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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day155

“Our task is to open our souls to Him, to let Him again enter our deeds. We have been taught the grammar of contact with God; we have been taught by the Baal Shem that His remoteness is an illusion capable of being dispelled by our faith. There are many doors through we have to pass to enter the palace, and none of them are locked.” (Essential Writings pg. 92)

The first sentence above brings to mind:“What an order, I can’t go through with it” is a ‘cry’ from the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous in Chapter 5 after the reading of the 12 Steps! The “task” Rabbi Heschel is giving us seems so daunting to so many who are not even aware of the call of their souls, who are so enamored with their intellect, so deep in their self-deception and mendacity that they are unaware of how closed off their souls are. No wonder we have made the false premise that God is hiding because God doesn’t care, it is our defense against God entering our souls, it is the path to blocking God from entering our deeds.

Yet, Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom above is the only path for solving the distress, the anguish, the anxiety that we all face each day. We are being called to open our souls, our selves to God, to allow the lies and the deceptions to fall away and re-enter our covenantal relationship with God, with one another. Rabbi Heschel is teaching us that we are capable, we are worthy, we are necessary to and for God, for Godly actions, for connection to something greater than ourselves. This teaching is calling out to us to go beyond our reason, to enter into the mystery that is holiness, to let go of the absurdity we live in each day. It calls out to us to transform the absurdity into meaning, to live into mystery so we can find ourselves, our authentic selves not the false ones we have become so adept at showing to the world and to ourselves.

Immersing ourselves in this “task” can be frightful because, like Abraham, we “go to ourself, for ourself” to a place that only God can show us, an unknown and unknowable place. There is no GPS that we can use, there is no “you have arrived” outer voice to validate when and where we stop. Even more scary is the truth that we lose our false egos, we lose our facades, we lose the cataracts that have given us false images of ourself. We lose the foreskin we have placed over our hearts and we lose the rationalizations of our intellect. “To open our souls to Him” means we have to suffer losses that our reasoning tells us are essential to our well-being, it means we have to end our reliance on the lies we have been telling ourselves and that society expects us to live. “What an order”!

Yet, without letting “Him again enter our deeds”, we continue to be on the hamster wheel of ecstasy and despair, tremendous highs and the lowest of lows, comparisons where we are either better than or less than, competitions that give us the ‘right’ to ‘kill the competition’, and living in fear of everything being taken away, losing our place, our wealth, our health, our masks/facades. Without  opening “our souls to Him”, we stand at the precipice of the abyss and our footing gets shakier and shakier, with one good blast of wind pushes us into the abyss forever. Without opening “our souls to Him” by not letting “Him again enter our deeds”, we are blind to the realities of our current situation and we continue to blame and shame everyone else, we continue to make war with one another and use false gods to validate our mendacity, our treachery, our abandonment of our souls and of God.

Rabbi Heschel gives us the path to rectifying the errors of our ways, he is giving us the response to living in fear, the solution for leaving the despair, depression, hatred and false needs we live in daily. “Open our souls to Him” is to relearn how to live in the world with one another in, at least, somewhat peaceful co-existence. It means to regain our eyesight and see the divine image that each of us is created in, it means to see and live into the intrinsic worth and value every one of us possess naturally, that calls to us that we belong in the world just because we are born, we have value for who we are and the divine need we can fill, the broken chip in the world that only we can repair. “Open our souls to Him” calls for us to return to a way of being that the Bible describes; building a Mishkan, a sanctuary within each of us,  a place where God dwells among/in/with us. This “task” takes work, it takes each of us finding the spiritual path that speaks to us, it takes each of us finding a spiritual guide to help us along the way, it takes each of us to let go of the particular lies we have told ourselves that have atrophied our souls, our spiritual growth.

It takes “to let Him again enter our deeds” by no longer trying to prove our worth, no longer engaging in life’s activities for the sake of our false selves, no longer believing we have to be ‘the best’. It takes the realization that what we do here will be remembered and matters. It takes a dedication to doing the next right thing no matter how I think nor how I feel. “To let Him again enter our deeds” reminds us that we have done this before, we have responded to God’s call for us and to us before so we are actually returning to a way of being that is familiar and that we can once again call “home”, once again experience the oneness that seek every time we recite the Shema. “God is One” and we are part of God when we “let Him again enter our deeds”, so we achieve the goal we all truly seek.

I open my soul each day, to the best of my ability. I invite God into my deeds and seek guidance from God, from spiritual guides and all of my success, all of my good works are due to the guidance of God and spiritual teachers, family and friends. 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 154

“The direct effect of His hiding is the hardening of the conscience: man hears but does not understand, sees but does not perceive-his heart fat, his ears heavy (Isaiah 6).” (Essential Writings pg 92)

Rabbi Heschel is calling out to all of us to end our ignorance and our stubbornness. He is demanding we end our incessant need and way of purposely misunderstanding and misperceiving God’s call, the call of our neighbors, the call of our souls.

It is not our inability to hear nor see that Rabbi Heschel is addressing, it is our unwillingness to understand and to perceive. Perceive comes from the Latin root meaning “entirely take” and in English both words are synonyms of each other. Rabbi Heschel is also making a correlation between our hearing and our seeing, our understanding and our perceiving that is, all too often, misused in the ways we live our daily lives.

When our conscience is hardened, when our morality is distorted, when we live amorally, we become incapable of really understanding what we hear. Humanity has, for the millennia, put up barriers between understanding what we hear with our soul’s ‘ears’ as opposed to our mind’s/ego’s propensity to twist everything to what we believe is in our best interest. While humanity has progressed in philosophy, mathematics, sciences, medicine, etc, we seem incapable of understanding the call of God, the ways to improve the quality of life for ourselves and for one another because we have hardened our conscience so much that we deny the true understanding of what we hear.

When we hear the cry of the enslaved and forget/ignore that when anyone is enslaved we are all enslaved, we do “not understand”. When we denigrate the call of the poor for help, we do “not understand”. When we hear the call of the stranger and we put up barriers to help them, we do “not understand”. When we hear the call of ‘one who is not like me’, ie women, people of color, people of different faiths, and believe we should control them, we should deny them freedom of choice, deny their free will, we do “not understand”.

When we see injustice happening around us and do not care because “I was not” them, as Martin Niemoller writes, we do “not perceive”. When we see the lies of people who engage in anti-semitism and believe the lies of the far left/far right, we do “not perceive”. When we see the hatred and strife between people, between nations and we do nothing to make peace, we do “not perceive”. When we see the ravages of history and continue in the same path, we do “not perceive”. When we see the building up of authoritarians and believe we will benefit from their ‘goodness’, we do “not perceive”.

How is this possible? “His heart fat, his ears heavy” seems to say it all. Be it Moses, the prophets, the Psalmist, spiritual teachers throughout our history, all warn us of this curse; all rail against this basic human drive which many people believe is a sanctuary against the onslaught of God’s calls to us, a hiding place for us to be able to ignore God’s demands and the cries of another human being for help. Even though, time and time again, we have to answer for our hiding, for our hiding of God’s will, God’s teachings, we have seen the destruction of societies, the destruction of countries, the destruction of people’s lives, be it in Ancient Rome, Europe, the Middle East, Japan, etc and we continue to plug our ears with fat and put weights on our eyes. We are witnessing the destruction of truth and facts throughout the world, in America, in Israel, in Gaza, in Ukraine, in Russia, in Turkey, in Hungary, etc. Yet, rather than clean out the fat in our ears, we put more in by giving oxygen and life to the lies of the despots, the authoritarians, the deceivers. Rather than take the weights off of our eyes, we seem to be adding to them by giving credence to the ‘men of god’ who proclaim they are fighting a ‘holy war’ for God’s principles, be it when life is viable, be it ‘this is all our land’, ‘might makes right’, ‘if I want to take it, I am entitled to it’, etc.

We have to end our fear of truly understanding what we hear, of really taking the fat/wax out of our ears and understand that we are engaged in an internal battle between our desires and God’s will, between our inauthentic needs and the call of our soul, between the lies we tell ourselves and are spread into the world and the truth we know in our hearts, in our inner life and we need to put out into the world. We need to stop being fearful of seeing what is truly in front of us and behind us, we have to re-imagine what life will be like when we live in truth, when we follow the ways of God, when we engage our soul’s perception and vision and end our false need on egotistical and false visions.

We can only do this if and when we surrender our need to be right, let go of our need to look good, look strong, look holy. When we take the fat out of our ears and the heaviness off of our eyes, we can see that we are already holy, as Leviticus 19 teaches us. We will understand our strengths and perceive how to use them for the benefit of God, of another(s) and of ourselves. We will hear and understand how to be a little more good each day. We will see how we can sharpen our understanding and our perception a little more each day through prayer, study, acts of kindness, acts of T’Shuvah, etc. We will understand our ability to grow along spiritual lines makes us better human beings, we will perceive paths to wholeness and peace, seeing everyone as divine reminders and not need to denigrate one another to ‘feel good’ about ourselves. 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 153

“The direct effect of His hiding is the hardening of the conscience: man hears but does not understand, sees but does not perceive-his heart fat, his ears heavy (Isaiah 6). (Essential Writings pg 92)

Rabbi Heschel’s teaching above gives us the challenge and the dilemma of being human and our concealment, obscuring of God to ourselves. We are living in a period where “the hardening of the conscience” of humanity seems to be getting stronger and stronger. We make moral equivalence where there is none, we blame the people we victimize, we extol the authoritarians and the despots, we denigrate people ‘not like us’ and we wield power for our sake not for the sake of heaven nor the sake of our neighbor.

In 1972, in his interview with Carl Stern, Rabbi Heschel spoke to “the hardening of the conscience” when he said we no longer “love thy neighbor as thyself”, rather we “suspect our neighbor” instead. Our need to exile God, as Rabbi Heschel says earlier in this passage, has caused us to not even recognize “the hardening of the conscience” that takes place. Much like the hardening of the arteries that go undetected until there is a crisis, “the hardening of the conscience” goes undetected until it is almost too late; we had a Civil War because the conscience of the Southern States almost congealed in their desire to have dominion and rule over people of color, we went to war in 1941 because the conscience of Japan and Germany almost congealed in their desire for power, for rule and dominion over other Asians, over Europe and Germany’s desire to exterminate the Jewish people.

Rather than learn permanent lessons and change our ways from these drastic upheavals in our history, we can trace the subtle and not so subtle ways humanity has continued its trek to “the hardening of the conscience”, its blasphemous ways of exiling God, of concealing the truth of God’s will, of obscuring the actual calls and demands of God for the sake of our power, our ego, our need for certainty. We push God into hiding because we cannot be certain that what we are doing is truly God’s will, that we are being ‘perfect’ in performing the deeds God calls us to do. In order to deal with our anxiety, we seek certainty, we seek surety, and in seeking the unattainable, we have hardened our conscience and live in self-deception, deception of another(s) and mendacity.

“Now we are engaged in a great Civil War” are words written and spoken by Abraham Lincoln in 1863 as part of his Gettysburg Address and, because of “the hardening of the conscience” of humanity, we think these words no longer apply, yet they do! We are in a civil war in our country, we are in a civil war in Israel, in Gaza, across the globe there are civl wars happening. The war is whether “a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal… can long endure.” In nation-states all over the world there is an internal war going on between people who’s conscience is not totally hardened, who are awakening to the reality of what “the hardening of the conscience” has done to their countries, to their way of life, to themselves and are fighting to do angioplasty on the arteries of their conscience. Be it the Anti-Trump, Anti-Bibi, crowd, be it the Anti-Right Wing Religious Zealots, Anti-Putin, Anti-Fascism crowd, there is a ground swell to be more like Alexi Navalny than like Ben-G’vir, to be more like Rev William Barber than like Stephen Miller, to be more like Bill Gates than Jared Kushner. Every one of us needs to have angioplasty done on the arteries of our conscience. Every one of us needs to recognize the diagnosis that Rabbi Heschel gave to us some 70+ years ago was correct then and is devastatingly correct now.

