Post by Rabbi Neil on Nov 29, 2019 19:02:41 GMT
If I were to ask the question “Why are you here tonight?” I think I might be able to guess at the majority of the answers that people might consider. Some would probably say “to pray,” some might even go further and say “to atone.” Some would say, “for community,” and some would say “because it’s tradition.” Probably very few people, if any, thought of the answer, “to change the world.” The High Holy Day sermons this year focus on exactly that one response, though, because I believe that that answer is essential for the season, that it contains all the other responses, and I believe that exploring that answer can help make the High Holy Days an extremely powerful time for all of us.
To start to think about how our presence here tonight can change the world, we first need to go back to Biblical times. Prayer in the Bible was extremely simple. It was a genuine expression of self that implored God to make a change in the world. When Miriam was sick, for example, Moses prayed for her to get better with a five-word prayer that was honest and pure enough for God to respond favorably – “el na r’fa na la, God, please, heal her, please.” When Hannah desperately wanted a child, she prayed quietly at Shiloh and while Eli the Priest thought she was drunk because he saw her lips move but heard nothing come from her mouth, God heard her personal and intimate prayer. Time after time in the Bible, the sincere, personal prayer of the individual is heard by God, who responds accordingly.
But the liturgy that we know is not personal prayer, but rather communal. Yes, there are moments for personal prayer in the service, which are always silent, but the overwhelming majority of our time praying over the High Holy Days is spent praying communal pre-written prayers. That’s not the same as Biblical prayer at all. So, what caused the shift? The answer was the dramatic increase of the number of Jews and the perceived need to centralize ritual practice so that as Jews started to spread out, there always remained one version of Judaism, with local variations. The further Jews spread geographically, the more each generation tried to synchronize Jewish practice. So, where Biblical prayer was spontaneous and personal, early and later Rabbinic prayer became established and communal. Especially after the Temple was destroyed, set times for prayer were established to correspond with the sacrifices offered at the Temple. Of course, that wasn’t the only time one prayed and the Rabbis prescribed specific blessing formulae for differing events, such as before and after eating food, or after seeing a rainbow, for example. But it was all very proscribed. In an attempt to establish a consistent and shared Jewish identity, Rabbinic Judaism has always tried to ensure uniformity of practice, with minor local variations. On Kol Nidre, I’ll address why we might need to rebel against that. But for now, my focus is on how genuine prayer and social justice are two sides of the same coin. For that to happen, though, prayer needs to change.
The Mishnah tells us that it was Rabban Gamaliel who set the order of prayer. That is taken in orthodox communities to mean that he wrote the siddur, and that the words we pray are essentially around 2000 years old. The problem with that perspective is that the first siddur did not appear until the 9th century – nearly a millennium after Rabban Gamaliel lived. If the words of prayer were set, why did it take so unbelievably long for them to be written down? The only possible answer is that the words weren’t set, but the themes were. When Rabban Gamaliel set the order of prayers, he set the order of the themes of prayer, not the words. It was only later, especially under the influence of Jewish mysticism which saw every word of prayer as an exact mystical necessity that corresponded with the reality of other worlds, that the words became concretized. Contrary to the over-simplistic projection back to the past, the shift from personal to communal prayer did not originally remove the essential individualized aspect of prayer. Jews would gather together and pray based on the same themes at the same time, but not necessarily using the same words, except for some core prayers. We spend so long focusing on the prayers in the middle of the page that we usually don’t consider the theme that’s written out at the edge of the page in our machzor. We should be praying themes, not specific prayers.
So, what has any of that got to do with social justice? Actually, a lot. The word for social justice that lives on the lips of Reform Jews is tikkun olam. But that doesn’t mean what most Reform Jews think it means. In fact, the concept of tikkun olam has its origins in Lurianic Kabbalah, in a deeply mystical branch of Judaism. In that model, during creation, there was sacred, holy light held in vessels, but the light was so pure that it shattered the vessels and the light scattered throughout creation. Our task, according to that mystical perspective, is to elevate the sparks back up to their original source. Tikkun Olam, the repair of the world, is achieved not just through social justice but through returning the holy sparks scattered throughout creation back to their source. But how? The answer is through mitzvot, which necessarily includes prayer. For example, before I eat an apple, if I say the blessing with full kavannah, with clear intention, before eating it, then Lurianic Kabbalah considers that I have elevated the spark within that apple and returned it to its source.
