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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 95

“Its aim is not to record history but rather to record the encounter of the divine and the human on the level of concrete living. Incomparably more important than all the beauty or wisdom that is bestowed upon our lives is the way it opens to man an understanding of what God means, of attaining holiness through justice, through simplicity of soul, through choice. Above all, it never ceases to proclaim that worship of God without justice to man is an abomination; that while man’s problem is God, God’s problem is man.” (God in Search of Man pls 243-244)

Today is Day 100 since Oct. 7, 2023 and there are still 136 Hostages being held by Hamas and their allies in Gaza. The world is doing nothing to bring them home, the world condemns Israel and celebrates Hamas, terrorism, and hostage taking. The world is holding a trial accusing Israel of genocide-a false claim-while giving a wink, a nod, and silent acquiesce to hostage taking and terrorism! These ‘good christian’, ‘devout muslim’, conservatives and their close allies on the progressive left have failed to hear, heed, read, act on Rabbi Heschel’s teaching: “above all, it never ceases to proclaim that worship of God without justice to man is an abomination;”. The ‘religious zealots’ in the Jewish faith are guilty of ignoring this truth, this wisdom as well. In fact, most people in the world are guilty of this “abomination”!

We have laws and rules, we have customs and rituals that have their roots in the Bible and we pay lip service to them rather than truly engage with them. We have lost our spiritual and moral compass’ while proclaiming our self-righteousness by blaming another person, another group, another nation of the things we too are guilty of. The 136 hostages still in captivity are a stain on the souls of every human being. The hostages being held in Russia are a stain on the souls of every human being. The people being enslaved in Afghanistan, Iran, China, the United States, and every other country because of their gender, their sexual identity, the color of their skin, etc are a stain on the souls of every human being. When will we say enough is enough?

We, the people, have to stand up for what is right and true. We, the people, have to tell Rashida Tliab, Ro Khanna, Mike Johnson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, their allies, our neighbors, family, friends, communities that being a Zionist is not a crime, that standing for justice and truth, compassion and freedom, is true in each and every instance in life. We, people of faith, have to call ourselves out, the people who claim to be ‘Bible-thumpers’, and those of ‘no faith’ when we claim to be “people of God”, when we claim to be “humanists”, and we either turn a blind eye to injustice and/or participate in actions that are unjust. Rabbi Heschel’s words and teaching above are demanding a calling to account for each and every one of us-not to make ourselves feel bad-rather to make ourselves aware of the injustices that we turn a blind eye to, the injustices we have deceived ourselves into believing are just, the unjust actions we take in willful blindness.

I use the term willful blindness because we are all aware of what is justice and what isn’t. The Bible teaches us “Tzedek, Tzedek, Tirdof” “Justice/Righteousness, Justice/Righteousness you shall pursue”. We have the Bible to point us in the direction of justice, to tell us what is both just and unjust, so we all know right from wrong, we are all able to discern what is true and just from what is false and unjust. Therefore, every human being who participates in, who is a silent witness to, injustice is turning a blind eye to the teachings of the Bible, purposely and willfully closing their eyes to the plight of another human being in favor of their own gain, their own fear, and the detriment of their own soul. Yet, we are all witnessing this willful blindness this “abomination” on a daily basis, some of us are defending it by saying Israel is bad, Joe Biden is wrong and bad for responding to attacks by the Houthis, Hamas, the terrorists, are good and right in their hostage taking, rocket firing, etc. All this while praying to Allah, praying to Jesus, praying to Buddha? This is not to whitewash the claims of injustice against the Israeli government, rather, this is to hold these officials, these ‘spiritual leaders’ to account along with the other charlatans and idolators in every other country. AND, Hamas and their allies, like Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Iran, need to be held accountable for the senseless taking of human life they do themselves and they have caused the people of Gaza. Had Hamas returned the hostages, we may not have seen the devastation that has taken place, had Hamas not used people as human shields, we may not have seen the same number of casualties. Had the world not turned a blind eye to all of this, had the world not openly and totally accepted the words of terrorists and their allies in the UN, their allies of UN workers, we might have a real accounting of what is happening in Gaza.

In recovery, we recover what is just, we end the abominations we have caused and take responsibility for them, repairing the damage as best as we can, vowing to not repeat these injustices and be of service to all who suffer from the injustices of another human being/group. We dedicate ourselves to pursuing justice, we let go of our judgmental thoughts and “we seek to understand”. We engage in our personal inventories each and every day so we can continue to grow in righteousness, and we end our relationships with “abominations” and people who seek to be willfully blind, who seek to abuse the Bible, the Truth, in order to satisfy their own egos, their own selfishness, their own grab for power. This is the call and the response of living a life of recovering our humanity! Pray for the return of the Hostages NOW. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 94

“Its aim is not to record history but rather to record the encounter of the divine and the human on the level of concrete living. Incomparably more important than all the beauty or wisdom that is bestowed upon our lives is the way it opens to man an understanding of what God means, of attaining holiness through justice, through simplicity of soul, through choice. Above all, it never ceases to proclaim that worship of God without justice to man is an abomination; that while man’s problem is God, God’s problem is man.” (God in Search of Man pls 243-244)

Rabbi Heschel’s call to us in the second sentence above is the same call as the prophets demanded of the Israelite people and the people of Judea. It is the same demand as the prophets demanded of the priests, the wealthy, the powerful and the royalty of both kingdoms. This wisdom needs to be applied in every generation and within every human being. We are all guilty of separating holiness from justice, at times; blocking the simple call of our souls with the noise of our inner life and our minds; making choices that our hearts and eyes desire rather than the ones that increase our holiness. These issues are at the heart of being human, the wrestling of within ourselves to attain a level of holiness in all of our affairs and we have the practice of T’Shuvah-a daily inventory of our actions- to determine the paths we have taken to rise up to the holiness we are capable of and the paths we have taken where we have failed to rise up either through ignorance, willful blindness, and/or choice.

The separations of justice and holiness, the blockage of the soul all of us engage in to a greater or lessor degree, as well as the choices we make from self-deception, self-seeking, from societal norms harm us and everyone around us in overt and covert ways. We are witness’ to the practice of some ‘religious’ figures who defend injustice as ‘God’s will’, as in Israel right now where some of the ‘ultra-religious’ are proclaiming that Oct. 7th is a punishment for not taking all of the land; as in the Arab world and the world at large, the imams, ‘radical muslims’, ‘good christians’  who defend Hamas’ brutal attack against civilians, the rape and murder of women, children, men of all ages, the taking of hostages and the refusal to return them as just and right! We have seen ‘religious leaders’ defend the injustice towards immigrants, legal and illegal, in this country, laud and celebrate the domination of women’s bodies and the belief that women and minorities are not ‘capable’ of good decision making so white men should be in charge. This separation of holiness and justice is so insidious that even men who belong to minorities in this country are willing to ‘kiss the ring’ of the MAGA crowd!

We seem to be so narcissistic and in love with our minds we are unable to relate to nor hear the simple calls of our souls. Our souls are the essence of who we are as humans, I believe. Our souls are formed from the Ruach Elohim(the spirit of God) that is breathed into us at birth. In Hebrew as in most languages the word for soul is associated with the word for breath. In Latin, the word is spiritus meaning breath, also anima which is described in the dictionary as the “irrational part of the soul as distinguished from the rational mind”. This last definition is the root of the problem most people have with hearing and following the “simplicity of soul”. Because we are so enamored with “the rational mind”, we live at a lower level of being! Einstein’s quote: “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift” is exactly where we are at today as we have been throughout history. Because of the emphasis society places on the ‘rational’, because we want to have power over people, because we are afraid of those ‘dreamers’, those ‘descendants of the prophets’ who can cause a rebellion of spirit, a freeing of the soul from the prisons we have forced them into, society shuns the words of the prophets and their simple meaning. Instead they use these words for their own twisted ends, society has bastardized the Bible, the prophetic voices of old and of today, worked hard to silence the words, teachings and actions of Rabbi Heschel’s, Rev. King’s, Rev. Niebuhr’s, Rev. Barber’s etc voices and/or twisted their words, taken them out of context and abused them for their own selfish and unjust ends.

Rabbi Heschel’s phrase “simplicity of soul” describes, as I hear him in my being in this moment, a way of being that follows the “sacred gift” Einstein speaks of, the will of God in this moment as the universe is speaking to us, a higher logic that needs no proof other than we ‘know the truth in our bones’, we know the ‘next right action to take’ without knowing how or why, we follow the wisdom and ‘third’ eye of being human and connected. We crave the holiness that “simplicity of soul” enjoins upon us. We celebrate the Sabbath, in every religion, as the day to connect, to look back and look forward, to allow the past week to catch up with us, to ‘rest’ from creative work, enjoy the creations we have made, see where we have been and where we are going, and at the end of the Sabbath, we distinguish between the Holy Day and the mundane days. Mundane is not bad, in fact it is on the ‘mundane days’ that God created the world! And, as Rabbi Heschel is demanding of us, we get to “understand what God means” more each week.

This is the work and the foundation of recovery. We are constantly seeking to “know God’s will and the power to carry it out” each and every day. We do our inventory(tshuvah) each day and we grow one grain of sand more holy, our choices are based in justice, decency, and the wisdom of the prophets, Bible, Big Book, Buddhism, etc a little more each day. This is how we grow the simplicity of soul within us. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 93

“Its aim is not to record history but rather to record the encounter of the divine and the human on the level of concrete living. Incomparably more important than all the beauty or wisdom that is bestowed upon our lives is the way it opens to man an understanding of what God means, of attaining holiness through justice, through simplicity of soul, through choice. Above all, it never ceases to proclaim that worship of God without justice to man is an abomination; that while man’s problem is God, God’s problem is man.” (God in Search of Man pls 243-244)

Rabbi Heschel’s is calling us to account, he is reminding us what the “encounter of the divine and the human on the level of concrete living” has to create within a human being, within a society, and within our world. The phrase “the way it opens to man an understanding of what God means” is what we all seek yet ignore the pathway to this understanding, the Bible. In Jewish prayer we repeat daily, in the Bible we read and study daily, what God means: Returner of our Soul; Truth teller; Compassionate One; Lover; Friend; Teacher; Infinite One; Ineffable One; Wholeness; the One who brings our disparate parts together; the Shielder of woman and children; the Protector of the stranger, the poor and the needy; Loyalty; Covenantal Partner; and so much more!

And, we have come to witness “what God means” to be bastardized and politicized for the selfish needs, the grab for power, the response to the truth of impermanence and uncertainty by idolators; by false prophets, by charlatans and idiots! God doesn’t mean anti-abortion - there is no prohibition of it in the Bible and the fetus is not a human being until birth; God doesn’t mean ‘white power/white rule/white supremacy’- as Rabbi Heschel states elsewhere “God is either the Father of all people or of no people” there is no mention of race in the Bible except to describe the (2nd?) marriage of Moses to the Cushite woman-who many translators believe was dark-skinned/of African descent- and we are all created in “the Image of God” so our skin color cannot be that important and is more a result of the area of the world we lived in than a ‘race’ we belong to. The Bible speaks to all of us as one race: Human!

Delving into the Bible, there are so many pathways to understand “what God means” and they all seem to lead to Rabbi Heschel’s teaching “of attaining holiness through justice”. People have forever attempted to separate these two attributes and meanings of God; holiness and justice. “Stay out of government you religious people”, “separation of church and state”, “Sharia Law/Talmud Law,/Christian Law should rule the people” and other such bullshit are popular phrases that have ruined the spirits, the minds and the physical safety of so many people throughout the millennia and to today. While I don’t want to be ruled by the right -wing or the left-wing religious zealots and pretenders, I do understand how the Bible teaches us of God’s input into the political life of a nation, into the policies of kindness, caring, compassion, welcoming. One can see how God tells Pharaoh to “let My people go”, reminding us that we are all God’s people-not just the ones proclaiming to ‘know God’, not just the ones who are practicing rituals and, as Deuteronomy 29:18 comes to remind us:”I shall have peace though I walk in the stubbornness of my heart”. There are so many people who use the Bible as a weapon, as a cudgel rather than as the way to attain “an understanding of what God means”!