We have the cure, however! The cure is in recovering our Spiritual path, in tearing down the walls, the paths, the dams we have built to keep God in hiding. The cure is to let go of our need for certainty, for surety, for needing to be right. The cure is to look in the mirror and see what God sees, see what is reflected in our soul’s truth, not the ways our minds/intellects lie to us. The cure is to end our need to have rule and dominion over people who are not like us, to stop trying to make people, even our own children, over in our image. We have to end our erroneous belief that we are God, that we know all and we see all. We have to begin to reflect on our errors rather than blame another person for them. We have to see how we have put so much plaque in the arteries leading to our conscience that we now believe we can wrap ourselves in the flag, in the Bible, in the New Testament, in the Koran, etc and defy the very words these symbols, these texts speak. We are in desperate need to end our mendacity, our sublimation of holy ideas and ways to our selfish, egotistical needs. We are in desperate need for true Spiritual Leaders, people who will be physicians of the soul so we can do the necessary surgery to remove the plaque from the arteries leading to our conscience and heal the maladies of our souls that we suffer from.

From the time I was 16-36 I was proud to build up the plaque that impeded my ability to listen to my conscience. These past 36 years have been spent removing the plaque, hearing and responding to the call of my conscience and my soul. I have not always done this well and I have been engaged in healing my spiritual maladies and I no longer care about the judgement of those who seek to blame me, I no longer am concerned with what those who want to exploit my errors and my vulnerability do, I am only concerned with “the hardening of the conscience” that I am avoiding and, I pray, helping another(s) avoid. 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 152

“It is not God who is obscure. It is man who conceals Him. His hiding from us is not His essence…A hiding God, not a hidden God. He is waiting to be disclosed, to be admitted into our lives.” (Essential Writings pg.91)

Rabbi Heschel’s teachings in the last two sentences above cannot be taken in by reading them just once, as with all of his wisdom. God is not hidden, God “is waiting to be disclosed, admitted into our lives” both exhilarates one and causes us to take a careful inventory of our ways of being in the world and holds us accountable. Rabbi Heschel is dispelling the myths and lies we tell ourselves about God, about the world, and, especially, about ourselves.

Both those ascribing to religious teachings, faith, and humanism are being called to account for the myriad of times we force God into hiding. Rabbi Heschel is speaking to us of our power, our use of our free will, our commitment to the Covenant God made with us at Sinai, the covenant of Christ, the covenant of Mohammed, the call to higher consciousness of the Buddha, the covenant of morality that humanists claim, etc. Because we have free will, because we have the power to deny, to lie, to deceive Rabbi Heschel is reminding us to be in truth with ourselves, to be in truth with God, to allow God “to be admitted into our lives”!

Our self-deception keeps growing and growing, our deception of another(s) keeps expanding as well. We have ‘grown up’ with religious teachers and leaders, moral truths and ways that have become so twisted and manipulated that they have become almost meaningless and many people either give lip-service to them or reject them completely. In America, 33-40% of people claim “none” when asked their religious beliefs, they have become so jaded, so fed up with the ways God has been misused as an excuse, a weapon, an alibi by ‘religious’ manipulators. While the attendance at Houses of Worship declines, fundamentalists double down and those who are not fundamentalists still give pap to the people in the pews.

God is not a trinket to pull out when things go well or go not well, God is not an icon/idol to hold up to prove one’s worth. God is waiting “to be admitted into our lives” wholly and completely. We cannot have ‘religious fervor’ in our Houses of Worship and then go cheat our competitor, our customer in our businesses. We cannot claim to wrap ourselves in the mantle of God while treating people who are not ‘like’ us differently and with prejudice, envy, enmity. We cannot claim to be Godly while we act selfishly, cruel, unkind, unwelcoming, refusing to ransom the captive, etc.

We are witnesses to and participants in a great crime-making God hide. God keeps calling and we keep twisting God’s words and ways to fit our needs, our desires rather than change us to adhere to and fulfill God’s ways and desires. God cares about humanity-full stop. It is humanity that is ignoring and uncaring of God’s will, God’s desire “to be disclosed” in truth, in love, in kindness. When ‘religious’ leaders call for the killing of the infidel, when they say God wants people who seek abortions to be called murderers, when they claim with authority that only they know what is right and good, when they claim their way is the only way, when they support authoritarians, liars, despots, when they give credence to internment camps, to the lies of politicians, they are the ones who are obscuring God, they are the ones working hard to conceal God.

Admitting God into our lives means we “walk in God’s ways” in all of our affairs, it means we have to live the principles of the Bible in our everyday lives, not just on the Sabbath, not just on Holy Days. We have to engage in wrestling with the myriad of spiritual texts available to us, choosing the one that speaks most directly to us, and then follow the precepts and morals, the actions and the truths the text offers us. All spiritual texts lead us to admitting God into our lives-when we engage with them for the sake of Heaven as well as ourselves, when we engage in them to raise our spiritual and inner lives as well as the spiritual and inner life of another(s). We have the technology to “spread the word” that God is here, that God is knocking at our hearts, at our souls’ gates and we have to unlock the solid iron doors/gates we have put up as barriers to God’s call, to God’s knocking, to allowing God in. These iron doors have been put in place because of the myriad of hurts, the bruises and tears in our hearts and souls put their by our experiences with the “religious” lies we have been told, the rejections of growing into the divine need we are created to fill that is rejected by ‘society’.

The only remedy for us, as I hear Rabbi Heschel call to us, is to allow God in! “Admitting God into our lives” is the only path of healing that is sustainable, no person, no job, no amount of money, nothing will heal the “hole in our soul” that we have suffered. This means we are going to “miss the mark”, be stubborn and inappropriate at times, be vulnerable to the attacks of another(s), at times be unpopular because we stand with and for God in our world, in our ways. It means that we commit to live into the principles of the spiritual path we have chosen, even when this makes us unpopular. It means we are quick to forgive those who come to us in remorse, we seek to resew fabrics of connection rather than make more outcasts, we receive people who have ‘fallen’ “back in love” as God does. We no longer use status to keep people out, rather we use our status to bring people in. God’s tent is large, all of us, no matter our spiritual discipline, can belong and we have to embrace people and let them know we all belong to the human race, we all are imperfect and we all need to disclose God to one another and admit God into our lives. 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 151

“It is not God who is obscure. It is man who conceals Him. His hiding from us is not His essence…A hiding God, not a hidden God. He is waiting to be disclosed, to be admitted into our lives.” (Essential Writings pg.91)

In the first two sentences above, Rabbi Heschel dispels some myths about God and about humanity. “Obscure” comes from the Latin meaning “dark” and “conceals” has the Latin root of “completely hidden”. Using these two definitions, can better understand what has happened and is continuing to happen to all of us: God is not dark, it is humanity who has completely hidden from God! Yet, we humans either blame God for “hiding” or we ignore the spirit of God that fills the universe, that gives us the very oxygen we need to breathe.

“Where is God” has been said myriads of times throughout the millennia and responses range from, ‘god wants this to happen’ to ‘there is no god’. I use the small letter “g” because these responses are deceptions, lies used to exert human power, keep people under the thumbs of priests, rabbis, imams, despots, authoritarians, etc. Because of our desperate need to hide, because of our inability to be responsible and answer Hineni to God’s calls, because we refuse to live into the ways of being holy, because we are more concerned with how things look (optics) than how things are, we are susceptible to the deceptions of another(s) and the lies we tell ourselves. Herein lies the reason for our spiritual bankruptcy.

We darken God’s will in order to ‘bend’ it to our will. Rather than following the teachings of the Bible where we are told to “do justly, love mercy, walk in the ways of God”, we have made God so obscure, so lofty so we can impose our human desires and will all the while calling it God’s will. This is one of the most common examples of idolatry practiced by human beings. When we hear of internment camps being built in the United States for ‘those people’, when we hear of suspension of the Constitution “on day 1”, when we hear a madman, desperate to stay out of prison, desperate to hold onto his money(or continue to fool people he has billions) and he is supported by millions while he hires criminals and people who have Putin’s interests at heart, while he celebrates Viktor Orban, and then say “Christ sent him”, we are in trouble. This is the essence of humanity concealing God!

We conceal God and claim that God ‘has left the building’ in order to exert control over people and to make our egocentric desires ‘holy’. We seem to be incapable of being responsible and heeding the words of the Bible: “don’t scout out after your heart and your eyes which you will whore after”. As my Rabbi Ed Feinstein says: “don’t be a tourist”. We obscure and conceal God so we can be tourists in our own lives, so we can go on a scouting mission. This scouting mission is not to find “the Promised Land”, it is not to find “the Golden Medina”, it is to find the ways we can satisfy our darkest desires, our most egotistical dreams, to gain and hold power over groups of people based on their ethnicity, their religion, their sexual preferences, even their gender. These out of measure desires have brought us to our knees as a society on numerous occasions and it takes a revolution to bring us back to sanity, sometimes bloodless and often very bloody.

What does obscuring and concealing God get us? It allows us to live in the fantasy that we are in control, that we can bend things to our will. It allows us to deny truth and to live in mendacity and fantasy. It tells us that “clothes makes the man”, “with money, I am somebody, without money, I am nothing”. It allows us to imprison people at our will, especially political opponents, it allows us to engage in “identity politics” so deeply we can deny the horrific crimes perpetrated by ‘our people (like Hamas) because they are ‘freedom fighters”. We allow our denigration of any human being ‘not like us’ and claim we are doing ‘god’s will’. We listen to the lies of another and believe them because they appeal to our sense of injury, our need to be victims to ‘the other’. Obscuring and concealing God has made our religious institutions irrelevant for most people, places of mendacity, deception and the ‘good people’ running them are cowards who darken God’s ways, who completely hide from God’s will and, yet, proclaim their allegiance with their bona fides to God. They defy in their actions the very principles they proclaim they follow!

We, the people, have to let go of our need to obscure and conceal God in our daily living. Rabbi Heschel’s entire body of works calls us to this task, he continues to offer wisdom and hope, rebuke and repair, yet we continue to hide from him, from the prophets, from the Bible, from Christ’s teachings, from the ways of the Buddha, from the Dalai Lama, etc. Father Greg Boyle and Homeboy Industries, John Pavlovitz, Rev. William Barber, Rabbi Shmuly Yanklowitz, are some of the people who are calling out to us to end our concealment of God, to end the ways we obscure God and Godliness. We, the people, need to surrender-to let go of our fears at being seen, our terror of being seen by God and another human being. We need to remember, as Rabbi Hillel says: “What is hateful to you, do not do to another person”, we have to stop the lying, the self-deceptions, the deceptions of another(s) we engage in so we can hide from God, so we can keep the world darkened for our ‘benefit’. We, the people, have to recover the light of Godliness, the struggle of doing the next right thing as the Bible teaches us, and re-engage in a connection with the Ineffable One and one another that is real, transparent, forgiving, loving, truthful and kind. This is a path to uncovering God’s essence again, for us to come out of hiding and live into God’s will. 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 150

“More grave than Adam’s eating the forbidden fruit was his hiding from God after he had eaten it. “Where art thou?” Where is man? is the first question that occurs in the Bible. It is man’s alibi that is our problem. It is man who hides, who flees, who has an alibi. God is less rare than we think; when we long for Him, His distance crumbles away.” (Essential Writings pg.91)

Rabbi Heschel’s last sentence above is one of the truths that seems to elude many people. The pattern of most psalms is to call out to God acknowledging the troubles we are facing, ask God for help and then thank God for the help we have received. In Psalm 145 we learn:”God is near to all who call upon God, to all who call in truth”. Throughout Psalm 145, we recite different truths like this one to remind us it is not God who is distant, it is us human beings who “flee”, who “hide” from God and then blame God for our faults, for our errors, for our egocentric self-deceptions.

In Psalm 145, we learn: “God is full of kindness, full of compassion, upholds all who fall, raises up the bowed down, etc.” yet, we human beings while reciting this Psalm and our prayers, while reading and studying the Torah, the Bible, we fail to grasp the truth of the words we say, the truth of the teaching of Rabbi Heschel above. We are so enamored with our selves, with our egos, with wrapping ourselves in what we think is right, good, so hopelessly in the disease of self-deception and believing the deceptions of another(s), we have sunk into a morass of mendacity. Rather than hear the words we speak, we twist the words of the Bible, the words of the Psalmist, the words of the prophets to our liking, to make us feel good rather than for their purpose: to make us reach towards God, to help us grow into the partners with God we are created to be.

Human beings have bought into the lie that we have to be self-actualizing, we have to make ourselves ‘the be all/end all’, we have to do whatever it takes to have power so we can fulfill the mandates of God, as we misunderstand God. Instead of allowing the words of the Psalmist to wash over us, to cleanse us of our selfish desires, of our egotistical beliefs, we twist them to our advantage by saying ‘my god says’ and ‘my god is love’ etc, etc. What Rabbi Heschel is calling us to, I believe, is to truth, to come out of our hiding, end our alibis, stop running away from God and respond to God’s “first question”.

While many think we are hard-wired to lie, to defend, to blame, I believe we are hard-wired for connection, I hear Rabbi Heschel telling us the same thing. It is not God who is hiding, it is us. It is not necessary for us to hide any longer, we are good enough to be accepted back by God, we are good enough to receive God’s “abundant kindness”, God’s compassion, to be lifted up by God every time we fail and fall, every time we are bowed. In Jewish prayer, we are always upright when we say the name God/Adonai, even if we were bent over prior to God’s name, we stand up and face God, we do not need to be begging God for kindness, we do not need to engage in false humility by staying bowed at our calling of God’s name. God wants us to face God so we can respond to the “first question”, so we can know we do not have to hide anymore, so we know we no longer need an alibi for our errors, for our mistakes, for our misdeeds. So, what is the problem that humankind can’t/won’t believe these truths and stay hidden from God, blame God, etc?

We are unwilling to admit our errors, we are unwilling to accept those who have made errors back into ‘normal society’. We are so deep in our own mendacity, we are so engrossed in our own fears of being found out for our own imperfections, we have to blame anyone else we can find. Our egos are so puffed up that denial is not just a river in Egypt, it is an everyday friend to many people. It is a way to forget the help we have received from God, from another human being, it is the way we can step on someone who is higher up on the ladder than we as we are climbing the ladder to ‘success’ and they reach out an helping hand. We step on them because we keep believing if we can’t ‘outperform’ them, we have to ‘kill’ them in order to hide what we are lacking. We are so concerned with how we look, we can’t ask for help from God, from anyone without seeming weak in our own eyes. Just as the spies in the Book of Numbers said: “we were grasshoppers in our own eyes and so to in theirs” as the reason not to go into the Promised Land, many people are afraid to be seen as “grasshoppers” so they hide from God, from all of us. And, we, the people, buy their lies because we have our own that we are afraid will be uncovered.

Our choice is simple, admit our need to be seen by God, by one another. Join with God, with people to raise our spiritual health, live the spiritual values God has given us to the best of our ability and end our incessant need to blame, shame, and be ‘perfect’ in the eyes of another. We have the inner strength to call out to God as Rebbe Nachman did: “God Help Me” and then be open to hear the response. We have within us the power and light of our souls to change the course of our life and the course of our world. We do not need to bow down to the rich and famous, to the authoritarian and the liar, to the false prophets and charlatans that abound in the world- we only need to “long for Him” and “His distance crumbles away” and our separation from our authentic self, our separation from one another also crumbles away. I know this to be true because it is the story of my recovery and the stories of recovery of so many people who have found their way back through the loving ‘hand’ of God, have felt God near because they “called upon God in truth”. 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 149

“More grave than Adam’s eating the forbidden fruit was his hiding from God after he had eaten it. “Where art thou?” Where is man? is the first question that occurs in the Bible. It is man’s alibi that is our problem. It is man who hides, who flees, who has an alibi. God is less rare than we think; when we long for Him, His distance crumbles away.” (Essential Writings pg.91)

We are so ensconced in our hiding that we have come to believe we are responding to “the first question that occurs in the Bible.” We are so ‘into our disease’ of self-deception that we are woefully unaware that we continue to “hide”, to “flee”.  Rather than saying “hineni”, “here I am”, we have “an alibi” for not being real, for not being authentic, for not responding to essence of God’s call and the essence of the call of another(s) who is need. We are so accustomed to the “lies we tell ourselves” that we have forgotten the question, changed the question,  and we berate someone else for asking the question.

We are unwilling to face the problem of our hiding, our lack of answering the call of the question that God asks in the 3rd Chapter of Genesis, and most people have continued since the time of Adam to ignore this fundamental question ever since then. What makes Abraham so ‘great’ in the Bible is his search for and response to God’s questions and directions. What makes Moses so important and such a great leader (for the most part) is his willingness to turn towards the “burning bush” instead of ignoring it. What makes the prophets so powerful is their ability to go against their nature to hide from the call of God, which they know will make them subject to ridicule, imprisonment, maybe even death, to deliver God’s message, help the stubborn and egotistical Priests, Royalty, wealthy to change. Even Jonah, who tried to flee, is unable to run away from the call of God.

Yet, we continue to do so, like humanity throughout the millennia, we even use our clergy, our leaders, our elected officials to hide from “the first question”. We are locked in a terrible prison of our own making that gives us cover, gives us rational reasoning and tells us we are being open and honest and not hiding, we are responding and not fleeing, we are so deep in our mendacity that we believe the actions we take to defame, to deny, to lie about, to ignore the call of everyone ‘not like us’ is actually God’s will! When we look at the poverty that abounds, when we ignore the truth of good people in order to believe the lies of the terrorists, in all their forms, when we deny the dignity due to people of color, women, LGBTQ+, in the name of God, we are hiding from “where art thou?” We are facing, as humanity has always faced to a greater or lessor degree, a fork in the road, a decision-making moment, that has nothing to do with ‘who is right and who is wrong’. It has nothing to do with winning and losing for personal, financial gain nor party politics.

This fork in the road is are we going to continue make “man’s alibi that is our problem”? Are we going to continue to use the myriad of lies, the distorted mirror we have been using to navigate through life with? Are we so afraid of the truth, so afraid to “face” God and ourselves that we are willing to destroy what makes us human? We have been living like Alice in Wonderland, turning demagoguery, authoritarianism, blaming ‘the other’, etc into ‘holiness’! We are continuing to promote the terrorism of Hamas by only blaming Israel for what is happening even though Hamas continues to hold hostages against International Law. We are so enamored with our ‘identity politics’ that we demonize people for the actions we disagree with while decrying their demonization of us! Clergy are extolling fundamentalism, re-reading of the Holy Books so they can have control and power, rule and domination over everyone else and calling this God’s will! In democracies, there are people running for the highest offices in the land, President, Congress, Prime Ministers, Houses of Government who are extolling the ending of democracy so they can have absolute power, so they can be “in office for life” and name their own successor-in their family of course. And, we, the people, are buying into these lies and so many more.

We have to break the “looking glass” once and for all. The sages say T’Shuvah was put into the world before the world was created, the prophets call for our return because God wants to heal us, embrace us. Adam had the opportunity and he blew it, we have the gift and opportunity to amend Adam’s error, to amend the errors of our ancestors, amend our own errors of hiding, fleeing, making alibis. It takes courage to face oneself, it takes admitting the deep longing we have for truth, authentic connection, with God and with human beings, it takes willingness to surrender our armor, let go of our lies, leave the narrowness (Egypt) of self-deception and self-delusion, ignore the calls of the deceivers and liars in the media, in our political discourse, in our Churches, Temples, Mosques, and shatter the distorted mirrors that the funhouse provides and return to the reality and the call of “Where is Man?”

We are being called each day to respond with Hineni, to repair the woes of the world instead of adding to them. We are called to respect one another, to end our egotistical ‘war’ with each other, to stop excluding people for being who they are and making mistakes. We are being called to allow one another the opportunity to do T’Shuvah, to repair relationships, to be “fast to forgive”, we are being called to rebuke one another so we can get to the truth rather than to continue the falsehoods we have come to worship. Most of all, we are called to respond to God, the Ineffable One, not the idols that we have created to replace Adonai, God. 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 148

“More grave than Adam’s eating the forbidden fruit was his hiding from God after he had eaten it. “Where art thou?” Where is man? is the first question that occurs in the Bible. It is man’s alibi that is our problem. It is man who hides, who flees, who has an alibi. God is less rare than we think; when we long for Him, His distance crumbles away.” (Essential Writings pg.91)

Rabbi Heschel speaks to the foundational issue facing humanity since the time of Adam. The first sentence above truly says it all; grave comes from the Latin meaning “heavy, serious” and, used as an adjective it denotes “giving a serious concern”. More concerning than disobeying is Adam’s hiding. More “heavy and serious” is our hiding from our own errors, yet we seem incapable of learning from Adam’s experience as well as our own past experiences.

We begin hiding as children, when we are too afraid to admit we did something wrong. We continue to hide our missteps and from our disobedience through adolescence and into adulthood. We offer numerous and mendacious excuses for our wrongdoing in order to validate ourselves and blame another(s), because we are too afraid to be seen as less than perfect, we are too unwilling to be responsible and truly look at ourselves. In the wake of the Shoah, here in America, we continued to have Jim Crow laws, we continued to ‘keep those people in their place’, we continued to have quotas on Jews for college admissions, we continued to promote white power in the subtlest and not so subtle ways. When called out on it, we hid, we made excuses, we blamed our victims! Sound familiar?

Adam had a choice, to stand up and be responsible or to hide and he chose hiding. One would think, after hearing this story for the millennia, we would do T’Shuvah for Adam, for ourselves, yet we persist in hiding and, in an act of extreme hubris, we proclaim our innocence and make believe we are not hiding. We are so lost, so spiritually sick as Maimonidies writes about, we have convinced ourselves as to our openness and our spiritual health! We proclaim our allegiance to God, to the principles of the Bible all the while we are hiding, we are obfuscating the truth, we are unwilling to own our part and be responsible-choosing to make the ‘other’ person at fault.

Our so-called ‘religious’ members of Congress do this by proclaiming erroneously that the Bible forbids abortion and yet, they refuse to help the needy, the poor; they continue to vilify the stranger and seek to make it harder and harder for people ‘not like them’ to vote! Rather than “proclaim freedom throughout the land and to all its inhabitants therein” they restrict freedom for another(s) and expand freedom for themselves because “this is what god wants”, I do not capitalize God here because they are idolators, charlatans, and their hiding from God is so odorous. It is frightening to witness how “grave” their hiding is and how their hiding reverberates throughout the world, into the worlds above.

Hiding is so embedded in the fabric of our being, we are so enmeshed in hiding that most of us are unable, unwilling to make ourselves aware of it. “What will the neighbors think” is a way of being that begins when we are children, “poor me” gives us the ‘right’ to take advantage of another(s) because we ‘deserve’ it. “What am I without money”, what am I without my status, my role” are phrases we learn at our family tables and in our schools, in our work life and in our religious institutions. Tevye, the milkman, says it perfectly: “when you’re rich they think you really know” to describe some of the benefits given to the wealthy. They get the best seats, they can show up when they want to, their voice is heard and followed regardless if it is true and appropriate precisely because we hide from God, we hide from one another, we hide from ourselves!

We have played the “hide and seek” game for so long and so well, we have lost our desire to “seek”. The “grave” situations we face in our world, will democracy hold fast or be overtaken by autocrats and their lies, will terrorists be believed and honored for their terrorism, their murders, their rape and capture of women and children, will “advice of counsel” continue to be more important than doing the next right thing, etc; are the direct result of our plunging into hiding. In the Shoah, people hid to survive and then were afraid to speak of their horrific experiences for fear of being shunned by the world, it took Elie Wiesel to break the silence. In the first sentence above, Rabbi Heschel is breaking the silence of our hiding, describing the serious concern we should have about the hiding we engage in now.

We, the people, have to uncover our hiding places through the practice of T’Shuvah, of doing our own inventory, of healing our fractured souls, of shutting up our intellects that give us the rationale to continue hiding. We have the path forward and, because of the deceivers mendacious lies about what the Bible says, how the Bible can show us a path to truth, to being open and to being free, we refuse to take the paths that God has given us. In recovery, we are no longer closed, we are open books, knowing that telling our stories of hiding can and does help another come into the light. Our being responsible for our errors, making public confessions, we reverse the errors of Adam and humanity, we begin the process of “trudging the road to happy destiny”, we are able to see and live into the purpose and passion our souls direct us to. Are you willing to come out of your hiding place and make rapprochement, healing or do you enjoy your stuckness? 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 147

“Man was the first to hide himself from God (Genesis 3:8), after having eaten of the forbidden fruit, and is still hiding (Job 13;20-24). The will of God is to be here, manifest and near; but when the doors of this world are slammed on Him, His truth betrayed, His will defied, He withdraws, leaving man to himself. God did not depart of His own volition; he was expelled. God is in exile. (Essential Writings pg. 91)

Rabbi Heschel’s teaching in the last two sentences above are startling, provocative, and extremely disturbing, as is his nature. We have faced this dilemma for the millennia and we continue to live in a manner where God is “expelled”. We suffer from “God is in exile” and are willfully blind to this truth as well as continuing to deceive ourselves that it is ‘someone else’s fault’, we even blame God rather than take responsibility for our expelling God from our manner of living.

I am studying the Books of Samuel with Hazzan Danny Maseng, we have gotten through 4 chapters of 1 Samuel. In it one can discern the civil war between Samuel and the children of Eli, the priest. In it, we experience Samuel being able to hear God, do God’s bidding and become the leader of the people Israel because the people realize that God ‘speaks’ to Samuel and he listens, he obeys, he welcomes God in. Just as in Exodus, God desires to “dwell among” us and it is we, the people, who continue to expel God, to send God into exile by slamming the doors on God’s will, bastardizing God’s truth and defying God’s call with such strength and self-deception that most of us are unaware of our actions.

We hear talk by clergy and laypeople of wanting a Christian Nation, of the United States being a Christian Nation, even though our constitution states otherwise. While the founding fathers had a deep faith, while they knew and called upon God’s truth, guidance and wisdom; they also knew that nations that were ‘religious nations’ had not, throughout history, supported freedom. God wants us to be free, God wants us to surrender from strength and follow God’s laws, God’s truth, and engage with one another in love, kindness, compassion, forgiveness and truth. Yet, the ‘religious people’ decide over and over again that only they know the truth, they continue to limit God’s will and God’s truth to their needs and their desires. While they proclaim their allegiance to God, their devotion to God’s will and truth, their actions belie the truth of their hunger for power, their incessant need to have “rule and dominion” over people for their gain, for their prestige, not for the sake of heaven.

In his book, God in Search of Man, Rabbi Heschel begins the book: “Religion declined not because it was refuted, but, because it became irrelevant, dull, oppressive, and insipid…when religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than with compassion, its message becomes meaningless.” This is how we have “expelled” God. We have made God, religion, all irrelevant in the lives of most people because we have turned God into an authority figure that is distant, angry, oppressive, lacking any flavor or taste. While the words of God, the words of Torah and the Bible are actually sweet and tasty in the mouths of humanity, we have turned them into words that taste like dust, that are bitter in our mouths and minds. This was and is being done by Clergy and laity alike.

God is very concerned with politics, as Rabbi Heschel states in his interview with Carl Stern. We also see this throughout the Bible, the Books of Samuel, the stories of King David, and, of course, by immersing ourselves in the books of the prophets. Yet, God’s politics are about how we treat one another; “one law for the citizen and the stranger alike”, “proclaim freedom throughout the land and to all it’s inhabitants therein”, the king should write the Torah himself and read it every day, care for the powerless and voiceless, redeem our kinsmen, etc. Not the politics of the religious right, not the politics of wielding power over our “enemies”, over anyone who doesn’t conform to our way of thinking, our one way should fit all of God’s will. Rather than have discourse and respect for another opinion, these idolators and charlatans have decided that women should be in the kitchen, as Katie Britt demonstrated, people of color should be subservient to white people, Jews are the cause of all the problems we have in the world, anti-semitism and mendacity about Jews is actually the way to be, Muslims are foreign and terrorists, etc.

It is time for us to recover the handles of the doors “of this world” that we have “slammed on Him” and open them up. We have to unlock the doors of our hearts, souls, and minds to the call of God that emanates each and every day throughout the world. We have to take the cotton out of our ears and hear the cry of the poor and the stranger, respond to the call of the needy and the captive. We have to, in other words, be In Recovery! Our individual souls are crying out in pain and we cover it with pills and psychiatry rather than seek a spiritual solution. We are being called to invite God into our being, into our decision making, into our relationships and we need to recover our strength to hear and act on these calls. We are desperate for connection to something greater than ourselves and we have lost the language and the belief that God wants us back, even though the prophets proclaim this truth. We need to recover our ability to surrender in truth, to accept God’s love and Good Orderly Direction and feel uplifted rather than beaten down. We do this when we invite God back in, when we open the doors of possibility and connection, when we respond to the calls of God and another(s) with compassion and caring. 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 146

“Man was the first to hide himself from God (Genesis 3:8), after having eaten of the forbidden fruit, and is still hiding (Job 13;20-24). The will of God is to be here, manifest and near; but when the doors of this world are slammed on Him, His truth betrayed, His will defied, He withdraws, leaving man to himself. God did not depart of His own volition; he was expelled. God is in exile. (Essential Writings pg. 91)

“His truth betrayed, His will defied, He withdraws, leaving man to himself” is a frightening phrase for all of humanity. We, the people, have to reconcile our actions with Rabbi Heschel’s words of wisdom. He is speaking from a historical and global viewpoint as well as a personal and current perspective. While I believe that God is always near, as the prophets teach, as our psalmist sings, we, the people, have to look at ourselves as individuals and communities to see how we have betrayed God’s truth, how we have defied God’s will.

When left to our own devices, we can see throughout history what has happened; war, famine, slavery, etc. Our situation today is bleak because people in power, both governmentally and personally, religiously and economically, have engaged in such mendacity that we are hard-pressed to discern God’s truth from our lies, we seem incapable of understanding the simplicity of God’s will and have substituted our lust for power, wealth, prestige, for the will of God. In other words, we are left to ourselves because we want to be alone, we want to not be accountable, we want to suffer and indulge in our spiritual maladies. How is this possible?

I agree with Rabbi Heschel’s teaching above, God withdraws because we forsake the covenant we have made with God and God has made with us. The psalmist sings of his/our despair, our fear of another and how the only path is to ask for God’s help to face the inner and outer demons we face daily. The prophet calls upon us to return, to end our false sacrifices, our false piety and prayer and surrender our oversized, out of proportion egos to God’s will and to end our mendacity. Yet, some of our clergy preach ‘prosperity gospel’, some of our clergy preach human retribution and annihilation as God’s will, some leaders preach authoritarianism, Christian nationalism, Sharia law as God’s truth, some business say it is ‘dog eat dog’, etc, all the while conveniently forgetting God’s call for Tshuvah, God’s call for caring for those less fortunate, God’s will “proclaim freedom throughout the land and to all its inhabitants therein”.

In Exodus, God’s will is to build a way of living that allows “God to dwell among us/in us”, yet we continually build structures to keep God out of our daily living. We preach the falsehoods and lies of “only I can fix it”, that politics should blind the eyes of the righteous and pervert justice, that people can and are bribed to go along to get along. We have no use for God’s truth unless it goes along with what we want and if it doesn’t, we can find a verse, a phrase out of context to validate our desires. We can find a priest, Rabbi, Imam, minister to preach our way of thinking because they fear for their positions rather than fearing for their mendacity. We say the shareholders have to be satisfied more than caring for the customer and what our product does to the psyche and spirit as well as physical well-being of people. We believe the lies and distortions of politicians rather than what we see with our own eyes because we have defied God so often, so completely, we believe the false gods we have created; we believe and follow the words of those who tear goodness down; rather than hear and obey God’s will for us to live together in ‘peace’; rather than the lamb lie down with the lion we believe the lion should eat the lamb!

Left to our own devices because of our denial of God’s truth, our defiance of God’s will, we have wrought a world that no longer cares about the voiceless and the powerless, a world where Pharaoh(Putin, Orban, Netanyahu, Religious zealots) is celebrated and Moses (those who love democracy, who care about their enemies, seek freedom for all) is denigrated. We are living in a world where justice is no longer blind, it can be bought. We have created a world where a woman is chattel, a person’s individuality is seen as rebellion, there are ‘alternative facts’, the Bible and all Holy Texts have become weapons. False prophets and false redeemers are elevated to holy people and the epitome of holiness by the idolatrous priests, rabbis, imams and ministers. We are a spiritually sick world that is so blind and so stuck we believe we are healthy!

Rabbi Heschel’s words and teachings from 70+ years ago have not been heeded because he was an inconvenient prophet, a thorn in the side of ‘religious people’ as well as ‘regular people’. He is calling out to us, warning us, revealing truth to us and we do not want to hear it. We are more defiant of God, we are more impervious to God’s truth today than when these words were written. Seeing how sick we are, isn’t it time to surrender to God’s will, to imbibe God’s truth? Isn’t it time to recover our covenantal relationship with God rather than shred it? We, the people have to join the revolution to recover God’s truth, to carry out God’s will so we can fulfill our duty to make the world a better place than when we found it. We have to heal our spiritual maladies, as Maimonidies teaches, so we can live with one another rather than against one another. We have to circumcise the foreskins of our hearts so love can come in and flow out, we have to take the cataracts off our eyes so we can see the beauty of another soul, recognize the divine reminder each person is, and our best to live God’s truth and will out loud 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 145

“Man was the first to hide himself from God (Genesis 3:8), after having eaten of the forbidden fruit, and is still hiding (Job 13;20-24). The will of God is to be here, manifest and near; but when the doors of this world are slammed on Him, His truth betrayed, His will defied, He withdraws, leaving man to himself. God did not depart of His own volition; he was expelled. God is in exile. (Essential Writings pg. 91)

Rabbi Heschel’s teaching in the second sentence above is the bane of our existence. While it was certainly true 70+ years ago, it is even more true today. Humanity suffers from EGO, easing God out, in massive proportions and it doesn’t seem to phase most people. In fact, I would posit that most people are unaware of their perpetrating this most harmful of actions.