But does that really fix the world? What about all the hungry people, the homeless masses, the neglected immigrants? Can I really be said to be repairing the world if I say a blessing over an apple but only send “thoughts and prayers” to those people instead of actually helping them? Of course not - that would be offensive. Tikkun olam through prayer addresses the fracture in the world around us – it sees holy sparks in everything and everyone and tries to elevate them. Similarly, tikkun olam through action addresses the fracture in the world around us – it sees every individual as important and in need of elevation from that which negatively affects them. Both are ways of addressing the fracture in our world and repairing it.
But does saying a few words over an apple really elevate anything? That’s where we have to clarify what the purpose of prayer is. Remember Rabban Gamaliel used to pray themes, not exact words, way before Judaism became super rigid for the sake of uniformity. In the Bible, prayer literally affected the world. A person would pray to God, and God would change the world on their behalf. Prayer had external power. After the destruction of the Temple, though, Judaism holds that God hid the Divine face, the immediate Presence, from us. God became more removed from this world. Prayer then moved to having internal power. So expecting prayer to magically transform anything outside ourselves is nonsensical. Prayer is not magic, but it can still be transformative. The Hebrew for prayer is l’hitpalel, meaning to assess oneself, to reflect on oneself. Prayer is not a telephone conversation with a supernatural Deity living on a cloud whose handset is always on mute. Prayer is a conversation with the self. Our tradition originally guided that conversation with suggested themes, but then went further to suggest specific words for that conversation. During communal prayer, the choir and I lead with the specific traditional words but you don’t have to say or sing those exact words. You can pray your own prayer based on the theme that unifies us.
So, we have three important concepts now starting to connect. Tefillah, prayer, is a reflexive activity designed to help us reflect on ourselves. When we pray together in community, as we shall a lot during these High Holy Days, the prayer leader uses traditional words to guide prayer, and everyone in the community is invited to either recite these words or, in an absolutely authentic Jewish way, to recite their own quiet prayer based on the traditional theme. In so doing, the prayer changes us, and we can only change the world if we first change ourselves. To engage in Tikkun Olam is not to engage in tokenism. It is to repair society as a whole, and that starts with the repair of the self. Giving money to someone on the street without addressing the underlying cause of local poverty is a mitzvah, but it’s also tokenistic. It only relieves the poverty that inconveniences us and embarrasses us by daring to get in our face. The underlying cause of poverty, ultimately, is that we have separated ourselves from the human other. There is a fracture in our relationship with other people. Our radical individualism, a thoroughly modern social affliction to which I’ll return on Yom Kippur, causes a profound fracture in society. To repair the world in the immediate present, we must act, and that necessitates social justice. To repair the world in the future, we must change ourselves, and that necessitates prayer, or self-reflection.
In Judaism, prayer has always changed the world. In Biblical times, it changed the world by having God act on our words. In modern times, it changes the world by having us act on our own words. You cannot meaningfully act without vision, and that means that we have to imagine the world we want to see. We have to say it out loud. We have to pray it. Prayer is the visioning of a better world through envisioning a better self. Without prayer, social justice easily falls into tokenism and actions that make us feel good without ensuring structural change. Without social justice, prayer easily falls into meaningless platitudes and a devolvement from any responsibility to change this world. Prayer and social justice are, then, two sides of the same coin of tikkun olam.
We, the Jewish community, have a sacred task, which is to head towards the perfection of the world. To be Jewish means to intend and to act accordingly. It means to transform ourselves and the world around us. It means to see the fracture both within and without, and to try to repair it. So, when we prayer over the coming days and weeks, let our prayer therefore not be meaningless platitude. Let it change us, inspire us, let it be real for us, challenging for us. Let us not ask for help outside, but search for strength within. Let our prayer transform ourselves and therefore be the first step to transforming the world. Today is the birthday of the world, so we celebrate in prayer to help improve ourselves and thereby improve the very world that we are celebrating. May our prayers be our own, may they change us and therefore start to change the world, and let us say, Amen.
To start to think about how our presence here tonight can change the world, we first need to go back to Biblical times. Prayer in the Bible was extremely simple. It was a genuine expression of self that implored God to make a change in the world. When Miriam was sick, for example, Moses prayed for her to get better with a five-word prayer that was honest and pure enough for God to respond favorably – “el na r’fa na la, God, please, heal her, please.” When Hannah desperately wanted a child, she prayed quietly at Shiloh and while Eli the Priest thought she was drunk because he saw her lips move but heard nothing come from her mouth, God heard her personal and intimate prayer. Time after time in the Bible, the sincere, personal prayer of the individual is heard by God, who responds accordingly.
But the liturgy that we know is not personal prayer, but rather communal. Yes, there are moments for personal prayer in the service, which are always silent, but the overwhelming majority of our time praying over the High Holy Days is spent praying communal pre-written prayers. That’s not the same as Biblical prayer at all. So, what caused the shift? The answer was the dramatic increase of the number of Jews and the perceived need to centralize ritual practice so that as Jews started to spread out, there always remained one version of Judaism, with local variations. The further Jews spread geographically, the more each generation tried to synchronize Jewish practice. So, where Biblical prayer was spontaneous and personal, early and later Rabbinic prayer became established and communal. Especially after the Temple was destroyed, set times for prayer were established to correspond with the sacrifices offered at the Temple. Of course, that wasn’t the only time one prayed and the Rabbis prescribed specific blessing formulae for differing events, such as before and after eating food, or after seeing a rainbow, for example. But it was all very proscribed. In an attempt to establish a consistent and shared Jewish identity, Rabbinic Judaism has always tried to ensure uniformity of practice, with minor local variations. On Kol Nidre, I’ll address why we might need to rebel against that. But for now, my focus is on how genuine prayer and social justice are two sides of the same coin. For that to happen, though, prayer needs to change.
The Mishnah tells us that it was Rabban Gamaliel who set the order of prayer. That is taken in orthodox communities to mean that he wrote the siddur, and that the words we pray are essentially around 2000 years old. The problem with that perspective is that the first siddur did not appear until the 9th century – nearly a millennium after Rabban Gamaliel lived. If the words of prayer were set, why did it take so unbelievably long for them to be written down? The only possible answer is that the words weren’t set, but the themes were. When Rabban Gamaliel set the order of prayers, he set the order of the themes of prayer, not the words. It was only later, especially under the influence of Jewish mysticism which saw every word of prayer as an exact mystical necessity that corresponded with the reality of other worlds, that the words became concretized. Contrary to the over-simplistic projection back to the past, the shift from personal to communal prayer did not originally remove the essential individualized aspect of prayer. Jews would gather together and pray based on the same themes at the same time, but not necessarily using the same words, except for some core prayers. We spend so long focusing on the prayers in the middle of the page that we usually don’t consider the theme that’s written out at the edge of the page in our machzor. We should be praying themes, not specific prayers.
So, what has any of that got to do with social justice? Actually, a lot. The word for social justice that lives on the lips of Reform Jews is tikkun olam. But that doesn’t mean what most Reform Jews think it means. In fact, the concept of tikkun olam has its origins in Lurianic Kabbalah, in a deeply mystical branch of Judaism. In that model, during creation, there was sacred, holy light held in vessels, but the light was so pure that it shattered the vessels and the light scattered throughout creation. Our task, according to that mystical perspective, is to elevate the sparks back up to their original source. Tikkun Olam, the repair of the world, is achieved not just through social justice but through returning the holy sparks scattered throughout creation back to their source. But how? The answer is through mitzvot, which necessarily includes prayer. For example, before I eat an apple, if I say the blessing with full kavannah, with clear intention, before eating it, then Lurianic Kabbalah considers that I have elevated the spark within that apple and returned it to its source.
But does that really fix the world? What about all the hungry people, the homeless masses, the neglected immigrants? Can I really be said to be repairing the world if I say a blessing over an apple but only send “thoughts and prayers” to those people instead of actually helping them? Of course not - that would be offensive. Tikkun olam through prayer addresses the fracture in the world around us – it sees holy sparks in everything and everyone and tries to elevate them. Similarly, tikkun olam through action addresses the fracture in the world around us – it sees every individual as important and in need of elevation from that which negatively affects them. Both are ways of addressing the fracture in our world and repairing it.
But does saying a few words over an apple really elevate anything? That’s where we have to clarify what the purpose of prayer is. Remember Rabban Gamaliel used to pray themes, not exact words, way before Judaism became super rigid for the sake of uniformity. In the Bible, prayer literally affected the world. A person would pray to God, and God would change the world on their behalf. Prayer had external power. After the destruction of the Temple, though, Judaism holds that God hid the Divine face, the immediate Presence, from us. God became more removed from this world. Prayer then moved to having internal power. So expecting prayer to magically transform anything outside ourselves is nonsensical. Prayer is not magic, but it can still be transformative. The Hebrew for prayer is l’hitpalel, meaning to assess oneself, to reflect on oneself. Prayer is not a telephone conversation with a supernatural Deity living on a cloud whose handset is always on mute. Prayer is a conversation with the self. Our tradition originally guided that conversation with suggested themes, but then went further to suggest specific words for that conversation. During communal prayer, the choir and I lead with the specific traditional words but you don’t have to say or sing those exact words. You can pray your own prayer based on the theme that unifies us.
So, we have three important concepts now starting to connect. Tefillah, prayer, is a reflexive activity designed to help us reflect on ourselves. When we pray together in community, as we shall a lot during these High Holy Days, the prayer leader uses traditional words to guide prayer, and everyone in the community is invited to either recite these words or, in an absolutely authentic Jewish way, to recite their own quiet prayer based on the traditional theme. In so doing, the prayer changes us, and we can only change the world if we first change ourselves. To engage in Tikkun Olam is not to engage in tokenism. It is to repair society as a whole, and that starts with the repair of the self. Giving money to someone on the street without addressing the underlying cause of local poverty is a mitzvah, but it’s also tokenistic. It only relieves the poverty that inconveniences us and embarrasses us by daring to get in our face. The underlying cause of poverty, ultimately, is that we have separated ourselves from the human other. There is a fracture in our relationship with other people. Our radical individualism, a thoroughly modern social affliction to which I’ll return on Yom Kippur, causes a profound fracture in society. To repair the world in the immediate present, we must act, and that necessitates social justice. To repair the world in the future, we must change ourselves, and that necessitates prayer, or self-reflection.
In Judaism, prayer has always changed the world. In Biblical times, it changed the world by having God act on our words. In modern times, it changes the world by having us act on our own words. You cannot meaningfully act without vision, and that means that we have to imagine the world we want to see. We have to say it out loud. We have to pray it. Prayer is the visioning of a better world through envisioning a better self. Without prayer, social justice easily falls into tokenism and actions that make us feel good without ensuring structural change. Without social justice, prayer easily falls into meaningless platitudes and a devolvement from any responsibility to change this world. Prayer and social justice are, then, two sides of the same coin of tikkun olam.
We, the Jewish community, have a sacred task, which is to head towards the perfection of the world. To be Jewish means to intend and to act accordingly. It means to transform ourselves and the world around us. It means to see the fracture both within and without, and to try to repair it. So, when we prayer over the coming days and weeks, let our prayer therefore not be meaningless platitude. Let it change us, inspire us, let it be real for us, challenging for us. Let us not ask for help outside, but search for strength within. Let our prayer transform ourselves and therefore be the first step to transforming the world. Today is the birthday of the world, so we celebrate in prayer to help improve ourselves and thereby improve the very world that we are celebrating. May our prayers be our own, may they change us and therefore start to change the world, and let us say, Amen.