בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה ה' אֱלהֵינוּ מֶלֶךְ הָעולָם אֲשֶׁר קִדְּשָׁנוּ בְּמִצְותָיו וְצִוָּנוּ לַעֲסוק בְּדִבְרֵי תורָה:
Blessing for Torah Study
Barukh Atah Adonai Eloheinu Melekh Ha'Olam Asher Kideshanu Bemitzvotav Vetzivanu La'asok Bedivrei Torah
Blessed are you Adonai, our God, Sovereign of Eternity, who has made us holy through Your sacred obligations and obligated us to immerse ourselves in the words of Torah.
וּנְתַנֶּה תֹּקֶף קְדֻשַּׁת הַיּוֹם כִּי הוּא נוֹרָא וְאָיֹם וּבוֹ תִּנָּשֵׂא מַלְכוּתֶךָ וְיִכּוֹן בְּחֶסֶד כִּסְאֶךָ וְתֵשֵׁב עָלָיו בְּאֱמֶת אֱמֶת כִּי אַתָּה הוּא דַּיָּן וּמוֹכִיחַ וְיוֹדֵעַ וָעֵד וְכוֹתֵב וְחוֹתֵם וְסוֹפֵר וּמוֹנֶה וְתִזְכֹּר כָּל הַנִּשְׁכָּחוֹת וְתִפְתַּח אֶת סֵפֶר הַזִּכְרוֹנוֹת וּמֵאֵלָיו יִקָּרֵא וְחוֹתָם יַד כָּל אָדָם בּוֹ
וּבְשׁוֹפָר גָּדוֹל יִתָּקַע וְקוֹל דְּמָמָה דַקָּה יִשָׁמַע וּמַלְאָכִים יֵחָפֵזוּן וְחִיל וּרְעָדָה יֹאחֵזוּן וְיֹאמְרוּ הִנֵּה יוֹם הַדִּין לִפְקֹד עַל צְבָא מָרוֹם בַּדִּין כִּי לֹא יִזְכּוּ בְּעֵינֶיךָ בַּדִּין וְכָל בָּאֵי עוֹלָם יַעַבְרוּן לְפָנֶיךָ כִּבְנֵי מָרוֹן כְּבַקָּרַת רוֹעֶה עֶדְרוֹ מַעֲבִיר צֹאנוֹ תַּחַת שִׁבְטוֹ כֵּן תַּעֲבִיר וְתִסְפֹּר וְתִמְנֶה וְתִפְקֹד נֶפֶשׁ כָּל חָי וְתַחְתֹּךְ קִצְבָה לְכָל בְּרִיָּה וְתִכְתֹּב אֶת גְּזַר דִּינָם
בְּרֹאשׁ הַשָּׁנָה יִכָּתֵבוּן, וּבְיוֹם צוֹם כִּפּוּר יֵחָתֵמוּן. כַּמָּה יַעַבְרוּן, וְכַמָּה יִבָּרֵאוּן, מִי יִחְיֶה, וּמִי יָמוּת, מִי בְקִצּוֹ, וּמִי לֹא בְּקִצּוֹ, מִי בַמַּיִם, וּמִי בָאֵשׁ, מִי בַחֶרֶב, וּמִי בַחַיָּה, מִי בָרָעָב, וּמִי בַצָּמָא, מִי בָרַעַשׁ, וּמִי בַמַּגֵּפָה, מִי בַחֲנִיקָה, וּמִי בַסְּקִילָה, מִי יָנוּחַ, וּמִי יָנוּעַ, מִי יִשָּׁקֵט, וּמִי יְטֹּרֵף, מִי יִשָּׁלֵו, וּמִי יִתְיַסָּר, מִי יַעֲנִי, וּמִי יַעֲשִׁיר, מִי יֻשְׁפַּל, וּמִי יָרוּם.
וּתְשׁוּבָה וּתְפִלָּה וּצְדָקָה מַעֲבִירִין אֶת רֹעַ הַגְּזֵרָה. כִּי כְּשִׁמְךָ כֵּן תְּהִלָּתֶךָ, קָשֶׁה לִכְעוֹס וְנוֹחַ לִרְצוֹת, כִּי לֹא תַחְפֹּץ בְּמוֹת הַמֵּת, כִּי אִם בְּשׁוּבוֹ מִדַּרְכּוֹ וְחָיָה, וְעַד יוֹם מוֹתוֹ תְּחַכֶּה לוֹ, אִם יָשׁוּב מִיַּד תְּקַבְּלוֹ. (אֱמֶת) כִּי אַתָּה הוּא יוֹצְרָם וְיוֹדֵעַ יִצְרָם, כִּי הֵם בָּשָׂר וָדָם. אָדָם יְסוֹדוֹ מֵעָפָר וְסוֹפוֹ לֶעָפָר. בְּנַפְשׁוֹ יָבִיא לַחְמוֹ. מָשׁוּל כְּחֶרֶס הַנִּשְׁבָּר, כְּחָצִיר יָבֵשׁ, וּכְצִיץ נוֹבֵל, כְּצֵל עוֹבֵר, וּכְעָנָן כָּלָה, וּכְרוּחַ נוֹשָׁבֶת, וּכְאָבָק פּוֹרֵחַ, וְכַחֲלוֹם יָעוּף. וְאַתָּה הוּא מֶלֶךְ אֵל חַי וְקַיָּם.
We lend power to the holiness of this day. For it is tremendous and awe filled, and on it your kingship will be exalted, your throne will be established in loving-kindness, and you will sit on that throne in truth. It is true that you are the one who judges, and reproves, who knows all, and bears witness, who inscribes, and seals, who reckons and enumerates. You remember all that is forgotten. You open the book of records, and from it, all shall be read. In it lies each person's insignia.
And with a great shofar it is sounded, and a thin silent voice shall be heard. And the angels shall be alarmed, and dread and fear shall seize them as they proclaim: behold! the Day of Judgment on which the hosts of heaven shall be judged, for they too shall not be judged blameless by you, and all creatures shall parade before you as a herd of sheep. As a shepherd herds his flock, directing his sheep to pass under his staff, so do you shall pass, count, and record the souls of all living, and decree a limit to each persons days, and inscribe their final judgment.
On Rosh Hashanah it is inscribed, and on Yom Kippur it is sealed - how many shall pass away and how many shall be born, who shall live and who shall die, who in good time, and who by an untimely death, who by water and who by fire, who by sword and who by wild beast, who by famine and who by thirst, who by earthquake and who by plague, who by strangulation and who by lapidation, who shall have rest and who wander, who shall be at peace and who pursued, who shall be serene and who tormented, who shall become impoverished and who wealthy, who shall be debased, and who exalted.
But repentance, prayer and righteousness avert the severity of the decree. For your praise is just as your name. You are slow to anger and quick to be appeased. For you do not desire the death of the condemned, rather, that they turn from their path and live and you wait for them until the day of their death, and if they repent, you receive them immediately. (It is true -) [For] you are their Creator and You understand their inclination, for they are but flesh and blood. We come from dust, and return to dust. We labour by our lives for bread, we are like broken shards, like dry grass, and like a withered flower; like a passing shadow and a vanishing cloud, like a breeze that passes, like dust that scatters, like a fleeting dream. But You are the king who lives eternal.
The litany of terrible circumstances that the prayer invokes — who by fire, who by water, who by sword, who by beast — are not beyond the pale of possibility. The text teaches us that indeed, these are the things we can count on seeing in this world. We just do not know when they will occur, or to whom. This moment in the service is a profound opportunity to acknowledge the fragility of existence and the ever encroaching reality that the longer we live, the more likely that we and those we love will be touched by pain, grief, and sadness.
And yet the hymn does not leave us without hope, at the end it will say, teshuvah tefilah and tzedaka mavirin et roa hagzera. Living a life engaged with repentance and return, prayer and reflection, and acts of charity and justice, help make the moments we have more rich, more meaningful, more holy.
Tisha B’Av comes exactly seven weeks before Rosh Hashanah, beginning the process that culminates on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Tisha B’Av is the moment of turning, the moment when we turn away from denial and begin to face exile and alienation as they manifest themselves in our own lives—in our alienation and estrangement from God, in our alienation from ourselves and from others. Teshuvah—turning, repentance—is the essential gesture of the High Holiday season. It is the gesture by which we seek to heal this alienation and to find at-one-ment: to connect with God, to reconcile with others, and to anchor ourselves in the ground of our actual circumstances, so that it is this reality that shapes our actions and not just the habitual, unconscious momentum of our lives.
Among the key spiritual themes embedded in Sukkot are those of transience and impermanence. The requirements of Jewish law are explicit as to what can appropriately be understood as a sukkah in order to fulfill the mitzvah of “dwelling.” A sukkah must be stable enough to convey a sense of stability and of being sheltered, yet fragile enough that it not be construed as “permanent.”
The balance between fragility and stability has its spiritual correlation in the awareness that life takes place between the boundaries of birth and death, and is by definition transient. Whatever we seek to make of life, whatever contributions we create, however we try to ensure that our efforts are durable, to one degree or another each person remains aware that they are constantly in process and moving through time.
The awareness of impermanence can lead in different spiritual directions. It can become a motivation for tenacity and devotion, inspiring efforts at personal as well as professional accomplishment that almost defy the boundaries of life. It can help to mitigate disappointment as well as the inevitable distress of life—not by diminishing them, but by helping to keep them in perspective...
This awareness of impermanence is reflected in the closing lines of Psalm 90: “May the work of our hands endure…” where the psalmist evokes our hope that even within the boundaries of life and death, what we achieve will survive, will make a difference, will be remembered, will endure. Jewish tradition is emphatic about the responsibility for remembering. In the memories of those who keep our names and stories alive, we are granted a fragile shelter of stability, and are entered into an unshakable engagement with eternity.
A favorite rabbinic question concerning Hanukkah is, What is the miracle of the first day, since there was enough oil in the cruse to burn for that day?
To my mind, the answer that comes closest to the meaning of Hanukkah is that the miracle the first day was the deep faith that it took to light the menorah, knowing there was not enough oil for eight days. That same faith led the Maccabees to revolt against impossible odds, to strike like hammers and scatter sparks of revolt in the hills of Judea. They believed they would prevail "not by strength, nor by power, but through My spirit--says the Lord." This faith allowed them to light the menorah, and it is this faith that made it burn for eight days. It is the miracle of faith despite darkness, and of belief in the growth of light in the depths of winter.
Hanuka may be seen as Judaism's answer to seasonal affective disorder (SAD), or as its winter solstice practice. In the longest darkness of winter, we kindle a growing number of lights to remind ourselves that spring will come and life will emerge once more. In this context, placing the Hanuka lamp in the window serves a different purpose of pirsum hanes, publicizing the miracle, and making it a more universal miracle of hope in the midst of despair and darkness.
Remember that darkness is part of the picture. Chanukah is not about banishing darkness completely. It is about kindling a little bit of light in the midst of darkness. In the words of Parker Palmer, the great teacher of teachers, “When we so fear the dark that we demand light around the clock, there can be only one result: artificial light that is glaring and graceless and, beyond its borders, a darkness that grows ever more terrifying as we try to hold it off. Split off from each other, neither darkness nor light is fit for human habitation. But if we allow the paradox of darkness and light to be, the two will conspire to bring wholeness and health to every living being.” Accepting darkness and light as part of our lives creates the only ground in which genuine gratitude can grow.
The Jewish festival cycle is full of different moods—the bittersweet joy of Pesah, the mourning of the Three Weeks, the awe of Yom Kippur, the rejoicing of Simhat Torah, among others. Each if us in our own life experiences the same range of feelings, and part of the festival cycle's effort is to provide a context for those feelings. Each of us probably has difficulty expressing one or more of them—for example, grief or joy or guilt. Surprisingly, perhaps, many people find it less difficult to feel contrite on Yom Kippur than to act the joyous fool on Purim. Purim calls upon us to give free rein to that dimension of our personalities signified by the phrase ad lo yadah. Ad lo yadah -- the state of not knowing the difference between Haman and Mordechai -- is a time when all our rules and inhibitions are swept away, when the superego is pushed away by the untrammeled id. We enter into the world of the drunk, a world of blissful ignorance of reality.
The thought arises, “the theatre is inciting my children to hate the home if not to commit murder and arson. We must have more censorship!” It is overlooked that such fantasies are kept for dreams and pictures and plays just because each of us already has within him so strong a censorship, and it is wrongly inferred from the power of fantasies that people are likely to fail to distinguish between fantasy and reality…
The function of farcical fantasies, in dreams or in plays, is not as provocation but as compensation.... The violent release is comparable to the sudden relieving hiss of steam through a safety valve…. [It is] an essentially temporary truancy from the family pieties, and, like farces, if it has any appreciable effect at all, helps those pieties go on existing.
Haggadah means narration, and tonight’s celebration insists on the moral seriousness of the stories that we tell about ourselves. Stories are easily dismissible as distractions, the make-believe we craved as children, losing ourselves in the sweet enchantment of “as if”. “As if” belongs to the imagination, that wild terrain governed by no obvious rules. But tonight we are asked to take this faculty of the mind, so beloved by children and novelists, extremely seriously. All the adults who have outgrown story time are to be tutored tonight, with the physical props meant to quicken our pretending, and the ways of the child to guide us.
It is not enough to merely tell the story, but we must live inside of it, blur the boundaries of our personal narrative so that we spill outward and include as part of our formative experiences having lived through events that took place millennia before we were born.
It is the imagination alone that can extend the sense of the self, broaden our sense of who we really are. We are Jews, insists the tradition, and the identity of an individual Jew is never strictly individual but also collective. By extending our personal narratives to include the formative tale of Jewish identity we appropriate that collective self as part of our own.
But the tradition also insists on possessing tonight’s story in more general moral terms, the Torah reminding us never to oppress the stranger, “since you know the soul of the stranger, having been strangers in the land of Egypt.” This story that we relive tonight is meant to grant us knowledge of “the soul of the stranger,” and there is nothing more universal than that soul and our knowledge of it, and it is only the tutored imagination that can lead us to it and to the compassion it yields.
Tonight is the night that we sanctify storytelling.
Lawrence A. Hoffman
Liturgy in general is sacred drama--sacred because of the way it is "performed" and the personal stake the performers have in performing it. It is clearly "theater": people play roles (getting an aliyah, opening the ark), they wear costumes (tallit and kippah), and they have assigned lines to chant or read out loud. Unlike ordinary drama, however, it is not performed for an audience. The performers and audience are one and the same. They do not just "play" the roles; they are the roles, and they take the roles so seriously that they internalize them as their identities. When the actress playing Lady Macbeth leaves the theater, she is not expected to murder someone on the way home; when Jews put down their Haggadah, they are expected to have a heightened sense of Jewish identity and to be more attuned to their Jewish responsibilities. People, that is, who leave the Seder and ignore the plight of the homeless have missed the point...
Dramas have shape and direction; they tell stories that establish a problem and then solve it in the end. The Haggadah presents the foundational story of how we got here, and as its problem, it asks, implicitly, why it matters, if the Jewish People continues. Each year demands its own compelling solution. That is why its script remains open and why, also, we have to reenact it year after year. If it comes out exactly the same as the year before, we have failed our dramatic duty. If we finish the Seder knowing for certain why the age-old tale of Israel's origins informs the people we are and the lives we pledge to lead, then, and only then, can we conclude Dayyenu--that... is enough.
Neil Gillman
The Passover Seder is a class with the Haggadah as textbook and the Seder leader as primary instructior. This metaphor stems from the notion that the mitzvah (sacred exhortation) to be fulfilled at the Seder is to tell the story of our people's redemption from bondage. The method of instruction is thoroughly up-to-date in that it uses not only words but also choreography (sitting and standing, opening and closing doors, holding up different symbolic foods, searching for the afikoman) and other forms of experiential learning (consuming different foods, dripping the wine with our fingers, and music). Also unusual is that the participants can be both students and teachers; the learning is thoroughly democratic, as befits the experience of freedom.
The haggadah textbook, moreover, is never complete; it is always in the process of formation. The printed text is simply the point of departure, and every class is encouraged to edit the book as the class progresses, to omit and/or to add to the received text. Though each Seder is roughly the same, no two are identical, and even the same family's Seder may change from year to year as the participants change.
What did the Israelites actually hear at Sinai?
One Hasidic master taught that the Israelites heard only the first letter of the first word (the alef in anokhi, which is a silent letter) and intuitively understood the rest (Menahem Mendel of Rymanov). That is, having encountered God in such a real and direct way, they understood the rightness and wrongness of certain modes of behavior without the need for words to be spoken. What God said is clear, how God communicated it to human beings remains a mystery.
What God said will be the content of the rest of the Torah and generations of commentaries; that God communicated the divine will to human beings is a foundation stone of Judaism. Rosenzweig suggests that the single word actually spoken by God was the first word- anokhi (I am). From God’s affirmation of existence and presence, all else flowed.
There is a bat kol (a divine voice) that perpetually “sounds” at Mount Horeb (Sinai), saying: “Return, you wayward children.” It is the cause of our yearning for the Infinite: However struck we are in our wayward ways, there is a whisper, a subliminal vibration that stirs within us and moves us to yearn to get closer to God. That is, revelation was not a one-time occurrence. The call continues to “sound” today, at every moment. The variable is whether we are open to hearing it.
When in our wanderings, we come to Sinai, God speaks to each of us directly. The mountain of revelation appears to us on our journey when we are ready to receive the awesome truth of our connection to the Source, to each other, and to all of creation.