaf ear to the call of the prophets, to the will of God, no matter what Mike Johnson and his ilk proclaim. There is no honor in going along to get along, there is no trust in selling out like Kevin McCarthy.

Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob Smith’s program of recovery is prophetic in spirit and nature, it is, like the Bible, like Rabbi Heschel’s teachings and writings, a program of action based on the wailing and weeping of marginalized people-addicts, alcoholics, gamblers, people who don’t ‘fit in’. Being responsible to God, being responsible to another human being, being responsible for our actions without a lot of lawyer talk, is what the prophets called for and what people in the Recovery Revolution live. We weep over our callousness, we wail about our acts of injustice and mendacity, we cry for the souls of those who are in need of recovery and cannot face the truth, be they alcoholics or just people with the “ism” of alcoholism! God Bless, Happy Hanukkah, stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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Living Rabbi Heschel's Wisdom - A Daily Path to Spiritual Growth

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 65

“The prophet is a person who suffers the harm done to others. Whenever a crime is committed, it is as if the prophet were the victim and the prey. The prophet’s angry words cry. The wrath of God is a Lamentation. All prophecy is one great exclamation. God is not indifferent to evil!”

As we continue to celebrate/observe the holiday of Hanukkah this year, and in every year, these words hopefully are resonating within our souls. We are all descendants of the prophets, we are all imbued with the same sensitivities as the prophets, yet we seem to have become inured to the evil, the harms, the crimes being committed in our name, in God’s name!

Hanukkah translates to mean “dedication”. Each year, at the winter solstice, we are being called to dedicate ourselves to the freedom, to decency, to justice, to goodness, to fighting for God’s will to be front and center in all of our actions. Yet, as Rabbi Heschel reminds us, we cannot do this as long as we turn a blind eye to the crimes committed against another, as long as we continue to commit crimes against our own souls. We are all guilty of being perpetrators in the crimes of our times through our silence, through our going along to get along, through our mendacity and our self-deceptions. In each moment we are able to dedicate ourselves to being more like the prophets and less like the Greeks, the Romans, less like Putin, Hamas, Trump, et al. We are called by the prophets, we are called by God to “suffer the harms done to others” rather than commit these harms. Rabbi Heschel is teaching us, again and again, to stand with the prophets instead of being the people they called out, the people they railed against. And, we continue to be deaf to their call, we continue to believe we are right, we continue to be inured to the evil, the violence, the terror we perpetrate upon another human being and upon ourselves.

While some portray God and the prophet as angry in the Hebrew Bible, Rabbi Heschel is opening us up to a different reality, the spiritual reality of God’s cry, of the prophet’s cry over what we are doing to the gift of life, the gift of creation we have received. The only remedy for us, the only way we can begin to redeem ourselves, dedicate ourselves to God’s will, to God’s call, to the wisdom of the prophets, is to end our criminal behaviors. As we can see in the world today and throughout history, very few of the criminals are ‘put away’, are brought to justice, rather they seem to be running the world today as they have in the past. We, the people, have a wondrous opportunity to dedicate ourselves to dealing with the evil inside of us, to end our self-deception of ‘rightness’, of believing the lies we tell ourselves, of participating in the crimes of nations, communities, of clergy, and of our own indifference to the crimes that happen on a daily basis. We have to stand up to the people who believe that Palestinians are less human than Jews, we have to stand up to the people who believe Hamas are ‘freedom fighters’, we have to stand up to the people who believe the hostages should not be seen by the International Red Cross and they deserved to be taken hostage. We have to stand up to the fundamentalists who believe the United States is or should be a ‘christian nation’, we have to stand up to the people who look down upon the homeless population, seek to blame the stranger for the ills of society, engage in Anti-Semitism, Islamaphobia, anti-LGBTQ+ behaviors.

Most of all, we have to stand up to the evil inclination in all of us. We are given the tools by the prophets, by God, by our spiritual traditions to harness our evil inclination in the service of good, yet we seem to enjoy indulging in negativity. Be it the impugning of reputations because of our imperfections, be it the cries for the extermination of the Jews and of Israel, be it the denigration of the dignity and value of any human being, we have to say NO to ourselves, we have to rise above the internal fray and hear the call of our souls, the call of the prophets, and suffer the harms we have done to another, suffer the harms that are done in our name by another, and stand up against the people who enjoy their criminal behaviors and validate these behaviors by wrapping themselves in the flag of their country or their misinterpretation of God’s will, no matter who it is.

Those of us who are part of the recovery revolution observe and celebrate Hanukkah each day. As my Rabbi, Rabbi Ed Feinstein teaches, the most important day of any holiday is the day after the holiday: “how has it changed you”, he asks. We, who are engaged in our own recovery ask and answer this question each day-no matter which holiday we have just celebrated. We are constantly seeking to spread the message to people who are still suffering from their inability to see the crimes they are committing, hear the words of the prophets and heed them. We are dedicated to self-improvement, to spiritual growth, to service and to truth.

I live in self-deception less and less each day. I am dedicated to growing and I suffer whenever I see crimes committed against anyone. I also have committed crimes against another and am dedicated to not repeating them. Rabbi Feinstein says I am more a prophet than a rabbi and my prophet self sounds angry when in reality, I am crying out to people to hear me, to hear the call of their own souls, to change, to not reject me, not reject their spiritual life, not reject the words of the prophets nor the teachings of the Bible. My cries have sounded angry because I see mendacity and deception as the root of the “7 deadly sins”. I have indulged the anger at times, I have been unable to control myself and this has led to harms as well. I am sorry for these harms and I am sad that I have been misunderstood by people as well. I am responsible and I re-dedicate myself to goodness each day. Happy Hanukkah and God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark.

