Crowning God

The idea for this drash came from twitter user @aisheschaver putting the two Rabbi Akiva stories together - I am grateful for their insight!

I usually approach this time of year thinking about God's Authority over us. After all, our orientation during these days is the total submission of subjects before Ruler. On Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur, uniquely in the year for most Ashkenazi Jews, we bow fully, bending our whole bodies to the earth before the Sovereign of sovereigns of sovereigns. In the musaf Amidah of Rosh HaShanah, there is an entire bracha devoted to God's Kingship, and psukim telling us about this ("malchuyot"). In the Gemara (Rosh HaShanah 34b), Rabbah imagines God as commanding "Malchuyot - so that you will crown Me as King over you". But who are we, when we crown God?

Passed down to us in the Talmud are two stories of crowns that I want to tell. In one story (Menachot 29b), God ties crowns to the letters of the Torah, to be puzzled over by Moshe and explained by Rabbi Akiva. This is a reference to the pronged ornamental "tagin" familiar from the tops of certain letters in the Torah scroll. Moshe asks why God is doing this - the language is actually quite strong, "מי מעכב על ידך - mi me'akev al Yadecha?" Who is holding Your Hand back [from giving the Torah without these crowns]? God responds that the crowns are being placed for Rabbi Akiva, several generations in the future, to derive "mounds and mounds of halachot from each crown". Here, when God crowns the letters of Torah it is both to make Her creation beautiful, and to be signs and hints for Her creatures to learn from. In Rosh HaShanah musaf, we sing together a promise to give God a keter meluchah, a royal crown. Perhaps we are also promising to make God beautiful, and to make Her something-to-be-learnt-from just like the spiked letters of the Torah.

The second story of crowns, in Nedarim 50a, is the set-up for an eventual story of reconciliation. When Rabbi Akiva's father-in-law has cut him off, he and his wife Rachel are reduced to sleeping in hay in the winter. The Talmud records him plucking straw from his wife's hair, and telling her he wished to buy wishing it could be a "city of gold", a golden hair ornament worn by brides. In this warm and intimate moment, as a gesture of love between partners on even footing, he crowns her. When we proclaim God's Kingship, the whole community of Israel is for a moment sleeping in a hayloft with God to keep out the cold. And although we are in love, we crown Them wistfully. As Rabbi Akiva wishes he had the gold to make his wife a true adornment, we pray to God wistfully: we would have crowned You in Your chosen Temple, if only we had it. We speak to God on equal terms, on loving terms, and in impoverished terms. The image isn't the gold, scarlet, blue, and purple of a coronation we might imagine, and yet it's beloved - we can crown God and still be lacking.

A final piece of the "city of gold" is that, as a gesture of mourning in the war of Titus, the chachamim prohibited any bride (however wealthy) from wearing this adornment (Sotah 49b) - leaving them the option of a fine woolen headdress. As much as we may try to crown God with gold, sometimes we are left with hay and wool, and this too is a crown.

As well as subjects to God, we are students and teachers, spouses and lovers, beggars and mourners - all of us, together, crowning God.