In Deuteronomy, Moses says: “The word is very near to you, in your mouth, in your heart, that you may do it.” He also reminds us that not hearing God, ignoring God for other gods, will bring about the end of our humanity. He says: “I have given you both blessing and curse, life and death, choose life!” Yet, we humans continue to distort his words, God’s will, and our own importance. Our EGO’s have become so out of proportion, that we have deluded ourselves into believing we are ‘doing God’s will’ all the while we are doing the will of false gods, doing the will of our intellects, doing the will of our Yetzer Hara which is out of proper measure. We cry out to God on days of remembrance, like Easter, Passover, Shavuot, Yom Kippur and then quickly forget our cries and how they are answered, especially if we don’t like the answer. We have taken the will of God that is “here, manifest and near” and twisted it, bastardized it for our power rather than for the glory of God.

“The doors of this world are slammed on Him” every time we vilify the stranger. Every time we treat another person as a non-entity, someone having less value than us, enslave them through actual slavery, paying less that a living wage, exploiting their talents for our glory, we slam the doors on God. Every time we engage in cursing one another, cursing the planet/nature, through acting as if we are the end all/be all, as if we know what is best and right, we slam the doors on God. Each time we use religion to reign over another human being, each time we lie about what the Bible, the New Testament, the Koran actually says, we slam the door on God. Each time we mumble the word that is “in your mouth, in your heart” we slam the doors on God. Each time we forget the lessons of the past, each time we ignore Moses’ call to Choose Life, we slam the doors on God. Each time we lie, deceive, anoint false prophets, we slam the door on God. Each time we celebrate the authoritarian drive in each of us, we slam the doors on God. As you can see, we are slamming the doors on God often, with regularity, and without even realizing we are. We have become so good at mendacity, we practice indifference with such skill, that we have become inured to the evil we perpetrate and the myriad of ways “the doors of this world are slammed on Him”.

Hearing the words of Moses in the context of Rabbi Heschel’s brilliance gives me pause and alarm. Our clergy are supposed to lead us “to the promised land” just as the priests of antiquity were called to do, yet they/we seem to be leading us back into a myriad of Egypts, into narrow places within which there is no room to maneuver, no space to turn around in. It seems ironic that the people who are supposed to be called to help us experience God’s will that is “here, manifest, near” are some of the people leading us away from this experience so they can impose their will, not God’s, upon us! We do not need Christian Nationalism as our form of government, we do not need to live under Shariah law, we do not need to live under Jewish law as these fundamentalists want us to, as these charlatans desire and work hard for us to be under their thumbs-this is not God’s will. The destruction of the Kingdom of Israel, of Judea twice, are prime examples of what happens when liars and charlatans take power under the guise of “God’s will” and really are slamming the doors on God. We have historical lessons from Spain, from the Ottoman Empire, etc, no country has survived that gave control over to the radical fundamentalists of any tradition. Since there are 70 “faces” to the Hebrew Bible, it is impossible to have a one-size fits all, to know exactly what God wants, except for connection, for our allegiance to decency, kindness, truth, freedom!

I am calling out Clergy, elected officials of our country, leaders of the “free world” and people of all countries to stop slamming the doors on God! I am calling all of us out to recover the words of Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha, Plato, Socrates, etc and open our mouths to speak the truth from our souls, from out hearts. I am calling us all to task to heed Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom, to live into his brilliance and follow his teachings. Rabbi Heschel’s words above and in every sentence he wrote, in every action he took are roadmaps, pathways to recovering the essence of being human; they allow us to follow the wisdom of the Kotzker Rebbe: we find God “wherever and whenever we let God in” to our daily living. Recovery begins with acknowledgement that we are not God, the first commandment teaches us, in my words: “God is God and I’m not-Thank God!”. This humility will help us all open the doors we have “slammed on Him” and bring us to a new freedom and a new connection with one another, a respect for our different ways of seeing and implementing God’s word and will instead of fighting to implement our own words and will. It will lessen the mendacity and self-deception we put into our world and, possibly, find more ways to live together in peaceful co-existence. 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 144

“Man was the first to hide himself from God (Genesis 3:8), after having eaten of the forbidden fruit, and is still hiding (Job 13;20-24). The will of God is to be here, manifest and near; but when the doors of this world are slammed on Him, His truth betrayed, His will defied, He withdraws, leaving man to himself. God did not depart of His own volition; he was expelled. God is in exile. (Essential Writings pg. 91)

Taking in the first sentence above should cause us great alarm as well as crumble the facade and mendacity humanity has built up over the millennia that God hides, that God has withdrawn from the world. It is humanity that is hiding, from the first error Adam made till now with all of our errors, our missing the marks. We blame God for being too distant and no longer interested in the works of humanity, many so-called ‘religious people’ blame the secular ones, the infidels for God’s withdrawing from our world rather than take responsibility for the hiding all of us do.

Our hiding is so subtle, most of us are unaware of how we hide from both God and our own inner life, our spiritual core. Our hiding begins early on when we deny wrongdoing because we don’t want to be ‘punished’, when we seem incapable of being responsible for our actions. We hide, as Adam did, because we refuse to learn from our errors, we are afraid of doing T’Shuvah, taking inventory, and repairing any and all damage we have done to the world, to another human being, to ourselves. Rather than “failing forward”, we keep falling backward into denial, blame of another, etc. We are so stuck in our hiding that we even blame God for our malice, our cruelty, our inhumane ways of treating one another. “Nothing happens in God’s world by accident”, “God loves the rich and successful and doesn’t love the poor and needy as much” are two lines we hear often from the people who hide the best. “They brought this upon themselves and this is God’s retribution”, is another phrase that ‘proves’ God is punishing the people who are downtrodden, who need help and care. “God loves me and not you”, hence I am successful, “I can enslave you, making more profit on your back is just me using my God-given talents and smarts to succeed, it is what God wants” gives some people the right to take advantage of the power they have and even turn democracies into autocracies.

We hide from our spouses, our significant others, we hide from our children and our employers, we hide from our employees and our friends. We hide from our clergy and they from us. Hiding is the appropriated state of humanity, it seems, since the time of Adam. Hiding from God allows us to hide from everyone, hiding from God allows us to do what we want to and use/blame God depending on the situation. Hiding from God has been and continues to commit us to a slow death while we are alive. Our hiding from God, from family, friends, causes us great angst, that we have decided to call mental illness, we have decided to call it depression, anxiety, bi-polar, etc. While these conditions do exist and need medical treatment, they are diagnosed much more often than medically sound! They are used as an excuse for our hiding from God, they are used as a pap for our hiding from one another, and the solution, therapy and pills, do not deal with the underlying cause: a spiritual malady caused by our hiding from God!

Maimonidies in his “Eight Chapters” cites the differences between medical healing and spiritual healing. While we may not agree with all of his conclusions, the thrust of this book is to educate us on the spiritual health/sickness we all may suffer from. When we believe we are not worthy, this is a spiritual malady; when we believe we are more worthy than anyone else, this is a spiritual malady; when we believe we are meant to have “rule and dominion” over another, another group of people, we are suffering from a spiritual malady; when we believe that the color of our skin, the ‘faith or non-faith’ we ‘practice’ makes us better suited to hold power and ‘those people’ have to be subjugated to ‘our way of being’, we are deeply ensconced in our spiritual malady. We have taken hiding to such a level that we have become blind to the truth, we have become ignorant of God’s will, we are delusional as to our ‘nearness to God’. Yet, we continue to live into our hiding and our delusions, we continue to believe that anyone who helped us who we now have to step on, it is God’s will for us to be disloyal to principles, to values, to people, to God. We continue to shout our loyalty to God, our adhering to the rituals, the dogma all the while betraying the Covenant, ignoring the call of the prophets, refusing to take responsibility and fiddling while the world burns from climate change, from authoritarianism, from our hiding.

Rabbi Heschel’s brilliance in the first sentence above shakes me to my core. I have spent the past 35+ years not hiding, not blaming my hiding on God, on another. I continue to take responsibility for my actions and accept the actions of another. Yet, I continue to be crushed when people hide from me, when I experience what I thought was real and true actually be a facade that was really, really good. This is what we all need recovery from: hiding and believing our facades are real. We all need to recover from our spiritual malady and the first step on this path is to admit we are spiritually ill, we are hiding from God, from the people around us, and this hiding causes great pain and harm to another, to God, and to ourselves. The next right action is to open ourselves up to God’s healing power as the prophets teach and proclaim to us; Hosea calls out to us that no matter how many times we have committed adultery, no matter how many times we have prostituted ourselves, God is ready to accept us back, God desires us to return. I know this to be true from my history and the experiences of so many people I have encountered in helping them recover their spiritual health. 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 143

“We have trifled with the name of God. We have taken ideals in vain, preached and eluded Him, praised and defied Him. Now, we reap the fruits of failure. Through centuries His voice cried in the wilderness. How skillfully it was trapped and imprisoned in Temples! How thoroughly distorted!” (Essential Writings pg. 90)

“Now, we reap the fruits of failure” is truer today than when Rabbi Heschel wrote these words. Then, as now, his words must have been dismissed, thought to be hyperbole, many were basking in the glow of victory over the Nazis in the Second World War, while fearful of Russia believed in the might and right of America, Israel was a State again, the baby boom was on, etc. Yet, Rabbi Heschel, in his prophetic eyesight, could see how we were reaping the “fruits of failure” of our religious institutions, our moral deficiencies, of our bastardization of God’s Name, God’s will, God’s path for us. Today, we hear how “skillfully” God’s will and God’s name has been “trapped and imprisoned in Temples” and how God’s name and God’s will is used for reaping “the fruits of failure”.

We have more poverty at a time when there is such great wealth in the world, we have more mendacity when truth would serve us better, we have more hatred when love is talked about so much, we have more moral decay when the Bible is used as a weapon when it preaches love, kindness, forgiveness, community. We are witnessing and participating in the failure of humanity to hear God’s voice as it “cried in the wilderness” of yesterday and still cries out to us today. God is calling to us from Mount Sinai, from our Temples and our Churches, our Mosques and our homes, from our souls and yet, we continue to imprison it with our intellects and rationalizations. Our clergy fail us too often, our teachers fail us too often, even our parents fail us.

Our clergy fail us, in many cases, from their fear of their congregants, parishioners, boards. To speak the truth, to end our trifling “with the name of God”, to embrace and praise God, rather than eluding and defying God calls for a deep sense of courage, of outrage, of overcoming the fear of ‘losing our positions’ of being the Kohanim that God calls us to be in the Bible. Rather than speak the words of the prophets, rather than call out the name of Jesus, our clergy have to have a renaissance of spirit, to allow their souls and their morality to overcome their desire for political power, their wanting to keep their ‘job’ while missing the call from God. We, clergy, have to willing to follow the examples of the prophets, of Jesus, of Moses, et al, and stand up for truth, stand against the desecration of God’s name, we have to end our taking “ideals in vain” and stand with God instead of trying to make God stand with us. We have to be spiritual leaders and spiritual healers, rather than spiritual charlatans offering pap to the needy while catering to the wealthy, to the powerful. We have to end our crusade to ‘be the only way’ and embrace all paths to God knowing that there is no path that fits all people. We, the clergy, have to do our own T’Shuvah, our own Chesbon HaNefesh, accounting of our souls, then make our amends and find our way back to serving God rather than a board, be willing to go to jail like Jeremiah and the Berrigan brothers and Dr. King, attend the protests against mendacity, against immorality, against Godliness as Rabbi Heschel, Rabbi Prinz, and so many others did.

Our institutions of learning are no longer free to teach the whole story. In colleges and universities students no longer go to learn about life, to discover the vast wealth of knowledge of history, science, religion, humanities, they go to get trained and indoctrinated. In some places learning about the abject horrors of slavery and holding those slaveowners to account is verboten, against the law! In some places ignoring the truth about Hamas and how often they have failed to say YES to a deal for the return of hostages and a cease-fire is de rigueur, learning how many times the Palestinians turned down a deal for a two-state solution is forgotten. In our schools today, active shooter drills are commonplace and many schools are waiting for the next shooting, praying it won’t be on their campus’ while extolling the bastardization of the 2nd Amendment.

We “reap the fruits of failure” in our families as well. We have forgotten to raise our children’s spiritual life while concentrating on their physical, intellectual, and mental health growth. We are reaping these “fruits of failure” by the apathy, the attachment to lies and deception that the internet and social media have created, and the focus on “getting mine” that has overtaken our world-both with children and parents. Raising our children to be decent human beings who care for the needy, welcome the stranger, treat each person as a divine reminder, has been lost in our quest for ‘success’, for ‘enlightenment’, etc.

We, the people, are in desperate need of recovering our hearing and our eyesight, of healing our spiritual “holes in our souls” so God’s voice isn’t unheard anymore in the wilderness. We need to remember that we have to build a “Mikdash”, a place within us and our community so that “God dwells among us” is a call that was made in Exodus and is still being called out today. We have to open our ears and our eyes, our hearts and our minds to more than what we can readily see, hear, feel and think and follow the calls of Rabbi Heschel, the prophets, Dr. King and Thomas Merton, the Dalai Lama and the Hasidic Masters, Moses and Jesus: CHOOSE LIFE. We, the people, have to stop choosing death and curse, we need to be blessed and bless others so we can reap the fruits of our success at being human. This is my quest and I pray it is yours! 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 142

“We have trifled with the name of God. We have taken ideals in vain, preached and eluded Him, praised and defied Him. Now, we reap the fruits of failure. Through centuries His voice cried in the wilderness. How skillfully it was trapped and imprisoned in Temples! How thoroughly distorted!” (Essential Writings pg. 90)

Continuing to understand and implement Rabbi Heschel’s teaching in the second sentence above, I believe it is incumbent upon us to ask ourselves if our preaching and our praising are just deceptive ways of hiding from our eluding and defying God, as Rabbi Heschel teaches us. Taking in his words and rebuke of us, hopefully, forces us to take stock of our self-deceptions, our believing in the mendacity and deceptions of another(s), and return to the spirit of one of the paths towards decency, faith, and living in community that the Bible gives us.

Yet, in the last 70+ years, our preaching has gotten more subtle in its hiding from and eluding God, our praise has covered over our defying of God so well most of us are unaware of it. We hear preachers extolling Christ while preaching ‘prosperity gospel’, we listen to Rabbis engage in the minutia of Talmudic reasoning while forgetting and/or ignoring God’s call to us through Isaiah-don’t bring me your sacrifices, take the actions that uphold the dignity of every human being, we hear Imams speak of Allah Akbar, while promoting inhumane actions through terrorism, through prejudice, etc. God eludes so many of our Clergy, in all faith traditions, because we are so deeply ensconced in our self-deceptions, we have learned to spout mendacity from their teachers, we have made being a member of the Clergy a career rather than a calling. We are held captive to a board of directors, we are called out when we speak truth by the people in the pews who do not want to look at themselves. The easy solution is to blame the Clergy, the more difficult and responsible solution is to look inside ourselves and do our own inventory, take our own responsibility and make the changes we need to make so we end our “preaching to the choir” of people seeking to elude God and instead speak the hard truths of change, of reconnection to the principles of the Bible, and seek new responses for the myriad of life’s challenges we face.

When we sing Hallelujah in our churches and temples all the while thinking about our business life, our economic woes/fears, our belief in fearing the stranger, blaming the victims of need, wrapping ourselves in the literal word of the Bible to validate our ignoring the poor, we are defying God. When we use the goodness of another as a weapon against them, we are defying God. When we use the vulnerabilities of another against them, we are being evil and defying God. When we believe our privilege gives us a pass rather than making us more obligated, we are defying God. When we forget our being chosen as a birthright rather than accept the obligation to fulfill what we are chosen for, we are defying God. When we continue to use the words of praise and gratitude while crossing the street because we see a person different than us, when we ignore the beggar who is in need, when we ask for God’s help and deny helping our fellow human beings, we are defying God.

Yet, we seem to be incapable of accepting our two-faced ways of being. We seem to be incapable of looking in the mirror at our own mendacity, we seem to be incapable of accepting and admitting the ways we preach while eluding God and God’s will; the paths we choose so we make ourselves feel good by praising God while defying God’s call to us. Yet, we can hear Rabbi Heschel’s words and wisdom anew today. We can and must end our eluding and defying of God, of God’s will, of God’s call to us. We, the people, must look inside of ourselves and end our wonderful words of preaching while taking actions that elude God’s will, God’s teachings, the words of Moses and Christ, the actions of the prophets. We have to admit our errors, we have to do our T’Shuvah and end our deceptions, both of self and another(s), we have to make our amends to those we have harmed, and we have to change both our actions and end our desire to engage in deceiving ourselves. We, the people, have to call out the charlatans in all faith traditions, in all either/or thinking in politics, economics, religions, social media, etc. We, the people, have to call out one another when our preaching and praising eludes and defies with love and strength. We, the people, have to demand of our leaders in all walks of life truth, concern, making sure they enhance freedom for “all the inhabitants therein”, holding them to account that all people who live within our borders are part of “all the inhabitants therein” regardless of race, religion, gender, who they love, etc. We have to throw out of office the people who ‘get off’ by denigrating their enemies, lying to their people, promoting their personal agendas over what is best for the people. We have to stand up for God, we have to stop hiding from and making our falseness an altar we seem to relish worshiping at.

Rabbi Heschel’s call to us is a call that is directed to each and everyone of us. While it is easy to blame the Clergy, the political system, I hear Rabbi Heschel asking me what I am doing in my life that promotes bastardizing ideals, preaching and praising. I look at the times I praised someone so I could fleece them, prior to my recovery, prior to my return to God’s path for me. I look at the times people praised me while defying the teachings, the moments where people preached bullshit so they could elude God and responsibility. I am watching the lies of Netanyahu, Trump and their cronies/allies, the mendacity of ADL in honoring Jared Kushner, and wonder how we have fallen so far. I pray we hear Rabbi Heschel’s words and answer his call to change. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 141

“We have trifled with the name of God. We have taken ideals in vain, preached and eluded Him, praised and defied Him. Now, we reap the fruits of failure. Through centuries His voice cried in the wilderness. How skillfully it was trapped and imprisoned in Temples! How thoroughly distorted!” (Essential Writings pg. 90)

Rabbi Heschel could be describing this moment and, I believe, this is the wonder and awe of his prophetic voice. We live at a time where our awareness of the myriad of ways “we have taken ideals in vain” seems to elude us. We hear and spout ourselves great ideals of democracy, of freedom, of faith, and then bastardize them to the greatest extent we can, all the while extolling our faithfulness to them! The word vain comes from the Latin meaning “empty, without substance” and one English definition is “useless, producing no result”. This is such an apt description of what so many people do with  the ‘ideals’ they espouse. We see this in our government, in our institutions of higher learning, in our ‘religious’ institutions, in our families, communities, etc.

As a Jew, the hatred that is happening in the world today against Jews by other people who experience hatred because of the color of their skin, because of their sexual orientation, is appalling, a sense of betrayal, a bewilderment. The extolling of Hamas under the guise of “freedom fighters” and they “care so much about the Palestinians and the people of Gaza” makes me want to scream, shout, knock some sense into these ‘well-intentioned’ idiots! Hamas, Radical Islam would kill LGBTQ+ people like dogs in the street, they massacred Jewish and non-Jewish young people at a concert dedicated to peace, they killed babies, raped women, and people validate their actions under the ideal of ‘freedom’; while Hamas and their Iranian puppet masters do not want anyone to be free! If this isn’t taking an “ideal in vain”, what is? Because they wrap themselves in what are Biblical ideals, calls from God without acknowledging where their ideals come from, the progressives like Tliab, Omar, Bowman, are all able to forget who marched with their ancestors for freedom and civil rights, who has stood for these ideals in all their affairs and, instead, abuse the Jews rather than speak about their issues with the government of Israel, with the ways Hamas has imprisoned the people of Gaza, etc. Because they are taking “ideals in vain” they cannot see the forest for the trees, they cannot acknowledge the both/and of this situation, and they are unable/unwilling to see a path forward that doesn’t mean Israel’s destruction as a Jewish State.

The evangelicals and other right-wing religious groups, including right-wing Jews, spout their love of God and of Christ, their adherence to the ways of the Bible, the New Testament, all the while the ways they act out their ‘ideals’ is “empty, lacking in substance” and they produce none of the results that Biblical ideals point us to. Rather than finding ways to live together in harmony, if not peace, these so-called ‘religious’ people bastardize the words of Christ and the Bible to “love your neighbor as you love yourself”, to “not hate your brother in your heart”, to “care for the stranger, the poor, the needy, the widow, the orphan”, they seek to divide us, they seek to bar and blame the stranger from our midst-up to an including Jews who they consider the strangest and the most culpable for societal ills, they continue to criminalize poverty and blame the poor people for their poverty because, in some circles, they say the people are unloved by God! While Biblical tradition says the gates of repentance are always open, the prophet calls us to return to the fold because God “will heal our backsliding and take us back in love”, these charlatans continue to make a life of faith into a theocracy with them being the autocrats in charge!

We, the people, have to end taking “ideals in vain” and admit that we may never achieve these ideals and we are not free to cease our pursuit of them. We, the people, have to end the tyranny of the left, of the right, and bring America, Israel, and, hopefully, the world away from the fringes, away from either end of the spectrum. This is not just a political necessity, this is a spiritual one as well. Without our acknowledgement that we will never be perfect, that the institutions we create to solve the dilemmas facing us will always make errors, that the people who create solutions to the problems we face will always have clay feet and show their imperfections, we can never truly move forward in getting closer to the “ideals” we hold dear. We, the people, have to take back our institutions from the ‘perfectionists’, from the people who erroneously believe ‘they can do no wrong’, from perpetrating the myth that the fact we have “taken ideals in vain” is okay because we are doing it. After all, the Supreme Court is taking a ridiculous case where someone says they are above the law because of their status, after all, justice for the wealthy is different than justice for the middle class and poor, health treatment is different depending on one’s economic status, etc. Yet, the “ideal” is “proclaim liberty throughout the land and to all its inhabitants therein”, it is “justice is blind”, it is “everyone an Image of God” and deserves their dignity respected and to be considered as having infinite worth. Seems like we have fallen way short of these ideals, hence the proof of Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom above.

We, the people, need to recover our essence of being, our basic goodness of being, our purpose for being created and alive. We have to surrender our false egos, stop taking our souls to the beauty shop so we look good on the outside. Each morning I wake up and say a prayer of gratitude to God for “returning my soul to me with compassion”, knowing today is new, I am fresh and I have to return to pursuit of God’s ideals, be one grain of sand better today and practice the ideals above a little more! God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi

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

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 140

“We have trifled with the name of God. We have taken ideals in vain, preached and eluded Him, praised and defied Him. Now, we reap the fruits of failure. Through centuries His voice cried in the wilderness. How skillfully it was trapped and imprisoned in Temples! How thoroughly distorted!” (Essential Writings pg. 90)

Immersing ourselves in Rabbi Heschel’s words above, knowing they are from 70+ years ago, looking at our world today, one can only wonder what has prevented humanity from hearing, heeding, engaging in his teachings. Considering Rabbi Heschel is calling out to our ancestors, our family trees, and they discarded his words, failed to take action on them, is there any wonder we find ourselves in the predicament both globally and individually that we are in?

The first sentence above describes the idolatry of many so-called ‘religious’ people who use “the name of God” to validate their selfishness, their drive for power, their desire to enslave everyone to bow down to them, not God. Whether it is legislating a women’s health care away from it being her decision, keeping ‘those people’ in their place, denying the freedom of whichever group they are afraid of, continuing to build gates and walls to keep the stranger far from our borders and homes, ignoring the plight of the homeless, blaming the victim, etc these ‘religious’ people invoke “the name of God” as their reasoning.

The word “trifle” means “a thing of little value or importance” in the Oxford Dictionary and comes from the French meaning “deceit, mock, deceive”. Rabbi Heschel’s first sentence above can be understood to be saying that We have mocked, deceived, engaged in deceit with the name of God! This is a frightening statement and one which would make everyone who engages in this deceit want to hide, deny and defame the truth of Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom. While he is writing in his time, he is also writing from a historical view as well as a prophetic view. What he claims is happening in the 1950’s is happening on steroids right now!

Be it politicians, Rabbis, Priests, Imams, Ministers, all have engaged in this deceit regarding what they say in “the name of God.” We have listened to these ‘spiritual leaders’ denigrate their neighbor instead of loving them, defile the words of Christ instead of feeding the poor, ignore the call of Moses to “choose life”, etc. We are witnesses to the mendacity of ‘being chosen’ as some privilege rather than an obligation. Any use of “the name of God” that is not accompanied with the laundry list of obligations that God demands of us, is by its very nature, deceitful. Any use of “the name of God” that doesn’t bind us to love, kindness, truth, compassion, rebuke, is, by its very nature a mockery of God’s name! Yet, we continue to use “the name of God” to deceive and to mock, to add followers to our folly, to create and propagate the myth of mist that says what is “in the name of God” according to our Holy Texts is false, only what they say is truly spoken “in the name of God.” This is the how and why of the disdain of religion is so prevalent in our society today-people are tired of mendacity, they are tired of hearing falseness and our spiritual homes very rarely truly teach the truthful words of God and our obligation to fulfill them.

We also see how “we have trifled with the name of God” in our homes and families. When parents teach their children that “god will punish you”, when Santa Clause doesn’t visit or give gifts to “the naughty”, when speaking of Jesus dying for their sins rather than living to teaching us to help one another, when Moses is seen as only angry rather than concerned, when rebuke is seen as a negative rather than an expression of deep faith in one’s ability to change, we are engaging in deceit, using “the name of God” to control our children, our neighbors, etc. We make a mockery of “the name of God” when we say ‘all you have to do is be reborn through a new baptism’, all you have to do is ‘convert to our way/sect/denomination and all your troubles will disappear’, and other such poppycock. We “trifle with the name of God” when we invoke God’s name to injure, diminish, harm, dismiss the image of God another person is created in, when we go along with the authoritarians who want to deny the Holocaust, who engage in anti-semitism, racism, islamaphobia, hatred of any kind. We “trifle with the name of God” when we attempt to define God, when we spout our understanding of God’s words and will as the only truth. When we define God, we are limiting God, thereby using “the name of God” to do our will instead of the other way around.

In recovery, we seek to reverse our trifling with “the name of God” and return to reverence for God, for “the name of God”. Yet, even in recovery, we deceive ourselves into believing that whatever is happening in our lives, in our world is God’s will- wrong! In my recovery, each and every day I seek to discern what is God’s will and what is my will; making sure I speak out and up(often too loudly for most) when evil/wrongdoing is happening; not letting the ‘little’ lies, deceits, happen because they are no big deal-they are a big deal. I commit each day since Dec.1986 to not make a mockery or “trifle with the name of God” ever again. 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 139

“We live in an age when most of us have ceased to be shocked by the increasing breakdown in moral inhibitions. The decay of conscience fills the air with a pungent smell. Good and evil, which were once as distinguishable as day and night, have become a blurred mist. But that mist is man-made. God is not silent. He has been silenced.” (Essential Writings pg. 90)

The last three sentences above send chills up and down my spine and my soul cries out for me to cut through “that mist is man-made.” They cause me and, hopefully, everyone to look at the myriad of subtle ways we add to the mist that causes good and evil to become so mixed up. Because of the pull of self-deception and our desire to be deceived, we make up stories that are not true, believe ‘facts’ that are false, allow feelings to become facts, and seek all manners of escapes from truth, reality, commitment, obligation, and God.

Our political process is one such “mist is man-made”, we have become so oblivious to the truth that the “spin doctors” are believed as truth tellers. We believe the falseness of the right-wing and left-wing commentators even though we know, deep in the recesses of our minds and our souls, what they are saying is not truth. While there may be some true things in what they are saying, they use the truth to tell lies, to ‘hook’ us into their conspiracies and their ‘side’. Both of these ‘wings’ are authoritarian, both use God as justifications, both allow alliances to be destroyed unless people go along with the lies they tell themselves and everyone else. This is one of the ways we have silenced God.

In our faith traditions, people continue to tell us what God wants all the while denying the foundational texts of their faith. 36 times in the Torah we are told to welcome the stranger, help the poor and the needy yet, many ‘religious’ Jews speak despairingly about people of another faith, people of different ethnicities, and bastardize the very teachings they claim to be the guardians of! They continually tell us ‘what God wants’ and in doing so, they are creating more “mist” and silencing God’s voice in favor of their own. Jesus never talks about abortion, he never says to make women less than men, he washes the feet of the stranger, he feeds the poor-yet so many ‘good christians’ have bastardized his words and silenced his voice in favor of their own “mist”-making and, again, silenced God with their own voice.

It is very difficult to cut through the “mist” that is “man-made”, it is very difficult to hear God amid the noise of our minds and inner life. Yet, we can do both when we are willing to be in truth, when we are willing to take the time to discern what is good and what is evil. We, the people, need the help of God’s voice, God’s teachings, to make these discernments and, we continue to believe in the superiority of our voices, of our thoughts. Seeing the world as it is, cutting through the “mist” is the path to freedom, it is the pathway to wholeness, it is the pathway to holiness.

We are told in Leviticus: “you shall be holy because I, the Lord, am holy”. I this commentary about this verse, Ramban says we need to hear this and take this in because it is possible to be a “scoundrel within the bounds of the Torah” and therefore we need to be told/reminded that holiness is our path, holiness is something that we already have within us and our job is to grow our holy soul so we do not create more “mist”, so we do not substitute our voice for God’s voice, so we end our incessant need to silence God.

We have witnessed throughout the millennia a myriad of ways people of all stripes and kinds have been “scoundrels” within the ‘law of the land’. In our recent history, we can look to Hitler and the Nazi’s who made the law of the land fit their desires with little or no pushback from the German people nor the clergy. We are witnessing here in the United States how the right-wing ‘fringe’ have taken over the Republican Party and even the Supreme Court is siding with them! Mike Johnson, Marjorie Taylor-Greene, Rashida Tliab, and other members of Congress do everything they can to create more “mist” as a smoke screen to the truth, which is always messy. They continue to validate their points of view without ever seeking to see or hear the ‘rest of the story’. Trump and his thugs have taken “mist” making to whole new level, the media constantly denigrate Joe Biden for being 81 years old-a discrimination that even the progressives go along with, Netanyahu and his band of so-called religious parties have tried to make the legal process in Israel subservient to the political. Iran, Russia, China, and many other countries have legal systems and religious systems that are jokes. Yet, all claim to be speaking in the name of God-all speak only in the name of their self-interest which is the exact opposite of God’s call to us. Many people have silenced God because of the ways of these so-called ‘religious’ people.

In recovery, I and my fellow travelers recapture God’s call, we take the cotton out of our ears, we take the blinders off our eyes, we open our hearts and silence the constant noise of our heads so we can discern what is truth and what is good separating from the lies we have told ourselves, the deceptions of another we have bought into, and the evil we have perpetrated prior to our recovery. I have spent the past 35+ years undoing the evil I did, letting go of the self-deceptions and lies I bought into. I still make mistakes, I just don’t have to lie about them, I don’t hide from being who I am, as messy as this is. I have encountered many people who want to keep the “mist” as thick as they can so they can hide from themselves and everyone else their errors, their betrayals and, in doing so continue to silence God. Isn’t it time to end our “mist” making ways? 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 138

“We live in an age when most of us have ceased to be shocked by the increasing breakdown in moral inhibitions. The decay of conscience fills the air with a pungent smell. Good and evil, which were once as distinguishable as day and night, have become a blurred mist. But that mist is man-made. God is not silent. He has been silenced.” (Essential Writings pg. 90)

Rabbi Heschel’s teaching above about “Good and evil” are as true today as they were when he wrote them some 73+ years ago! It seems as if society has lost its ability to distinguish between them. While it had “become a blurred mist” then, it seems as if they have become so blended together it is more difficult to distinguish them, it is  more like the early evening sky than only a “blurred mist”. Every one seems to have their own belief and understanding of what is “good and evil”, people proclaim their way is the only right way, what we learn in the Bible, what we learn about being decent, being human has become so distorted in the ways of so many that many people question their own vision of what is “good and evil”. We are so lost in the darkness of the early evening sky, we have lost our way and the ensuing angst, negativity, evil doings seem to be multiplying.

Social media gets a lot of the blame today because anyone can say anything and millions of people ‘see’ their lies and their obfuscation of truth, their denial of what is good and right, their upholding of evil ideas and ways for the benefit of their own power, their own bias’, etc. Yet, while this is true, we have been confounded by the “blurred mist” for a lot longer. Throughout the ages people have believed “might is right” and because of the belief in “survival of the fittest” also includes the people who can conquer another, who can imprison truth and good, who enslave those they fear, we have blurred the lines between good and evil for the millennia.

At Hanukkah we sing a song “Mi Yimalel” (who can retell) and it says “in every age a hero or sage came to our aid”. Today, “good and evil” have become so indistinguishable that, for a great many people, their heroes and sages are the perpetrators of blurring the lines between “good and evil” and, in fact, trying and, in many cases, succeeding to convince ‘their people’ that what is evil is in fact good! Be it Trump today, Pharaoh in the Bible, the Priests and Kings at the time of the prophets, Putin, Netanyahu, any of the dictators and despots of earlier times, all of these ‘leaders’ use subterfuge and mendacity to cover up the evil they perpetrate upon their people and their ‘enemies’. Their ‘enemies’ being anyone who stands up for good, who calls out the evil, who cares for and takes care of the poor, the needy, the stranger; who stands up against hatred and violence, who makes clear the line between good and evil.

We are in desperate need as a society for “the hero or sage” to come to our aid. We are in even more desperate need for us as a society to allow the ones who are here to be heard and heeded. Whether it is the Bible, the New Testament, the Koran, be it Rabbi Heschel, Dr. King, the Dalai Lama, Ticht Nhat Han, John Pavlovitz, Rev. William Barber, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Ernest Kurtz, M. Scott Peck, so many more, we have the “hero or sage” who can come to our aid-we just have to allow them to penetrate our hearts, our minds, our souls; we have to take off the armor surrounding our beings and “circumcise the foreskins of our hearts”, we have to “Hear Israel” by opening our ears and we have to surrender our need to be in power, our desire to live in self-deception, our longing to ‘be strong’. Our greatest strength is our ability to “fail forward”, to learn from our errors, make our amends repair the damage and set ourselves on the proper path for serving something greater than ourselves. The only path to achieving this way of being, the only path to hearing and following “the hero or sage” who comes to our aid is by doing our own inner work. We are constantly being called to look inside of our selves, to discern the deceptions, the lies, the mendacity we have allowed to take hold of our minds and emotions so we can heal them through our spirits. We have to engage in the process of spiritual healing, rise above our false pride, our need to be right, our love of blurring the lines between “good and evil”, blow away the mist that seems to blind us to truth and goodness.

The road of spiritual healing begins with an admission that we are sick, we have become so “fat” that we are unable to discern what is good and what is evil. We have become so obsessed with our own false goals and worship our own false gods, we have engaged in such mendacity as to believe “the one with the gold rules”, until we admit our erroneous thinking and acting, we can’t begin to heal. Once we have admitted our errors, we then need to let go of our old ideas even though we have deceived ourselves into believing these old ideas were good for us. We let them go by deepening our spiritual practices, immersing ourselves in whatever moral and spiritual path speaks to us, even combining some of them to make a practice we can live into. We then return to a state of moral living, of learning/re-learning the difference between “good and evil”, we end our blurring the lines by having a firm grasp on truth and decency. We practice being of service instead of being served, we see one another as divine images and respect the dignity of another human being as much as we are respecting our own dignity. We no longer need to prove our worth to anyone including ourselves, we just know we are worthy, we are equal and we are unique. We hear the call of the prophet, the call of our neighbor, the call of truth and the call of morality in all of our affairs. This is recovery, this is making “good and evil” “as distinguishable as night and day.” Doing this makes each of us “the hero or sage” we need today, the redeemer we are desperate for and the “freedom fighter” to lead us our of our self-imposed slavery and prisons. 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 137

“We live in an age when most of us have ceased to be shocked by the increasing breakdown in moral inhibitions. The decay of conscience fills the air with a pungent smell. Good and evil, which were once as distinguishable as day and night, have become a blurred mist. But that mist is man-made. God is not silent. He has been silenced.” (Essential Writings pg. 90)

Speaking the words of the second sentence above:”the decay of conscience fills the air with a pungent smell” engages two senses; hearing and smelling. By saying these words and hearing them we have an opportunity to smell “the air” and take in the “pungent smell” of our decay of conscience in order to end our self-deception of believing we are “stopping and smelling the roses”! We have fooled ourselves for so long, we have bought into the deceptions of another, of society that our morality has grown and, even though we are going against the teachings of the Bible, even though we are ignoring the words of the prophet, we are morally superior to any other generation! Remembering these words were published in 1951, some 73 years ago, should give us pause as to the mendacity we are living in, the self-deception we have fallen into and the loss of our sense of smell, sense of hearing, sense of seeing we have suffered.

The world stinks! We have polluted our air with more than chemicals, the O-Zone layer of conscience has holes drilled into it and we are ignoring this “pungent smell”. Mendacity has altered our senses, our conscience in such a way that we disbelieve the wisdom of Rabbi Heschel, we disbelieve the actions of Rev. Martin Luther King, we hear denials of the Holocaust, we watch as people emulate Nazi Germany and Hitler believing these charlatans want what is best for us. We are so lost we don’t even know what is up and what is down, we are so confused we have forgotten that the 2nd Temple was destroyed because of Sinat Hinam” - senseless hatred, we ignore the teachings of the Rabbis that the 1st Temple was destroyed because of the mistreatment of the widows, the orphans, the poor, the needy, we treat the stranger the same way as they did in Sodom and Gemorrah and believe we are right! We seek to imprison different groups of people in subtle and not-so-subtle ways and deny our acting like Pharaoh, who did not know Abraham Lincoln, do not know of the Civil War, etc.

We keep spraying perfume to cover up the “pungent smell” of the air around us and we fail to fix the wholes in our conscience and the conscience of the world. We wrap ourselves in our “identity politics”, in our so-called faith, in our adherence to tradition which belies what the Bible say, makes a mockery of Jesus’ words, seeks to undo the progress we have made in fulfilling the words “all men are created equal”. We lie, cheat, steal, commit plagiarism, bastardize truth, spout “alternative facts”, worship at the feet of dictators, ignore and dishonor the people who have created places of holiness, houses of help, and pound our chests with how we are the only ‘ones who know’ what is good and what is true, we are the keepers of The Word, all the while practicing idolatry, deception, mendacity.

We, the people, have to do a spring cleaning. We, the people, have to take stock of what is and separate the “wheat from the chaff”. We, the people, have to smash the perfume bottles that have covered up the “decay of conscience” the “pungent smell” that has been in our world for far too long. We, the people, are being called by Rabbi Heschel’s words, by the actions of the prophet, the ways of Christ to rid our Temples, our Churches, our Mosques, our governments of these ‘money-changers’, these liars, these destroyers. We don’t have to wait for a messiah, we have to take action right here and right now. Rabbi Heschel, Rev. King, the Berrigan Brothers, Rabbi Joachim Prinz, Bobby Kennedy, Rev. Barber, et al, teach us, as Rabbi Prinz says in his March on Washington Speech in 1963:

The most urgent, the most disgraceful, the most shameful, the most tragic problem is silence.” Rabbi Heschel refuses to stay silent, even today more than 50 years since his death, he calls out to We, the people, with a demand and a disturbance, with awakening thunder and unwavering hope and belief in the goodness of humanity. We have to stop patting ourselves on the back, we have to stop lulling ourselves into false beliefs and clean out our nostrils and smell the “decay of conscience”, we have to see the smog covering our decency, our humanity, our inner life so we can repair the damage of so many years of decay-we are not rotten to the core, yet.

I hear Rabbi Heschel call us to recover our humanity, recover our conscience, which is exactly the goal of the recovery movement. It is the reason God put T’Shuvah into the world-not because, as some believe, we are supposed to be perfect-rather because God knew/knows we lose our way, our senses become dull and we need a way back, we need a path of recovering our humanity and repairing the damages we have wrought. Along this path of repair, change and hope, we are commanded to forgive another person and to forgive ourselves. Immersing ourselves in being human does not mean being perfect, it means we strive to be “one grain of sand better” each day. It means we make a 2% shift from 49% wanting to and knowing how to repair the “decay of conscience (that) fills the air” to 51% taking the actions we know will make the necessary repairs and changes to the ways we live so the “air” is filled with the sweetness of being human, our conscience and the  conscience of the world is repaired and we can change our way of living to meet the hopes and dreams of God, of goodness, of decency, of freedom for all. We see this happening throughout the country and we need to enlarge the ways people are doing this instead of making everything corporate, worrying about “advice of counsel”, getting even through lies. 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 136

“We live in an age when most of us have ceased to be shocked by the increasing breakdown in moral inhibitions. The decay of conscience fills the air with a pungent smell. God and evil, which were once as distinguishable as day and night, have become a blurred mist. But that mist is man-made. God is not silent. He has been silenced.” (Essential Writings pg. 90)

Rabbi Heschel writes these words in the 1950’s and rather than heeding his call, rather than hearing his prophetic vision and words, we have sunk deeper and deeper into “the increasing breakdown in moral inhibitions”. Against the backdrop of the victory of World War II, during the “baby boomer” generation, the people who Tom Brokaw calls “the greatest generation” believed they were above the evil and the immorality of Nazi Germany. Yet, Rabbi Heschel is seeing behind the curtain of the facade people put up, he is seeing the racism, the anti-semitism, the self-deception of people and calling it out.

What will it take for us “to be shocked by the increasing breakdown in moral inhibitions”? We are so far down the rabbit hole that we hear conservatives blame music, the arts, the way women dress, ‘the libs’ for this “breakdown”, all the while remaining oblivious and/or willfully blind to their cruelty towards anyone not like them, engaging in denying the right to vote to ‘those people’, legislating against good health care, criminalizing poverty, unwelcoming the stranger, all in the name of ‘religion’. We are witnesses to this “breakdown” as well as participants! Yet, we seem incapable of responding to the wisdom of Rabbi Heschel above, we seem unwilling to take a stand for what is right and what is moral, blaming God, society, another group, anyone but ourselves.

The “sexual revolution” is blamed for “the increasing breakdown”, rock and roll music and Elvis Presley were blamed for it, rap music, the civil rights movement, the ending of quotas on Jews, and so many more advances in society are being blamed for this “breakdown in moral inhibitions” when the truth is that greed and power are at the core it. Authoritarianism, dictatorship, legislative power, the power of the purse are the rot that has allowed this “breakdown in moral inhibitions”. The idea: “the one with the gold rules” can be traced to antiquity and, instead of heeding the words of the Bible, instead of acting like Jesus, people throughout the millennia have abused these words and deeds for their own gain, for their own power, to enrich themselves and blamed everyone else for the ills of society. We are seeing this happen again, only on steroids by the “good christian, religious Jews, devout muslims’!

Blame the victim is the battle cry of our generation, it is the drug addicts fault that he/she dies of an overdose of Fentanyl, it is the poor person’s fault that he steals a loaf of bread, it is the person’s fault they get cancer from asbestos, it is …. We are incapable of being shocked by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and, some in our country believe Ukraine should just surrender and become a satellite of Russia again-forgoing their freedom, welcoming the people who have raped and pillaged their country, killed their citizens, kidnapped their children. There are those who believe Hamas cares about freedom for the Gazans, who think what they did on October 7 was just and right, they are freedom fighters who gave Israel what it deserved! There are demonstrations across the world and especially in our country that are hailed by ‘the progressives’ as good, making Jews unsafe in their dorm rooms, in their homes, their houses of worship is a good thing for these ‘progressives’ who ask for money for Jews to fund their drive for education, for health care, to fight against the oppression of women, people of color, etc. These ‘progressives’ have decided that they are the paragons of morality, they are the last defense before the total “breakdown of all moral inhibitions” all the while being morally corrupt, supporting these ‘freedom fighters of Hamas’ who kill their own people, who discriminate against LGBTQ+, who have stolen all the money given to build Gaza up so they can attack Israel, annihilate the Jews, and, of course, built lavish places for their leaders to live in both in Gaza and Qatar.

Our inability “to be shocked at the increasing breakdown of moral inhibitions” is bringing us dangerously close to totalitarianism, to believing ‘only I can save you’. Our inability has caused a large portion of our country to deny truth, to follow a madman who only wants power and who’s drive is deny freedom to the masses and share power with other authoritarians and dictators. Our ability to have true friendships where we speak truth to one another, to be able to rebuke one another when we are screwing up, when we are adding to the moral decay, our taking of our own inventory and making amends dwindles more each and every day. We get angry with the people who point out truth to us, we adopt a ‘who do you think you are’ attitude when called out on our bullshit and lies, we seek to crush anyone and everyone who tries to make us look in the mirror and see truth.

I am hearing Rabbi Heschel calling us to the task of ending our “breakdown of moral inhibitions”, I hear him calling us to “recover the questions” which is the first subchapter of his book God in Search of Man. I hear Rabbi Heschel demanding we live into recovering our humanity, our sobriety of living, recovering our connection with God, with the Ineffable One, and recovering a sense of community and purpose that the Bible teaches us to have. I hear him echoing the words of the Torah, “care for the poor, the needy, orphan, and the widow; welcome the stranger, you shall have one law for the citizen and the stranger alike, etc.” We can recover our humanity, our morality, our decency-the question before is are we willing? God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark