Are you still trying to cure your "false problems"? Year 3 Day 328

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 328

“Most people are afflicted with false problems. They fail to be aware of what really ails them, of what is ultimately at stake in the life of man. Our most precious insights come from encountering that which is greater than ourselves.” (Insecurity of Freedom pg. 60)

The reason to study the words and deeds of people in our history and in our present is to educate, cultivate, grow our own sense of truth and let go of the myriad of self-deceptions we have cultivated and the ones we have adopted from another. These deceptions, be it self or outer, are the root cause of our being “afflicted with false problems”, I believe. When we buy into the deceptions and mendacities of the ‘leader’, of the authoritarian, we find ourselves condemning the good behavior of ‘the enemy’ and extolling the bad behavior of ‘our side’. These deceptions and mendacities lead us to becoming blind to truth, unable to hear what is real and hold tight to the “false problems” we are being told about by another and/or our self-deceptions.

What are we to do when the ways of Josef Goebbels is more advantageous than the ways of Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha? What are we to do when the embrace of ‘false problems” leads us to take fake cures and after “drinking the Kool-Aid” we find ourselves sicker than before. What are we to do when the ‘fearless leader’, is a coward who denigrates everyone else except the ‘white folks’ he is talking to and promises them  superiority while “picking their pockets” as President Lyndon Johnson taught us? What are we to do when almost 1/2 of the country seems to like being led to the slaughter by Elon Musk, Miriam Adelson, Right-Wing Christian Nationalist billionaires, Donald Trump and their gang of crooks? What are we to do when the words of Rabbi Heschel from 1962 go unheeded and our religious education, our moral education, our civics education is so MEH that we find ourselves in this predicament 60 years after we passed the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, 60 years since we came to believe that equality was afoot, that the sacrifice of the Union Soldiers was being redeemed?

We have to stand up and speak TRUTH to the masses, we have to stand up and speak TRUTH to the powerful, we have to stand up and say NO to the lies of the billionaires, to the MENDACITY of the christian nationalists who go against all that Christ taught and did. We have to stand up and say NO to the bastardization of the ‘orthodox Jews’ who claim to be following God’s command while actually only following their desire for control and power, just like the priests, the royalty and the wealthy did during the times of the two Temples and we know how that turned out. We have to go to the heart “of what really ails” us, “of what is ultimately at stake in the life of man”-the ability to make “free-will moral choices”, the ability to “Choose Life”. We cannot do this as long as we “are afflicted with false problems.”

The cult leaders, the dictators, the authoritarians want us to be “afflicted with false problems” so that we don’t see how they are manipulating us for their own gain, for their own power and how they will treat us just like they are treating the so-called ‘enemy of the people’, ‘the vermin’, the “low IQ” people, the minorities, the Jews, etc. They have to keep us at each other’s throats because, like the Pharaoh of Egypt who pretended to “not know Joseph”, they are afraid of our strength, our resourcefulness, our healthy spiritual and moral courage when we gather together to CHOOSE LIFE. They are “petty tyrants” like King George, like the myriad of “petty tyrants” throughout history and they will be defeated-the question we have to ask ourselves is how much devastation, how much death, how much freedom do we have to lose before we revolt as the people of the colonies did in 1776? The “enemies within” are the ones that are in our inner life, the ones that keep us in self-deception, in blindness, in deafness, in the belief that we don’t have to follow the lessons of morality, the ways of being good citizens. We can jettison the truth in order to serve the selfish needs of ‘the leader’!

We have the solution! It is in our hearts and our souls, it goes beyond the rational mind which will believe ‘logical’ arguments even when the premise of such arguments is false! We have to hear the call of our souls, we have to encounter “that which is greater than ourselves”. This can be God, it can be nature, it can be another human being, it can be being part of a group that serves an ideal, a teaching of the Bible like, “in righteousness you shall judge, don’t put a stumbling block before the blind, don’t curse the deaf, don’t go around as a slanderer, don’t stand idly by the blood of your neighbor, don’t avenge a grudge, Love your Neighbor as Yourself”. When we see the commonalty, the humanity in another human being, in another group; skin color, religious belief, spiritual practices fall by the wayside because we see another image of the divine that compliments ours. We are given these teachings in the Holiness Code in Leviticus, Chapter 19. Many of them are followed by “I am the Lord” which can mean that just as we encounter “that which is greater than ourselves” in spirit, we have to take the actions we learn in the real world. We, the People, have to take back our power, we have to once again stand at Mt. Sinai, we have to once again encounter “that which is greater than ourselves” and hear the Shema, we have to once again listen intently to the words of the Sermon on the Mount, we have to imbibe the teachings of the Buddha. We have to be human in all our affairs and choose life!

I am a veteran of being “afflicted with false problems”. It is hard to rise above the self-deceptions and the outer lies I encounter, it is hard to sit with the sadness of being blamed for things I did not do, for not being forgiven for things I did and have done T’Shuvah for. It is hard to listen to the mendacity of the “holier than thou” people who, like the ones at the times of the Temple in Jerusalem, spread lies and deceptions to hide their own agendas, to hide their theft of the soul of freedom. It is hard to rise above what ails me truly when it seems like I am in my self-deception. I have the experience, however, of recovery. I have survived this condition with the grace of God and the help of so many people. I have come to see what truly ails me and continue to live the life that is authentically mine. It is so joyful to live a life of hope and possibility, a life of acceptance and moving forward, a life of reaching out to help another and learn so much about myself in the process. It is joyful to keep “encountering that which is greater” than me and knowing all is going to be okay as long as I stay in this embrace and do the next right thing and help another(s) do the same. My gift is to bring others to their own “encountering that which is greater than” themselves and I pray I keep living my purpose. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Are you engaging with your "inner chaos" or hiding from it? Year 3 Day 327

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 327

“We must address ourselves, in education, to the fundamental problems of existence: How to illumine the inner chaos? How to simplify the self?” (Insecurity of Freedom pg 60)

“I have the answer and give you inner peace” is the refrain of so many so-called religious people, cult leaders, etc. “I can take care of you and be your protector, your retribution” says political leaders, aka autocrats, and other charlatans. Yet, the words above show what true religious education is about, it speaks to the role spiritual growing has in our lives.

Because we are created, born with 2 opposing inclinations, because we have both a soul/gut intuition and a rational mind, because we like shiny things and gold attracts us, the “inner chaos” is built in! There is no getting rid of it, there is no great panacea or 1 thing that will solve this inner war no matter what the snake-oil salesman keeps trying to sell us. We are no different than our ancestors who bought into the ‘cures’ of the snake-oil salesman of the ‘wild west’, no different than the Israelites who had euphoric recall for the days “by the fleshpots in Egypt”, no different than the people who believed Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler, Caesar, Mao, King George. Yet, both ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ people seem incapable of accepting this truth! “To simply the self” is not to dumb down, it is not to become malleable like putty in someone’s hands, it is not to ‘kill’ the parts of self we don’t like, it is to “keep it simple stupid”! The way “to simplify the self”, I believe after being a student of life and Rabbi Heschel, is to remain authentic, not put on the myriad of masks we use to hide, not engage in mendacity and self-deception. Simple is not the same as stupid, “simplify” in this context is about dealing with the complexities of life, the prism of choices and knowing that doing the next right thing is the path to wholeness, authenticity, and quieting the “inner chaos”.

It is not easy to do this and our Clergy, our teachers often do not help us. Rather than “illumine the inner chaos”, they bring us pap to hide ourselves from it. Giving my troubles to Jesus, doing the Mitzvot, declaring the greatness of Allah will not solve my “inner chaos”, will not help me deal with my “inner chaos”; these can help me “illumine the inner chaos” I am experiencing so I can look at it, make better choices and determine the voice of negativity from the voice of positivity, the voice of spirit from the voice of rationality that wants me to hide, to ‘get ahead’ by any and all means. What we really need is to learn how the Holy Texts of each faith, of every spiritual discipline helps us “illumine the inner chaos”. In recovery, in Judaism, in Christianity, in Islam we do this by taking stock of ourselves through an inventory of our past; seeing the good and the not good actions we have taken, putting ourselves back in the moment of choice and relate the voice that was so loud in our inner life and learn how to deal with it differently than just blindly following it, making our amends and having a plan not to repeat this way of being again. Otherwise, when we say “I’m sorry” we are just trying to get the heat off, trying to appease someone else and have no intention of changing, no intention of dealing with our “inner chaos” any differently. This is the tragedy of ‘quick fixes’, of ‘follow me and I will solve all your problems’, of buying into the lies of the snake-oil salespeople like Stefanik, Johnson, Cruz, Trump, Putin, Netanyahu, Ben-G’Vir, the Ayatollah, etc. All of these wanna-be dictators and actual dictators all promise big and deliver little, they all sound so empathetic towards the ‘downtrodden’, the powerless and voiceless and their actions are to take advantage of the “inner chaos” in their people for their own power and glory. Rather than helping to “simplify the self” through authenticity and finding ways to harmonize the 2 inclinations within each human being, they treat the self of everyone else simple and stupid. How disgusting and despicable, yet throughout history these ways of being keep rearing their heads, keep winning over the very people whose self-interest is being violated. As Mark Twain said: “As lie is halfway around the world before the truth gets its socks on.”

This is the challenge facing us right here, right now: are we going to engage in what religion is meant to do to help us “illumine the inner chaos” and “simplify the self” or are we going to continue to follow the leader/authoritarian/snake-oil salesman to our own ruin? We can “illumine the inner chaos” by using the Bible, the holy texts of other spiritualities to help us see ourselves in all of the characters, all of our archetypes, see our inner Pharaoh and our inner Moses, know they are carrying on the same argument as we read in Exodus. We get to see and hear Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount and Moses’ farewell address and know that we can, and I might add should, Choose Life. We immerse ourselves in the text and have our own understanding of what these holy texts teach us, we are not bound by the words of ‘the sages’ or of the speakers themselves. Every holy text of every spiritual discipline is to be understood on so many levels and in different ways each time we read them, each time we immerse ourselves in them otherwise they cannot be dynamic, they cannot be viewed as eternal wisdom and eternal truth. We “simplify the self” by embracing our own unique spiritual type, we “illumine the inner chaos” through experiencing the confusion of Abraham when he is asked to sacrifice his son Isaac, when Esau doesn’t understand that his father doesn’t have a blessing for him, when we hear of the moaning and complaining of the Israelites in the desert, when we see the words of the prophets fall on deaf ears both in the Bible and NOW. We can do this as Deuteronomy 30:11-14 says: “For this commandment…is not hidden… it is in your mouth and your heart”.

I continue to have my “inner chaos” illumined and to “simplify the self” within me through this blog, through my studies, through my learnings, through my living an aware life. Socrates said: “An unexamined life is not worth living” and Malcom X said: “the examined life is painful”. Both are true and I have found the pain is worth the emptiness and vapidity of not examining my daily living. I am become aware of errors that I didn’t see at the time through this examination, I see my “inner chaos” better each day and deal with it better each day, I am more authentic through my “examined life” and strive to peel away the thin membrane of mendacity, self-deception, and vapidity that keeps trying to cover my heart and soul. It is hard, I am not perfect which is why this is a daily activity. I am enraged at the lies of the charlatans who profess to be ‘religious’ and the snake-oil salesman who claim to care about anyone but themselves. I pray I channel this rage into words and ways that “illumine the inner chaos” within you and help you be more authentically you. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Are you challenging the status quo or just "following the general trends"? Year 3 Day 326

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 326

“Religion in America is inclined to follow rather than to challenge the general trends of opinion, as if the task of religion were to serve as a handmaid to civilization. Religion begins where philosophy ends. Without religious education, general education may end in the trivialization of man himself.” (Insecurity of Freedom pg 59/60)

Living into these words and immersing ourselves in the thought and spirit of them brings me to the realization that what we are facing today is long in the making. We are facing and experiencing religious life that “is inclined to follow rather than to challenge the general trends of opinion” especially when it comes to engaging with the power structure of countries and authoritarians. While the ‘religious people’ believe they are leading Bibi, Trump, et al-we know that is not the case. While these autocrats give lip service to the ‘religious, like Putin who gave ‘power’ to Chabad in Russia, they are doing what they want to stay in power for themselves and remove any and all challenges to them within the populace.

Just as the Catholic Church and the other denominations of Christianity were “inclined to follow rather than challenge” Hitler and the Nazis, we see the same in today’s politics. While it seems as if the “religious right” have sway over Trump and Bibi, they are only using them to get what they want-power and immunity while the Supreme Court here fiddles and Bibi and his thugs look to disempower the rule of law in Israel. They both have the same playbook and seem to be shredding all the defenses put in place to prevent this from happening.

I am being told how much of a fool I am by the people who believe that an authoritarian cares about freedom for Jews, freedom for Blacks, Latinos, etc. History says otherwise, history teaches us that the best philosophies have limitations and only when real religious education, actually following the wisdom of Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha does civilization flourish. The people of the Renaissance were not non-religious, they had a belief in something greater than themselves, they painted and thought, built and discovered precisely because they could “transcend themselves” and “surpass their needs” to serve ends that went beyond their narrow world. Einstein, Pasteur, the scientists who came up with a covid vaccine in less than a year all challenged “the general trends of opinion” and have been rewarded with disdain by the autocrats and their useful idiots rather than with praise.

Religion is NOT a handmaid to civilization unless we allow it to be. I am not talking about fundamentalism that passes for religious life, I am speaking of the living, breathing power of Biblical teachings. Rabbi Heschel bemoans the lack of knowledge of the prophets by most people, I would add the lack of the real truth found in the books of Samuel and the truth of King David who continually reached out to something greater than himself for the strength to overcome his myriad of weaknesses and errors. Each time he did this, he catapulted himself to a higher level of living. He wrote the Psalms as praise for this power and gratitude for the opportunity to make mistakes, repair them and rise above them. When one cannot admit one’s errors, when one cannot take the text in context and has to bastardize the meaning by picking a word or phrase here and there, by bastardizing the intent of people like Rav Kook, by throwing away the US Constitution, the Declaration of Independence of both the US and Israel in order to ‘be right’, in order to be the dictator they have always wanted to be, in order to turn one’s back on everything that allowed them to reach the position of power they hold - this is not religious living nor religious education. We find ourselves in this dilemma, how as a human being can we tolerate the “trivialization of man himself”? How can we be so blind as to not see where our actions are leading us? How can we go along with these autocrats knowing their propensity to shame and blame, enslave and fear-monger is their “religious life”? How can “we sit idly by the blood of our brothers” and call ourselves ‘religious’? WE CAN’T!

We, the People have to stand up for ourselves, we have to stop making excuses for making ourselves caricatures of being human. We have to retake the reins of religious as well as secular education, we have to teach citizenship and the fundamental principles of “care for the stranger, the poor, the needy” in our midst. We don’t have to go looking for them, they are right here in our midst and we have done a terrible job of caring for Americans who are needy, who are poor, who feel like strangers in their own land. We have seen the backlash to not caring for our own in the Black Lives Matter, the rise of the LGBTQ+ community, the demand of the various minorities for a seat at the table and then the backlash to this backlash by the White Supremacists and the autocrats. We, the People have to take back the reins of power and decency, we have to teach civics, the constitution, the declaration of independence not as some thing that is history rather as something that is alive and well because we keep living into them. The same is true for our religious education, we have to experience the Bible rather than read it and pick it apart. This is true for the ‘critical scholarship’ and for the fundamentalists-we have to experience the teachings, the law and the stories so we can sit around a table with one another and argue to learn the meanings and relevances of this text of eternal truth and wisdom for us right here and right now.

I am disappointed in my early religious education for not providing me the tools to explore the texts deeper and for not reading the texts with me as a living fountain of wisdom and spiritual sustenance. I am grateful that I learned enough Hebrew and text to whet my appetite, I am grateful to the ‘old men’ who taught me the beauty of davening/prayer when I was a teen. I am grateful to all the teachers who have helped me learn and use the wisdom of the Bible and its offshoots in my everyday living. I am grateful to the myriad of people I have studied these texts and argued with to make them come alive and find the relevance of them for the moment we were/are in. I am grateful that I have not stopped by religious education and I continue to fight against the “trivialization of man himself” each and every day. I am grateful that I continue to use prophetic wisdom and actions to guide my living. I am grateful to those who have disdain for me, who cannot accept my amends nor offer their own because they give me the experience of when I acted in this manner. I am grateful that the disciples I have raised and helped are living productive and meaningful lives. I am grateful that “religious living” has given me a life worth living. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Are you discovering the goodness of your soul through acts that transcend the self- Year 3 Day 325

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 325

“To educate means to cultivate the soul, not only the mind. You cultivate the soul by cultivating empathy and reverence for others, by calling attention to the grandeur, the mystery of all being, to the holy dimension of human existence by teaching how to relate the common to the spiritual. The soul is discovered in response, in acts of transcending the self, in the awareness of ends that surpass one’s interests and needs.” ( Insecurity of Freedom pg. 59)

Discovering our soul is the most important discovery we can make in our lifetime! Without this discovery, we are constantly wandering the earth and we are unable to “cultivate the soul”, we are unable “to educate” ourselves nor anyone else. Without this discovery we are unable to “relate the common to the spiritual”, we don’t even experience “the spiritual”!

We are seeing the truth of the words above in our everyday living both for ourselves and for everyone around us. What is our “response” to the pain that people are experiencing in Israel, in Gaza, in Ukraine, in Russia because of the darkness of a few people who have power in these places. Be it Bibi, Sinwar, Putin, they are showing us their souls, the darkness and the hatred in the responses they have to the wars that are ravaging their people. The innocents murdered on Oct. 7, 2023 were people who sought rapprochement with the very people who murdered them! The Ukrainian people are fighting for their sovereignty which shows the light of their soul as a people and as individuals. The response by Israel has been unrelenting and non-discriminatory-killing innocents along with the myriad of Hamas combatants hiding among the civilians-and Bibi could have found ways to get the hostages home, stop the killing by settlers of people in the West Bank and find ways to make a compromise that could ensure peace between Palestinians and Israelis, between Israel and its Arab neighbors, and stand together against Hamas, Houthis, Hezbollah, and Iran.

In America, 10’s of million people are telling us they like the darkness in the soul of Donald Trump. They are saying “transcending the self” is for stupid people, voting for someone who believes that nothing can “surpass one’s interests and needs”! Since the darkness of the soul of Trump, Bannon, Miller, Flynn, et al are on full display, the people voting against their own interests, people supporting someone who cares nothing for them, is mind-boggling. Yet, this is where we are, 6 days from Nov. 5, 2024. We don’t know the outcome, we don’t know how these 10’s of millions of people will “cultivate the soul”, “cultivate empathy and reverence for others”. It is a scary time when a former President and current candidate rejects empathy, has no reverence for anyone other than himself, who is incapable of “transcending the self” and his “response” is darkness and hatred.

We have to decide what we are discovering about our soul, are we going to cultivate the goodness of our soul, do we want to cultivate the empathy necessary to be human? The Bible is full of stories of people who engage in “acts of transcending the self” like Abraham who fights for Sodom and Gomorrah. We have the example of Moses who does the same in confronting Pharaoh at great personal risk to free the Israelite people from the grips of slavery. We have the example of Joshua, King David, who are acutely  aware “of ends that surpass one’s interests and needs”. Then we have the prophets who stood up and spoke truth to power with no regard for their own personal safety because they had a calling, they showed the light of their souls through their constant care and concern for the the Kingdom of Israel and for Judea. When our calling, when our “empathy”, when our “transcending the self” are more important that “one’s interests” we show the light of our soul and we minimize the darkness, we are able to make amends for our “missing the marks”, and we can mature our souls, we can cultivate “reverence for others” and we can discover our authentic self. This is the goal of life, to live authentically. The Idols in the Temple want to impress the lie ‘if you live a false self long enough it becomes your authentic self’. These idolators, like Trump and his ‘religious’ supporters, want to push the false narrative of living the darkness is the most authentic way of being, that bowing down to authoritarians is the path to freedom, that showing no empathy for the plight of another is the true show of strength.

It is up to We, the People, to say NO to these idolators, it is up to us, we, the people, to say NO living a false script. It is up to us, we, the people, to say YES to “empathy”, Yes to “reverence for others”. We, the People, have to say YES to responding to life with goodness and kindness. We, the People, have to say YES to “transcending the self” so we can help another human being. We, the People, have to say YES to having “awareness of ends that surpass one’s interests” and We, the People, have to be like our ancestors the prophets and speak truth to the deceivers, speak truth to the people, shout it from the rooftops and not stay silent in the face of the lies of the Idolators who have taken control of some of our Temples, Churches, Synagogues, Mosques. We, the People, have to say YES to showing the goodness of our souls and stop hiding our purpose and passion for fear of being shamed by another, for fear of being discriminated against by haters. We, the People, have to end our ‘woke’ selves and deal in truth, “proclaim freedom throughout the land and to all its inhabitants therein”, respect the choices of another human being as long as they are not infringing on the choices of another. Racism, anti-semitism, islamaphobia, from any quarter is not okay and We, the People, have to stand for the poor, the needy, the stranger, the widow, and the orphan if we are to live authentically from our souls.

My latest podcast is out and your can find it on Apple Podcast and Spotify: Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/6Xk2vy28li7xA91t2wmX7h?si=8a621455108e46ea Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/f-your-feelings-with-rabbi-mark/id1587525986?i=1000674910133 . I am engaged in the cultivation Rabbi Heschel is speaking about, I have been engaged in responses that reflect my authentic self since February of 1987 and I have been “transcending the self” most of the time since then. It is hard, I am not perfect and I make errors, and each time I learn from my mistakes and discover new things about my soul, my being and how to be human a little more each day. We, the People, have the opportunity to discover more of who we are by the responses we make on election day, on the days after and in our dealings with one another. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Are you cultivating empathy or hatred, reverence for others or disdain? Year 3 Day 324

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 324

“To educate means to cultivate the soul, not only the mind. You cultivate the soul by cultivating empathy and reverence for others, by calling attention to the grandeur, the mystery of all being, to the holy dimension of human existence by teaching how to relate the common to the spiritual. The soul is discovered in response, in acts of transcending the self, in the awareness of ends that surpass one’s interests and needs.” ( Insecurity of Freedom pg. 59)

“Cultivate” comes from the Latin word “colere”, meaning ‘to inhabit’ as well as “to develop”. While it seems as if Rabbi Heschel is using “cultivate” to mean “to develop”, I wonder what he would say if we were to rewrite the first sentence above as: to educate means to inhabit the soul, not only the mind. It changes the emphasis a bit, I believe Rabbi Heschel is using cultivate to mean both “develop” and “inhabit” because without living into our soul, how can we develop it? Without developing our soul a little more each day, how can we inhabit it? “To cultivate the soul” is to live into the values, the spirit, the purpose and the passion that is unique and inherent in each human being. Rabbi Heschel is calling out to us to end our senseless abandonment of our soul, to end the ridiculous dependence on our minds alone, to let go of our fears of exploring and “cultivating” our soul.

Of course he then tells us how to “cultivate the soul”, how to inhabit our soul’s knowledge and wisdom, how to live from the inside out rather than from the outside in. While we know we have to experience the truth, do the mitzvot and then understand them, we do this so we can “develop” our soul’s knowing, our soul’s maturity, our soul’s strength to deal with the onslaught of outside influences and the war that our rational mind wages upon our intuitive one. These words, written 62+ years ago, ring in our ears, penetrate our souls if we are willing to be human.

Listening to the rhetoric of the current Republican Party, listening to Jews like Rosenberg and Miller spew hatred of immigrants when they are living in America because their families immigrated and were allowed in is disgusting and the reason Rabbi Heschel’s words needed to be heeded and followed in 1962 and ever since. Yet, alas, we haven’t. We have not developed “empathy and reverence for others”, we have not learned to inhabit “empathy and reverence for others” and so we are in the situation we are in today-people blaming innocent people for their own troubles, people looking to point fingers away from themselves so they can hide their evil doings. Rather than “calling attention to the grandeur, the mystery of all being”, these Republicans In Name Only, aka RINOs, are denigrating both the “grandeur” and the “mystery” of being, denigrating the divine image of their ‘enemies’ and themselves, all the while selling Bibles made in China which Trump denigrates, phony watches and other such grifts AND claiming to be the anointed one, claiming that Jesus sent Trump to save us all??!! We know bullshit when we see it and when we hear it, and to hear it coming from Jews, from other minorities is reminiscent of the Jews who thought Nazism would be a passing fancy. It has lasted for over 100 years and grows in the darkness and lies of it’s adherents.

We have to say NO to the fascists, to the authoritarians, to the war mongers, to the haters, to the ‘victims’ and say YES to living and developing “empathy and reverence for others”. YES to “calling attention to the grandeur, the mystery of all beings, the holy dimension of human existence by teaching how to relate the common to the spiritual”. When we say YES to relating “the common to the spiritual”, we are inhabiting the “soul” we have been given, we are developing along spiritual lines and we come to realize that the common is also spiritual, everyday actions are holy when we do them with intention to and for goodness, when we take these “common” actions for the good of another, when we say hello because we want to recognize another rather than ignore them. It is the very essence of “Namaste”, “the light in me sees the light in you”. When we say YES  to “calling attention to the grandeur, the mystery of all beings” we are living in awareness. Awareness of the vastness of the universe, the surrender of needing to know everything, leaving the mind’s need for proof and basking in the truth of beingness. When we say YES to “cultivating empathy and reverence for others”, we learn how to understand the experiences of another(s) and not need to make them wrong nor stupid, not need to tell them to ‘grow up’ and other such nonsense, not need to make them into bad guys and blame them for the evil in the world. When we say YES to inhabiting, to “standing in awe”(Latin root meaning) of another human being, we no longer need to make enemies, we can rebuke them with love, we can love them even when we don’t like them nor their actions, we can see the innate holiness just as God told Moses to “come to Pharaoh” and see the divine image in Pharaoh, speak to this image and try and bypass Pharaoh’s mind so he could see truth. The same is true for us today when we say YES to these ways of inhabiting and developing our souls.

This is a journey I have been on for a while, it is a three steps forward, one step backward process. It is not linear nor should it be. Yet, I have expected it to be and other people have demanded it be for me. I have fallen short at times in living into “empathy and reverence for others”, I have fallen short, at times, to seeing the “grandeur and mystery of being”, and each time I move a little closer to hitting the bullseye. In looking at my trajectory since I entered recovery in 1988, the times I fall short are much less and still painful when I do, I have been on the target more and more in each passing year while not hitting the bullseye, I am at least in the right ballpark. I am remorseful for my misses and grateful for my hits. The living in and developing of my soul has caused me to be more enraged at the actions of the people who want to denigrate another, who want to hold grudges, who cannot admit their part in any interaction that goes ‘wrong’, who are being authoritative because they are afraid of being wrong, who deny responsibility and scapegoat another. My inner Jeremiah gets activated as you can hear on my new podcast dropping later today on Apple and Spotify. Please hear the call of  your inner prophet and stand up and say YES with me. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Choosing the wages of virtue over the payday of 'sin' - Year 3 Day 323

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 323

“We must not underestimate the difficulties of moral living. It takes great courage, wisdom, defiance, and depth of faith to remain moral. We have been guilty of oversimplification. We maintain that virtue pays, we forget that vice pays more.” (Insecurity of Freedom pg 58)

The Rabbis say the reward for doing a Mitzvah is another Mitzvah, the sense that we have accomplished something that is in our best interest and the best interest of another, the knowing we have done something that connects us more to the power of the Universe and to another human being. They say the ‘punishment’ for a ‘sin’ is another ‘sin’, the truth that once we taste the ‘honey’ of negativity, we will be moved to get more of this ‘honey’. Both of these statements are true and, I believe, an “oversimplification”. No one is all good nor all bad-each of us has the potential to do both good and not good because we have both inclinations. It is even more nuanced because what may seem not good in one moment may, in the long run, turn out to be a mitzvah! Even when taking the action of a mitzvah, aka a good action, we may be doing it for our personal gain, to get an advantage and use it for not good outcomes.

“Moral living” is not black and white, unfortunately. While it is simple to be moral, it is also very complex and causes great introspection, great maturity, and the power to choose more than what our inclinations are pulling us to. In Numbers 15:39, after the missing the mark of the spies and the people Israel, we are told: “do not scout out after your heart and your eyes which you will whore after them”. The power of our heart to move our eyes to find what it desires can be applied to the brain as well, because the Rabbis thought the heart was the seat of both emotions and wisdom. To tell someone to “just do it” is an oversimplification of the complexity of being human, a failure to acknowledge the constant war within, pulling us to do the next right thing and the next wrong thing at the same time. The war gets even more complex because both inclinations can seem to be right in the moment and, maybe they both are! Allowing my ‘evil’ inclination to protect me when someone is a danger to me, to themselves, and/or to another is a good thing; allowing it to lie to me and think someone is a danger when they are actually a friend who is speaking truth is not a good thing. We have to engage in the nuances and the complexities that are inherent in being human in order to engage in “moral living”. It ain’t easy!

One of the lessons of the prophets is that “vice pays more”. The priests and the royalty along with the rich and powerful subscribed to this belief. We know this because they bastardized the rituals and the ‘laws’ of morality. They kept, like the sons of Samuel and Eli before them, using their positions to extort bribes and more wealth from the people rather than serve God, serve the populace, serve the good inclinations of their own beings. And it worked for a long time! We see this today with clergy promoting the welfare of the rich and the powerful, the liar and the charlatan, the fascist and the authoritarian. They do not believe in the Bible’s dictate: “One law for the stranger and the citizen alike”, they do not believe in equal justice under the law, they laugh at “freedom for all”! Some of the people in chaste in the Clergy of all faiths have sold themselves to their benefactors, their patrons in order to keep their positions-not caring that the words they speak are in direct conflict with the teachings of Moses, of Jesus, of Mohammed, of Buddha, of the entire Hebrew Bible. They will lie and attend rallies for people who believe that Hitler was a good guy! They will call Latinos and Blacks ‘vermin”, they will blame the Jews if Trump doesn’t win, they are calling out false claims about the election if they don’t win! These ‘men of god’ are descendants of the Priests in the Bible who Isaiah, Jeremiah, Hosea, et al railed against, and, in the end, who the populace believed to their own ruin. While good wins out, eventually, these liars teach us how much ‘sin’ pays and how the aftermath of their ‘sin’ can last for centuries-19 in fact till Israel was re-established as a state!

With all of this about ‘sin’ we cannot forget that “virtue pays”! While the wages don’t seem to be as much, it doesn’t seem to win all the time, it does pay dividends in the long run. Herein is the dilemma: are we in our lives for the long haul, the long run or are we so caught up in instant gratification that we can’t wait? For virtue to pay, for us to be able to live with ourselves and not constantly want to jump out of our skin, we have to accept that we will not see the fruits of our labor in our lifetime sometimes. There is a story of a boy who asks his grandfather why he is planting a tree when he will never see it bloom and nor taste its fruit and the old man answers: for you to enjoy, for the sake of future generations and because it is the right thing to do. We don’t seem to have a lot of people telling and living this story right now and we have many more than we think. Each of us can choose to do the next right thing and read the immediate ‘payment’ of being able to quiet the war within, to let go of our expectations of glory, our resentments for not being noticed, our anger at being excluded for the ‘club’ we don’t want to be part of anyway. Doing the next right thing gives us a connection with another human being that is precious, a connection with the universe which is comforting and a connection with our souls which is life sustaining. So, yes “virtue pays” and it is up to us to choose this form of payment over the other one.

Having wrestled with this truth all my life, having given into the belief that “sin pays more”, I can attest to the truth that virtue is “the easier, softer, way”. The wages of ‘sin’ paid more in the moment and cost me friendships, relationships, a way of being okay with myself. Seeing “moral living” as a ‘sucker’s way’, I did things that I regret to this day and I impacted many people in harmful ways. I almost lost myself completely in ‘sin’ and I am grateful that I was shown, often, the enslaving ways of the Pharaoh of this way of living. Finally I made the decision to change, after about 20 years of being employed and paid by ‘the wages of sin’. I am testifying to the truth that “virtue pays” and the dividends are more than one can see on a balance sheet, they are within us. I can live with myself and my errors each day, I can forgive those who have ‘trespassed against me” just as I ask them and God to forgive me m ‘trespasses”. I don’t have to worry about the cops, look over my shoulder to see who is following me, keep my back to the wall so I can see the doorway at a restaurant, etc. I can walk into a room or a place where I know there are people who think poorly of me and hold my head up. I can breathe free and care about everyone without resentment nor fear. These are some of the ways “virtue pays”. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Having the Inner Strength to Live Morally in an Immoral World- Year 3 Day 322

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 322

“We must not underestimate the difficulties of moral living. It takes great courage, wisdom, defiance, and depth of faith to remain moral. We have been guilty of oversimplification. We maintain that virtue pays, we forget that vice pays more.” (Insecurity of Freedom pg 57/58)

Rabbi Heschel’s words are ringing throughout the land today. Our arrogance, our obliviousness, our self-deceptions and mendacity have hidden these “difficulties of moral living” so badly that many people have come to morality as immorality and visa versa. We are a country, a world where the words of the Prophets are ignored, forgotten, or bastardized to fit the particular immorality being espoused. We see this way of being in some of our religious institutions, in some of our elected officials, in some of our homes, schools, business’, etc and we are blind to the long-term consequences and we are so arrogant as to believe what history has taught us about immorality and its consequences won’t apply to us!

People complain about the verses in the Bible that speak about what will happen when the people Israel “goes astray” calling God “Vengeful” when in fact, Israel is told of the consequences of immoral behaviors in any and all facets of living, work/employment, worship/religion, governance/caring for the people around us. These verses are n-t “vengeful”, they are prophetic. Just as the prophetic words of Deuteronomy which caution us against following a “False Prophet” call to us to stay moral, just as Moses reminding us that we will not last if we give lip-service to moral behaviors while plotting how to be immoral, how to lie with a smile and destroy the goodness within another person, We, the People, have to be aware of the deceptions of another as well as the lies we tell ourselves about the ease of “moral living”.

In Germany, the religious right, the Catholic Church supported Hitler and the Nazis, and the ones that didn’t stayed silent as Martin Neimoller’s  poem depicts: “First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.” We saw Father Coughlin and other religious leaders support Hitler in the 1930’s with large gatherings of the German Bund at Madison Square Garden! We see the same type of support for MAGA, this time instead of Hitler, Trump and Musk are promoting Putin who we all know is the ‘most moral of men’-NOT! Yet Jews, Latinos, Blacks will vote for him because he is a liar who appeals to their lies, they are both immoral and get away with it so people think they will also, they spew hatred which appeals to the ‘downtrodden’ when Trump, Musk, and their cronies and thugs are “The Man” who has spread hatred and kept their knees on their necks! “The difficulties of moral living” are so vast and subtle, so nuanced and apparent, that most people are oblivious to them and believe the lies of liars to their own peril and ruin-just as the prophets, as Moses, as the Bible teaches and we fail to learn.

“It takes great courage, wisdom, defiance, and depth of faith to remain moral” is a truth  that we underestimate often, precisely because we underestimate the “difficulties of moral living”. From Abraham till now, to be a moral human being has always taken these attributes and most of us ignore the necessity to develop our “courage” in the face of societal conventional notions, the necessity to develop our inner “wisdom” in the face of the societal pull to ‘be like everyone else’, to develop our “depth of faith” and “defiance” in the face of ‘religion-lite’ practices and teachings. We have lost the words and actions of our ancestors the prophets because the people entrusted with their teachings and models of behavior; the Rabbis, Priests, Ministers, Imams, have given into their own fears, have cozied up to the powers that be too much and have been co-opted by the bribes they have been given and the fears that overwhelmed them. The Rabbis who were killed by the Romans have been immortalized and their ways have been forgotten and or used as ways not to be courageous, defiant, faithful and wise because one could die from it. Rabbi Heschel, Rabbi Prinz, Rev King, the Berrigan Brothers all demonstrated these traits in calling out  the immorality of Racism and of the Vietnam War. Rev Barber and others are calling out the immorality of Racism and poverty today and not being heard in the chambers of power as Rev King et al were in the 1960’s. Instead, Musk and Trump have more sway over the Republican elected officials than the needs and interests of their constituents! Instead of standing courageously and defiantly against the isolators who want control over women and their bodies, against the white supremacists who believe only white ‘christian' people should rule these elected officials, even Black, Jewish and Latino ones just go along to get along!

We, the People, have to stop looking the other way, we have to stop hiding our heads in the sand and we have to pull our heads out of our asses! The time is NOW, we have put up with the lies and deceptions for too long and we are at the tipping point-either we stand for Goodness, Truth, Kindness, Wisdom, and Faith in God’s ways or we surrender to the bullies, we go along with the deceivers, we relinquish our moral and spiritual heritage. It is not too late! Vote for decency and democracy, freedom and faith in the dignity and worth of every human being, vote from the divine image you are created in rather than the false ego, the evil that has been taught you. We can return to the goals of the Bible, we can get closer to the goals of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Kennedy, Reagan- we are being called to exhibit the “courage, defiance, wisdom and depth of faith” we have within us.

I come from a poor family who lived these ways of “moral living” faithfully, no matter the outer cost to them. Decency and kindness were the only ways my grandfathers did business and raised their kids. We were taught to argue for truth and not to be right, to respect every person no matter their religion or skin color. Morality was the number 1 rule in our homes and it is #1 for me in my recovery. No matter the cost, I have done my best to live a moral life in all my affairs and to be satisfied no matter the outcome as long as I am moral. I am not perfect and it is what I strive for, I refuse to stay silent in the face of immorality and I ask you to listen to my podcasts; https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/f-your-feelings-with-rabbi-mark/id1587525986?i=1000674219137 or https://open.spotify.com/episode/2DIT7Ls3Gp8GM0mVooOXcK?si=970f92e0de55406c God Bless and stay safe and Moral, Rabbi Mark

Does your engagement with religious/spiritual teachings and teachers help with the problems of human existence? Year 3 Day 321

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 321

“For a word of the Bible to happen it must permeate the soul, relate to one’s problems, dreams, and emotions. Detached from the living issues of the human situation, our commitment becomes dim, inane. In other words, to teach religion means to teach a way of dealing with living problems of human existence, with the problems of the student who sits in front of us. Otherwise it remains trivial. And religious cannot survive as a triviality.” (Insecurity of Freedom pg. 57)

Today is Simchat Torah in parts of the Jewish World, Simchat Torah means the Joy of Torah, the joy of learning, the joy of growing in understanding, wisdom and actions. Rabbi Heschel’s words above are so crucial to celebrating the amazing blueprint for living that the Bible, the Torah is. The Bible and the Torah, while universal documents, are deeply personal to each and every individual, helping each and every one of us “dealing with living problems of human existence”. To be human is to have problems, to be deeply engaged in living gives us more problems and, as Rabbi Heschel says, the deeper the problems, the richer our living!

Religion is not a one-size fits all, it is not a panacea for what ails us, it will not take away our troubles. Religion gives us paths to deal with life’s challenges and problems, to deal with the war within us, to deal with living in a communal society without giving up our uniqueness, to live our uniqueness out loud so we can add to our corner of the world. Religion teaches us morality, it teaches us how to return after we err, how to fix our messes, how to restore our dignity and the dignity of another human being after we and/or someone else tarnishes/damages our dignity or the dignity of another. Religion teaches us the pitfalls of egocentric behaviors, of jealousy, of comparisons. It teaches us the dangers of worshiping false gods, bowing down to people and giving over the control of our minds and spirits to “the new Pharaoh arises”. Religion teaches us to hold onto our choices, to choose wisely, to not accept bribes, to not buy into the lies of the false prophets, to not engage in senseless hatred and to not ignore the plight of voiceless and powerless, the poor and the needy, etc.

On a more personal level, religion teaches “the student who sits in from of us” how to deal with their individual problems and, if as teachers and practitioners of religion, we are not doing this, if we are not seeing the individual student in front of us, if we are not responding to the call of their souls, if we are not helping them find their solutions in the text, then we should not be teaching religion because we are charlatans. If we cannot see the problems of the student who sits in front of us, if we cannot admit to our own problems then we are trivializing religion, we are making a mockery of what has sustained the world for over 2500 years and transformed humanity from ‘wild beasts’, from a “dog eat dog’ mentality to a society that has empathy and compassion, one that seeks truth, one that seeks to live into acts of kindness towards all. We have to see the person in front of us as a divine image seeking a framework to express their purpose and passion through religion, through the Biblical teachings and our job is to help guide them.

Of course, we see that religion “remains trivial” to so many because they were never seen as individuals in need, the teaching of religion has been more about rules than compassion, more about creed, power, habit and not about the crisis of today, not about faith as a living fountain that we can all drink from, it has become more about authority than learning solutions to today’s problems. We have allowed the liars and the deceivers to take over the Temples, the Churches, the Mosques, and the Synagogues. We have allowed them to do the least possible and we have accepted crumbs instead of demanding a seat at the table, instead of demanding that the words of the prophets be heard, taught and followed, we have allowed the people in ‘power’ to be more like the priests, the royalty, the wealthy when both Temples were destroyed and the 10 Tribes of the Northern Kingdom were dispersed among the Assyrian nation!

Religion is not the problem, it is the solution-full stop. We are the problem both the people teaching religion, the people espousing false religious beliefs and false prophecy as well as those of us who are accepting their lies and deviousness. When we fail to see that Donald Trump is a bad human being, when we fail to call out his love of dictators and Hitler, when we call him the ‘anointed one of god’ when we use ‘christian nationalism’ as a euphemism for control by the wealthy and the white supremacists and we believe that this is freedom - it is not religion that fails, it is us who trivializes religion. When we cannot see the difference between good and evil, when we cheer a team that celebrates what Hitler’s generals did, when we vote for a candidate that fomented an insurrection and/or his cronies who kiss his ass now when they know the truth of who he is and what he is, it is our failure, not religions.

We, the people, have to take back the teaching of religion. We, the people have to return to the text and follow the example of King David who could admit his errors and do his repentance. We, the people, have to stop thinking that the teachings of religion are far away, when they are “in our mouths and in our hearts”. We have to stand up for what is right no matter the personal cost because not standing up costs so much more. We, the people, have to look ourselves in the mirror, look our children in the eyes and answer the question: “Daddy, Mommy, why did you allow these idolators to take over the Temples, the Mosques, the Churches, the Synagogues, and the country?”

I live with the teachings each day, I have worked hard to never trivialize the texts and the lessons. I have found the solutions needed to deal with my problems and the problems of living that confront me daily in the Bible. I have done the best I know to teach another how to use the texts to seek the solutions for their particular issue in any given moment. I have counseled people for years and helped them find the solutions that are particular to them always seeking to lift them up and follow my passion and purpose. I believe the words above, I live these words and am profoundly grateful for all the teachers who have seen me and showed me texts that are my solutions. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Making "a word of the Bible happen" in everyday activities is possible when the words permeate our souls! Year 3 Day 320

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 320

“For a word of the Bible to happen it must permeate the soul, relate to one’s problems, dreams, and emotions. Detached from the living issues of the human situation, our commitment becomes dim, inane. In other words, to teach religion means to teach a way of dealing with living problems of human existence, with the problems of the student who sits in front of us. Otherwise it remains trivial. And religious cannot survive as a triviality.” (Insecurity of Freedom pg. 57)

Today is the last day of Sukkot, the eighth day and tonight is Simchat Torah, the rejoicing of the ending and new beginning of reading the Torah as well as the first anniversary, Yahrtzeit, of the Oct. 7th terrorist attack which killed over 1200 people, took 251 hostages of which some 101 hostages either dead or alive remain in captivity in Gaza. On the eighth day after a birth, a boy is circumcised and receives his name, I pray that on this eighth day the hostages and their families are given hope that a deal is being made, that the terrorists of Hamas, the government of Netanyahu and his thugs realize the importance of human life according the “word of the Bible”.

Rabbi Heschel, in the first two sentences above, describes the dilemma we are in, Be it in the Middle East, America, in our cities and communities, in our religious centers, in our individual being. “A word of the Bible” does not “permeate the soul”, it does not relate to one’s problems, dreams” and this is because many people teaching and engaging in “a word of the Bible” are unwilling to allow the words to “permeate their soul”, unable to hear truth and are more interested in twisting the “word of the Bible” to their selfish, greedy, goals of power and control.

I am struck by the first sentence in that Rabbi Heschel is talking about “a word of the Bible to happen”. He is reminding us and demanding of us, calling out to us and begging us to remember the words mean nothing if we don’t make them happen in the moment, in the world and in our inner lives. Otherwise, what is happening in ‘houses of worship’ is worshiping idols, is, in Hebrew, Avodah Zarah-worship of idols. He is also telling us how to make “a word of the Bible happen”, by having it touch our souls, by allowing ourselves to be changed by this “word of the Bible” in this moment and knowing that an imprint of this experience is left upon our inner life. We will never be the same after we allow “a word of the Bible” to “happen” to us, to “permeate the soul” because only then can we experience and understand how this “word of the Bible” relates and helps us find solutions to our “problems, dreams and emotions”. Only by making “a word of the Bible happen” in our souls so we make it “happen” in the world can we begin to breathe a little better, can we end our constant worry and holding of our breathe to see if we are going to be okay. Only by realizing that the Bible is a blueprint for all of life’s ups and downs, a solution “to one’s problems, dreams and emotions”, can we find the right solution for this moment in our lives and in the lives of those around us. Only by allowing “a word of the Bible to happen” can we end our constant fear and loathing of another human being, can we throw the Idols in the Temple out, can we light the candles of Hanukkah and rededicate ourselves to the words “of the Bible” in truth.

On page 3 of his book, God in Search of Man, Rabbi Heschel describes the reason for “the eclipse of religion in the modern world.”  “Religion declined not because it was refuted, but, because it became irrelevant, dull, oppressive, insipid.” It has not gotten any better since 1955 when these words were first published, in fact, I would offer each of these descriptors have gotten more embedded in the minds, teachings, preachings of the so-called ‘religious’ establishment. Because so many faith leaders have “detached from the living issues of the human situation, our commitment” has “become dim, inane”. The so-called ‘religious’ establishment in Israel, in Iran, in Gaza and in Lebanon have made “a word of the Bible”, a word of the Koran, empty and use the words found in these holy texts for their vanity, not for the sake of heaven! The same is true here in the U.S. People who claim Trump was anointed by Christ to lead America are saying this for their own power grab, they actually believe Trump will not turn to fascism, they actually believe they will thrive under a man who worships Hitler, loves authoritarians like Putin, etc. It will not be ‘christian’ law, it will be Trump-Law and this will not bode well for anyone but the Trumps! We have Idolators in the Temples and the Churches, in the Mosques and the Synagogues, yet we continue to listen to them, we continue to pay them to destroy us, to tell us ‘don’t worry, he will fix all your problems,’ and other such bullshit! Because of the Idols in the Temples, religion has lost its moral high ground, it has lost its raison d’être, “to permeate the soul” and change our hearts and actions, to make a “more perfect union” between human beings and between us and God.

We can still turn this runaway train around, we can still rescue the hostages in Gaza, in Russia, in our own communities, in our country. It will take a herculean effort to throw the idolators out of our religious institutions, it means changing the power structure, the board structure, it means demanding of our clergy that they teach the Bible and the particular religious tenets as solutions to the problems of today, that they teach all of us how to use the Bible in order to “relate to one’s problems”, how to “circumcise the foreskins of our hearts” and how to let go of our vanity and stop worshiping the emptiness of mendacity and self-deception. We do this by immersing ourselves in the spiritual texts of our faith, we do this by making “happen” a phrase like “Love your neighbor as you love yourself” in our daily activities, we do this by making “happen” a call to “care for the stranger, the orphan, the widow, the poor, the needy” every day reaching out to help rather than abuse another. We have the blueprint, we have the inner strength, we have the leadership of Jesus, Moses, Mohammed, Buddha, and our ancestors who have kept their teachings alive and present. We just have to have the courage to “Go for yourself, go to yourself” and live a life of blessings rather than be seduced by the curses.

I have been successful in my years of recovery to allow “a word of the Bible to happen” by having them “permeate my soul”. This is my “gift”, I can sit with someone, find the “word of the Bible” they need to hear so they can find a solution for their problems, their dreams. This is the honor I have been given by God and the task I have been created for. I am grateful that people keep helping me have the words of the Bible permeate my soul so I stay fresh, current and growing. I am no longer an empty, vain vessel, I am a servant and a student. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

"Learning, study" as a lifelong challenge to sort out our inner life - Year 3 Day 319

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 319

“Learning, study is more than preparation of young people for good citizenship. Study is a form of worship, an act of inner purification.” (Insecurity of Freedom pg.57)

Rabbi Harold Shulweis, whose memory is a blessing, would re-enforce the importance of study as “a form a worship” when he spoke to Rabbinic Students, to congregants, to anyone at all. I am hearing his voice along with Rabbi Heschel’s in my ears right now. This thought is a radical idea for many, in fact it is so out of people’s minds that study is no longer important except for the way it will help someone ‘get ahead’, ‘make a fortune’, etc. Religious school education ends for most young people by the time they reach their teens and even if they go on, be it by choice and/or coerced by parents, they tune it all out. In our secular schools, Civics is no longer taught in many schools so young people are not even aware of the responsibility that freedom brings, the actions of good citizenship.

We are in a crisis of our own making. The United States is facing an election that could well decide the fate of democracy as one of the candidates keeps trying to show his ‘macho man’ way of being by loving Hitler, Stalin, Putin, etc; while the other one is a woman who has been in public service her entire life, who, as a daughter of immigrants, believes deeply in the promise of our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution. That the former President of the United States who fomented an insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, could be close to regaining the Presidency shows how far we have fallen, how not only has “good citizenship” been jettisoned, people are showing the lack of “inner purification” and their disdain for same. WTF??!!??

To engage in learning means we have to hear all sides of the issue, be it secular and religious, spiritual and practical, as every issue confronting us has both spiritual and practical aspects, they are found in both the secular foundational texts of a country’s existence and the religious texts of the Hebrew Bible which, I believe, is the foundational text for all western faiths. Learning is the process by which we let go of our old ideas and open ourselves up to new ways of seeing the text, new ways of seeing our bias’ and our self-deceptions. Learning causes us to “lift up our eyes and see”, as Abraham is instructed in Genesis, so we can find the ideas, the actions we need to take to uncover the hidden gems within us, within the texts, within another human being. Learning is never done alone because we will constantly miss the same thing over and over again. In Judaism we have a Chevruta, a spiritual friend with whom we pour over the Bible, Talmud, the commentaries, etc because our spiritual friend, our Chaver, reflects our soul back to us so we can purify the dross that we carry within. Study is not to be done all day, every day, rather we are supposed to learn each day, I prefer morning, and then put the learning into practice throughout our day because study alone will not bring about change, it is not enough to engage in “an act of inner purification” and not be engaged in the world around us. This is a truth that the Rabbis of old knew because they had professions or benefactors so they never made a living by study or teaching, it was done for the sake of learning alone. So, Mr. Ben G’Vir, Mr. Smotrich, Mr. Netanyahu, protecting the Ultra-Orthodox from serving in the military, from getting employment goes directly against the teachings of the Sages that you revere so much, whom you quote so often, whom you bastardize thinking people will not check your sources! Without “an act of inner purification”, without “learning, study”, we are raising generations of people who’s inner lives are a mess and they think it is an issue of mental health rather than an issue of spiritual immaturity. It is not their fault, it is the fault of society, it is the fault of parents, it is the fault of the system of religious and secular education who have failed us all.

The founding fathers of the United States gave us a Constitution that was flawed so they also gave us the Bill of Rights and a path for continuing to improve upon the Constitution as we learned more and progressed. While once there was slavery and a Black Man was counted as 3/5’s of a person, everyone is free and is counted as a whole person who can vote their conscience without fear or favor, in theory. We know the Voting Rights Act of 1964 which the current Supreme Court has said isn’t applicable anymore because every state just goes along with it has been gutted in many states, especially those controlled by Republican Legislators. We know that our children in Florida are being taught that Slavery was good for Black people because it taught them a trade, according to Governor DeSantis. We are aware of the dangers of immigrants thanks to Trump/Vance and the Republican leadership while we are a country founded by immigrants, a country that decimated the Native American population because we were afraid of them. We are so far from the ideal, from the path of freedom that began in Boston and Philadelphia because of our lack of “learning, study” because we no longer engage in “an act of inner purification” and believe the drivel and dross being pushed upon us by Mike Johnson, Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz, et al.

It is time for us to stand up and say NO to the status quo and YES to “learning, study”. It is time for us to admit our need for inner purification and to vote for people who want to do what is right and best for the many while allowing the people who oppose them to be heard and change their ideas when alternatives that make more sense are provided. It is time for us to end the status quo that keeps people from hearing truth, the status quo that provides lies and the status quo that has made a Truth a useless commodity, the status quo that holds the Liar in higher esteem than the prophets words in the Bible, who loves Korah more that Moses, who believes that authoritarianism is better that “proclaim freedom throughout the land and to all its inhabitants therein”(Lev.25:10). We need to stand for “inner purification” here, in Israel, and across the globe.

I have been engaged in “learning, study” for the sake of my “inner purification” since I was arrested in December, 1986. I am still fighting the status quo of my youth, I am fighting with people who think the status quo is ‘good enough’, I am fighting with the people who are so blind, so drunk with their own power, their own false egos that they believe they have achieved “inner purification” while denigrating another, hating another, lying about another, and getting people to go along because the people are afraid of them. I still rail about this mendacity, I still fight the fight for “inner purification”, I am still engaged in “learning, study” and I am still growing. It is hard and it is exquisite, exhausting and exhilarating. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Engaging in "True learning", "the study of Torah" all involve getting beyond our selfishness-are you able to do this? Year 3 Day 318

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 318

“The study of Torah is a challenge to the mind as well as an act of being involved in the dialogue of God and man, an act of sanctification of time. True learning is a way of relating oneself to something which is holy and universal.” (Insecurity of Freedom pg. 57)

“True learning is a way of relating oneself to something which is holy and universal” makes one think not just of religious teachings, but of all learning. When we learn science, humanities, mathematics, language, as well as the Torah and all spiritual texts we are relating ourselves “to something which is holy and universal”. Thinking about this, hearing Rabbi Heschel’s call to us I am in awe of the simple truth of this sentence. Whether our learning is about our actions or the actions of another, whether our learning is discovering the ‘secrets of the universe’, or leads to a vaccine to prevent some terrible illness or at least mitigate it, or it is about how to live a better life from the inside out, or it is about a deeper understanding of our unique purpose and how to fulfill it; all of it depends on our willingness and ability to relate ourselves to something greater than ourselves, to relate our selfs to that “which is holy and universal”.

In the beginning, this discovery of what “true learning is” was found in “the study of Torah” because one could not learn Torah with only one’s mind nor only one’s soul. “The study of Torah” has to involve both mind and spirit, body and soul because it is an experience of matter and energy, hence it “is a challenge to the mind as well as an act of being involved in the dialogue of God and man”. Just as “true learning is” an act of our whole being and can be present in all learnings, so too is “the study of Torah” an action which involves all our faculties. Without our mind engaging in this study, we will be woefully deficient in understanding and in maturation of our intellect, without our soul’s engagement we will find the rationalizations and become dismissive of the wisdom of Torah that doesn’t make sense to our rational minds.

We are in desperate need of hearing the words above, of engaging in “the study of” all religious texts in the ways described above in order to let go of our self-deceptions and the deceptions of another. Thinking about the stories of Jesus in the New Testament, he hung out with all the people that the Christian Nationalists, the Prosperity Gospels adherents, the Project 2025 architects and believers, the Billionaire Trump Boys Club hate, denigrate, use as props for their authoritarian desires! In the Torah, we are challenged to care for the stranger, the poor, the needy, the widow, and the orphan 36 times! We are taught that God dwells among us when we make a space for holiness to reside within us and around us. While many people understand this as an edifice, I hear it as a space within our souls, within our minds where we engage in and are “involved in the dialogue between God” and ourselves-not just “man” as a separate entity from the individual, rather each of us as people wrestling with our minds and navigating the dialogue and the arguments between our soul’s knowing and our mind’s thinking. Hence the need to bring both of these ways of understanding and thinking, knowing and doing together to find the right action for this moment. It can never be to vilify someone for our own gain, it can never be to spew hatred and lies, in the name of God, it can never be to proclaim that ‘they’ need to be vanquished, ‘they’ are “enemies of the people”, “vermin” because another human being disagrees with someone, because another person is holding us to the standard of decency learned from Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha, etc. When ‘religious’ people proclaim adulterers, coveters, thieves, false witness’, and soul murderers as “the anointed ones” we know they are Full of Shit and we have to say STOP.

It is crucial in this time of war, both civil and between peoples, that we go back to the basics of Torah and of “true learning”. Of course there are times when we have to go to war, when we have to battle, and the first arena any war, any battle has to take place is within ourselves. We have to “challenge our mind” and be “involved in the dialogue of God and man” before we make any outer decision and because of the bastardization of holy texts, because “true learning” is no longer important to these religious charlatans, to these False Prophets, we find good people being led like sheep to their own ruin and destruction and the ruin and destruction of freedom and our holy scriptures.

This is what we are fighting for right now in the US election, in the war in Ukraine and in the Middle East quagmire. We have to call upon the leaders and the people to “challenge the minds” of conventional wisdom and old hatreds that no one really knows the origin of anymore and engage in being “maladjusted” to these conventional notions, to these old animosities, so we can find a new solution, a way forward in, at the very least, respect for the divine image of each individual no matter what “side” they are on. We have to find pathways to reach out and help people who have ‘drunk the kool-aid’ on either extreme come back to a middle path, at least 10% away from their respective extremes. We have to say NO to the likes of Bannon and Flynn, Trump and Vance, Sanders and AOC, Bibi and Ben G’Vir as well as Putin, Orban, Kim Jung Un. We have to fight for that which is “holy and universal” like freedom, respect, justice, compassion, truth, kindness, etc with all we have against the forces mentioned above who want to be in control of all of us and have the world be a kleptocracy, which is what Elon Musk is trying to make happen by bribing people to vote for Trump! We have to demand better of ourselves and we do this by voting out the charlatans, the liars and voting in fighters for decency, democracy, freedom and truth.

I have been engaged in this challenge most of my life, even when I was a drunk and criminal. I have always been fighting the inner war I hear Rabbi Heschel calling us to wage and, unfortunately, my mind won far too often in my youth; my rationalizations won and I was the people I describe in the paragraph above-indecent, uncaring, lying, cheating, etc. I am remorseful to this day for the damage I caused. I am remorseful for the damage I have caused since 1987 and I realize the vast majority of my actions, whether someone found them good or not good, were the result of the trying to serve something “holy and universal”, they were after “being involved in the dialogue of God” and me. There were/are times when I hear me and believe it is God and more often than not, God wins the dialogue and people don’t want to hear it. I am continuing to “challenge my mind” and I continue to engage in “true learning” so I become a better version of me that I was yesterday. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Are you using faith as a guide, a challenge or as descriptive and literal? Year 3 Day 317

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 317

“The Torah is not description but guidance; not an acceptance but a challenge; not reminiscence but commandment. It is not a portraiture of that which is but a vision, an anticipation of that which ought to be.” (Insecurity of Freedom pg.57)

In his commentary on Leviticus 19:2, the Ramban says we have to be told to be holy because there are people who will be “scoundrels within the bounds of the Torah”. I hear Rabbi Heschel echoing this sentiment in the words above. When we see Torah as ‘history’, it is easy to believe it is describing something that was, that we can just accept the laws/commandments, that it gives us a false sense of ‘how to be’. Yet, as at the end of the Holiness Code we are told: “Love thy Neighbor as thyself”, there is no description as to how to do this, nor is this a reminiscence because even the Jewish People who proclaim Am Yisrael Chai, the Jewish people live, have never all agreed on anything, except, maybe, the Shema is our watch phrase, our goal. The same is true with the other Spiritual Texts held in the same esteem, holiness as the Torah and the Bible; they are for guidance, they are a challenge to our status quo, they are commanding and demanding, they are a vision as well as an anticipation of that which both ought to be and can be-if we are willing to use the Holy Texts for their intended purpose.

“The Torah” is a manual that guides us on how to be more human today than we were yesterday, how we can be better versions of ourselves in this moment than we were a year ago, how to live a life that feeds our spiritual as well as physical selves and how our souls become the arbiters of what is the next right thing to do rather than our rationalizations and feelings. We are given 365 “don’t do this” commandments because, as we have seen throughout history, we do them with little or any thought when we believe it is in our best interests to lie, to commit adultery, to steal, to make the truth non-existent, to be misogynistic when we want to have dominion and rule over a woman and/or over another group of people. We are guilty of “Coveting our neighbors’ stuff” because we decided they ‘took’ it from us rather than come face to face with our own shortcomings and repairing ourselves, as long as we have someone to blame, we don’t have to be responsible for our part in our own demise, in our own current situation. We have 248 “Do this” commandments because we can see how often we didn’t-even having them spelled out to us, we find reasons not to take the next right action and do what we are called to do. A few of the most violated “do this” commandments is “care for the stranger, the needy, the poor and the orphan” another is “proclaim freedom throughout the land and to all its inhabitants therein”, still another is “forgiveness”. We think it serves us to denigrate the stranger, those who are ‘different than us, and hold onto our grudges! While there are many more, these three show us how we can deceive ourselves to go along with an authoritarian, with a societal ‘norm’, to our own ruination. Violating these three and the others ruins our humanity, we lessen our own value and worth, our own dignity and image; we tarnish the divine image we are created in and we deceive ourselves into believing someone will save us, rather than depending on our own strength, independence, wisdom and ability to join forces for good, for what is right and what is being demanded of us. Torah is guidance, it is not a nice story or a story of fear and punishment. It is guidance as to what happens when we take the next right action and what happens when we take the next wrong action. We don’t have to blame anyone else, we just have to look within which is the goal of Torah, to look within and then outside to see how we can add rather than subtract.

Torah is the challenge of building a world that we can live in with one another in harmony and detente, if not peace. It is the vision of how we ought to help one another, redeem the poor, ransom the captive, dignify another human being and see the infinite worth of every individual, after all we all stood at the bottom of Mt. Sinai, we all stood at the edge of the Jordan when Moses spoke to us reminding us that everyone was at the Jordan waiting to cross over and we all were equal from the water drawer to the head of the tribe.

It is time for us to reclaim the Torah from the Charlatans of the far right and the far left. It is time for us to reclaim the Bible from these ‘experts’ who believe ‘only i know what God wants’ when Torah has so many faces, so many understandings, so many interpretations. It is time for We, the people, to recapture the commandments, to use the guidance, to end our longing for the good old days and realize the best is yet to come because there living in the past is ignoring the beauty of today and the challenges of today. It is time of We, the people, to challenge the liars who claim life is so terrible, those authoritarians who want to tear everyone down so they can have control and dominion over people for their own selfish desires. We, the people, have to regain the vision of Shalom, wholeness that permeates every word of Torah, of the Bible. It is time for all of us to sit down and argue for the sake of heaven, for the sake of learning with the thoughts and values of the Bible, of the Torah rather than argue to be right and in control. We, the people, have to reclaim our heritage from the prophets, to speak truth to power and to the people, to be loud and proud of who we are and what we bring, to serve something greater than ourselves so we can truly be our authentic self. We have to ability, we have the texts, we just need to be willing-are you?

I have used the Torah and the Bible as guidance and hear the commands of the text over and over again in each reading and I hear the guidance and the commands anew each time. To this end, I have studied with Rabbi Ed Feinstein for 31 years going over the same texts, arguing anew over each one and finding new ways to set our vision in line with the divine, to hear the commandments anew, to deepen our compassion and understanding of our fellow human beings. Ed and I have been partners in Chutzpah as he says, partners in healing broken spirits, partners in loving our neighbors, partners in proclaiming freedom for all, partners in knowing if we are alive, we have to learn. The guidance and the vision of Torah has shaped my life for the last 35 years in ways that are too large for me to even comprehend. It has made me more responsible, more sensitive, more enraged at mendacity, more compassionate towards people who are just stuck. Torah has made me engaged in anticipatory excitement of what can and should be, it has cleaned my shame and allowed me to be imperfect, it gives me the strength and sight to do T’Shuvah and no longer worry about someone else defining me. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

How are you engaging in enobling your humanity and the humanity of another? Year 3 Day 316

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 316

“The belief in the possibility to affect and enoble human beings is the rock upon which all of Judaism is built. Denial of this belief would render all of Torah innocuous.” (Insecurity of Freedom pg. 56-7)

While these two sentences seem obvious given the commandments we learn in the Torah and that are lived into in the rest of the Bible, we seem to forget this truth, we seem to be able to ‘spin’ the Mitzvot to our liking, to serve us instead of serving something greater than us. Rabbi Heschel’s use of the words “possibility”, “enoble”, “affect” point us in the direction of inner exploration and discernment. The Hebrew word for prayer is reflexive, we are not asking God, some other entity for something, we are actually asking our self for something, be it healing old wounds, finding new paths for reconciliation and peace, to truly understand what we know in ways that serve us and more than us, etc.

Prayer, you should, you should not commandments are for the individual human being and for a sense of communal spirit. They give us a “rock” of commonality of values and principles, they give us the wherewithal to change when needed, to help another person change, to keep a community together in truthfulness, kindness, love and loyalty to shared principles. Judaism is not just a religious movement, it is a way of living movement and we, some of us Jews, believe the spiritual principles, the commandments, the communal structure gives us a way to live with our imperfections and the imperfections of another. It is the belief that we all change, we all grow and we all have to choose what change we are going to effect in ourselves and which way we are going to grow.

Adherence, study, immersing oneself in the Torah, in the Bible gives the individual a sense of belonging, of being known, of being loved because all of the heroes in the Bible are flawed, they make mistakes and the need for Rabbis to make them perfect bastardizes the text! Understanding sibling rivalry, understanding curiosity, especially when told “don’t eat from this tree and that tree only”, standing up for people one doesn’t even know and calling the Judge of Judges to be just takes a lot of chutzpah and is necessary if we are going to enoble our humanity, if we are going to affect the ways another person grows their own humanity. We have the opportunity to do this each and every day, we have the tools, as Deuteronomy 30:14 says: “The word is very near to you, in your mouth, in your heart”. We don’t have to search too far for what will/can “affect and enoble” us, we just have to begin to dig down through the shmutz that has blocked our spiritual arteries, that is imprisoning our soul, that is denying this “belief in the possibility to affect and enoble human beings”, that is working hard to bastardize and deny the “rock upon which all of Judaism is built”.

What is the plaque in our spiritual arteries? It is greed, believing I have to ‘get mine’ and no else matters. It is power, believing I can bastardize Holy Texts to serve my power grab, my hatred of another human being, even though we are not to hate our neighbors in our hearts according to the Holiness Code in Leviticus. It is lying and making truth indiscernible, treating fiction as fact and fact as fiction, accusing another person of that which we are guilty of. It is when we don’t see the infinite worth of another person so we can enslave them, not give them equal pay, not see them as equal to us because of gender, ethnicity, religion, sexual preference, etc. Laziness in not discovering what any spiritual tradition truly says and only going by what the ‘guru’ we have picked says it says tends to create a lot of plaque because we are not exercising our spiritual muscles, our spiritual flow, we are only taking in and not really giving out and this creates a blockage as well.

When we say, believe, practice the religion, the spiritual discipline of NONE, we have made the decision that the Torah, the Bible, the New Testament, the Koran, the Tibetan Book of the Living and Dead, etc are of no consequence for us. We have said they are not harmful nor helpful, they are not offensive nor defensive. How awful and foreboding is this! To say the Torah, etc are not offensive is like saying someone spitting in your face is love. To say the Torah is not helpful is like saying all of medicine is ridiculous because we don’t need any help from anyone nor anything. It is like saying the vaccinations developed are unnecessary, Pasteurization is too expensive and doesn’t do anything for us, the polio vaccine was a hoax, and other such stupid sayings. To “render all of Torah innocuous” is to tear down the foundation of democracy, of freedom, of Judaism and the structure of the world. We would be left with ‘survival of the cunningest’, we would see alliances no longer made for the greater good because there is no greater good than the survival of oneself, one’s community, one’s country, etc. We would see almost 50% of the people believing a convicted felon, a proven liar, a charlatan who is only out for him/herself selling a bunch of bullshit about caring for another and we would see so-called ‘religious’ people supporting him, we would see people who seem like decent people supporting the liar because s/he would be good for them. This person would be exalted because people have lost the foundational belief that Mitzvot, that faith and the actions that come out of one’s faith, can and must “affect and enoble human beings.

Sitting here this morning, getting ready to co-officiate at a wedding of two amazing young people, reading this makes me so grateful that I heard a call 38 years ago in a prison cell, that I responded to that call and began a way of being that begins each morning with prayer, study, gratitude, and writing. I am able to look back at old writings and see how faith has changed me, how AA has changed me, how Judaism has made me a better human being. I am in wonderment and disbelief that life could be so good for a guy who was not so good for much of the first half of his life. I know ‘in my bones’ that without Torah and the Bible telling me through the stories that change was possible, that Jacob could change and it was hard, that a King like David could screw up and admit his errors, do his T’Shuvah and be forgiven, that no one had to die for my sins to be forgiven, that speaking truth to power will not make you popular and is necessary as the prophets show us, that I do not have to add to the destructive forces in the universe in order to be successful. I know that money will not make me joyous, only living well will, only loving fiercely and being loyal will and I have come to realize the people I help do not always reciprocate and that is good also. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Rejecting the lies of those who claim human beings don't change- Year 3 Day 315

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 315

“Supremely sensitive as the prophets are to the wickedness of man and deeply conscious of his stubbornness and callousness, they also insist upon the ability of man to change, to repent, to return to God and live by justice and compassion. Prophecy may be defined as a formidable effort to change any spiritual status quo, as an everlasting protest against any fatalistic conscription of life, against those who teach that human nature will never change.” (Insecurity of Freedom pg. 56)

“Prophecy may be defined as a formidable effort to change any spiritual status quo” can change both the ways we understand the role of the prophet, the “vengefulness” of God that people speak about when Moses foretells what is going to happen to the people when they decide to worship false gods, and it could, possibly, stop us from scouting out “after our heart and eyes because we will whore after them”(Numbers 15:39) and in the 3rd paragraph of the Shema.

The prophets were speaking truth to power AND they were making “a formidable effort” to change the people as well. Unfortunately, not enough people took their words into their hearts and changed their “spiritual status quo” then and we still haven’t leaned into them today. I hear Rabbi Heschel demanding we engage with the prophets and with the prophetic vision they have left for us, I hear him calling out for us to end our spiritual stuntedness and allow ourselves to grow spiritually, morally, mentally. When wonder is the foundation of living, then we can never be stuck in a societal “spiritual status quo”, we have to keep growing and changing. Yet, we seem to be unable to throw the “Idols in the Temples” out, just as the Priests were unable to in the days of the prophets and since.

For many in the world the “spiritual status quo” is one of anger and rage, feeling like a victim and having to be part of an identity group that has been wronged. It is always being the underdog and “THEY” are out to get us. We see the progressives engaging in anti-semitism with no thought to how the Jews have supported the underdog, the widow, the orphan, the poor, the needy, and the stranger throughout history. We watch in horror as white supremacists claim they are the group being discriminated against while they spew lies, rage, rebellion against democratic norms and democracy itself. We are witnesses to the lies of the media along with the bias’ so it is almost impossible to get the facts. Be it Bibi or Trump the ‘poor me’ and ‘strongman’ themes that both of them perpetuate are false, they are dangerous, they are demeaning and they are not in keeping with the words of the prophets, they are not to be found in the Bibles they claim to revere, yet people believe them, people are worn out by them and people have forgotten the words of the prophets and the actions those words call for. We have to reclaim our heritage, we have to reclaim our calling, we have to reclaim our spiritual health. The time is now, the way is clear and the purpose is to “form a more perfect union”, to “proclaim freedom throughout the land and to all its inhabitants therein” which is inscribed on the Liberty Bell and in the Bible, Lev. 25:10. When the far left and the far right attempt to pull us towards idolatry, we have to say NO, loudly and proudly declaring our spiritual growth and our loyalty to the principles of the Bible and to the words of the prophets.

We, the people, have to stop going along with the lies and worshiping the idols of power, authoritarianism, hatred, victimhood, mendacity, self-deception among others. We can do this by going the “protest agains any fatalistic conception of life”. “Thats the way it is and always will be” is a lie promoted by society to control the masses. “The Bible says….” Is usually an interpretation not the actual words and when the words are used out of context they create a false justification for bad actions. The call of the Rabbis to not hear the call of the prophets but to shift their words to make them more benign and not call the people to revolt was their way of holding power and, to be fair, to keep Judaism alive as well as changing it to fit their vision. The Rabbis and Priests, Ministers and Imams who preach hatred, who support the extremism of the far left and the far right are assisting “Idols in the Temple” to flourish. The worship of the moneyed class by elected officials and by staff at non-profits as well as in the boardrooms of for-profit companies is reminiscent of the same worship that caused the destruction of both Temples and the exile of Jews from Israel and from Judea. Because of the “idols in the Temple” that Israel had, they became the “lost tribes” which is an important lesson for us all. Keeping “Idols in the Temple” will always lead to our becoming lost and, if we don’t “protest…against those who teach human nature will never change”, we will not even leave a record for the next generations.

There is a solution! Recover our spiritual passions, uncover our true selves, discover our unique gifts and purpose and continue to engage in spiritual growth. We have to be forever unsatisfied with the “spiritual status quo” no matter how good we think it is. Rabbi Dr. Abraham Twerski once told me: “As soon as you think you are spiritual, you aren’t!” While we have to be satisfied with our growth, with our portion, satisfaction doesn’t mean stopping nor settling. It means we accept that this is the best we could have achieved for today, knowing tomorrow will be one grain of sand better. All of us yearn to connect to another human being, all of us are haunted by hiding our true selves for fear of being made fun of, all of us know we have a purpose and gifts and our afraid society will not accept our gifts and deny us our purpose. We can do this when we decide to serve something greater than society. We can do this when we realize we have a seat at the table and nobody can stop us except us. We can do this when we know change is the only constant and our evolution is imperative for the world to evolve as well.

I rail against the “spiritual status quo” all the time and I keep growing myself. I call bullshit on the ideas that change is not possible and I believe in the wonder and possibility of life. I believe everyone can change and those who choose to be extremists have to be treated like the ones who have “Tzaarat” in the Bible-sent outside the camp to be ministered to and healed. I was the Rabbi of one such camp for many years and helped many people heal and return to their proper place. This is my unique gift and I rejoice in it. I continue to speak out against “a leopard doesn’t change its spots” when it comes to human beings, I am grateful to the myriad of teachers who helped me and I continue to put these vibes into the world. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Realizing our "ability to change, to repent, to return to God, and live by justice and compassion." Year 3 Day 314

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 314

“Supremely sensitive as the prophets are to the wickedness of man and deeply conscious of his stubbornness and callousness, they also insist upon the ability of man to change, to repent, to return to God and live by justice and compassion. Prophecy may be defined as a formidable effort to change any spiritual status quo, as an everlasting protest against any fatalistic conscription of life, against those who teach that human nature will never change.” (Insecurity of Freedom pg. 56)

Rabbi Herschel’s dissertation for his Doctorate at the University of Berlin was on the prophets and his book The Prophets published in 1962. He speaks often in his writings about the prophets, the need to study them, learn from them, etc. In the first sentence above, he is using the experience of the prophets, their raison d’être to remind us of both our ability to be stubborn and callous as well as “the ability of man to change”. Rabbi Heschel is calling to us to read the prophets, to imbibe the words, the experiences of the prophets, to learn what happens when we hold onto our “stubbornness and callousness”, destruction and exile, loss of self and purpose as we see from the 10 “lost” tribes and the exile of Jews from Judea for almost 1900 years! The “Idols in the Temple”, the title of this essay, are very clear to one in the writing above; they are the lack of true education, the lack of knowledge of the prophets, the insistence to ignore the truth and wisdom of the prophets, the digging in of human beings to ‘prove their rightness’, and the willingness of some to heed the call of the prophets “to change, to repent, to return to God and live by justice and compassion.”  Yesterday I wrote about our need for education of our inner life and the words are the beginning of our education, the truth that we can change, that we can repent, we can be forgiven, we can return to the person we believe we can be, that we are born to be, we can “live by justice and compassion” and thrive, not be weak.

I hear Rabbi Heschel call out to us to let go of the fallacious beliefs of ‘the rugged individual’, ‘the strongman is needed to protect me’, ‘it is my enemies fault I have to do this’, ‘a leopard doesn’t change its spots’, etc. Learning the prophets, hearing their innumerable calls “to return”, “to repent”, can give us both hope that God will truly “heal their backsliding, love them freely” as the prophet Hosea says. Educating our inner life through studying the prophets teaches us “Return, you backsliding children and I will heal your backslidings” as Jeremiah teaches. Throughout the Hebrew Bible we learn of God’s waiting for our “return”, we witness the changes of Joseph, of Judah, of the Israelites, we witness the return to God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and especially King David. We also are witnesses to the “stubbornness and callousness” of the Kings of Israel following King David, even his son Solomon! We learn from Elijah that the voice of God is not always so loud, is not always earthshaking, that most often it is the “still small voice” inside of us, in our inner life that without education we dismiss, silence, imprison.

We are witnessing today a phenomena that began with the Rabbis of old who were afraid of the prophets, a re-interpretation of the Biblical text to suit their needs, to give them power and to ignore the truth and the call of the prophets and the Torah, to take the text out of context to further their goals, not necessarily the goals of God, of higher consciousness, of the people we are supposed to be serving. We have so many False Witness’ in the clergy today in every faith it is stunning. When a group can call themselves “Rod of Iron Ministries” and glorify the AR-15, when a Pastor can preach hatred towards the stranger and the poor, when a Rabbi can call for the death of a prime minister of Israel (Yitzhak Rabin) and consider Palestinians not human, we are in deep shit! Not because the majority necessarily believes them, rather because a large minority does! We have become a world that has no relationship to truth, no desire to live with inconvenient facts, no willingness to leave the “stubbornness and callousness” of their need to be right-be it in governments, corporate offices, non-profit boardrooms, or family get-togethers. Rather than study the prophets, learn how “to change, to repent, to return”, we study the dictators, worship at the feet of the authoritarians, wring our hands at what is happening and lose our voice to say NO to falseness, to bastardizing Holy Texts, to “callousness”.

It is not ‘their fault’! Trump, Putin, Bibi, Omar, Tliab, are all characters we have created and nurtured, put up with and encouraged precisely because our inner lives are so chaotic, so immature. We, the people, have to return to living with compassion and justice in our daily lives. We, the people, have to learn from the prophets the way back to our true selves, the way to live authentically no matter what society is demanding and accepting. This is the life Rabbi Heschel, Rev. King, Einstein, Harriet Tubman, Theodore Herzl, Bobby Kennedy, and so many more lived and we can use them as guides. We, the people, need to repent for the injustices we have witnessed and not corrected, the compassion we have refused. We have to change our ways by seeking knowledge through “maladjustment to conventional notions and cliches”, by never seeing something the same way twice, by letting go of our need to be right. We do this by seeking our spiritual guidance, we do this by educating our inner life and taking the next right action, we do this by admitting our fallibility and our need for collaboration rather than ruling. We let go of our false need to dominate and we realize the truth of Genesis Chapter 2-“it is not good for humans to be alone”. We, the people, have to take back our world, our control and no longer seek to win, rather seek to be just, no longer seek to ‘get even’ seek to be compassionate, no longer speak lies, seek the truth.

I have studied the prophets, I wrote about them daily from Jan-Sept. In 2021, and they changed my life. I seek them out often for guidance because they speak to my inner life in a powerful manner. Knowing the scorn they felt, the impossibility of their task, the danger of speaking truth to power and to the people, I am in awe of their steadfastness to live their purpose and be the person they were born to be-no matter what. Being a truth teller is not a popular position and, truth be told, it gets one into trouble often-I know this from experience, it is why I went over to the dark side as a teenage because I was shunned when I spoke truth. In my recovery, I have taken the blows that my truth telling causes, I have admitted when what I thought was true wasn’t, I have changed, repented and returned over and over again-making me stronger not weaker. I hear the lies of people, the need to be callous and stubborn of former friends and I am sad. And, I keep the faith that change is possible. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Educating our Souls so we can refine our impulses and drives - Year 3 Day 313

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 313

“Judaism is committed to the notion that education can and must reach the inner man, that its goal is to refine and to exalt the nature of man.” (Insecurity of Freedom pg. 56)

In 1635, 141 years before the American Revolution, public education began in Boston, Massachusetts. In 1642, 134 years before the American Revolution, Massachusetts Bay required parents to teach their children to read and write! In Deuteronomy, Chapter 6 verse 7 we are commanded to “teach them diligently to your children”, and in the Talmud we are told a father is “obligated to teach his son Torah” among other things pointing to the validity of what Rabbi Heschel is saying above and pointing to the importance of education for the soul of every human being, the soul of a nation dedicated to freedom, to growing a “more perfect union”, to being that “shining city on a hill”, to growing into the person we know we can be and want to be. Just as education has been crucial to Judaism and to the American experiment, it was also important to the Church, which St. Augustine began a school in the church he founded in Canterbury to study religious texts to improve and “exalt the nature of man.” Throughout the Arab world from 750 educating the young both in the Koran and other subjects was deemed important.

Education was always about the inner life of the child, the youth, the teen, the adult. Spiritual, religious education was never to be about the keeping of facts or the one-way to do something as evidenced by the myriad of arguments as to how to fulfill a commandment found in the Talmud. Education was/is to help us grow our inner life and change our outer actions. It is/was to “speak of them when sit in your house, you walk on the way, lie down, rise up” as Deuteronomy continues to teach us. We are told to keep them as “frontlets before our eyes” and “a sign upon our hand” so we are constantly available to learn, to implement, to change. Remembering what we said at Mount Sinai, “we will do and we will understand”. Unfortunately, education has been under attack for quite some time. In 2014, “only 23% of the 9100 eighth graders were at or above proficiency levels in civics” according to an article in the School Library Journal. In Judaism religious education is not much better as too many 13 year-olds are given the option of ending their religious and spiritual education once their B-Mitzvah is over. Prior to this, the state of education is always inspiring one to learn more. In all sects of Judaism, priority is given to teaching the dogma of the sect over the truth of the Bible, the “spin” of the Rabbi over the teaching students and their parents how to read the texts themselves, put themselves into the texts, learn the lessons and understand it uniquely for themselves and the moment. Hence, the problem of education is that neither public nor private, neither secular nor religious cares to “reach the inner man” nor “to exalt the nature of man”, rather it is to promote their agenda rather than truth, create cult followers rather than human beings with the power and the tools to change themselves and their world, to understand, interpret, and implement the ways of the Bible, the New Testament, the Koran, the teachings of Buddha, etc in their own unique way, enhance their inner life and “exalt the nature” of themselves. Religious education is so awful, fallen so far that in 2023 Russell Moore, editor-in-chief of Christianity Today, reported that “multiple pastors tell me, essentially, the same story about quoting the Sermon on the Mount, in their preaching-‘turn the other cheek’-to have someone come up and say “where did you get these liberal talking points”!! The Rabbis of the West Bank and the Far-right in Israel and the world believe it is okay to kill Palestinians because they are “Amalek” without any remorse!!

We hear much about “Am Yisrael Chai”, the people of Israel lives! Yet, we have never been one people with one way of seeing things, we have never agreed with one interpretation nor one teaching except for the Shema as the ‘watchword of the Jewish people’ and even the Shema is open to many interpretations, that something happened at Sinai, that the Torah is at least 2500+ years old and not much more. This is because Jewish education is supposed to have us “argue for the sake of heaven” so we can keep learning, keep turning the texts that influence our daily living over and over again in order to grow internally, to mature our souls and educate our intuitions. We cannot continue to be Jews and love Judaism while going against the dictate of the commands of Deuteronomy 6:4-9! We cannot say we are living a Jewish/Christian/Muslim life while treating the poor, the needy, the stranger, the widow, the orphan badly! We cannot say we are the saviors while we use the rhetoric of the autocrats, while we support the degradation of any group of people no matter what some in that group have done to us.

Education is the key to understanding ourselves, to growing our inner core, to having the strength to say NO to the bullies. Refining and exalting the nature of human beings forces us to let go of our need to compare, our need to be in despair because of comparisons, to accept our gifts as enough, to know we matter, to know we are growing into a richer and more meaningful way of living. This is crucial for our children to grow up knowing and for us to keep remembering as adults.  Education is the key to growing our souls to know better than to follow the wrong path without any awareness, it is the key to “lift up our eyes” and see what is truly in front of us, what is behind us and how to make better decisions and take the next right actions. We have to re-invest in our own education, in the education of those around us, in our communal education so we achieve 80-90% proficiency in Civics, in following the teachings of Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha, etc. Education is the only way to fulfill the commandment of Deuteronomy Chapter 30:19; CHOOSE LIFE.

Education is the only way I am able to exist in the world of spirit, to be a decent human being, to acknowledge my “miss the marks” as well as the “hit the marks’ I achieve. It is the path I began in 1987 when I asked my brother to send me a Prayer Book and a Bible when I was in prison. It is a path that I know is never done for me, I keep finding teachers and students, learning partners and guides to help me stay fresh and not get stale. I am amazed at how I, like many others, get pigeon-holed into one way of being seen. I have been told that my message and my delivery is not conducive to ‘regular congregations’ and, every time I have spoken places, I am pretty well received, the message is ignored usually after I leave and it is heard. I continue to learn and grow, I continue to see the past in new lights and learn new lessons, I continue to learn, I continue to grow, I continue to CHOOSE LIFE. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Staying awake, aware and teachable in dangerous times - Year 3 Day 312

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 312

“Constant danger requires constant vigilance, constant guidance. What is needed is defense in depth, in the depth of every person. But the tragedy of our civilization is the liquidation of the inner man. We are doing our utmost to flatten man. Spiritual resources are being depleted.” (Insecurity of Freedom pg.56)

Each morning I am surprised at what Rabbi Heschel wrote 50-100 years ago, I do not think about nor prepare what I am going to write about before I sit down in the early morning. I do this so I encounter the teachings fresh and new without my preconceived notions nor my pondering how to be ‘smart’ about his words. Today is no different and I am realizing, again, how timely his words are, how eternal they are; there is always “constant danger” and most of us are oblivious to it! When we give everyone the “benefit of the doubt” many times we are being naive and allowing evil to flourish. When we don’t pay attention to what is around us, to what people are saying, what their actions tell us, we are being ostriches and hiding our heads in the sand. When we refuse to grow our inner life, when ‘way down deep we are shallow’, we are ripe and totally susceptible to the ravings of a lunatic and the ‘saving grace’ of the strongman. This is how dictators take over, this is how authoritarians win the day. This is how good people will do things that go against their best interests to serve ‘the man’.

We are in “constant danger” politically, morally, religiously and spiritually precisely because we have failed in our “constant vigilance, constant guidance.” “Vigilance” comes from the Latin meaning “keep awake” and “guidance” comes from the Latin meaning “to teach, instruct, point out”. Rabbi Heschel called out to all of us to be aware of our surroundings, not paranoid, just aware and stay awake! Rather than going to sleep and allowing people to “teach us the wrong ways of being, to instruct us in how to deceive ourselves and lie to ourselves, he is demanding we grow our inner lives so we can discern between the lies of society and the truth of our souls. I hear him wondering and crying out to all of us DANGER surrounds us when we fall asleep, when we do not “stay awake”, when we follow the teachings of the liar and the charlatan and not the teachings that raise our souls, educate our inner life. We have to return to this teaching over and over again because we keep forgetting about the “constant danger” that the “liquidation of the inner man” has brought about.

The only reason the far right gains traction across the globe is because we have failed to have a good “defense in depth, in the depth of every person.” We have failed in our schools- many of which no longer teach basic civics; in our religious organizations- many of which teach a false dogma that was never part of the original text of the Bible, the New Testament, the Koran, etc; and in many spiritual disciplines which are used by some practitioners as a salve for their conscience-‘see how spiritual I am, I practice Yoga and cheat my customers, but that is only business’. We have become pawns and willing participants in “the liquidation of the inner man” by deciding we don’t need any moral and spiritual training after we are 13, after our confirmation, because it won’t help us in our careers, it won’t make us any money. Even the fundamentalists stop growing their inner life at 13 because it doesn’t help their cause, it might make them rebel against the dogma that is designed to make them “excellent sheep” just as our universities and colleges, our businesses and politics are doing as well. We have to say NO to this way of being, we have to listen to our wise elders, to our ancestors, to the words of wisdom passed down through the ages. We have to stop the “liquidation” of our inner lives and souls.

Each of us needs a spiritual guide so we can receive “constant guidance” for the “constant danger” that awaits us. This “constant danger” is falling into a rut of being the smartest person in the room, believing the lies of our minds and the press we get, being empty inside because we have spent “the moral capital of our ancestors and not put any back into the moral/spiritual bank” as Dr. Stephen Marmer said at a conference in Los Angeles in 1990. We have failed to heed his words just as we have failed to heed Rabbi Heschel’s words. It is time for we, the people, to take back our birthright that we allowed the nephew of Laban the Aramean to steal from us. It is time for we, the people, to live into the blessings that Isaac gave us, to reject the “guidance” of Rebecca and the vanity of Rachel, the ‘where’s mine’ of Jacob. It is time for we, the people, to live into our birthright of being created in the image of the divine. It is time for we, the people, to return to the heritage we all share, leaving Egypt, letting go of the inner slavery as well as being saved from the harsh burdens of the taskmasters. It is time for we, the people, to once again say “We will do and we will understand” changing the ways of the Greek society we are in and returning to a ‘Jewish’ way of life, the way of Abraham, “go for yourself/go to yourself … to a land I will show you”, going forward even though we don’t know where because we will learn from our actions. It is time for we, the people, to care for the stranger within us, our inner life, and nourish our spirit, connect with a guide so we can “go for” our self to the place we belong, to fulfill the need we were created to fill.

I have had a spiritual guide since 1987 and while I have changed them, my current one I have had for the past 30+ years. I have not always listened to the guidance and I have paid a price for it, I have not heard clearly his advice and I regret that I didn’t get ‘hearing aids’ sooner. I have done the best I can to live in “constant vigilance” because I am aware of the “constant danger” around me and around the people I have served. Yet, as I look back, I see every time I forgot about the “constant danger”, I did not hear the “constant guidance” of my spiritual guides nor was I in “constant vigilance” and the situations always turned out badly. I know that it is so hard to be in “constant vigilance” from my own experience and I am understanding why “constant guidance” is part of the first sentence. I can’t do it on my own and the guide we choose is our partner in discerning the dangers ahead so we can avoid them, the guide we choose is our partner in growing our inner life rather than liquidating it. Having “constant guidance” allows us to replenish our spiritual and moral bank accounts rather than deplete them. “Guidance and Vigilance”, ‘staying awake and being teachable” is the secret to my success both in my rabbinate and in my daily living. I self-recriminate the times I fell asleep and I am so grateful for the guides and fellow spiritual travelers on my journey! To those who ‘won’ because I was asleep, I have no resentments and I say “God Speed”. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

How are you regaining your "independence, sensitivity, inner balance and freedom? Year 3 Day 311

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 311

“Abstaining from cultivating inner attitudes is an abdication of responsibility. It means turning over the child to other agencies of mass culture that powerfully affect attitudes and value judgments, such as television or comic books, Hollywood and Madison Avenue, the impact of which represents a major threat to the independence, sensitivity, inner balance, and freedom of the individual.” (Insecurity of Freedom pg. 56)

Rabbi Heschel wrote this in 1962, some 62 years ago! He was worried about “comic books, Hollywood, Madison Avenue” and while they all have contributed to our situation today, the internet has exploded as the “major threat to the independence, sensitivity, inner balance, and freedom of the individual”! And, like Nero, we sit and fiddle while democracy is burning from the inside in this country and across the globe. How sad and shortsighted, how devastating to the individual soul and spirit to be inundated with the lies and mendacity of “Madison Avenue”, “television” in the form of the bias of a network and the bending over backwards to achieve moral equivalence when there is none! Be in MSNBC’s very biased coverage of what is happening in the Middle East-it is horrific and there is blame on both sides yet they seem to only blame Israel when listening to Joy Reid and some others, or Fox News and the other right-wing news outlets who validate the lies of Trump and the Republicans knowingly and with no shame, even after losing a $700,000,000+ judgement to Dominion! CNN, in their desire to be ‘fair’ buys the lies of the ‘freedom fighters of Hamas’, JD Vance, et al and makes moral equivalency between the murder and massacre of Oct. 7, 2023 and the devastation in Gaza, between the raining down of missiles from Lebanon that drove 100,000 Israelis from the northern part of the country away from their homes and Israel’s targeted responses. We are in the throes of a “major threat to the independence, sensitivity, inner balance, and freedom of the individual.” This is not a new phenomenon, it is just being heightened each day by people like Elon Musk, the Murdocks, the 2025 project people, by Trump, et al; by AOC, by Rashida T’liab, by the movements that have disinvited Jews to the table because we are ‘whitey’, we are ‘oppressors’ and embrace the terrorists of Hamas and their supporters; and it is being heightened by the onslaught of lies and information coming over our smartphones, our tablets, our TV’s, our computers that bombard us with so many lies and misdirections, we no longer are able to discern truth and this is the greatest loss of all-our inability to discern truth which is the sum total of what happens when our “independence, sensitivity, inner balance, and freedom” are threatened and under constant attack.

Mark Twain wrote: “A lie is halfway around the world while the truth is putting its shoes on.” Truth gets lost and hidden when we no longer are able to think independently because we have to ‘go along to get along’, when we are more afraid of upsetting the boss, going against the group, being alone, being laughed at for caring for ‘those people’ (fill in the blank), when we make allies of our enemies like the christian nationalists who some orthodox Jews embrace-when they hate Jews, Blacks, immigrants, people of color, etc, like the far left who embrace the Hamas terrorists and Hezbollah knowing they hate America, hate anyone who doesn’t bow down to Allah, and isn’t willing to submit themselves to the rule of the Imam/Ayatollah! How ridiculous and how seriously devastating are these ways of being? Yet, because we did not heed Rabbi Heschel’s words along with the words of many other people like Rev King, Rabbi Prinz, Bobby Kennedy, we find ourselves in a grave situation.

The 2024 Election will not be stolen by Kamala Harris-full stop. The ones trying to steal the elections, trying to rig the elections are the Republicans who are gerrymandering their states, putting ridiculous voting rules and restrictions in so blacks and other LEGAL immigrants/citizens are afraid to vote. Some of us have watched in horror people buy into the lies of Trump, willing to vote against their best interests and ignore the truth in order to buy into the lies of ‘the leader’. They are giving up their “independence” and buying into ‘group-think’. We are witnessing the diminishing of the “sensitivity” for the well-being of another human being and seeing it replaced with blaming the immigrant, using the same terminology used by Goebbels. We are witnessing the loss of “inner balance” through the denial of the Holocaust by so many ‘friends of Trump’, spewing of hatred and seeking ways to subvert the law to the whims of ‘the leader’, through the onslaught of mendacity to the point it is hard to discern the truth unless you have a very strong spiritual corpus colosseum. All of this adds up to the loss of “freedom” of each one of us. When I have to spend time railing against the lies and deceptions, it takes away from my own learning and teaching, nurturing and growing of my soul and yours. We are becoming so polarized, those of us in the middl, those of us seeking truth, are shunned, are overwhelmed at times with the push/pull of the ends of the continuum.

We have to reclaim our “freedom”- we cannot depend on Trump and his lies to help us. We cannot expect Kamala Harris to do it on her own. We have to demand of our clergy a new way of worship and learning- one that engages us in a robust argument for the ‘sake of heaven’ as we learn to do as Jews. We have to demand that politics is left at the door and we are here to learn how to make our political decisions based on principles, not likes, how to grow and nurture our spiritual health so we are not so susceptible to the lies of another and we are more aware of the moments we fall into self-deception. We have to learn how to stand with the prophets instead of the priests, stand with the prophets instead of going along with the power and the wealthy, stand with the prophets even when we are being scorned, laughed at, ignored. This is how we will keep our “independence, sensitivity, inner balance, and freedom” as individuals and nations.

It is hard to live this way, I know. I am not perfect and have made my own errors and my own ‘slips’ into inappropriately railing against lies and mendacity. I know being ‘alone’ is better than being in a place that I know is false and full of vipers. I know that being me is more important to my soul and to my purpose than being ‘accepted in polite society’. I know my father’s legacy lives on in my siblings and myself and our children. I know speaking truth, not giving in, separates me at times and I am more okay with this than ever before. God Bless and stay safe, rabbi Mark

How are you still abdicating your responsibility to cultivate positive and truthful inner attitudes in yourself and the people around you? Year 3 Day 310

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 310

“Abstaining from cultivating inner attitudes is an abdication of responsibility. It means turning over the child to other agencies of mass culture that powerfully affect attitudes and value judgments, such as television or comic books, Hollywood and Madison Avenue, the impact of which represents a major threat to the independence, sensitivity, inner balance, and freedom of the individual.” (Insecurity of Freedom pg. 56)

Continuing where I left off prior to embarking on the 40 days of repentance, today being the day after Yom Kippur, I find Rabbi Heschel’s words, once again, disturbing and an apt description of what it was like, what it is like and what it will be like unless and until we heed his thoughts in whatever way we choose to.

Every word of the Bible, every Holy Day in Judaism and all other faiths I believe, point to and address “inner attitudes”. We are awash in ways to hear, grow, nurture our “inner attitudes” through religious education, prayer, meditation, developing our higher consciousness, with Rabbis, Priests, Ministers, Imams, Zen Masters, etc. Yet, we continue to be “abstaining from cultivating inner attitudes”! What is stopping us is the question that arises today, 41 days after beginning a deep dive of introspection of our inner life? I believe there are probably many reasons, I am going to focus on a few.

First of all, cultivate means “to prepare the land”, “to develop” , “to grow and nurture” so we can see Rabbi Heschel’s belief that we all need to prepare our inner life so we can develop, grow, and nurture a life worth living-which is at the core of every person’s raison d’être, everyone’s need to pursue a passion and live their unique purpose. This “cultivating” takes time and energy, it takes a commitment by the parents and the child, by the adult and the people around the adult-this cultivation can and must be happening at all times and when it doesn’t happen as a child, we the children are obligated to cultivate our inner attitudes ourselves. Just as if a parent doesn’t teach their child Torah the child is obligated to learn it when the child is old enough to find their own teacher. Herein lies the problem facing us today: The parent doesn’t see the benefit of “cultivating the inner attitudes” unless there is a ‘mental/psychological issue’. They will send their kids to shrinks at an early age, they will get them pills to help them ‘concentrate’ better, they will send them to Synagogue long enough to have a Bat/Bar Mitzvah, the party and the gifts AND not cultivate their “inner attitudes” because it doesn’t do them nor their children any economic nor social good. If we can’t ‘make money’, get more ‘likes’ achieve fame the attitude is “why bother”. Since there is no outward apparent advantage from “cultivating inner attitudes”, most people don’t. Another reason is that it is difficult and there is no ‘quick fix’. It takes time and work, there is no perfection nor ‘done’ to this endeavor. We are constantly in need of “cultivating inner attitudes” until we die. So, why bother if one can’t master it? What is the payoff for this work?

We have abdicated our responsibility and we are paying for it dearly and, once we realize the true cost of our abdication of “cultivating inner attitudes”, once we are presented with the bill for our “abdication of responsibility” we will cry out like the Israelites did in Egypt, we will realize as they did that we were, once, “more numerous and more mighty” than the Pharaohs and taskmasters and because we were “abstaining from cultivating inner attitudes” we find ourselves enslaved to the ‘strongman’, to the ‘dictator’, to the ‘christian nationalists’ , to the white supremacists, to the fascists, to the friends of Orban, Putin, etc.

Abdicating our responsibility to cultivate our “inner attitudes” causes us to lose our essence, to lose our inner compass, our ‘north star’ and this leaves us open to buy the lies and mendacities of those seeking power for their own sake. It allows us to accept their deceptions and revel in our own self-deceptions because they do not ask anything of us. These charlatans seeking power and their ‘friends’ in the religious communities tell us they will do it all for us, ‘god’ will do it all for us, believing they can sell us on these ideas because we are so gullible and infantile in our inner life. We see how this has happened in Russia with Putin, Hungary with Orban, Turkey with Erdogan, Israel with Bibi, Ben-G’Vir, Smotrich, etc. We watched in horror, all of us at the time and now only some of us, on Jan. 6th, 2021 as the Capital was breached and, even after being threatened and running to safety (like Josh Hawley did), some Republicans still tried to stop the peaceful transfer of power! Today, these same insurrectionists in the Congress claim Jan.6th was a ‘peaceful protest’ with people who were just tourists! These same people have spread the ‘big lie’ so often people don’t know what to believe precisely because of abstaining from cultivating inner attitudes.

We know how to cultivate our inner attitudes and it is not only therapy. Therapy will deal with depression and anxiety, it won’t deal with the matters of the soul-our reason for existing, our need to find the unique need we can fill, our relinquishing our power so we can be in a covenantal relationship with another human being. We are being called to stop the “abdication of our responsibility” to learn and grow our inner life, our spiritual life. We are both human and more than human, we are both matter and energy, we are both body and spirit, and without cultivating our spiritual life, without growing our connection to something greater than ourselves, we are not only abdicating our responsibility, we are becoming fertile ground for the next Pharaoh who appears, the next Trump, Netanyahu, Orban, Putin, who wants to rise from the ashes. The deceivers are never vanquished forever, we have to continue to learn and grow our inner lives so we can discern between falsehoods and truth, between deception and reality, between profane and Holy.

I ignored the inner attitudes when I was a teenager, I was too caught up in my own sorrow. In the past 37 years, I have spent a part of every day learning and growing my “inner attitudes”, I no longer abdicate my responsibility nor do I abstain from cultivating my soul’s knowing. I am dedicated to daily spiritual growth, to leaving the self-deceptions I have fallen prey to, to finding my new place to serve. I can’t do this without my inner life being clear-eyed, without hearing and following the call of my soul over the call of my mind and/or false ego. It is hard, it is a daily struggle and I fail at times and, I know, I keep coming back! God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Engaging in the "urgency" of the moment and being "personally motivated" to engage in repentance, repair and change -Year 3 day 309

Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 309

9th Day of 10 Days of Awe and Repentance

“Each person must examine whether one is part of a movement forced upon us by the environment or whether one is personally motivated, whether one is responding to pressure from outside or to an internal sense of urgency…Enlightenment about repentance is the central task of our time.” (Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity pg 70)

Today is the last day of the 10 days of Repentance, the 10 days of Awe prior to Kol Nidre and Yom Kippur. Today is the day people will feel the pressure to ask for forgiveness-maybe- and absolutely feel the communal pressure to go to Temple for services that they neither understand nor particularly like. They will go for the sermon, for the music, to see people and to be seen-how many of us go to meet God, meet our own souls “face to face”? How many of us are “part of a movement forced upon us” rather than being “personally motivated”? I fear most people attending services are part of the former group rather than the latter. We have been engaged and in the work of T’Shuvah, repentance, for the past 40 days  and have developed and or had “an internal sense of urgency” or we have been ignoring the work and only now feel the “pressure from outside” to do something. Which group do you belong to?

We are living in a moment, an era where “enlightenment about repentance” is not important to most and urgently needed. What is important is making apologies for everyone else’s feelings. It is amazing to me that the lies and the subterfuge of people both in power and next door, their feelings have more weight in our society than the truth, than the feelings of the ‘aggressor’ they have pointed out. Can one be sensitive to everyone and everything-of course not-hence the need for repentance/tshuvah. What we have going on, in some cases, is people who identify as minorities and have been wronged do not think they have any responsibility in wronging another because they are the victims. We have a victim mentality that precludes people being “enlightened about repentance” and engaging in it. This is true from Trump to the progressives who are complaining they don’t get their way-again the far right and the far left are closer to one another than to those of us in the ‘middle’ (10% off the ends of the continuum). Remembering Lyndon Johnson’s quote: “If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.” People like Trump and the Christian Nationalists, Roger Stone, et al have made this an art form and they keep gaining supporters!! The far left is willing to abandon their allies, the Jews, rather than wrestle with the truth of the situation in Israel. They are calling murder and terror, hostage taking and using their citizens, schools, mosques, hospitals as human shields, Freedom Fighting! This is how badly we need “enlightenment about repentance”. This is how badly we need people to come “face to face” with their inner life and their inner voice of spirit, “face to face” with the creative energy of the universe, their higher consciousness, and gain an “internal sense of urgency” so they become “personally motivated to repent, return and change! It is time for all of us to do this work.

To this end I want to lead the way:

I, Mark Borovitz, have an internal sense of urgency to heal the wounds I have caused with another(s) through:

my inattentiveness;

My unawareness

My blindness

My insensitivity

My loudness

My overwhelming arguments

My anger

My inability to see what is

My need to get ‘my way’

My harsh opinions

For all of these I want to heal them. I ask for your forgiveness and reach out to heal our old wounds.

I, Mark Borovitz, have am personally motivated to continue and grow the good things I have caused through:

Fighting for the soul of the individual in front of me

Taking the risks necessary to help another human being flourish

Wrestling with the Yetzer HaRa of another (and myself) to help them and me be better human beings

Not accepting the status quo

Not going along to get along

Speaking truth to power no matter the consequences

Engaging in Text Study with people so we both can learn and grow

Fighting the system so people can get the health care they need in the moment

Staying loyal to the people who have helped me along the way.

Letting go of any resentments and just being sad, not mad at the ways things turn out

Reconnecting with people and laughing about ‘the good old days’.
Meeting new people and making new friends.

I, Mark Borovitz, am grateful beyond measure to those who have helped me through:

Learning with me

Rebuking me when necessary

Accepting my T’Shuvah

Helping me grow

Standing with me during the onslaughts of negativity

Calling for me to stay engaged even when I don’t have a spiritual place to call my own

Helping me be a better husband, sibling, uncle, father and grandfather

Giving me the encouragement to persevere and honoring my ‘prophetic voice’.

G’Mar Hatima Tova: Our “urgency” and “personal motivation” will turn the tide of darkness and hatred into light and rapprochement through the power of repentance and the love of one another. Let Freedom ring this year through repentance, return and change. God Bless, Easy fast, and stay safe,  Rabbi Mark