At the end of each week, we have a ritual called Havdalah-distinction between the Holiness of the Sabbath day and the mundane of the 6 days of creation. While we distinguish between Kodesh(holiness) and Chol(days of creation), we are acknowledging we need both. We also are committing to bringing more justice into our world and in our everyday living as part of this ritual. As I am understanding Rabbi Heschel this morning, without justice there can be no holiness. This is an outrageous statement that, hopefully, smacks all people across the face, splashes cold water upon all of us to wake up and smell the roses, “rise and shine and give out your glory glory” and to listen anew to the anti-war songs of every generation, especially the Vietnam War era with ears that hear the holiness in the call for justice. Taking Rabbi Heschel seriously, being a student of his, immersing ourselves in the thoughts of the Bible, expressing the “encounter of the divine and the human on the level of concrete living” through our actions means we have to care for the stranger, the poor, the needy, the widow, the orphan; we have to care about justice for all-not just the rich and famous; we are obligated to seek out truth and call out mendacity and deception; we are obligated to respond to the call of the downtrodden, the miseries of people near and far; we need to stand for what is right according to the Bible- not the false prophecies and interpretations of the Christian, Muslim, Jewish Idolators who seem to have the loudest voices. Rabbi Heschel’s stand against prejudice is legendary and a road map for the rest of us. We need to end the separation of Justice and Holiness, we need to remarry science and spirit, we need to speak truth to the liars and to the ones in power.

Each and every day, I bring holiness into being through being just, sometimes more and somedays less-yet I know it is the only way to live Rabbi Heschel’s teachings, the teachings of the Bible and to continue to deepen my connection with the Ineffable One. While I live in the same uncertainty as everyone, knowing that my time here is an instant in the grand scheme of things, I also realize that having an encounter with the divine-makes my “concrete living” important. I matter and so do you! Everyone matters-so ‘why bother’, ‘fuck-it’ are no longer options-we have to because we can, because I am needed and so are you. I have made this phrase the cornerstone of my life, my rabbinate, my soul I pray you do also! God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 92

“Its aim is not to record history but rather to record the encounter of the divine and the human on the level of concrete living. Incomparably more important than all the beauty or wisdom that is bestowed upon our lives is the way it opens to man an understanding of what God means, of attaining holiness through justice, through simplicity of soul, through choice. Above all, it never ceases to proclaim that worship of God without justice to man is an abomination; that while man’s problem is God, God’s problem is man.” (God in Search of Man pls 243-244)

Rabbi Heschel’s words in the first sentence above, I believe, is crucial to our understanding, engaging in, and immersing ourselves in the thoughts of the Bible. Whether one believes everything in the Bible actually happened in the exact ways the stories relate, everyone can, and I believe needs to, immerse ourselves in “the encounter of the divine and the human on the level of concrete living”!

We live in a time where ‘alternative facts’, this “record of the encounter of the divine and the human” are being used by liars, are being used to promote mendacity and horror, indecency and injustice, degradation of the infinite value and dignity that every human being has. Be it the invasion of the Ukraine by Putin’s Russia, the terrorism of Hamas, especially since Oct. 7, 2023, the hatred and bastardization of Judaism by Netanyahu and his cronies, the lies of the MAGA crowd, the comparing of Trump to Jesus, the overturning of Roe and affirmative action as well as the Citizens United decision by the Supreme Court, all of these are examples of mendacity, injustice, and degradation of humanity. As soon as ‘those people’ are used in a sentence, as soon as language that denigrates any person, group, etc is used by anyone, we are either witnessing or engaging in denying the truth, wisdom, as well as the “encounter of the divine and the human on the level of concrete living” the Bible gifts to us.

When we receive the Bible as a gift, when we seek to understand and use this “record”, we find ourselves living and taking actions we never thought possible. We become part of the solution rather than part of the problem presented to us in any given moment. This gift gives us the opportunity to mature, to grow our spiritual life which then gives us the opportunity to have an “encounter of the divine” in any and every aspect of our “concrete living”. Rabbi Heschel, as I hear him speaking to us today, is reminding us that it is truly our souls that need to be in charge rather than our desires, our minds, our emotions. This first sentence is reminding me that our souls have to be the arbiter of our actions, our minds and emotions have votes, yet they no longer can veto what the next right action is for us, when we live the “record of the encounter of the divine and the human”.

This “record” has to be experienced and engaged in on a personal level, in Judaism we never study alone because we can easily bastardize the words and the “encounter” when we study the Bible alone. Yet, together we can discern the words and actions of the prophets so we can use them in our day to day living. We can learn from Jacob how not to treat our children, we can learn from the Israelites how enslavement can become so mundane we don’t even realize we are enslaved. In Exodus 5:21, the people come to Moses and say: “you have made us loathsome in the eyes of Pharaoh and his servants and put a sword in their hands to kill us”. Imagine how insane this sentence is when they have been beaten, abused, killed, enslaved for years and, seemingly did not know it!!

Without the Bible, without immersing ourselves in the “record of the encounter of the divine and the human on the level of concrete living” we too can be enslaved and not know it. In fact, truth be told, we witness the enslavement of another on a daily basis because of the lack of engaging in this “encounter”. We sometimes get a glimpse of our own lack of freedom, our own enslavement to ideas, prejudices, the deception by another(s), our own self-deception and push these ‘awakenings’ off because they seem to painful to experience and impossible to change. Rabbi Heschel’s solution for all of us is to immerse ourselves in the “record of the encounter of the divine and the human” as the Israelites eventually did when they were in Egypt. His solution for all of us is to discover and recover this experience and use the wisdom of the Bible, the hope and the solution the Bible gifts to us and become free from the mendacity, the self-deception, the inhumanity and the degradation of our dignity and worth we have come to accept as ‘normal’.

This teaching of Rabbi Heschel, once again, is part of the Recovery Revolution! While not explicitly using the word recovery, I believe Rabbi Heschel’s teachings call for us to recover the questions that God asks everyday, to paraphrase Reb Zusya: “when they ask me why were you not more like Zusya, I will have no answer.” Recovery is a path to be able to be more like one’s true/authentic imperfect self. We have a spiritual awakening that, while painful, is too powerful to ignore. We “encounter the divine” and we begin a process of living this “encounter” on a “concrete level”. We find living our spiritual principles to be doable and powerful, to give us a sense of comfort and joy we never thought possible. We “practice these principles in all our affairs” so we can raise up our standard of living, so we can live into and act with love, justice, mercy, kindness and truth which allows us to be comfortable in our own skin which is the greatest gift of all. I am blessed to “encounter the divine” each day, many times a day and I keep learning and seeing this “encounter” more and more each day. My goal is to continue to grow the learning and experience of these encounters to make my life one grain of sand better each day! God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 91

“The wisdom, teaching, and counsel of the Bible are not in conflict with the ultimate attainments of the human mind, but, rather, well ahead of our attitudes. The idea of the equality of man, for example, has become commonplace in our mouths, but how far is it from being an irresistible insight or an honest ineradicable conviction? The Bible is not behind the times, it is ages ahead of our aspirations.” (God in Search of Man pg. 243)

“The idea of the equality of man, for example, has become commonplace our mouths, but how far is it being an irresistible insight or an honest ineradicable conviction” has to penetrate our beingness, as I hear Rabbi Heschel’s call today. This is the great challenge for all people, to allow “the wisdom, teaching and counsel of the Bible” to penetrate our souls, our actions, our inner and outer ways of being. We, the people, are the ones who have made the Bible irrelevant through twisting it to suit our own desires rather than change ourselves to live up to and into the Bible’s path of wholeness and holiness. There is, always has been, a desire on the part of human beings to give lip-service to the Bible, to the ways of being human that the Bible teaches and commands us. The Bible is “ages ahead of our aspirations” by telling us how we can be human and the traps we can/will fall into that prevent us from attaining this goal. Many people complain, point out that the Bible is obsolete, it isn’t ‘scientific’, God in the Bible is vengeful, mean, capricious, etc, and there comments show a complete lack of understanding of and engagement with the spirituality of the Bible, an unwillingness to learn anew the ways of the Bible in order to enhance their lives and the lives of those around them.

A case in point is the quotation above: Racism, Slavery, Anti-Semitism, Islamaphobia are in direct contradiction with he “idea of the equality of man”, yet people will ‘use’ the Bible to engage in these despicable ideologies and actions. While there are some ‘religious’ Jews who think the Palestinians are ‘less human’ than they are-this is not what the Bible teaches. In the Bible we welcome the stranger, we have one law for citizen and stranger alike, we are constantly reminded that “we were slaves in Egypt” so we know what it is like to be treated as subhumans. Ergo, we are not to do the same to another human being. Rabbi Hillel the elder teaches: “What is hateful to you, do not do to another human being”! So, these so-called ‘religious’ people are actually idolators, bastardizers of the Bible, false prophets and we have to disregard what they are saying and live into the Bible, because “it is ages ahead of our aspirations.”

The same is true of the Hamas, the Palestinians, the Iranians and their proxies who consider Jews to be subhuman just as Hitler preached with the idea that the world would not go to war to save the Jews. Their inability to agree to a peace deal that would allow both peoples to live in peace, side by side, only seeks to perpetuate their propaganda to “blame the Jews” is not found in the Koran, it is not the way of peace, nor the path of Allah, yet the idolators of Islam, the charlatans, the liars, the deceivers all continue to deny “the equality of man”. The same is true of the people seeking to make America a “Christian Nation”, to join in an “America First” ideology, all seeking to make an hierarchy of human beings with White People at the top of the food chain. No where in the Bible does it proclaim the supremacy of white people, no where in the Bible does Jesus nor Moses call for a caste system with White People in charge. Yet, these idolators keep claiming white supremacy as a ‘christian value”, was Jesus white, was Paul white, we have no idea except they lived in Israel/Judea which is in the Middle East-just saying.

The issue for us today is whether we are willing to engage with the Bible for it’s “wisdom, teaching and counsel” or we are going to continue to have “contempt prior to investigation”. As the Big Book of AA says: “There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance—that principle is contempt prior to investigation.” – HERBERT SPENCER. We are living “in everlasting ignorance” as long as we see the Bible as a weapon against our enemies, twisting it, turning it until we get the answer we want rather than being willing, in truth and open to the ideas, claims, paths to wholeness and holiness of the Bible.

We have the path to doing this, it is called recovery. We need to recover our desire to rise above “everlasting ignorance” by taking “the equality of man” from “our mouths” and put these words, this truth into action. In recovery, we stop seeing and classifying people by the jobs they have, the color of their skin, the religion they practice and instead see them as fellow travelers on a journey to wholeness and holiness, fellow companions who have made the same and different errors of judgement and action that we have. We discern the “content of their character” and pay no attention to “the color of their skin”. This is the path of T’Shuvah, the path of recovery, the path of the Bible. The prophets call us back to God, back to being open to the rituals changing us, not us using them to look good. We, the people, have to return to the roots of being, our souls and use the Bible to mature our spiritual life so we can all live well.

I have been using the Bible as my guide for the past 35+years. I have lived “the equality of man” most of the time in my recovery and I see where I haven’t. I also see how people have used the Bible against me, against so many others, how people have twisted the spiritual nature of our actions against us and I resolve to forgive them and to be more aware of when I do the same. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 90

“The wisdom, teaching, and counsel of the Bible are not in conflict with the ultimate attainments of the human mind, but, rather, well ahead of our attitudes. The idea of the equality of man, for example, has become commonplace in our mouths, but how far is it from being an irresistible insight or an honest ineradicable conviction? The Bible is not behind the times, it is ages ahead of our aspirations.” (God in Search of Man pg. 243)

As I read these words from Rabbi Heschel, I am in awe, wonder, consternation, embarrassment and disturbed. The people purporting to be ‘God’s messengers’ in our time, as in times past, do not adhere to what Rabbi Heschel is teaching, at least the ones who are the loudest do not seem to. The people for whom the Bible is nothing more than a myth to laugh at, to read as amusement, this teaching of Rabbi Heschel’s seems ridiculous. To the people of faith who wrestle each and every day with how to live in accordance with “the wisdom, teaching and counsel of the Bible”, these words are refreshing, confirming, daunting and true. While I do not believe that each and every story happened as it is written, I do know  “the wisdom, teaching and the counsel of the Bible” is true and valid. I am certain, in my uncertainty, of the depictions and conflicts that the Bible relates to  us as well as I know it is undeniably true the solutions the Bible gives us are right and good. Yet, I and most people, continually find ourselves in a quandary because we don’t mine the depths of the Bible’s “wisdom, teaching, and counsel” enough to be able to resolve many of our own inner conflicts, many of our ridiculous outer conflicts  with another human being, another group, another nation.

The stories in the Bible teach us what it is like to be human, what it is like to live within the duality of being “animal and angel” as Rabbi Abraham Twerski teaches. From Rabbi Twerski, in speaking about addiction, I understand him as saying  that spirituality is the vitamin C for our souls and all of us, addict and non-addict, have a spiritual disease that is in constant need of this vitamin C. Rabbi Heschel is reminding us where to find this cure for the scurvy of our souls, the Bible. We are not called upon to live the Bible as the commentators of it did, nor as the people who teach the Bible today do. Rather, I hear Rabbi Heschel calling each of us to engage with “the wisdom, teaching, and counsel of the Bible” and understand it personally, hear what it is saying to us, this day, week, year and how we are growing our spiritual life by gaining new insights into its “wisdom, teaching and counsel”.

While many of us believe our minds are our greatest gift, I am hearing Rabbi Heschel call to us and realize the Bible is “well ahead of our attitudes”. While we believe what we think we can do, we don’t always realize that, at one time or another, for a short or long period of time, we have stinking thinking! One of the ways to decipher when we are in stinking thinking is when we are focused on our false egos, on attaining power over another human being, another group, believing we are the only ones who know. When we are willing to vote for a man who summoned people to Washington DC to interrupt and, hopefully in his thinking, stop the peaceful transfer of power, we are in stinking thinking! When we are willing to engage in the “eye disease” of prejudice through racism, anti-semitism, Islamaphobia, etc so we can ‘keep our nation white and christian’, we are in stinking thinking! When almost 1/2 of the people in our country are claiming God wants to keep the stranger out, exploit people who are different than we, criminalize the needy, we are witnessing stinking thinking! When the progressives engage in anti-semitism and don’t stand up for their supposed principles of caring about women who are raped, murdered, mutilated, babies killed in their beds, people taken hostage in Israel and Ukraine, this is also stinking thinking! Yet, many of the people in these groups see themselves as heroes of the ‘underdog’, claim that ‘white people’ are being discriminated against, think of Jews as ‘aggressors’, ‘deserving and causing these horrors that we committed by their heroes, Hamas-a terrorist organization that wants to annihilate Jews and Israel. Some of them clim to be “god-fearing” people who go to Church, Mosque, Temple, each week. Some of them are in Governments here in this country, in Israel, across the globe!

“The wisdom, teaching and counsel of the Bible” are the only true deterrents to stinking thinking! In recovery, the spirituality of the Big Book, the Bible, the Koran, Buddhism, Christianity, etc are the antidotes to the stinking thinking we engaged in prior to our recovery. We were lost until we began imbibing the ‘vitamin C’ of spirituality to heal our spiritual sickness, to heal our mental grandiosity, to heal our mendacious and deceptive ways of being. Recovery is all about growing our spiritual natures, our souls voice, soul’s knowledge to lead us out of the prison and slavery of self-deception, the prison and slavery of believing the lies we tell ourselves and the lies so many people spew upon us. We take “wisdom, teaching and counsel of the Bible” very seriously and we strive to live into the principles and paths of spirituality it gives to us.

In the past 35+ years I have been using “the wisdom, teaching, and counsel of the Bible” to the best of my ability. I am nowhere near perfect and each year I see progress. I continue to seek ways to serve God, to walk in God’s ways, to preach and teach a way of being that helps all of us out of our prejudices and bias’. I know I have cut down on my own stinking thinking over the years and I am grateful for the wisdom, the counsel that my spiritual guides have given me and continue to give me. Each of us needs a spiritual guide and I have been privileged to engage with some and be one to people God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 89

“Irrefutably, indestructibly, never wearied by time, the Bible wanders through the ages, giving itself with ease to all men, as if it belonged to every soul on earth. It speaks in every language and in every age. It benefits all the arts and does not compete with them. We all draw upon it, and it remains pure, inexhaustible and complete.” (God in Search of Man pg. 242)

Rabbi Heschel’s teaching in the last sentence above is crucial if we are to truly appreciate, learn and use the Bible as the road map to living well! While many people draw upon the Bible to validate their misuse of it, to abuse it, as Rabbi Heschel teaches us earlier in this section of God in Search of Man, the Bible remains “pure, inexhaustible and complete”. It is humanity that seems unable to immerse itself in the Bible to improve our ways of being, our actions towards one another and our covenantal relationship with God.

As we read the news, listen to the ‘religious’ people who spout hatred, destruction, demeaning of another group of people, it becomes more difficult for people to appreciate the truth, the wisdom and the guidance of the Bible. When Ben-Gvir in Israel speaks about the people of Gaza and his band of thugs who claim to be ‘religious’ Jews attack the people of the West Bank, using the Bible as their reference, it is hard for many to “draw upon it” for good, for decency, for truth, for connection to God. When the Ayatollah claims to kill and maim, to terrorize and brutalize in the name of Allah it is hard for many people to believe in and learn from the wisdom of the Koran. When Mike Johnson, Evangelical preachers claim that God doesn’t love LGBTQ+, the strangers trying to immigrate to the US, women who have abortions, when they engage in the practice of mendacity, racism, antisemitism, how can anyone have a desire to learn from the brilliance of Jesus?

Herein lies the challenge we face and, as Rabbi Heschel teaches us, “because man has problems. And the more complicated, the richer he is, the deeper are his problems. This is our distinction, to have problems, to face problems.”(Interview with Carl Stern, 1972). Our greatest problems today, I believe, lie in our inability to “draw upon it”, to allow the Bible to not only belong “to every soul on earth” to allow the Bible to penetrate “every soul on earth”. Hence Rabbi Herschel’s teaching that we should be “immersing ourselves in the thoughts of the Bible”. Yet, we continue to be lazy, to ignore “the thoughts of the Bible” and abuse these thoughts to validate our desires. We continue to use the ‘cliff notes’ of the Bible that someone else provides and we take these lies to be truth. For the people who want to believe the charlatans, this gives them the comfort to hold onto their prejudices, to allow the “cancer of the soul” that prejudice is to fester and spread throughout their mind and body. For the people who want to ‘be humanists’ and ‘don’t need God’, these ‘cliff notes’ allow them to be smug and self-satisfied with their ignoring of the brilliance, the “pure, inexhaustible” wisdom and guidance of the Bible.

Rather than use the Bible to face our problems, rather than adhere to the wisdom of the Book of Numbers, 15:39, part of the last prayer of the Shema that is said twice each day in Jewish prayers: “don’t scout out after your heart and your eyes because you will whore after them”, we do the exact opposite, whether we are ultra-religious, secular and anywhere in-between! We seem to be unable to meet the challenge of our times with the wisdom and the “inexhaustible” guidance of the Bible, yet, it is “this instruction I give you this day is not too baffling for you nor is it beyond your reach. It is not in the heavens… not beyond the sea… no it is close to you, in your mouth and in your heart”(Deut. 30:11-14). We need to face our greatest challenge: how to be human; with the guidance, the teachings, the wisdom of the Bible and the stories of how our archetypes met and didn’t meet the challenges of their day. We are in desperate need of ignoring the call of our egos to have power and dominion over another human being, to judge harshly the choices of another, and to look inside of ourselves, to become an active partner in our covenant with God and with one another.

This is the wonder and joy of recovery! In recovery, we return to the “pure, inexhaustible and complete” wisdom of the Bible and its commentaries-which I believe the Big Book of AA is one. Whatever text one uses in recovery, in our meetings we hear the stories and the testimonies of how drawing on them improves our life, guides our steps, and helps us see the ways our actions both ‘hit the mark’ and miss the mark’. In recovery, we draw upon the wisdom of our elders, the principles that the Bible first laid out for us and we use these principles and the wisdom to make better and more informed choices each day. We seek to do right rather than be right, we search for connections and similarities rather than building walls and seeing the differences. We are careful to not bastardize the gift of recovery God has given us by claiming to be the one and only arbiter of how to live. In recovery, we are know we are flawed and need to draw on the Bible, on the Big Book, on the wisdom and experiences of another and we know we have to continue to be teachable and to learn something new each and every day as well as being grateful for “this day”.

I continue to “draw upon it” and in doing so, I find new and deeper meanings and lessons from the Bible, from the wisdom of my teachers and friends, family and ancestors. The charlatans, the mendacious ones who spout the ‘politically correct’, ‘progressive’ ways still enrage me, especially those who use the Bible, Jewish teachings to validate their lies and deceptions, and I continue to draw on the words and ways of the prophets and teachers like Rabbi Heschel for better responses. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 88

“Irrefutably, indestructibly, never wearied by time, the Bible wanders through the ages, giving itself with ease to all men, as if it belonged to every soul on earth. It speaks in every language and in every age. It benefits all the arts and does not compete with them. We all draw upon it, and it remains pure, inexhaustible and complete.” (God in Search of Man pg. 242)

“It benefits all the arts and does not compete with them” teaches us that we do not have to give up our right-brain activities, it is not in conflict with our left-brain logical thinking as I hear Rabbi Heschel’s teaching. Immersing ourselves in this wisdom reminds us again, as Rabbi Heschel always does, to leave our either/or thinking and use the Bible to live in the “both/and” of living.

Be it Michelangelo, Rembrandt, and/or so many other artists of the Renaissance, the Bible is used as inspiration and to depict important stories in their art. The songs that have been written using the Bible’s words to teach us how to live better have been with us for over 2 millennia. Architecture, literature, music, along with sculpturing, painting, theater, ceramics, photography, poetry, dance, are all considered “the arts” and none of these are in competition with the wisdom, the teachings, the ways of the Bible-even though some ‘pious’ people have believed them to be during these 2 millennia! These ‘pious’ people are not interested in the breath of the Bible, they are only interested in using the Bible as a weapon of power and control.

The stories of the Bible inspire us to build buildings that reflect the inner inspiration of our understandings of the Bible. The Western Wall/Wailing Wall in Jerusalem is the last remnant of the Temple that the Romans and so many other conquering nations tried valiantly to destroy and, this remnant still stands as an example of art that benefited from the descriptions in the Bible. The Statue of Moses in the Basilica of San Pietro in Vincoli is Michelangelo’s understanding of what happens when we are connected with God, rays of light from above come into our brain and we are transformed. The Psalms have inspired a plethora of music from the Middle Ages till now. The binding of Isaac, the crossing of the Red Sea, the experience at Mount Sinai, etc have been depicted brilliantly in paintings and are still being re-interpreted by artists today. We are finding ceramics from the time of antiquity in the archeological digs going on, we read Shakespeare and other playwrights who draw inspiration and new commentaries on Biblical themes. Chagall has so many Biblical themes in his paintings they are too numerous to recount. Rather than be in competition, rather than being against the arts, as many Jews believed for a long time, the Bible helps to inspire “the arts” and is explained, taught, interpreted and understood better through “the arts’.

Rabbi Heschel says our lives are like works of art and when lived in ways that are compatible with the Bible, our lives benefit as does the life of the world. We have the opportunity each and every day to connect with the wisdom and truth of the Bible and create our own masterpiece-living well, adding to our corner of the world, being caring, compassionate, free of resentments, practicing justice and mercy, living in truth and love. Everything the Bible teaches us, whether in ‘commandments’ or the stories, we can use to build a life that is a work of art. And, like the sculpture, the painter, the writer, the musician, we use the principle of T’Shuvah, of seeing what doesn’t fit, what doesn’t look right on this work of art called our life and repair the damage, change the coloring, fix the cracks in the way we live each and every day.

This is how we can live in both the right and left brains simultaneously, I believe. When we are analyzing what we are doing(inventory), looking at this work of art called our lives with the same critical eye that Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Chagall, Picasso, Van Gogh looked at their creations, paint and repaint what is in our souls, in our right brains, we are living in “both/and”. Living in “both/and” is our daily opportunity to use the Bible to benefit our artistry, living our spiritual life in all our affairs, no longer separating who we are in business from who we are in Church/Temple/Mosque. No longer separating our meditative practices from our daily actions, no longer excusing our bad behaviors through denial, blame, shame of another, defending, rather admitting our errors and, through the power of repentance, repainting the flaws in our living and fixing the cracks in our actions. Taking seriously that the Bible benefits our artistry of living well, we become the truly pious people that the charlatans and the deceivers purport to be.

The recovery revolution begins with the basics of spiritual living-all the principles of AA, meditation, prayer, are found in the Bible and the stories of redemption and change we hear about from people in recovery mirror the stories in the Bible. We seek to fulfill the prayer of St. Francis of Assisi in which we ask to be of service rather than being served. We use the Serenity Prayer of Reinhold Niebuhr to ask for clarity, for the power and courage to “change the things we should” and discern what is our business and what is God’s. We use words, music, art to depict the myriad of principles we seek to live with and by, we meet in spaces that have paintings of hope, statues of inspirations(people who are living their recovery) and we tell anew the stories of redemption, hope, grace and love we experience in our recovery. I have used the Bible to make my life a work of art and, as I get older, I see the chinks in the sculpture, the cracking of the paint and I continue to use the teachings, the stories, the wisdom to fix them and live one grain of sand better each day. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 87

“Irrefutably, indestructibly, never wearied by time, the Bible wanders through the ages, giving itself with ease to all men, as if it belonged to every soul on earth. It speaks in every language and in every age. It benefits all the arts and does not compete with them. We all draw upon it, and it remains pure, inexhaustible and complete.” (God in Search of Man pg. 242)

Rabbi Heschel’s description of the power, the glory, the wisdom, the eternalness of the Bible above, hopefully stirs our souls and our minds to delve into it more. No matter how often it is bastardized, misused, abused, he is reminding us that the Bible never tires, it is indestructible and irrefutable. Yet, many of us watch in horror as some people use the Bible to deny Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom and the truth of the Bible.

Rabbi Heschel’s words “the Bible wanders through the ages” gives me hope and sadness. Wander connotes aimlessness, it gives the impression that there is no destination, yet, the Bible does have a destination as I understand Rabbi Heschel-“every soul on earth”. Like the love of God, the Bible “gives itself with ease to all men(people) and it is up to each of us to embrace it, to hold onto it, to learn from and with it. Yet, we seem to be unable to do this.

For two millennia ‘religious’ people have tried to take ownership of the Bible for their group and only for their group. When these ‘religious’ people use the phrase “the Bible says” or “it is written” they are trying to particularize the Bible to their whims, their desires and their power urges. As I am hearing Rabbi Heschel’s teaching above, he is reminding us that the Bible belongs “to every soul on earth”, not just to some. It is not a message sent to one particular group or person, it is a way of being that is for all people, a spiritual path that speaks to all of us. As Proverbs teaches: “teach each child(person) according to their understanding” so the Bible does for all of us, which speaks to every individual in their own unique way of being and helps us fully develop into the soul we were created to be.

When a particular group wants to monopolize the Bible for their own purpose, they are denying the truth and wisdom of Rabbi Heschel above. Not only do different groups have different understandings and interpretations, different people within each group have different understands and interpretations. The Bible is not a monolith, it is a living breathing recording of God’s words and will for us, it is a dynamic path that is always changing based on our spiritual growth, hence the need to read it anew each and every year. Be it the 5 Books of Moses(Torah), the Prophets, the Writings, we continue to mine the Bible for new wisdom from ‘old’ teachings. This monopoly that some people, some religions want to claim is false and has made the Bible anathema to many people, young and old. The false interpretations have caused wars, death, destruction throughout the ages and, knowing this, these ‘religious’ people continue to promote false values and mendacious ideas they claim the Bible teaches. It is time to call out the idolators who support ideas and policies that denigrate the poor, impoverish the needy and imprison the stranger. It is time for us to reclaim the Bible for what it truly is: a guide to living well, a call from God to the soul of humanity and the soul of every individual.

As Rabbi Heschel says: “it speaks in every language and in every age”. The problem is not the words of the Bible, the problem is our resistance to hearing the call of the Bible, the problem is our inability to engage in the ideas and principles of the Bible, the problem is our closing our hearts, minds, ears to the Bibles incessant call to care, to love, to be in truth, to join with the eternal wisdom of the Bible. Modern human beings believe they are beyond the Bible, that the Bible is ‘crutch’, they are not ‘afraid to burn in hell’, they believe in ‘humanism’ forgetting that their ‘humanism’ comes from the Bible! While I understand the rejection of religion by some because it is promoted as a monopoly, the Bible has been weaponized by some ‘religious’ people and ‘faiths’ to seek power over anyone ‘not like them’; it is immature and foolish to have “contempt prior to investigation”, which is what so many people engage in. Rather than immerse themselves in the thoughts of the Bible, as Rabbi Heschel calls us to do, many people reject the Bible out of hand, they have contempt for something they do not know anything about from personal investigation. We are in desperate need of hearing Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom, engaging with the Bible, seeing how it speaks to us in a language we can understand, argue with it, and learn how to be human from it.

In recovery, “contempt prior to investigation” is the one principle that will keep us ignorant and make recovery unavailable to us. As Father Martin says: “the deepest damage of the disease is to the “inner man”.” Our inability to experience recovery as a spiritual path to wholeness is the number one reason people go back to their old ways, people fail to grow and move forward, it is the essence of “contempt prior to investigation”. For many recovering people, the Big Book of AA is their ‘Bible’. All of the principles of AA come from the Bible, of course. The Big Book is one of the languages the Bible speaks in, just as the New Testament, the Koran, the texts of Eastern Philosophies are. In recovery, we are not in competition with the Bible, we are not in competition with religions, we are partners in claiming the Bible that speaks to us in our language and in this moment we are in. We have let go of the need to be right and seek to do right, we have let go of the need to be served and seek to serve, etc. The Bible speaks to me anew each day. I continue to accept it with the ease and love it offers and I pray each day for the willingness to carry out the message and principles it gives me today. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 86

“The vigor and veracity its ideas are perceptible under the rust and batter of two millennia of debate and dogma; it does not fade in spite of theology nor collapse under abuse. The Bible is the perpetual motion of the spirit, its waves beating against man’s abrupt and steep shortcomings, its echo reaching into the blind alleys of his wrestling with despair.” (God in Search of Man pgs. 241-242).

Rabbi Heschel’s teaching in the last sentence above calls to all of us to end our incessant need to hide, to defend our ‘bad’ actions, and to not give into despair. While many of us wring our hands and bemoan what is happening in the world, the Bible, according to Rabbi Heschel, “is the perpetual motion of the spirit” and is the antidote to what ails us as a society, as a family, as individuals. This is the challenge of being human-to engage the Bible with our souls, with our minds, with our entire being. This challenge includes us allowing ourselves to be moved by “the perpetual motion of the spirit” of the Bible rather than try and move the Bible to validate our “abrupt and steep shortcomings”.

While we make ‘new years resolutions’ and set goals for ourselves at this time of year, the most important, and I believe only, important resolution is to engage with “the perpetual motion of the spirit” of the Bible. This phrase imparts to us a pathway to engaging with the Bible, one that is always growing, learning, and dynamic. When we get lost in the commentaries of another, of a different age, we are building a dam and attempting to encase the Bible in the spirit of another time. We are blocking “the perpetual motion of the spirit” of the Bible, enabling us to deny our “shortcomings” and use “the blind alleys” of despair to capture people and use them for our unholy desires and goals.

We have witnessed this throughout history; the prophets called out the Priests and the royalty, the wealthy and the poor, as they walled off the ways of God to be only the sacrifices in the Temple and not impact the ways they led their lives. We witnessed this in the times of the Middle Ages during the Spanish Inquisition, the ways the Jews were exiled from so many countries, the ways the poor were treated by the wealthy and the royalty as well as the Priests of the Church. We witnessed this in this country with the bringing of Black people from Africa to be slaves and make landowners become rich in the South. We are witnessing it now with people in power who continually bastardize the Bible to enable them to feel good and righteous about treating the poor, the needy, the stranger, the women, the Jew, the Muslim, the Asian, the… poorly! The fact that Trump is leading the race in the Republican Party, the party of the Religious Right, the party of Christian Nationalism, speaks volumes as to how high the walls are that have been built to stop “the perpetual motion of the spirit” of the Bible!

For many people, these walls cause more despair, give us less hope and more fear, debilitate us and exhaust us. Yet, for people of faith-real faith, Biblical faith- the words above are what infuse us with energy to fight the charlatans, to stand up to the bullies, to repel the idolators. Immersing ourselves in the Bible, engaging in the Bible with the attitude of learning, experiencing the Bible with our spirits, gives an energy that we never knew we had. We are able to see our “shortcomings” through the stories of our ancestors, through the experiences of the archetypes of the Bible. We are able to see the humanness of living into the “both/and” of life-rather than the “either/or”. We can experience the myriad of paths to rise above the despair of slavery and know that we are worthy of being redeemed. We learn how to live with our imperfections, repair the harms we cause, reconnect with people we have hurt and stay connected to God and “the perpetual motion of the spirit” of the Bible.

The spirit of the Bible cannot be experienced by proxy! We have to all engage with it, imbibe it, wallow in it. We cannot allow the Bible to become calcified, only good for ‘those’ people, only understood by the people of antiquity. We get to engage with the spirit of the Bible, it continues to ‘breathe’ life into our being, into our actions. Instead of repeating the actions that caused the Prophets so much grief, we can learn from the errors of our ancestors, we can appreciate our ‘evil inclinations’ are not bad nor are we doomed. Rather we learn how to stay connected to our “better angels” and open ourselves up to the light and the wisdom that can shine so brightly that we no longer are stuck “in the blind alleys wrestling with despair”. We have the power to admit our shortcomings, to repair our errors, to learn new ways to handle situations that bewildered us, to end our obsessive need for certainty, for mendacity, for living a facade, etc. We have to be present in and with “the perpetual motion of the spirit” and let go of our need to be right, our desire to lie and deceive and truly not longer stand idly by the blood of our brothers and sisters as well as “love our neighbor as ourselves”!

The spiritual path is the foundation of recovery! Whether we are “drunk” on alcohol, power, needing to be right, looking good, in love with despair, or anything else-the only path of redemption is the spiritual path. We are suffering, as Father Martin says “from a soul sickness”. So, only by engaging in a spiritual path-no matter which spiritual discipline speaks to you- can we become free. I see the footprints of my path as I look backward so I can go forward and whenever I didn’t allow “the perpetual motion of the spirit” to carry me, I walked into blind alleys, I fought against “the waves beating against” my “abrupt and steep shortcomings”. Each time, I recovered through spiritual means, spiritual principles and with the aid and comfort of many people. My imperfections don’t make me bad nor do yours make you bad-they just make us human and engaging in a spiritual path to repair ourselves and the damage is the challenge of being human and being in recovery. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Immersing ourselves in rabbi heschel’s wisdom- a daily spiritual path to living well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 85

“The vigor and veracity its ideas are perceptible under the rust and batter of two millennia of debate and dogma; it does not fade in spite of theology nor collapse under abuse. The Bible is the perpetual motion of the spirit, its waves beating against man’s abrupt and steep shortcomings, its echo reaching into the blind alleys of his wrestling with despair.” (God in Search of Man pgs. 241-242).

I hear Rabbi Heschel’s desire to remind us and teach us to not allow ourselves to “fade in spite of theology nor collapse under abuse” in the words above. We have made theology whatever we want it to be, or we have made it into human’s interpretation of divine speech, of divine inspiration, of divine prophecy. Theology, translated from the Latin means “God’s words/writings” not our interpretation of it, not our twisting of God’s words for our power, prestige, benefit, status, etc. Priests were to teach how to make “God’s words/writings” alive and part of the foundation of everyone’s living. Of course this doesn’t mean there is only one way, rather, as I have hearing Rabbi Heschel this morning, “theology” is to be vibrant, a response to the challenges of today, a constant hearing, discerning and acting on God’s words as they impact us today-not the impact of the idolaters, not the impact of the deceivers, not the impact of the myriad of false prophets, not the Rabbis, Priests, Imams, Ministers who make a “theology” out of bastardizations of “God’s words, God’s writing” and substitute their own lies, treacheries, desecration of God’s Name. We see what they wrought, Hamas in Gaza, mistreatment of the people in the West Bank, Hezbollah, Iran, and so many other terrorists, Putin in Russia, Trump, Banyon, Jordan, Johnson, Abbott, DiSantis, and the rest of the RINO’s who claim to be the real Republicans, This is how insane it is when we allow the Bible, the Truth, the Words and Teachings of God to “fade” through false theology!

Rabbi Heschel is also reminding us that we; people of faith, people of truth, spiritual seekers, people in recovery, do not have to “collapse under abuse” no matter how much comes our way from the liars, the people who like to look good while they do wrong, from the self-righteous mendacious ‘religious’ leaders. We are capable of withstanding the abuse, standing up to the lies and the fake religious fervor of these grifters. Be it Smotreich, Ben-G’Vir, Netanyahu, Trump, Johnson, and all the rest of the Ministers, Priests, ‘good-christian’ folk, the Ayatollah, Sinwar, and the rest of the Hamas leaders, the people of Qatar and the Arab world who wrap themselves in robes and promote anti-semitism, anti-western attitudes and send their kids to universities in America, England, France, etc. all have the same thing in common-Abusing the Bible, Abusing the words and thoughts, teachings and commandments of God! Yet, the Bible “does not fade in spite of theology nor  collapse under abuse”!!(bold is my addition)

This is what is so important about joining the Recovery Revolution! We don’t have a theology that is abusive, we don’t have a dogma that makes everyone walk in lock-step, we don’t have a one-size fits all mentality. We seek to find new insights and clean out our ears to hear God’s words clearer and better, we seek to clean our our minds so we can ‘understand’ God’s words/writings with an openness of heart and spirit that controls our out-sized ego and our desire for prestige and power. We are constantly seeking advice, direction, studying with one another to ensure that our minds don’t wander, our emotions don’t overwhelm us and our souls, our spirits continue to lead us. We are committed to not abusing anyone with “god’s words” which are actually our lies. We are committed to standing up for the people God tells us to; the widow, the orphan, the poor, the needy, the stranger-i.e the most vulnerable in our midst. We, like the stories of Elijah, do not reject anyone who has a desire to change, not has already made the change, only has a desire to change. This is how we prevent abuse and fading of God’s words.

Today is the 58th Yahrzeit of my father’s death. Last Shabbat was the 51st Yahrzeit of Rabbi Heschel’s death. I am thinking about them both, as I do everyday, and today I am understanding the wisdom of my father a little better through this teaching. While not considered a ‘religious’ man, my father heard and understood “God’s writings/words” viscerally and lived them to the best of his ability. Not only did he live them, he taught them to his children and, by extension through us, to his grandchildren. No matter how poor we were, we gave Tzedakah at Hebrew School and we all knew we could not spend the money for charity on anything else-we have to give it away. He taught us to do our best and our best always changes-all we have to be able to do is look him in the eyes and say we did the best we could and together, we would figure out what went wrong and how to fix it. No amount of bullshit, no amount of riches and/or rewards could convince my father to lower his morality, to waver from his North Star of Godliness, of decency, of seeing every human being with dignity and value. He didn’t march with Martin Luther King Jr.-he made sure Black men and women got paid the same wages as white men and women for the same jobs-an act of blasphemy in Cleveland, Ohio in the 1950’s. He didn’t know how to “daven”, he made sure his children did. He wasn’t rich and he made sure his parents never went without. He was a brother, a son, a father, a husband, a friend, a confidant and he was imperfect like all of us. Yet, he never collapsed under the abuse of anti-Semitism he received in the Army and in the work place, he did not collapse when he pointed out errors to people and they tried to heap abuse, punishment upon him. He did not fade in spite of the lies people told about life, about God, about how to treat one another, about what the Bible said. My father, Jerry Borovitz, is still my North Star and Rabbi Heschel is my teacher and guide on my journey to truth, to strength, to light and to joy. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 84

“The vigor and veracity its ideas are perceptible under the rust and batter of two millennia of debate and dogma; it does not fade in spite of theology nor collapse under abuse. The Bible is the perpetual motion of the spirit, its waves beating against man’s abrupt and steep shortcomings, its echo reaching into the blind alleys of his wrestling with despair.” (God in Search of Man pgs. 241-242).

Vigor comes from the Latin meaning “be lively” and the English definition is “effort, energy, enthusiasm” and veracity comes from the Latin meaning “speaking truly” and the English definition is “habitual truthfulness”. I am in awe of Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom above. On this first day of 2024, I am thinking about the “rust and batter” I have added to the “debate and dogma” when studying, thinking about, engaging with another(s), in the words of the Bible, their meaning for us today and how to carry out the wisdom, the path, the spiritual principles of the Bible without adding to the “rust and batter”.

Our challenge today is not the veracity of dogma, it is not the debate over minutia, it is to recover the “vigor and veracity” of the Bible, it is to live into the wisdom, the ways, the call and the demand that the Bible puts upon each one of us. Rather than continuing to engage in who’s dogma is correct, who is the better debater, who’s theology is more in line with the divine, who can twist it better to suit their needs; we are in desperate need of scraping off “the rust and batter” of the Bible so we can, once again, hear the beauty and the wisdom, the call and response between humans and the Ineffable One.

Rabbi Heschel’s words give us comfort to know that our struggle to accept and engage in “the vigor and veracity” of the Bible is not new, it has been going on for “two millennia” and will continue. While the Messiah has not yet arrived, or come back depending on one’s belief, we have the records of the Prophets, of Moses, of the Psalmist, to live into and lean back on. We have the stories of Noah, of Adam and Eve, of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel and Leah to study and immerse ourselves in how people “came to believe” and accepted the covenant of God. We have the redemption story of Passover, the lessons of the Judges and the Kings, both good and not so good, all for our benefit to experience anew, each year, each day, the “vigor and the veracity” of the Bible and commit anew each day to the principles, the spirit and the ways of “walking with God” it enumerates to us.

And, we have to scrape off the false pride and false ego we hold onto so dearly so we can lift ourselves up from the “rust and batter” we have become buried in. We have to change our ways and goals of debate from proving we are right to understanding the myriad of ways the Bible is “speaking truly” to us and adapt ourselves to the “habitual truthfulness” instead of trying to adapt the “veracity” of the Bible to suit our whims and desires, our overreach for power and prestige, our unrealistic need for certainty through the dogmas we perpetuate. We, the People, have to end our incessant need to prove our “theology” is right and the only right way to understand God, our “theology” contains the only right religious beliefs and systems. We, the People have to reject the abuses done in the name of the Bible, the incessant deceptions perpetrated upon all of us by the ‘wise ones’, even by our ancestors and elders!

As I write today’s blog, I am reminded of Rabbi Heschel’s words in his interview with Carl Stern, “we have to immerse ourselves in the thoughts of the Bible”. I hear him calling out to us to let go of our dogmas and debate for the sake of being right, to stop our abuse of the truthfulness of the Bible and seek to be one with the Bible. Just as prayer may make us worthy of being saved, as Rabbi Heschel also teaches us in the same interview, so too will immersing ourselves in the “vigor and veracity” of the Bible make needing to be saved a mute point, because we will be saving ourselves already along with everyone we touch. Once we immerse ourselves and live into the “vigor and veracity” of the Bible we become infused with its “vigor and veracity”, we experience a new strength and a new way of seeing and hearing the world, one another, our own soul and the ‘voice’ of God. Our debates change from needing to be right to needing to learn, we argue for the sake of heaven, not the sake of self, we seek truth rather than mendacity and we find the ways to walk together in the light, with the strength, and with “the vigor and veracity” of the Bible.

Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom is not yet universally accepted! It is lived by those of us in recovery-imperfectly. We continue to be imbued with “the vigor and veracity” of the spiritual principles of the Bible, whether we attribute the spiritual principles of recovery to the Bible or not. We continue to seek more truth and be more active in our recovery, in our being of service and in all of our affairs. We no longer seek to make excuses, we speak the truth as we know it, we admit our errors and we make our amends so we can “walk together in the light of the spirit”. The longer we are in recovery, the more “rust and batter” we remove and the less we have to debate, dogma falls away in favor of connection, in the light of truth.

Writing this today allows me to see the ways I have made myself small by engaging in senseless debate for my own sake. It illuminates for me the areas where I have “rust and batter” still blinding me. It also allows me to know that my  actions which some call obnoxious, abrasive, etc are my expressions of the “vigor and veracity” I imbue from the Bible. This is not a clean-up, just a fact. Because of my years of lying prior to recovery-truth has become a necessity for me, otherwise, I fear returning to mendacity and deception of self and you. God Bless us all in 2024 with more safety, and more “vigor and veracity”, Rabbi Mark

Immersing Ourselves in Rabbi Heschel's Wisdom - A Daily Path of Spiritual Growth

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 83

“The omnipotence of God is not always perceptible, but the omnipotence of the Bible is the great miracle of history. Like God, it is often misused and distorted by unclean minds, yet its capacity to withstand the most vicious attacks is boundless. (God in Search of Man pg.241)

Living into Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom above gives us the opportunity to examine ourselves and those around us for our “unclean minds”. The Bible is the revelation of an encounter between God and humans. It is a guide and a roadmap for spiritual growth. As I immerse myself in it more each day and year, as I immerse myself in Rabbi Heschel’s teachings, the wisdom thoughts and teaching of our ancestors, we can all realize that our souls are supposed to be the arbiter of our minds and emotions rather than our minds be our arbiter!

Study of and immersion in the thoughts and wisdom of the Bible are two of the best ways to ‘wash’ our “unclean minds”. We are, and have always been, subjected to an onslaught of ‘dirty’ thoughts, an onslaught of resentments, a war with one another over competition and comparison, a fierce battle for power and prestige. We seek to find an enemy and make ‘them’ the cause of everything that is wrong with our lives, with our country, with our world. We stereotype groups of people in order to hide from our selves, hide from our own flaws, try and keep secret our “unclean minds”. Yet, through it all, the Bible continues to have power, the Bible keeps calling to our souls and to our “better angels”, it keeps giving us the hope and the power to truly be free of our “unclean minds”. While it is true that some people, maybe a lot of people, use the Bible as a cudgel, they distort it, take it out of context, wrap themselves in their interpretation of it, Rabbi Heschel’s words above come to remind us that the Bible has withstood these “vicious attacks” in the past, as it does now and will in the future.

The challenge of Rabbi Heschel’s teaching above is for us to end our “vicious attacks” on the Bible, for us to stop our misuse and distortion of the Bible to satisfy our “unclean minds”. We can only do this by experiencing the Bible in our inner lives, by opening our souls up to the teachings, the guidance and the spirit of the Bible. It is, after all, a compendium of spiritual wisdom and spiritual principles. We, the People, have to wrestle with our ‘lower angels’ and our “unclean minds”, we need to restore our souls to their proper place in our living-as the arbiter of our minds, as the power of our bodies, as the controller of our emotions. This is very difficult, it is counter-intuitive, it is a maladjustment to “conventional notions and mental cliches”. While we may never have totally clean minds, we can ‘wash’ them each day and night, we can continue to monitor our thoughts and actions and ask ourselves “is this in line with the teachings of the Bible?” When we realize we are a “contemporary of God” as Rabbi Heschel teaches us, we can catapult ourselves to the spiritual level we are meant to live in. Not the level of pettiness and pride, not the level of enmity and hatred, not the level of making someone else bad so I can feel good, rather living into the wisdom of Ben Zoma, “who is rich, one who rejoices in what one has”. This is the plane of existence where we want what we have rather than continuing to seek more and more to ‘be happy’. When we want what we have, we are not settling, we are rejoicing in what is in the moment, we are present in our lives, and we no longer have to make excuses, blames, start wars, be envious, be miserable, seek certainty, treat another(s) poorly to feel better about ourselves. We already feel good about ourselves by rejoicing in what we have.

The Bible is our “Big Book” of recovery from the human condition of “unclean minds” according to Harriet Rossetto. When we immerse ourselves in it, when we use it to look at our daily actions, when we heed the words of the prophets and the psalmist, the wisdom we glean from each chapter, we are moving away from our “unclean minds” and towards the dream/promise of the Bible, “nation shall not lift up sword against nation neither shall men learn war anymore”(Isaiah 2:4). We, the People, have the opportunity to imbibe Rabbi Heschel’s brilliance and use it to look within our inner life and see how we have allowed our “unclean minds” deceive us, how we have been seduced by the “unclean minds” of the charlatans and idolators who claim to ‘know’ the Bible. We are, once again, in a world where “unclean minds” are launching “vicious attacks” against the Bible, against humanity, against the dignity of anyone not ‘with’ them, against the inherent value of humans they want to conquer, destroy, eliminate. We witnessed this in WWII, we witnessed this throughout history. Now is our opportunity to stand up for and with the Bible to defeat these “vicious attacks” and purge the “unclean minds” from power.

While recovery is a spiritual discipline, it doesn’t promote one faith over another, it doesn’t require people to ‘believe’, and it doesn’t ‘define’ God. And it is a path of spiritual principles, a path that has grown out of the teachings and wisdom of the Bible. It is a path that acknowledges our “unclean minds” got us here, it is a path that has us look at the “vicious attacks” we have led and participated in against decency, truth, love, kindness, compassion, mercy, justice, etc. It is a path that has us do our own inventory of our “unclean minds”, root out our resentments and our self-deceptions. It is a path that has us constantly be on-guard for the subtle ways our minds retreat back into unclean thoughts and the ways  we drift into unclean actions. It is hard, we are not perfect nor are we expected to be according to recovery and the Bible. Yet, we can and must seek spiritual progress away from our “unclean minds” and its power so we can end our “vicious attacks” on truth, on love, on one another.

Happy New Year, stay safe and God Bless, Rabbi Mark

Immersing Ourselves in Rabbi Heschel's Wisdom - A Daily Path of Spiritual Growth

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 82

“The omnipotence of God is not always perceptible, but the omnipotence of the Bible is the great miracle of history. Like God, it is often misused and distorted by unclean minds, yet its capacity to withstand the most vicious attacks is boundless. (God in Search of Man pg.241)

In a weekly Shabbat morning study that has been ongoing for over 20 years, a few weeks ago we studied these words above. We were all struck by the power of them, the truth of them and they made/make us look within ourselves to experience this power, this “omnipotence of the Bible in the ways we are living today. Omnipotence comes from the Latin meaning “all-powerful” and while some human beings seem to believe they are omnipotent, Rabbi Heschel is reminding us of the fallacy of such belief, the ridiculousness of such thinking and the danger of acting in such a manner. Yet, some people still do with their lies, their deceptions and their actions. It is a “great miracle” that the Bible has withstood the assault on it, the bastardization of its teachings that have been “the most vicious attacks” on it. We are witnessing today, as we have in every generation, these “vicious attacks” by those who proclaim to believe in it the most, by those who claim their indecent, unkind, criminal actions are in accordance with the teachings and values of the Bible!

Whether these so-called ‘adherents to the Bible’ are radical Muslims, Evangelical Christians, Catholics who don’t adhere to Vatican II, Jews who are right-wing fanatics, or the secular “nones”, all have the same thing in common: they assault the “omnipotence of the Bible” with everything they have, with a verve and a vigor that makes unsuspecting people, uncertain people believe them and allow themselves to think these storm troopers against the Bible may be correct. This belief, this wearing down of the spirit and the minds of ‘the masses’ has allowed these terrorists to capture the minds of so many who become willing to go along with these ‘people who have all the answers from the Bible’. The power of the Bible is so great that people can bastardize it and seem legitimate, seem ‘holy’, seem ‘to know’.

That Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom above was published in 1955 is another sign of his prophetic nature and abilities. While he was describing what has occurred throughout the millennia, he also is describing what is happening today! The Bible “is often misused and distorted by unclean minds” today as much if not more than it was in the days of the prophets, in the days of Middle Ages, etc. Whether it is Ben-Gvir, the Rabbis in the West Bank who use the Bible to promote their desires for power and control by bastardizing the Biblical teachings or it is Mike Johnson, Mike Huckabee, Franklin Graham, et al who use the Bible to distort the clean minds of so many people, these vicious attacks will not change the Bible, will not change the teachings and the Biblical way of being, the truth of the Bible will win out as it has over the millennia.

While many people despair over these “vicious attacks”, while many people are convinced by these “vicious attacks”, Rabbi Heschel’s words come to comfort those of us who believe in the Truth of the Bible, who adhere to its “omnipotence”. Rabbi Heschel is calling to us to not become impotent in the face of these vicious attacks, to not try and “fight fire with fire” because we cannot win in the direct confrontation with mendacity. What we can do is be assured that the Bible’s ability “to withstand the most vicious attacks is boundless”. While Mike Johnson may say the Bible wants white men to have power, while he may truly believe a woman has no agency in a man’s world, while his actions may reflect the opposite of welcoming the stranger, caring for the poor, helping the needy, the truth of the Bible will prevail, the “omnipotence of the Bible” will win out, it just may take a little longer than most of us want it to! No matter what the Rabbis of the West Bank and their colleagues may preach and distort, no matter how much Ben-Gvir and his band of thugs including Netanyahu attempt to ‘take control’ of Israel, Rabbi Heschel’s words bring us to the realization that these attempts are not new, they are not even better than the previous attempts by so-called religious people to make the Bible theirs, rather than making themselves more like the Bible calls us to be. Finally, for today, Rabbi Heschel’s teaching above calls to those of us who truly believe in “the omnipotence of the Bible” to stand up for it, to respond to those who’s “vicious attacks” on it are killing innocent people in Ukraine, in Russia, in Gaza, in Israel, in the United States, in Sudan, with truth, with power, with strength that just as the Bible has “withstood” the attacks on it, we can also withstand the attacks on decency, democracy, love, truth, kindness, justice and mercy.

Recovery is an essential path for us who believe in spirituality, who believe that there is a “power greater than us” in the world and who believe in the eternal wisdom, truth, love of the Bible, of the myriad of other spiritual texts that are at the foundation of every spiritual discipline. We have to recover the meaning of these words of wisdom and truth for ourselves in this moment, we get to discover the brilliance of the Bible, the awesomeness of other Holy Texts and how these timeless lessons help us to withstand the assault on our dignity from outsiders and from within our own being. In recovery, we surrender our need to be right at all costs and we learn, re-learn, how to do right, how to be teachable, how to admit our errors and not be won over by our desire for certainty, our insatiable thirst for ‘winning’ and how to withstand the assault of our negative impulses. This is how we continue to grow in recovery, this is how we continue to believe in the power of our souls to withstand the “vicious assaults”  of our “hearts and eyes” to “whore after them”, as we say each day after the Shema prayer. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Immersing Ourselves in Rabbi Heschel's Wisdom- A Daily Path of Spiritual Growth

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 80

“God is presented to us as a comfort, not a challenge, a rumor, as if it is nice to have Him around. But God means defiance, rejection as well as affirmation. We have relinquished our roles as educators. We surrender, we abandon, we desert, and we forget.” (Essential Writings pg. 87)

How is it possible that we have abandoned, deserted and forgotten what God means, what God has commanded us? When we read the surveys about how religion has lost so many adherents, when “none” has risen in numbers so greatly, it seems as if Rabbi Heschel’s words and wisdom are, again, prophetic. Yet, we hear so much from the “religious right”, we hear how abortion is against Christian doctrine, though it is not mentioned in Scriptures as a prohibition, we hear about “those people” who are “invading our country” “poisoning the blood of our people”, etc from these ‘religious’ people. “We abandon, we desert, and we forget” when we use God as comfort only, when we seek to find a word, a phrase taken out of context to prove the points we want to make for our own self-interest. When the “nones” want to denigrate and deny the existence of God, using a phrase or the mendacious ramblings of these so-called ‘religious’ people, it makes rational sense to “abandon, desert, and forget” the true meaning of God, of faith, of religion.

We people of faith have, as Rabbi Heschel says in his book God in Search of Man, made religion ineffective. We have perpetrated the downfall of religion through making it “irrelevant, dull, oppressive, insipid(God in Search of Man pg.3). The “religious behaviorism” that Rabbi Heschel rails against is oh so prevalent today. The “religious” people have hidden behind God’s defiance of indecency, God’s rejection of injustice and bastardized both of these ways of being. They are not rejecting injustice, rather they are promulgating it! They are not defiance of indecency, they are promoting it, all under the banner of religion, under the flag of piety and purity. Bullshit!

We, the people, all of us, those of us who are people of faith, the “nones”, have to stop the “desecration of God’s Name” by these infidels, by these idolators. Rather than becoming “nones”, we have to double and triple our efforts to overcome the deceptions of the Mike Johnsons, the Ben-Gvirs, the Ayatollahs, the far right and far left media who seek to spread lies by telling only one part of the story, the passivity of people who are unwilling to stand up to these idolators. We have to be engaged in the war against the mendacity of Netanyahu, Putin, Trump, the Heritage Foundation, et al. We have to be in “defiance” of the rhetoric of the Rabbis, Imams, Priests, and Ministers who spew hatred and prejudice. We have to stand up against the stereotyping of groups, of individuals by these ‘holier than thou’ charlatans. While these liars continue to promote perfect adherence to some doctrine that human beings have discerned from our Holy books to aid in their search for absolute power, we, the people, have to say NO, we have to end our abandonment, our desertion of God, of the prophets, of truth.

“Never Forget” is a phrase that has special meaning for Jews and Armenians because be it the Turks, the Holocaust deniers, there will always be people who want to blame the victims. I think we have to also use this phrase for all of us to “Never Forget” the ways God is calling upon us to live-“do justly, love mercy, walk humbly with God”- as well as not forgetting that caring for the stranger, the poor, the needy, the widow and the orphan” is spoken 36 times in the Torah, it is the basis upon which the prophets railed against the priests, the royalty, the wealthy. We have to not forget what our ancestors went through to come to America, to give us a life in “the land of the free and the home of the brave”. It is our duty to not forget our obligation to make America a little more free and to be a little more brave each and every day in order to honor the sacrifice our ancestors made to come here, to fight for our country’s safety and the principles of democracy. As I was taught by my 9th grade Civics Teacher, Ed Roach, all of our freedoms come with the responsibility to use them well, to not take advantage just because we can. We cannot “forget, abandon, desert” God, humanity, our soul’s call anymore! We have to be Godly in our “defiance, rejection as well as affirmation” of mendacity, fake religious people and false doctrines that these idolators claim God is calling us to do. We can no longer afford to abandon the prophetic tradition, we can no longer afford to desert the pathways of Godliness, we can no longer afford to forget to hear and respond to the call of the universe, the call of our souls.

In recovery meetings, I say “my name is Mark and I am a grateful recovering alcoholic” not to shame myself, rather to never forget how far down the rabbit hole of mendacity I fell as well as to remind myself of how grateful I am to God, to the people who love me, to the people who have helped me-they are not always the same- to stay the course of recovery. It is not a linear course, and one that I am compelled to never abandon this path and to never desert the spiritual principles of recovery, of Judaism, of Godliness. Introducing ourselves in the above manner, is an act of “defiance”, it is telling ourselves and those around us we do not have to fall into the lies of “conventional wisdom”, we are in “rejection” of the stigma society has placed on those of us who have erred and returned. We are in “affirmation” of the healing power of God, the ways God ‘opens God’s arms” and welcomes back the stranger, the ‘sinner’, the children who have been in exile. We have a choice to make and we have to make is soon-live Godly or give in to the mendacity of ‘pious’ people. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Immersing Ourselves in Rabbi Heschel's Wisdom- A Daily Path of Spiritual Growth

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 80

“God is presented to us as a comfort, not a challenge, a rumor, as if it is nice to have Him around. But God means defiance, rejection as well as affirmation. We have relinquished our roles as educators. We surrender, we abandon, we desert, and we forget.” (Essential Writings pg. 87)

The last two sentences above send chills up and down my spine! While we pat ourselves on the back as parents, teachers, mentors, and guides, most of us fail to ask ourselves the questions that Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom demands of us. How have we “relinquished our roles as educators? How are we failing to “teach our children” to “love God with all our heart, all our soul, all our everything”? How are we letting go of our job to “speak of them in our house, when we walk on the way, when we lie down and when we rise up”? How have we “relinquished our roles as educators” by not living the principles/commandments/instructions of God, of decency, of kindness, of love, of truth, etc? When we see what is happening in schools(religious and secular), colleges, universities, to truth, to telling the whole story to developing the ability to discern and mature our minds and our souls, we know the truth of Rabbi Herschel’s words. When we forget to tell the whole story of the United States with our conquering of the Native American People, our trading in Slave Labor, our forgetting the words of the Declaration of Independence “all men are created equal”, we are “have relinquished our roles as educators”. When we teach that “Black people benefited from slavery because it taught them useful skills”, when we forget to teach about the Holocaust, when we forget the lynchings, when we fail to tell the story of Billie Holiday who was persecuted because of her song “Strange Fruit”, we “have relinquished our roles as educators”. When we do not teach the importance of “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” found on the Statue of Liberty and the terrible treatment of people at Ellis Island, we “have relinquished our roles as educators”. When we fail to speak to the souls of our children, the spirits of our peers and the inner life of our elders, we “have relinquished our roles as educators.”

In relinquishing “our roles as educators”, we have abandoned the principles upon which the humanity was created: to be “a contemporary of God”, to be “a divine need”, to be a “divine reminder” as Rabbi Heschel reminds us in his interview with Carl Stern. We have abandoned the care of the poor, the uplift of the needy, the embrace of the stranger for our own selfish desires, our own ‘need’ for power and glory. We are witnessing this abandonment in the Halls of Congress, Social Media, the Ukraine, Israel and Gaza, the Middle East in general, the UN, and across the globe-all done by ‘religious people’ as well as by non-religious people as well. We are witnessing a coming together of the charlatans, the authoritarians, the ‘god-fearing’ and the God-denying to further their own aims, their own goals, their own desires by abandoning the principles of Christ, Moses, Mohammed, who taught us the values of Godliness, the words of the Prophets to return to God, to stop our backsliding, to repent in order to be restored to our humanity.

We hear a lot of lip service to God, to religious and moral ethics and values while witnessing the exact opposite. We are hearing a lot of anger, a lot of hatred, a lot of blaming, a lot of bullshit that ‘religious’ people attribute to ‘god’s will’ while it is actually their will and their need for power, certainty, control. When ‘people of faith’ proclaim the ‘sins’ of another group loudly and falsely in the ‘name of god’, they are really proclaiming their surrender to ego, their surrender to mendacity, their surrender to deception. It is happening all over the globe and it is happening right here in our country, in our schools, in our Churches, our Temples, our Mosques. We keep surrendering to the “conventional notions and mental cliches” of society and are afraid to stand up for what is true and right. This surrender is devastating our society, it is killing the spirit and the passion of so many, it is causing wars, it impedes the command to help one another, to “love our neighbor as we love ourself”, it denies the command to “not stand idly by the blood of our brother/sister”, and it uplifts greed, bribery, injustice instead. We speak about “never surrender”, yet we continue to belie our own surrender to self-deception and lies.

We have the ability, however, to “surrender” to the Will of God, to the words and teachings of God we have received from Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha, etc and the wisdom of the wrestlings to understand and apply these values to our lives today, to our situations today, to grow our understanding and use of God’s will for us through our immersion in both the words and the spirit of God’s teachings. This surrender is not a ‘giving up’ or a ‘losing’, it is actually an admission that we are not the smartest person in the room, we are in need of learning and we are teachable. This is the Recovery Revolution! We surrender to truth, to our powerlessness, to our acceptance of being “a contemporary of God”, to our awareness of our strengths and weakness’ as well as what we have done well and how we have harmed. In recovery, we teach our children and one another a different way of being: one that “practices these principles in all our affairs”. We take back our “roles as educators” and we surrender to truth rather than mendacity!

This has been my life’s work in my recovery. I have fought against my own mendacity and self-deception and, while not always winning, I have won more often than not:) I refuse to surrender to the whim of people nor to the political correctness that governs our world, on the right and left. I have heard God’s call to me and I do the best I can to help people educate their souls and grow their inner lives. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Immersing Ourselves in Rabbi Heschel's Wisdom - A Daily Journey in Spiritual Enlightenment

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 79

“God is presented to us as a comfort, not a challenge, a rumor, as if it is nice to have Him around. But God means defiance, rejection as well as affirmation. We have relinquished our roles as educators. We surrender, we abandon, we desert, and we forget.” (Essential Writings pg. 87)

The more I live into with the second sentence above, the more disturbed I become. We are witnessing the bastardization of Rabbi Heschel’s teaching in our business affairs and in our personal lives. In our both areas, we believe “all is fair in love and war” and practice questionable ethics. Business’ are guilty of so many ethics violations and, when caught, will pay a fine and never admit guilt. Fox’s settlement with Dominion Voting Machines is one of the latest examples. Business’  and Political Action Committees won the Citizen’s United case in front of the Supreme Court making “dark money” available to political campaigns that serve the interests of both business’ questionable actions as well as the desires of wealthy to make sure they stay untouchable, in control, and promote right-wing policies that seek to keep the ‘riff raff’ under their thumbs. The same people who flourished in a free society and open markets want to make sure they gain and keep control of the country and not let anyone who isn’t ‘their crowd’ have a seat at the table. Be it the Dobbs decision, the decision to end affirmative action, the decision against Student Loan forgiveness, and any of the myriad of cases that Leonard Leo and his gang of merry men support they all have the same theme: keep ‘those people” down on the farm. And, of course, they do this under the guise of ‘good christian values’! Yet, God is shouting to us from Mount Sinai, God is demanding from us “defiance, rejection” and we seem to be deaf to these calls, these demands. Not only are we deaf, our hearing is so distorted many people hear God’s affirmation of these questionable actions, many people believe deeply that making scapegoats, pointing fingers at the downtrodden and poor, the needy and the stranger are what God is affirming! This is how far we have fallen away from Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom, from God’s teaching in the Bible, from God’s call to us on Mount Sinai and at the Red Sea.

Of course, none of this happens in our business dealings without our personal lives being in shambles. We are seeing a rejection of spirituality, a rejection of religious values, in favor of religious behaviorism, in favor of self-determination. I am hearing Rabbi Heschel remind us, call to us, and teach us that God is not hear to comfort us when we are making errors, when we are bastardizing God’s will and the teachings of Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha, etc. We have come to believe that freedom allows us to ‘get ours’, to do what we want, to scapegoat, ignore, enslave, deny rights to anyone who we deem ‘less than’. We seem to find what is wrong with the world, with people and use these vulnerabilities against them and for ourselves. We are witnessing family life disintegrating because of these traits, we are witnessing communal life fall apart as we live behind the gates of our communities and our homes. We see our cities fill up with homeless people, with people seeking refuge from their native countries because of the violence and rape they are assaulted with. Yet, we remain impervious to God’s demand to be defiant in the face of injustice, we remain impervious to God’s call to reject selfishness, self-centeredness, in the face of the cries of the innocents.

Unfortunately, this move away from God’s call for us to be defiant and rejecting of these behaviors is, in a large part, promoted by ‘religious people’. Be it the far-right settlers in Israel, the ultra-orthodox Jews across the globe who support Bibi and his gang of thugs, the Evangelicals and far right Christian Nationalists who support Trump and his gang of thugs, the Heritage Foundation who promote the 2025 project to put Government Agencies under the rule of the “prosperity gospel” and authoritarian rule, Iran and the radical Muslim Imams who promote hatred, anti-semitism, jihad and Shariah Law; all of these so-called ‘religious’ people are deaf to God meaning “defiance, rejection as well as affirmation.” They have led us to a time where young and old people reject religious values because of their duplicity and mendacity; to a time where religion has once again become insipid, dull, oblivious, and out of touch to the majority of people. They have led us to a time where people reject the “baby with the bathwater”.

We, the People, have to take back what being spiritual, what being religious has always meant: defiance of mendacity, rejection of hatred, stereotyping, gaslighting, affirmation of the inherent dignity of every human being, affirmation of and recognition of the divine image in every one of us. We can only do this when we join the Recovery Revolution! Rabbi Heschel is calling upon us to recover the concern of God, recover the challenge of God, recover the teachings of Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha, etc. He is demanding we let go of our old ideas and immerse ourselves in the teachings, the guidance of God in this moment, to see every moment as new and full of possibilities, to not give into despair. He is reminding us we have the choice to put on a “new pair of glasses” and see today as new, not be pulled down by the errors of our past, rather learn from them to make today a better day than yesterday. I hear him teaching and demanding we let go of our old ideas and view today with wonder and radical amazement, the maladjustment to conventional notions and mental cliches. Rabbi Heschel is a rebel, a prophet, a teacher and a guide. Will you join him in recovering the true nature of God?

I have joined him in ways that permeate my being. I view the world through the prism he offers to us and this allows me, when I am not sleep walking in life, to have defiance and rejection of what is not right, what is not Godly, and affirm the right of all people to “not learn war anymore”. I affirm the dignity and divinity of all. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Immersing Ourselves in Rabbi Heschel's Wisdom- A daily path of spiritual enlightenment

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 78

“God is presented to us as a comfort, not a challenge, a rumor, as if it is nice to have Him around. But God means defiance, rejection as well as affirmation. We have relinquished our roles as educators. We surrender, we abandon, we desert, and we forget.” (Essential Writings pg. 87)

Merry Christmas! Immersing ourselves in the second sentence above and thinking about the stories about Christ, knowing that the entire Torah relates to us God’s will and God’s words of rejection of indecency, defiance of the outsized false ego and false pride of kings, priests, false prophets, etc, we can know that Rabbi Heschel’s teaching of God meanings “defiance, rejection as well as affirmation” are at the foundation of our faith, at the foundation of our being human. Yet, too many people want to deny this truth, too many people have decided that “deep affection”, a definition of love, doesn’t include “defiance”, “rejection”.

When we immerse ourselves in the thoughts of the Bible, as Rabbi Heschel teaches us to do, we can see that God’s love is expressed through both the stories of connection with our ancestors and rejection of their bad actions! We can hear the defiance of God in relationship to the “conventional notions and mental cliches” of societal norms. The Torah, the Bible are, in my experience, stories and instruction manuals for defying the “ways of the world”, for rejecting “the status quo” and affirming spiritual truths that are the foundation of being human, that speak to our souls so we have the same experience as the Israelites at Mount Sinai, at the Red Sea. The more Rabbi Heschel’s teaching reverberates in my soul, the more I am certain of it’s truth and it’s importance.