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 64

“A silent justification, it makes possible an evil erupting as an exception becoming the rule and being in turn accepting. The knowledge of evil is something which the first man acquired; it was not something that the prophets had to discover. Their great contribution to humanity was the discovery of the evil of indifference. One may be decent and sinister, pious and sinful. I am my brother’s keeper.”(Essential Writings pg.86)

The last two sentences above is one of the hardest for most of us to take in, comprehend, and engage with. It is counter-intuitive for someone to “be decent and sinister, pious and sinful”, AND it happens all the time. Because of our “indifference to evil”, because of our “silent justification(s)”, we refuse to believe that someone can be both, we continue to live in a binary world of either/or. We refuse to see the humanity of anyone who disagrees with us, we all can and do become both decent and sinister, pious and sinful”. We have failed to look beyond the surface in seeing people, we make our decisions about another human being and that is it-nothing will change our minds. While we only have one opportunity to make a good impression, the realness of any human being comes out through getting to know them, to know their soul, to help them out of their willful blindness which also enables us to get out of our own willful blindness. Yet, we continue to engage in “a silent justification” of our own decisions, of our own ‘rightness’, of our own “evil of indifference”. When we get angry at the unhoused for being in ‘our neighborhood’, when we practice NIMBY against people who are ‘not like us’, when we only want to be with ‘our kind’, we are being both “decent and sinister, pious and sinful.”

In our political world, we go along with people who hide their “sinister” thoughts, intentions and actions because we deem them “decent”. We believe the words of those who portray themselves as “pious” while they practice “sinful” actions. We experience this phenomena with Mike Johnson, with the evangelicals who are supporting Donald Trump, with the Federalist Society and Heritage Foundation who promote ‘christian’ values that are antithetical to the teachings of Christ and the prophets, etc. We witness this with the progressives who extol the words of the prophets and practice anti-semitism, hatred of anyone who disagrees with them and/or who question their incongruences. We watch in horror as extremist Muslims and Jews practice the same “sinful” actions, have the same “sinister” designs against one another and their ‘own kind’ who disagree with them in the name of Allah and/or Adonai!

In the Bible, we think Cain is asking a question: “Am I brother’s keeper” when it could also be that he is coming to the realization: “I am my brother’s keeper”. We all are “my brother’s keeper” and we keep denying this truth, we keep using “the evil of indifference” to stay willfully blind to this fact. We are living in a world that has always needed all of us to accept this truth that Cain learned so long ago and needs to now very badly. We listen to people talk about the stranger, the poor, the needy, in terms of harshness and hatred rather than in ways that honor the truth Rabbi Heschel articulates above:”I am my brother’s keeper”. Rather than do anything, including selling a Torah, to ransom the captives, we allow people to be held in captivity by terrorists, by Putin, for weeks, months, years on end. Some of the most “pious”(?) among us believe it is right to enslave people and then extol the benefits of slavery like Ron DeSantis and some of the people in Florida. Our partisanship, our belonging to the tribe, the gang, the group helps us to be both “decent and sinister, pious and sinful” and we stay blind to this truth.

The recovery revolution is the revolution of Judaism, of Islam, of Christianity, of all spiritual disciplines. It is a revolution for the truth of our humanness, it is a revolution for ending our participating in “the evil of indifference”. It is a revolution for holiness, for Godliness, for awareness of and avoiding the pitfalls of doing “sinister” acts while looking “decent”; for ending our justifications of being “sinful” by bastardizing what being “pious” is. Joining this revolution is imperative in our time and has been in every time, the Israelites joined at Sinai, the prophets reminded us of our commitment to recover our ability to be “decent” and “pious” while leaving the pull of “sinister” and “sinful”. Their raging against this is found throughout their words to the Priests and the Kings, the rich and the powerful and the people who followed them. In recovery, we are constantly aware of and act on: “I am my brother’s keeper”.

I am guilty of “silent justification”, of being both “decent and sinister, pious and sinful”. I have not practiced being “sinister” since my recovery began, I have been sinful, however. I also have sought to learn about another human being beyond the surface/facade they have shown. I have lived:”I am my brother’s keeper” in these past 35 years to the best of my ability in the moment and grown into living this way more and more. I am enraged at the injustice I witness and speak about it. I am upset with the people who openly practice being “decent and sinister” and I become bombastic about it. I confront this way of being in myself and in another human being which, at times, causes me great trouble and gets me exiled. Yet, I cannot live with myself if I don’t call it out, if I don’t get confrontational when I witness “the evil of indifference”. “I am my brother’s keeper” is more than a phrase, it is a way of being. When I witness the ways some of the ‘progressives’ have abandoned Israel, when I witness the ways some of the ‘conservatives’ abandon the stranger, the needy, I am enraged and wonder what it will take for all of us to adhere to God’s teaching: “I am my brother’s keeper” and end our “evil of indifference”! God Bless, Happy Hanukkah, stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 63

“A silent justification, it makes possible an evil erupting as an exception becoming the rule and being in turn accepting. The knowledge of evil is something which the first man acquired; it was not something that the prophets had to discover. Their great contribution to humanity was the discovery of the evil of indifference. One may be decent and sinister, pious and sinful. I am my brother’s keeper.”(Essential Writings pg.86)

Rabbi Heschel’s teaching about the knowledge of evil is so important to remember and immerse ourselves in. Evil is what Adam and Eve learned about when they ate of the fruit of good and evil, they also learned what is good and the nuance between them, the ways to discern one from the other. This knowledge has been passed down to us throughout the generations. What we seem to miss, however, is the call and demand of the prophets to open up our eyes and see the evil in front of us, the evil within us and the “evil of indifference.” We have shut our eyes to this evil, we have become drunk with our own power of willful blindness, our increasingly dangerous skill at hiding in the shadows and calling it sunlight. We have ‘grown up’ to a new and blinding reality-mendacity in the form of the holy!

So many ‘religious’ people are indifferent to the evil that their idolatry causes in the world, in their communities, in their families. We are witnessing a renaissance of the hell of bygone eras where ‘religious’ people spouted verses from the Bible, from many holy texts, to validate their evil and their indifference. The prophets did not just talk to the people of Israel and Judea, they spoke directly to the Priests and the Powerful. They did not point out the obvious, they pointed out the lies of the Priests and the powerful, the hiding they were doing in plain sight, the unholy actions they were taking under the guise of doing the service of the Temple and of God. The “evil of indifference” was so great to the prophets, they risked everything, life, liberty, etc to get the Priests and the powerful, the people and the children to return to God and Godliness. Yet, then as now, their pleas fell on deaf ears.

We know evil when we see it, we just choose to ignore it for our own personal gain, because of our fear of standing against the norm, out of a lack of courage and being trained in the ‘art’ of indifference. Tonight is the first night of Hanukkah, a celebration of the victory over the Greeks in 167BCE or there about, yet it is also a ‘victory’ supposedly over Hellenism for Judaism. It is also a Civil War between the ‘religious’ and the secular Jews in Judea at the time-sound familiar? In their zealotry, the Maccabees were blind to the “evil to indifference” they practiced, they overpowered their ‘enemies’ in the Jewish world because they believed in their ‘righteousness’ and, as history has shown, became as corrupt as the people they replaced, as Hellenized as the people they fought against. Today, also, we see these ‘religious’ people trying to take over the country in Israel and in the United States so they can impose their ‘kingdom of god’ which is nothing more than idolatry, bastardization of the holy teachings and in direct opposition to the teachings of the prophets. Yet, these ‘religious’ people are so blinded by their inner evil they are masters at what the prophets discovered: “the evil of indifference”.

Just as Deborah, Tamar, and other women saved us in Biblical days, just as Joan of Ark, Isabella of Spain taught us what it means to stand for truth and discovery, it seems women like Liz Cheney, Cassidy Hutchinson, Nancy Pelosi are doing the same here in the United States. Women in Israel are calling Bibi and his gang of idolators to task about their “indifference to evil” in dealing with Hamas prior to Oct.7th, their indifference to the suffering of the hostages still in Hamas’ grasp, their indifference to the plight of the people in the West Bank as the settlers go after them with the full cooperation of some of the IDF! We need to heed these women, we need to follow their examples and cross political, ideological lines to end our dependence upon and our relishing in “the evil of indifference”!

We do this by joining what I call the Recovery Revolution. What better time than now to make a decision to truly turn our wills and our lives over to the care of God, remove the blindfolds we have put over our souls,  to end our passionate love affair with “the evil of indifference”! We are in a time of great spiritual courage, the forces of the Cosmos are pulling us to freedom, be it Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanza, all of these celebrations of the Winter Solstice are also invitations to end our love affair with “the evil of indifference”, to stop engaging in the lies we tell ourselves about how ‘right’ we are in our indifference to the plight of another. The Recovery Revolution calls for us, as the prophets call for us, to help the needy and the poor, the sufferer and the stranger; to care for one another and to live into the commandment: “Love your neighbor as you love yourself”. In recovery, we learn to love ourselves for who we truly are, to engage in life on life’s terms, to stop being engaged in “the evil of indifference”.

I am not indifferent, I ended my love affair with the “evil of indifference” years ago. I am bereft at how this evil has grown over the years I have fought against it in myself and in the communities I have been part of. I realize that the call of the prophets is very strong within me and I am not always ‘nice’ in my desire to smash this “evil of indifference”. While I know I can’t eradicate it, I keep believing if I smash it into enough small pieces, the people I am trying to help will be able to see it, manage it and end their affair with it. I am going to keep trying and, it is at times a very lonely place, a misunderstood place, and a place of hope, strength and connection to God and to people. God Bless, Happy Hanukkah, and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 62

“A silent justification, it makes possible an evil erupting as an exception becoming the rule and being in turn accepting. The knowledge of evil is something which the first man acquired; it was not something that the prophets had to discover. Their great contribution to humanity was the discovery of the evil of indifference. One may be decent and sinister, pious and sinful. I am my brother’s keeper.”(Essential Writings pg.86)

Continuing his thoughts and fears regarding “indifference to evil”, Rabbi Heschel, as I hear him this morning, is a prophet and a historian, a teacher and a guardian for all of us. These words from an unpublished manuscript describe what is happening right now as they described what was happening in his time and in every generation. We make “a silent justification” for our “indifference to evil”, we go along with the media, we go along with the ‘leader’, we go along with our immature inner voices and we stay silent and indifferent in the face of evil.

Listening to Liz Cheney these past few days has brought home Rabbi Heschel’s teaching above in a very dramatic and profound manner. While I disagree with many of her policies, while I disagreed with many of her father’s policies, I see her stubbornness and her determination to not be indifferent to evil. She was/is willing to be an outcast from the Republican Party, she was willing to lose her seat in Congress, she was willing to work in a bi-partisan manner to root out and make public the evil of January 6th 2021 and accuse the perpetrator(s) of this assault on our democracy. She is a hero and an anomaly in that she went against Trump, went against her party, went against her colleagues and stood for democracy and truth.

Her colleagues did the opposite, they are still doing the opposite, and we are in danger of losing the democratic way of life so many have died for. The “silent justification” of Kevin McCarthy, Ronna McDaniel, Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz, et al, is making “possible an evil erupting as an exception becoming the rule and being in turn accepted.” These people have a lot of help from Fox, from other media giants, from the people who have drunk the Kool-Aid and, like the people of Jonestown, are willing to be led by a lunatic who is so narcissistic he will harm the people who have been loyal to him for his own gain. Many people have come to accept the evil of Trump and his cronies, the evil of hating the stranger, taking advantage of the poor, shunning the needy, scapegoating the Jews, the Muslims, the LGBTQ+, the person of color, etc to feel better about themselves. The “indifference to evil” is justified because it is allowed to grow and fester in silence, which is why Liz Cheney is heroic in her public stance against both the evil and her condemnation of her former colleagues in staying indifferent to this evil.

In the reporting on the War in the Millde East, a war for the very survival of Israel, a war against a terrorist group who’s raison d’être is to annihilate the Jewish people, we hear little about the evils of Hamas, we hear much about the belief in the words of Hamas. Many of us Jews watch and listen in horror as the media, some commentators, even politicians rail against Israel (and by extension Jews) without ever condemning the evil of Oct 7, 2023 which caused this war. Watching the support of Hamas around the world, the love of Hamas and, by extension the hatred of Israel and Jews, in the UN, the words of Rabbi Heschel come alive in my mind, in my heart and in my conscience-this “silent justification” of the “indifference to evil” against Jews is not new, and it is exhausting, it is difficult to bear, it is fear-producing and it is a betrayal of the alliances, the values, the spiritual principles we say we share. Mike Johnson and his Republican cronies tying aid to Israel in this time of need to defunding the IRS, to his border craziness is another example of their “indifference to evil” and their “silent justification” of the evil they condone, spread and support.

The protests in Israel prior to Oct. 7th 2023 are examples of the opposite of “a silent justification”. They refuse to accept the evil of Netanyahu and his crazy compatriots in their evil ways of: demeaning Justice; of trying to colonize the West Bank; their bastardization of the Bible-instead of Justice Justice you shall pursue they pursue injustice, they give and take bribes which blinds the eyes of the righteous. The people of Israel stood up to their evil, they did not stay silent, they did not stay indifferent! There are continued protests regarding the hostages, regarding what is happening in the West Bank. We hear nothing of any protests in Gaza against Hamas, we hear of no protests of what Hamas did to the people of Gaza in any Arab city in the Middle East, in any city around the world, especially in the United States. Unlike the Civil Rights era of the 60’s, unlike the Anti-Vietnam era of the 60’s-70’s, unlike the myriad of times we have had to ‘take to the streets’ to defend, support, rally for the human dignity and rights of any and all people, be it LGBTQ+, George Floyd, etc our ‘partners’ have fallen into “a silent justification” for their “indifference to evil”; how sad!

I pray each and every day for the Recovery Revolution to permeate people as it has permeated so many of us in recovery. The spiritual values and principles are guiding lights on the path to no longer being silent, no longer being indifferent. Our recovery is rooted in our need and our awareness of the evil we perpetrated ourselves and the evil we were indifferent to, and the evil we stayed silent about. Rabbi Heschel’s words give me a new understanding of one cause of my addiction, my silence about the evils perpetrated upon me, upon my friends and family. While I was too young to know it at the time, as I grew-I kept the secrets, I stayed silent. In recovery, I knew I could not stay silent any longer and have been Very loud:)! We all need to take off the blinders, come out of the ether, and be in recovery! God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 61

There is an evil which most of us condone and are even guilty of: indifference to evil. We remain neutral, impartial, and not easily moved by the wrongs done unto other people. Indifference to evil is more insidious than evil itself, it is more universal, more contagious, more dangerous.” (Essential Writings pg. 86)

As I immerse myself in the last sentence above, the words of Elie Weisel come to me: ““We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.” Along with these words of truth and wisdom comes the quote attributed to Edmund Burke: “Evil flourishes when good men do nothing”. These two teachings are the proof of what Rabbi Heschel is saying above: “Indifference to evil is more insidious than evil itself, it is more universal, more contagious, more dangerous.”

Yet, we continue to witness the engagement in this “indifference”, we continue to witness and, for some, participate in it. “Indifference has become the norm, it is used as a cover for both the far left and the far right to engage in vilifying the victim, proclaiming their ‘rightness’ in their engagement in both “indifference” and in “evil”. In the Ukraine, there are people in the United States and across the world who have grown tired of supporting the freedom of the Ukrainians, they are tired of the war and feel like it is not their business to help people across the globe and/or are afraid of war with Russia. This “indifference to evil” has allowed and encouraged dictators for the millennia, this “neutrality” tried to keep us out of World War II, it is a cancer that spreads through the body of a nation and through the souls of humankind. It kills the spirit of freedom, the word of God, the lesson of the prophets.

In the Middle East, “indifference to evil” allows people to condemn Israel and proclaim Hamas as ‘freedom fighters’! It is a contagious disease that is spreading throughout the world, the murder and rape of women and children, the ambush and murder of over 1200 Israelis, the crossing of boundaries of a sovereign nation are of no real consequence because of people’s “indifference to evil”. The evil of Anti-Semitism is contagious, ignored and, in some cases, celebrated. Not caring about, not differentiating between good and evil, not seeing the nuances and the lies of this situation and any situation is a form of “indifference” to me. Whitewashing Israel and/or Hamas is a subtle form of “indifference to evil”.

We, as a people, have lost our way in the pursuit of personal gain, personal pleasures. We have grown our ability to “not easily be moved by the wrongs done unto other people” by making them into non-human, less than us, etc. The global crisis’ are of a personal making, as I hear Rabbi Heschel this morning. Because of our own lack of action, our own neutrality because it isn’t happening to us, we watch in silent complicity as people are denied their right to vote, their right to representation because of gerrymandering, their right to determine what happens within their own bodies, their right to die, their right to be free. We, the People, have to end our “indifference to evil”, we have to end our tacit support of the liars and charlatans who tell us God wants us to hate another human being for their sexual orientation, their belief in helping the poor, the needy, the hungry, their fight for freedom and safety, their belief in the promises of being taken out of the ‘Egypts’ they find themselves in, for demanding the release of the captives, etc. We, the People, have to turn inward and root out the “indifference” that stops us from “doing nothing” while evil is flourishing. We, the People, have to end our desire to not get involved, to believing ‘it doeskin’ concern us’, and end our support of the oppressor with our neutrality, our silence.

We can only do this by following the wisdom of Socrates: “An unexamined life is not worth living” and acknowledging the truth of Malcom X: the examined life is painful”. We are told in the Bible, in the Talmud, to continue to examine our lives, examine our actions, learn and grow, repair and change, not to be perfect and to be involved in living a whole life, an examined life, a life of standing up for truth, a life of standing up for justice, a life of seeing the nuances of each and every situation we find ourselves in. We are called to, as the Kotzker Rebbe reminds us, take each of the 10 sayings/commandments, personally: don’t murder our own souls, don’t prostitute ourselves, don’t steal from ourselves, don’t lie about and to ourselves, etc. This is how we end our “indifference to evil”, this is how we not “stand idly by the blood of our brother/neighbor, this is how we “Never Again” stay neutral in the face of evil, in the face of mendacity, in the face of hatred.

This is another of the foundations of the recovery revolution, examining our daily living as well as our previous living. We take “a fearless and thorough moral inventory and as we progress, we “humbly ask Him to remove our shortcomings”. We seek each day to grow in awareness, to grow in living the principles of spirituality, to grow in living more decently, kindly, more aware.

This way of being which I have wrapped myself in since 1987 is hard. It is painful for me to see the myriad of ways I went along to get along. It is painful for me to see the times I was unable to contain myself and became bombastic, difficult, and combative in the face of “indifference to evil”, in my estimation and experience. I cannot save my face and my ass at the same time, so many times I have come off as arrogant, angry, immoveable, in the face of both “indifference” and what I saw as evil-mainly the mendacity that people spread. I have not been neutral, I have not been patient, I have not been easily mollified, and this has caused pain for me and those around me. While I am sorry for the pain, I do not apologize for my inability to stay silent in the face of “indifference to evil”. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 60

There is an evil which most of us condone and are even guilty of: indifference to evil. We remain neutral, impartial, and not easily moved by the wrongs done unto other people. Indifference to evil is more insidious than evil itself, it is more universal, more contagious, more dangerous.” (Essential Writings pg. 86)

The last sentence above rings in my soul and, as Rabbi Heschel says earlier a, “disturbance in relationship between God and man.” What did the prophets rail about, what was their core message to the powerful and the rich, the people and the priests? It was to stop our “indifference to evil”. We humans have practiced our indifference in a myriad of ways going all the way back to Cain and Abel. The midrash around the Tower of Babel, where the builders were more upset about a brick falling and shattering than when men fell off the tower and were shattered. There is a midrash that up to 80% of the Israelites stayed in Egypt because they were so used to slavery, they were so indifferent to the evil being perpetrated upon them, they decided not to leave slavery and hardship! Throughout the Bible, we are told to be concerned about the plight of every human being, to care for everyone, to “not stand idly by the blood of our neighbors”, yet, we continue to be indifferent to the evils that were perpetrated by humans upon humans from antiquity till now. In listening to Rabbi Heschel’s words, his voice, I am disturbed, I am constantly looking inside myself to root out my own “indifference to evil”, my own “indifference” to the plight of another human, another people, to the members of my community and even my family. Are you aware of your own “indifference to evil”?

The word insidious comes from the Latin meaning “lie in wait for”, “an ambush”, “cunning”; Rabbi Heschel’s use of this word in describing “evil” warns us against our arrogance, is a reminder of God’s admonition to “remember what Amalek did to you on your journey…how, undeterred by fear of God, he surprised you on the march, when you were famished and weary.” (Deuteronomy 25:17-18). Our “indifference to evil” lies in wait for us, it ambushes us much like Amalek did, it cunningly convinces us that we are not indifferent, we are taking a stand, all the while we are “not making any difference” between what is good and what is evil, not taking a stand for God, for decency, for spiritual values the prophets called us to, not being responsible for our inaction, for our ‘going along to get along’, for diminishing what truly is with the ‘it’s not so bad’ and/or ‘they get what they deserve’ and/or ‘white people should rule’, etc. Indifference is so cunning that we believe the charlatans who tell us what they are doing is not evil, Jesus, Moses, Mohammed tells us to take advantage of ‘those people’.

Even the phrase “the other” is an evil we have become indifferent to. There is no “other”, there is only another, we are all human beings made in the Image of God, all of us have infinite dignity and worth, all of us are unique and bring something different to the world. All of us are a “divine need” and a “divine reminder” as Rabbi Heschel reminds us elsewhere. Yet, our “indifference to evil” has become so “insidious" that even the people who are called “the other” have adopted this misnomer as their cause! Rabbi Heschel’s march for civil rights, his campaign against the Vietnam War, his going to the Vatican during Vatican II, all point to his unwillingness to allow “indifference to evil is more insidious than evil itself” be true for him and for the millions of people he was standing with and for. We, the people, are called to care for the widow, the orphan, the stranger, the poor and the needy, it is demanded that we ransom the captive and we are commanded “when you encounter your enemy’s ox or ass wandering, you must take it back”(Exodus 23:4)! This is how much the Bible is aware of our propensity to “indifference to evil”.

We always have to be on guard against our “indifference to evil” and that of all human beings. We have to wake up and realize the disguises this evil takes, we need to be aware of it “lying in wait” for us, how it ambushes us and the cunningness of “indifference”. We are being called by Rabbi Heschel to remember our obligation to God, to our faith, to truth, to justice, to goodness, to kindness, to truth, to love. I hear him screaming in my head and in my ears to be aware of the myriad of lies we tell ourselves to cover up our “indifference to evil”, to mask the “insidious” nature of our “indifference” and ‘rest easily’ with the evil that is going on around us as “that’s just the way the world works”. NO, it isn’t the way the world is meant to work, NO it is not the ways of the Bible, the Koran, the New Testament-no matter what the Ayatollahs, the Imams, the Priests, the Ministers, the Rabbis, the far-right settlers, the far-left progressives say to make themselves right. It is time for people of faith to stand up and say NO to our practice of “indifference to evil”.

This is what the Recovery Revolution is all about; saying NO to “indifference”, saying YES to being aware, to making mistakes and repairing the damage, to seeking justice, truth, kindness, faith, goodness, to love. We are in a constant state of flux because we are always learning and growing, we are always uncovering and discovering old patterns and new ways of being. We practice our spiritual values and principles in all our affairs, which makes being indifferent, almost impossible.

I lived “indifference to evil is more insidious” for a long time, until my recovery, until my return to Judaism and decency. I can’t stand it now, in myself nor in another, I am afraid of it because it is another way to hide from God and from me. More tomorrow, God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 59

There is an evil which most of us condone and are even guilty of: indifference to evil. We remain neutral, impartial, and not easily moved by the wrongs done unto other people. Indifference to evil is more insidious than evil itself, it is more universal, more contagious, more dangerous.” (Essential Writings pg. 86)

Immersing ourselves in the second sentence above, in light of current events as well as historical events, causes us to look inside of ourselves to judge our way of being. The word for prayer in Hebrew means to look inside/judge ourselves. Asking ourselves when we have remained either “neutral, impartial, and not easily moved by the wrongs done unto others” can be/is a long list. Rev. Martin Luther King, a friend and partner with Rabbi Heschel, said: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” We have forgotten this truth just as we have forgotten the anguish of the prophets at the slightest injustice and harm done to anyone, even though society accepts it.

Be it the war with Hamas, the war with Putin, the war with Iran, the civil war in Syria, the war against terrorism across the globe, we have to remember and be moved easily by the injustices. “War is Hell” according to General Sherman, and there is no ‘moral’ way to conduct it. Israel is a land that both Palestinians and Jews have a claim on since Biblical days, it is not an either/or proposition. Being indifferent to this truth, on either side of the equation, is evil and produces more wars, more “wrongs done unto other people.” This is the issue for the world and for Israel and Palestinians that want a solution. While this is unpopular in many circles, a two-state solution is the only moral, spiritual and logical response. If we are not crying about the innocent people in Gaza who are being uprooted, dying, then we cannot claim any moral ground. If we are saying everyone in Gaza who is dying is an ‘innocent civilian’ and not accounting for the myriad of deaths of Hamas people, we cannot claim any moral ground. If we are not rooting out the cause of this war, Hamas’ evil and terroristic attacks on innocent Israelis, the raping of women, the killing of babies in their cribs, we cannot claim any moral ground. If we are not moved by the slaughter of people by Russian drones for no reason other than Putin’s desire for more, we cannot claim any moral ground. If we are not moved by the Russians who are dying, we cannot claim any moral ground. When we only seek to blame, when we only want to look at ‘one side’ as ‘the bad guys’, we are remaining “not easily moved by the wrongs done unto others”. When we forget the hostages taken by ISIS, Al Qaeda, Russia, Hamas, and blame the response, which at times is over the top, we are being neutral to the horrors perpetrated upon these people.

When we see the wrongs done by our criminal justice system and do nothing, when we “remain neutral” about the plight of people fleeing the oppression of their native lands for freedom in the United States, we are remaining indifferent. When we see the homeless and complain about them ‘being in my neighborhood” we are “not easily moved by the wrongs done unto other people”. When we sit idly by while legislators enact laws that discriminate against women, people of color, Jews, Muslims, Native Americans, we are guilty of indifference. When we say we don’t have an opinion, nor do we want to get involved, we are being “impartial” which is another form of indifference when it comes to “wrongs done unto other people.”

In our boardrooms, in our schools, in our Halls of Congress, in our communities, in our homes we have adopted an attitude of indifference that is sometimes overt and sometimes covert. No matter what “side” we are on, no matter whom we are rooting for, we have to be aware, involved and stand against any of the “wrongs done unto other people.” Rabbi Heschel asked: “How can I pray when the death of thousands of innocent Vietnamese are on my conscience?” How can we say that our Bible, our Koran, our New Testament gives us the right to perpetrate wrongs onto another human being? How can we not see every human being as a Divine Image, a Divine need, a Divine reminder as Rabbi Heschel teaches? By being indifferent!

In the Recovery Revolution, that was begun some 3000+ years ago, and enhanced some 88 years ago by Dr. Bob Smith and Bill Wilson, there is no place for indifference. While AA per say “doesn’t have any opinions on outside issues”, it speaks to the individuals need to not be indifferent to the harms we have perpetrated and may continue to perpetrate unto other people. We are calling ourselves to account every day, just as with the practice of T’Shuvah, and holding ourselves to the standard of morality, decency, repentance, change, new responses. In the Recovery Revolution, we follow the path of wholeness that any and all spiritual disciplines have given us-we recognize the worthiness of every human being including ourselves and we realize we are here to serve not be served, we are here to help the needy, the poor, the stranger, etc-not take advantage of them.

I am guilty of standing idly by at times, thinking it wasn’t my fight on rare occasions. Most of my life, I have been engaged, I have railed against indifference, I have been told ‘mind your own business’, ‘stay in your lane’ and I have responded by taking actions that show it is my business and the whole world is my/our lane. I have been abrasive, loud, overbearing in my passion, in my fear of being indifferent, and, no matter the consequences, hiding is not an option, quiet is not my jam. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 58

There is an evil which most of us condone and are even guilty of: indifference to evil. We remain neutral, impartial, and not easily moved by the wrongs done unto other people. Indifference to evil is more insidious than evil itself, it is more universal, more contagious, more dangerous.” (Essential Writings pg. 86)

These words of Rabbi Heschel send shivers up my spine. I can hear him calling out to us to change our ways, to wake up, to end our choice to “not differing” between good and evil. The Hebrew phrase for “indifference” I am translating to: “a captive soul”. Isn’t this what “indifference to evil” truly is, a soul that has been taken captive by our inability, our choice, our willful blindness to the evil around us?

We have, as Rabbi Heschel teaches, come to accept evil as an everyday ‘just the way things are’ way of being. We have rejected the fire of the prophets to whom any injustice, any evil perpetrated upon another was cause for alarm and immediate rebuke. Yet, as we can see in our governments, in our business, in our protests even, evil flourishing, evil being called good, evil being celebrated as ‘holy’, as what Jesus taught, as what the Bible says! We are in the midst of a bastardization of the prophets, a rewrite of what history has shown us, a return to ‘the survival of the fittest” mindset that cares only about being “the fittest” evil we can perpetrate. While evil is flourishing, too many of us are fiddling like Nero did as Rome burned.

When Hamas is celebrated as ‘freedom fighters’, when the settlers and right-wing Israelis celebrate the killing of innocent Palestinians, when the Arab Nations decline to stop Hamas, when the world perpetrates anti-semitism, when the Evangelicals rejoice that Israel will cause the Rapture, when the U.S. congress puts conditions on supporting our allies in their war against terrorism and aggression, we are witnessing evil on the part of the perpetrators of course, and, more importantly, we are guilty of, condoning of, and witnessing of the “indifference to evil” Rabbi Heschel is calling us out on. When the Governor of Florida can say that Blacks learned a trade from being slaves, when books on the Holocaust are banned, when LGBTQ+ people are denigrated and legislated against, and the people of the States sit idly by, we are guilty of “indifference to evil”. When a woman has no control over her body, when a male can tell a woman what she can and cannot do, when the Bible supports this and we go along with this travesty, we are participants in the “indifference to evil” that will upend our world.

We stood by in the 1930’s as Hitler and the Nazis came to power, as they perpetrated Kristallnacht, as they invoked the “Nuremberg Laws”, as we learned of the “Wannsee Conference and the “final solution”. We did nothing because we ‘didn’t want to get involved’, we did nothing because ‘it was just the Jews’, we stood idly by the bloods of our brothers because we were engaged in “indifference to evil”. Here in America, we went along with Henry Ford, Father Coughlin, America First, Charles Lindbergh, et al because we didn’t want to ‘fight a war for the Jews’. In the same era, we stood by while Black people were lynched and left hanging on trees, we heard Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” and got caught up in the music and not the message, we did nothing as the rights of every immigrant population were denigrated and our message of “give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” was a bumper sticker that most people never paid attention to. This is how we condoned and were guilty of “indifference to evil”.

Today, are we any better for our history? Have we learned any lessons? Rabbi Heschel was not always well received because of his insistence on our waking up, recognizing and repenting for our “indifference to evil”. Immersing my self in his words, thinking about the myriad of ways society wants our souls to be captives of the “indifference to evil” that permeates our world today, I hear his plea, I hear his demand, my conscience is disturbed and I can’t sleep well. Listening to the Republicans in Congress condone their savagery towards the poor, the needy, the stranger, while We, the People, do nothing to stop it, is another example of our complicity, our condoning, our being guilty of “indifference to evil”. Hearing “the squad” blame Israel for Oct. 7, support the evil of taking hostages, the stories of what the captives who have been released have gone through, and still believing the ‘heroism of Hamas’ and supporting these congresspeople is another example of theirs and our “indifference to evil”!

Recovery is freeing our souls from captivity, it is ending our “indifference to evil”, it is being responsible for the evil we have perpetrated and the evil we have been indifferent to. In recovery, as in Judaism, Christianity, Islam and all other spiritual/religious disciplines, we do our own inventory, we open our minds and our hearts up so our souls are no longer imprisoned in our bodies by a thick wall of evil and “indifference to evil”. While we are working on our self, we are also helping another human being, we are students and teachers, we are learners and professors on how to recognize the signs of “indifference to evil”, how we can end our self-centered thinking and acting. The recovery revolution is needed now more than ever, I believe. Adopting and living into Rabbi Hershel’s concern about our “indifference to evil” is more needed today than it was 50+ years ago when he wrote this. It is not popular to shout about this cancer from the rooftops and we must if there is any hope of freeing our souls from the captivity of “indifference to evil”. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 57

“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)

These words, this wisdom from an unpublished manuscript of Rabbi Heschel’s are as relevant today as when he wrote them, at least 51 years ago. Our “lack of understanding what is at stake in being alive” seems to have grown rather than us becoming more aware and understanding! Human beings seem to be unable to find ways to “turn our swords into plough shares and our spears into pruning hooks”, we have lost our ability to learn from Cain and realize we are “our brother’s keeper”. Hamas is celebrated and Israel is castigated, a truce is set and Hamas claims responsibility for a terror attack in Jerusalem. People say they love  Jesus and turn their backs on the stranger, the widow, the orphan, the poor and the needy. We have become a society that knows no shame in our mendacity, our deceptions, our warmongering, our hate, our blame and shame.

While society has a hand in this horrific situation we find ourselves in, the responsibility rests upon all of us. As I wrote yesterday, we seem to be denying our what makes us human, according to Rabbi Abraham Twerski, the ability to make “free-will moral choices”. We have done a wonderful job at exercising our free-will, we have enslaved people, we have dictated how people ‘should’ act from our free-will, we have started wars from our free-will, we have voted in authoritarian governments in democratic elections from our free-will, we have continued the millennia-long anti-semitic crusade against Jews from our free-will, etc. What we haven’t done is be human, we haven’t used our free-will to make moral choices, and herein lies our dilemma and our solution.

“What is at stake in being alive” is our spiritual survival, our moral survival, our physical survival and none of this is determined by outside forces, unless we allow them to be. We, the People, can choose to throw off the yoke of the kingdom of greed, the yoke of the kingdom of power, the yoke of the kingdom of mendacity, the yoke of the kingdom of deception, the yoke of the kingdom of terrorism, the yoke of the kingdom of fundamentalism. We can break these yokes and no longer be directed by the liars who turn us this way or that way as farmers do with oxen. We, the People, can choose to see the truth clearly rather than live life through the veil of lies and self-deceptions we have bought into and tell ourselves each and every day. We, the People, can choose to return to our roots, return to the basics of living: stop murdering one’s own soul and the soul of anyone else; stop whoring ourselves and/or turning another into a whore for money, property, prestige, self-gain/self-worth, no longer whore ourselves at the altars of our false gods, our false self-seeking bastardization of God’s will; end our stealing from our soul, stealing from another human being, stealing from the poor and the needy; stop ‘taking the fifth’ and no longer lie  about everyone else and ourselves, no longer use God’s name for our self-centered, self-aggrandizing lies and false testimony; return to living in gratitude for what we have, end our need to take from someone else what they have, end our jealous and envious coveting and learn to have joy for the success of another human being.

While it is convenient to blame governments, society, radicals, and they have their responsibility in creating the world we are living in today, it is more appropriate to take responsibility for our part the creation of this mess, our part in participating in “sin” through our “lack of understanding what is at stake in being alive.” We can choose to keep the status quo or we can choose to change the paradigm at which we live. This change will mean living by Rabbi Heschel’s phrase: “In a free society, some are guilty all our responsible”. We are being called by the spiritual forces in the universe to end our blame game, to stand tall and take responsibility for our errors of judgement, our self-seeking bastardization of the Bible, and every other spiritual/religious text, etc. We are being called to end our senseless hatred of religion because of the actions of people who claim to be “God fearing people” while they are, in reality: idolators. Be it Ben-Gvir in Israel, Johnson in the America, Sinwar in Gaza, or any of the myriad of liars and misinterpreters of the Big Book of AA, the Bible, the Koran, the texts of Buddhism, etc. We are being called to imbue the call of the Universe, the demands of God, the lessons of the prophets, the hope of Jesus, the prayers of Mohammed and live them in all our affairs so we can, one person at a time, change our current situations and make our corner of the world a place of redemption and revelation.

This is what the Recovery Revolution is all about. In recovery, we separate the lies and the truths we have bastardized, the deceptions we have bought into and the self-deceptions that have guided our living poorly, that have helped us to misunderstand “what is at stake in being alive”. In recovery, we begin with the commitment to live according to a standard that is higher than our self-serving old mentality, we are committing to live a life that understands and embodies “what is at stake in being alive”. We take our own inventories, we make our amends, we commit to living differently than we did, we know living well is dependent upon our daily spiritual health. We learn to live in both the call of God, the call of spirit and the call of our neighbor. We let go of being self-centered and become centered on doing the “next right thing”. It is a way of being aware of our imperfections and, rather than hiding and denying them, celebrating them as ways to learn and “fail forward”. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 56

“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 at stake in being alive” is a daunting question for most of us. Our “lack of understanding” is what causes most of the strife we are all experiencing in world events, communal events, and in our personal lives, I believe. Rabbi Heschel’s call to us is to delve deeper into what it means to be alive, to enhance our understanding of “being alive”, to end our willful blindness of and our indifference to “being alive. This is a concern of a spiritual nature and goes beyond religious differences, it is a call to activating our spirit in our everyday lives.

Rabbi Heschel teaches us elsewhere that “our destiny is to serve”, so “being alive” begins with our engagement in service to humanity, to God, to our authentic self. Yet, we witness and engage in service to our lower selves, to our false egos, to power for our own sake, and to selfish desires. Hamas, Putin’s Russia, Iran, and the other terrorists organizations, while wrapping themselves in either ‘godly’ or ‘patriotic’ garb are actually serving their own selfish desire for power, for “world domination” that denies “what is at stake in being alive”. The murdering of children, elderly, adults for the sake of one’s ego and power trip is an “abuse of freedom”, an example of “free will run riot”. Without the rest of us standing up and saying NO, terrorists will continue to strike fear in the hearts of humans, continue to make the world unsafe for anyone who is ‘not like them’, and continue the “callousness, hardness of heart” that we witness, that we are subject to, that is overwhelming our consciousness. While there are many legitimate differences with Netanyahu and the way some Israelis think and act towards the Palestinians, the terror, the evil of Oct. 7th changes all equations, requires that we not give into terrorists, that Hamas has to be banished from Gaza if there is any chance at a solution to dignity for both peoples.

In America, we see and hear Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, Steve Bannon, Chris Christie, Nikki Haley, and the majority of the Republican Party exhibit a “lack of understanding of what is at stake in being alive” also. Their obsession with power over the individual rights of women, people of color, Jews, Muslims in their commitment to: making America a “Christian Nation”; to their “America First” insanity; to their belief in “white power/rule” is another grab for power for the sake of power only. They have convinced themselves that the “Prosperity Gospels” is the true word of Christ, that their unwelcoming of the stranger, their mistreatment of the poor and the needy, their need to control the reproductive health of women, their obsession with LGBTQ+, is in accordance with the New Testament and with the teachings of Christ and the prophets! These ‘good christian fellows’ have usurped the Biblical teaching of not taking bribes because bribes blind the eyes of the righteous, they have usurped justice, kindness, love, truth, with their lies, their bastardizing of what is just, their inability to be kind and loving towards anyone who is not like them. They are feeding their false egos, their lower selves while proclaiming their actions are for the sake of Heaven!

Business leaders are more interested in ‘the bottom line” than in serving the greater good, even in serving their customers and clients. “What’s in it for me” is the underlying theme that runs through every board decision in many companies, how do I ‘kill the competition” is a question heard in many C-Suites, maximizing profits for shareholders takes precedence over what is good for humanity. Money, power, prestige are the key ingredients to success in our business communities, no matter what the cost is to another human being, to humanity in general. We see this with Health Care providers who are so inundated with the ‘rules’ of both government and insurance companies, they are unable to provide the care they want to because of these constraints. Everyone is looking at ‘the bottom line’ in dollars and sense rather than in how to help another human being, rather than taking seriously their responsibility to be good stewards. They respond to the worries of their backers, their shareholders, while failing “to respond to God’s challenge”!

Jewish tradition believes that God is calling to us each day from the mountain top, in the gates of our cities, in the fields of our farms with the same question: “Ayecha, where are you”. Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom above is reminding us to “take the cotton out of our ears and put it in our mouths” as some people in recovery suggest to newcomers. The Recovery Revolution, like all spiritual disciplines, is a revolution against inauthenticity, against false egos, against giving into selfish desires and against indulging our lower selves uber alles. In recovery, we love one another until and even after a person can love themselves again. Love in the forms of acceptance, brotherly love, understanding, humility and service. Rather than see how we can use our recovery to ‘be in charge’, we use our recovery to be of service. Rather than use our recovery to dictate, we use our recovery to accept people where they are and help them to understand how much more they can be. Rather than see and point out our differences in a show of power, we use our recovery to join with and see our similarities and celebrate the uniqueness of each and every human being.

I still suffer, at times, from “a lack of understanding what is at stake in being alive”. I continue to read, learn from, study, and be informed by Rabbi Heschel, by spiritual sources, by my previous errors, by my successes and the successful living of people. One day at a time, I grow in my understanding, I respond to God’s challenge a little better, and I wake up energized and excited to learn. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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