Whether we are talking about our political realm, our religious realm, our business ethics, our personal relationships, Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom in the second sentence above has to enter into our equations if we are to be human in all of our affairs. If we are to “do justly, love mercy, walk humbly with God” in our living, we cannot ignore what God calls us to be defiant of, what God demands we reject and what God tells us to affirm. We have to honor the protestors in Israel who are living “defiance” with their feet, who are telling Bibi and his band of thugs: NO. They are engaged in actions of rejection of Bibi’s status quo, of the lies of the far-right, so called ‘religious groups’. They are affirming one of the truths of the Book of Genesis, we are all related, Jews and Arabs are cousins, it is time to end the feud and find ways to live in peace with one another. We have to stand in “defiance, rejection” of the protestors who are promoting the false claims of Hamas, who are ‘standing up’ for the Palestinians who have rejected peace deals in the past, who go along with Hamas, with other terrorists in claiming Jews should be driven into the sea. These ‘protestors’ are not caring about truth, they are not seeing the nuances of the situation, they are not forcing Hamas and the other terrorists to return the hostages NOW, they are not even going along with the latest Ceasefire proposal! These ‘freedom fighters’ and their allies are not being Godly, they are not in “defiance” of lies, nor are they in “rejection” of mendacity, they are in “affirmation” of the same prejudices, the same hatred they are accusing Jews and Israel of! Sound familiar-“accuse others of that which you are guilty of” Josef Goebbels. The political far left and far right, the religious far right and far left seem to be incapable of living Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom because of their adherence to ideology rather than Truth, their adherence to what gives them comfort rather than what and when we ought to be in “defiance, rejection” of comfort and ideology, ask religious behaviorism. Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, the other members of the Jan 6th committee, Charlie Sykes, the Lincoln Project, and so many more are heroes for their “defiance” of the mendacious lies of Trump and his gang of thugs. Tomorrow I will write more on the ramifications of living into this wisdom from Rabbi Heschel in our business ethics and personal life.

In recovery, we begin with the spiritual principles of acceptance, hope and faith. We affirm these three every day. Living in acceptance of what is true and right forces us to live in “defiance” of the lies we used to tell ourselves and another(s) as well as the lies that creep into our consciousness in our recovery. Acceptance is a “rejection” of our false egos that want to convince us and another(s) as to what is ‘really going on’ and what should be going on. Acceptance is an “affirmation” of truth, of clearer vision, of taking action on what the next right action is. The spiritual principle of hope affirms our ability to defy societal norms, to reject the deceptions of another(s), to defy our urge to “scout out after our heart and eyes which causes us to whore after them”. The spiritual principle of faith is the affirmation that there is a higher wisdom and logic than our ‘rational minds’. It is a “defiance” of conventional wisdom and mental cliches that, while ‘logical’, are not true nor valid. It is a surrender of ‘our best thinking’ to the will of God, a rejection of our self-deceptions.

My actions of T’Shuvah help me live into the spiritual principles of recovery. I have lived a life of “defiance, rejection” and “affirmation”. For the first 35+ years I rejected God’s will more often than not, I defied truth, and affirmed mendacity. In these 35+ years of recovery, I live in defiance of “political correctness”, of being ‘nice’, of ‘accepting as valid the lies of another(s). I live in rejection of the lies I tell myself and seek to root out the ones I hide from myself. I am loud, abrasive, in your face in my “defiance, rejection” and I am just as loud, abrasive, in your face in my “affirmation” of what is good, what is true, what is holy, and of everyone’s ability to change, I accept what is, hope for the strength and wisdom to change me and the faith that all of us can live into what God’s will for us is. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 77

“God is presented to us as a comfort, not a challenge, a rumor, as if it is nice to have Him around. But God means defiance, rejection as well as affirmation. We have relinquished our roles as educators. We surrender, we abandon, we desert, and we forget.” (Essential Writings pg. 87)

Today is Christmas Eve 2023, immersing ourselves in Rabbi Heschel’s words above, hopefully makes us shudder with trembling awe. Christ ministered to the poor, the needy, the outcasts, the stranger and today we find so many ‘good christians, Muslims and Jews’ calling for the immigrants to go home, locking up the outcasts, decrying the homeless, seeking to end the governmental helping of the poor and the needy! We hear about God being love, which I believe is true and that God will comfort us, which I also believe is true, and yet, not as a challenge, not as calling to us to do better at being human.

While turning our lives over to the care of God is a tenet of all spiritual disciplines, this doesn’t mean that we are free to desist from doing the work that God calls us to do. God is always challenging us to be human, to stop our selfish actions, to end our disdain for anyone ‘not like us’, to cease and desist in our blaming another human being, another group for the ills of our world. I am hearing Rabbi Heschel call us to account, remind us of our puropose and recapture the meaning of being alive: “do justly, love mercy, walk humbly with God” as both the prophets and Moses teach us.

Yet, relating to God “as a comfort" only, as “a rumor, as if it is nice to have Him around” goes against the foundations of all spiritual disciplines, certainly Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. All of these western religions, all of these western spiritual disciplines call for their adherents to be involved, to be helping make our corner of the world a little better. All of these have, at their core, spiritual principles that we are called to live into, to enact in our daily lives, to celebrate and engage in the challenges that God, that life puts in front of us. These challenges are not God-made, they are human made. God gave us the Garden of Eden and we screwed it up, God gave us “the Promised Land” and we abused it, God gave us The Temple and the rich, powerful, famous, priests used it for their own advantage. God gave us free-will and we use it to do what we want, to puff ourselves up and then call ourselves ‘god-fearing people’.

As long as we continue to ‘see’ God as “comfort”, we will not respond to God’s challenge. We are witnessing this phenomenon with all of the fundamentalists who are claiming God for them and only them. We watch, some of us in horror, as fundamentalists in America seek to control women’s bodies, seek to hold onto ‘white power’, engage in actions which demand the poor and the needy, while claiming they are following Christ, Moses, Mohammed! I am hearing Rabbi Heschel call these people out, I am hearing Rabbi Heschel call the rest of us to task for not standing up for Godly actions, for letting this minority run and ruin the lives of so many, bastardize what freedom is, deny the poem on the Statue of Liberty, re-write the Declaration of Independence and the Declaration of the State of Israel.

Of course we also have among us those who believe God is “a rumor” so there is no need to hear the call of God, to accept and respond to the “challenge” of God. They are so arrogant as to believe their ‘morality’ is based on their humanism, on their own sense of what is right and wrong. They seem to agree with Karl Marx that religion is the opiate of the masses. While they might not be afraid to burn in hell, they seem to be actively helping to make our living today a hell on earth-in that they have allied with the fundamentalists to make war not peace, to denigrate the human, to allow for the rise of fascism as we have seen throughout history. Whether we present God “as a comfort” “a rumor as if it is nice to have Him around” both of these presentations allow people to bastardize the words of the prophets, twist the teachings of Jesus, and use God as a weapon against their own enemies, all the while being the real enemies of Godliness, of holiness, of truth, justice, kindness, mercy, humility.

In recovery, we believe God is love, God is joy, God comforts us AND, God challenges us to be one grain of sand better each day. We ask for God’s help to be a little more human each and every day. We know that we need to seek God’s wisdom and God’s will for us and for another, we acknowledge we are imperfect and that doesn’t preclude God’s love for us, God’s love of us. We live in constant “trembling awe” of God’s challenge to us: care for the stranger, the poor, the needy, the widow, the orphan around us and in everyone. The recovery revolution has opened people up to seeing the similarities among all people, it gives us the opportunity to cure our prejudices, remove the cancer of prejudice from our souls, give us a “new pair of glasses” to correct the “eye disease” of prejudice and blame, hatred and self-righteousness. We are constantly living into the 11th Step of AA: “sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.”

As Rabbi Heschel says in his Yiddish Poem, “God follows me everywhere”. This was true even before I knew it and, in my recovery, this truth haunts me daily. I am constantly hearing the challenge of God as I go about my daily life, I am worried that I am not responding to this challenge well enough and I don’t know how to do better right now. My challenge from God is to be me, as Reb Zusya teaches and I do the best I can each day, and each evening I find comfort in God’s love for my efforts. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 76

“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)

In his book, Man is Not Alone, Rabbi Heschel teaches us: “the greatest hinderance to knowledge is our adjustment to conventional notions and mental cliches” and the last sentence above affirms this truth. We have dumbed down our thinking, our discourse, our way of being so much that “cliches” and “platitudes” have become commonplace. I hear Rabbi Heschel calling us to end our mendacity and self-deceptions, end our hiding behind falseness and these “cliches”, the “platitudes” we have come to rely on.

“Cliches” comes from the French meaning “to stereotype” and “platitudes” comes from the French meaning “dullness and/or banality”. Considering Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom, he is railing against us stereotyping ourselves, one another, even religion and God. He is reminding us that without daily spiritual growth, we will sink into dullness and banality. When we repeat the “cliches” and use “platitudes” in our daily living, when we are so lazy that our minds recall them rather than delve into what really is happening, when we slough off the difficult work of seeking truth, when we go follow and adore people who tell us what we want to hear we are denigrating our humanness. We are turning our backs on Godliness, we are imprisoning our souls to the 7th circle of hell. I am hearing Rabbi Heschel demand more of us, I am hearing him call upon all of us to be human!

“From the river to the sea”, “poisoning the blood of Americans”, “Jews will not replace us”, and so many other cliches are becoming part of the American  and world political and social culture, with many of the people who repeat these false “cliches” having no idea what they mean or where they come from. Yet, they have become part of our discourse and they are both dangerous and demeaning, lies and spreading like wildfire. Rather than follow the examples of the Rabbis who kept Judaism alive and thriving, who understood the dynamic nature of Torah, we have come to rely “cliches” and “platitudes” rather than delve into the truth of what is right here, right now.

Not knowing when Rabbi Heschel wrote these words, it seems to me as if he could be writing them for our situation today. Be it Bibi Netanyahu and his gang of thugs, Putin and his gang of thugs, Orban and his gang of thugs, Trump and his gang of thugs, Hamas and it’s gang of thugs, the UN and their gang of thugs, the extreme left ‘progressives’, the extreme right ‘conservatives’, all use stereotyping, dullness and banality to ‘rile up their base’. Yet, their ‘base’ have no idea they are being lied to, no clue as to how much worse their lives will be under these authoritarians, these purists, and, as our history teaches us, we will all suffer from the lack of originality, the dullness, the “cliches” and the “platitudes” so many people want to live by. President Lyndon Johnson said: “John F. Kennedy was the victim of the hate that was a part of our country. It is a disease that occupies the minds of the few but brings danger to the many.” We are witnessing this hate on steroids, President Johnson was expressing some wishful thinking when he said: “was a part of our country” because that hatred has not left us, it has been here since our founding, from the Tories who supported the British and tried hard to undermine the first Continental Congress, to the Confederacy to the Carpetbaggers in the South, to the Klan, to the America First and Christian Nationalists before and during the 2nd World War to today’s incarnation of Gingrich, the Tea Party, the Maga Republicans and the Anti-Semites on the left. Using “cliches” and “platitudes” allow us to stay dumb! They allow us to convince people to go along with someone who purposefully wants to have power and control over us, wants us to destroy our moral compass, and imprison our spiritual power as well as deafen us to the call of God, the words of the prophets, the teachings of the great spiritual leaders from Moses to Jesus, from Mohammed to Buddha, from Thomas Merton to Rabbi Heschel, from Buber to Thich Nhat Hanh, from Rev King to Rabbi Harold Shulweis.

The solution  to the banality and the stereotyping, the unoriginal thinking and dullness of our world is to join the Recovery Revolution. We have to hear and use the teachings of the people who enhance our spiritual nature, who blow air and conviction into our souls, like the people mentioned above, like Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob Smith, the founders of AA, like John Pavlovitz, Rabbi Tova Leibovic-Douglas, like Rabbi Igael Gurin Malous, like Rabbi Ed Feinstein, like Rev. Najuma Smith-Pollard, like Rev. Mark E Whitlock, like Father Greg Boyle, etc. We have to return to our essence, return to the teachings of the Bible, return to the spiritual teachings of whatever spiritual discipline speaks to us. We get to find a new sense of self, a renewed connection with truth, with the universe, with holiness. We find ourselves interesting, we engage with interesting people and continue to grow our souls and our minds, our intellect and our “knowing”.

I joined the recovery revolution 36 years ago, in a prison yard, before I stopped drinking a year later. In these 35/36 years of being part of this revolution, I have experienced joy, sorrow, loss and gain, a coming into being more authentic and real, a seeker of truth and I have no patience with banality, with dullness and with stereotyping. I fight “going along to get along”, I am, at times, inappropriate and troublesome. Yet, I am never dull, I work hard to not be boring and I am excited to awaken each morning, I am grateful for Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom which challenges me each day and I am grateful for the love I experience from Harriet, Heather, Miles, my siblings and my family as well as from all of you. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark