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Kol Nidrei 2018 - Passionate Personal & Public Prayer

Tzom kal and gemar hatimah tovah to each and every one of you.       

In tractate Berakhot (32a) of the Babylonian Talmud there is a discussion of what happened between Moses and God during the incident of the Golden Calf.  In case you don’t remember the story, just before Moses came down Mt. Sinai with the tablets of the Ten Commandments, God informed him that the people had built a Golden Calf and were worshiping it.  Then God said to Moses:   “Now leave Me be, that My wrath will be enraged against them and I will consume them; and I will make of you a great nation.”  Moses turned down God’s request to become the founder of a new people and instead begged God to forgive the people.  God eventually relented, Moses came down, broke the tablets, etc.   

In the Talmud, Rabbi Abbahu explains what the Torah is implying when God says, “Now leave Me be.” He said:  “The phrase: Leave Me be, teaches that Moses grabbed the Holy One, Blessed be He, as a person who grabs his friend by his garment would, and he said before Him: Master of the Universe, I will not leave You be until You forgive and pardon them.”

It is a story only the Jews would come up with – such chutzpah to imagine Moses grabbing hold of Hashem, begging, pleading, or perhaps even demanding that God give Moses what he asks.  Now, none of us have the same kind of relationship that Moses had with God.  That is, even those of us who talk to God regularly don’t generally say, as Moses did, that God responds verbally to us.  But even if God doesn’t talk to us he did to Moses, how wonderful would it be if we could IMAGINE ourselves standing before God in that way, sharing, praising, thanking, confessing, pleading with, or maybe even clinging to God as we utter words from the deepest recesses of our hearts? 

To have that kind of passion in our prayers, such trust, that faith would be amazing.  But here is the complication.  While our ancestors Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Sarah, Moses, and Miriam all were very used to talking to God, many of us are not.  Moreover, all of them lived at a time when Jewish prayer was spontaneous, the result of kavannah, deep concentration and thought.  Today though, most of the prayers that we Jews recite are prayers that have become part of what is called “the liturgy.” When you look up the word “liturgy” on dictionary.com, deep concentration isn’t part of the definition.  Rather you read:  “a collection of formularies for worship or a form of public worship, ritual.”  Group prayer isn’t spontaneous at all – anything with the word formulary is not spontaneous.  It is the opposite, what in Hebrew is called keva, or “fixed.”   

Traditionally Jews not only pray together in group worship multiple times a day, most of the words of the prayers talk about “us” and “we,” reflecting the belief that all Jews are responsible for one another.  So on the one hand we want to imagine ourselves personally connecting to God when we pray, but on the other hand almost all of the words we utter are written for us already as part of a group.  How do we stay heartfelt while reciting the same words day in and day out and in a group?   Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel once quoted in the name of Rabbi Israel Friedmann, the Rizhiner Rebbe, this story about a small Jewish town way out in the boondocks:   

“It had all the necessary municipal institutions:  a bath-house, a cemetery, a hospital, and law court; as well as all sorts of craftsmen- tailors, shoemakers, carpenters, and masons.  One trade, however, was lacking:  there was no watchmaker.  In the course of years many of the clocks became so annoyingly inaccurate that their owners just decided to let them run down, and ignore them altogether.  There were others, however, who maintained that as long as the clocks ran, they should not be abandoned.  So they wound their clocks day after day though they knew that they were not accurate.  One day the news spread through the town that a watchmaker had arrived, and everyone rushed to him with their clocks.  But the only ones he could repair were those that had been kept running – the abandoned clocks had grown too rusty!” (quoted from Rabbi Gordon Tucker’s commentary in Pirkei Avot Lev Shalem)

This story sums up beautifully for us the challenge that a fixed liturgy provides, but it also provides at least part of the solution.  As Rabbi Gordon Tucker once commented on this topic (in his commentary to Pirkei Avot):  “[there are indeed] potential dangers [in] (of) the routinization of prayer, especially if it threatens to eclipse the heartfelt emotional responses, such as compassion, that prayer can engender.  But keva – ritual and routine - is certainly necessary, in order to keep the very possibility of kavanah – intentionality and deep connectedness - alive!”  Rabbi Tucker is spot on. Without praying regularly, what chance do we have to connect to God through prayer at all?

But what of praying in a group, the dynamic that comes from praying with others?  Rabbi Eugene Borowitz z”l, once wrote (adapted for gender neutral language):  “Judaism commends communal prayer because God cares for all as He cares for each one, because, while God is the God of each private individual, He is the God of all individuals as well. The single self is indispensable. Without any one, mankind is incomplete. So, too, without all other selves, equally precious to God, the single self loses its context and hence its final significance.  Human beings cannot find him/herself only in others, but one also cannot find him/herself without them. If prayer is supposed to open human beings to the truth of …existence it must begin with self but it must reach out to all mankind.  Judaism values communal worship not for its specific Jewish purposes alone, but for all people. Group prayer, by confronting us with others, by asking us to link our prayers to theirs, reminds us immediately and directly that it is never enough to pray for ourselves alone. Speaking as “we”, the individual discovers, acknowledges, articulates the needs, desires, hopes, which s/he, though one person, shares with all people because they are not only a private self but a member of humanity.” 

Rabbi Borowitz is absolutely correct.  We can learn all we need to know about Jewish hopes for ourselves and the world by reading the prayers in the siddur and machzor.  As Rabbi Tamar Elad-Appelbaum wrote in Pirkei Avot Lev Shalem:  “Prayer is the constant labor of bringing a person forth from the known to the panoply of unknown possibilities.  It is the invisible secret language shared by the human and the Divine in the floodwaters of life.  Together they foresee what can yet be and place their trust in it.”   “One must therefore be very careful, while praying, not to defile the power of dreaming that the prayer itself contains, a power passed from generation to generation of Jewish dreamers…..The pray-er must not be satisfied with simply reciting the words of the liturgy that have been passed down, but must invest personal meaning in the words:  shouting them aloud, whispering them, singing them, mouthing them, putting them to new or old melodies, revising them, even discarding them. ..One must take pains to avoid relating to prayer as though it were a wall to lean against; instead one ought to think of it as a pair of wings that can allow one to soar… There are three crucial elements in prayer, then:  the vow to stand up before God again and again and dare to dream of a healed world; the responsibility to keep one’s mouth and one’s heart in sync with each other as one dreams; and the belief in the possibilities of change on both the personal and the communal levels.”

The idea that the liturgy is a collection of our hopes and dreams is made explicit in the 1951 edition of the High Holiday Prayer Book by Phillip Birnbaum.  There in the service for the Kohanim that is part of the Musaf we read:  (Musaf Service – Birnbaum p. 870 – Kohanim)

“Lord of the universe, I am thine and my dreams are thine.  I have dreamt a dream and I do not know what it is.  May it be thy will, Lord my God and God of my fathers, to confirm all good dreams concerning myself and all the people of Israel for happiness; may they be fulfilled like the dreams of Joseph.  But if they require amending, heal them as thou didst heal Hezekiah king of Judah from his illness, Miriam the prophetess from her leprosy and Naaman from his leprosy.  Sweeten them as the waters of Marah were sweetened by Moses, and the waters of Jericho by Elisha.  Even as thou didst turn the curse of wicked Balaam into a blessing, may You turn all my dreams into happiness for myself and for all Israel.  Protect me; be gracious to me and favor me.”

My friends, we are at the very beginning of our twenty-five hour Yom Kippur, or Day of Atonement.  Throughout tonight and all of tomorrow we will be reciting hundreds, thousands of words which embody the hopes and dreams of our people.  As we do so we will join together in song, in English unison and responsive readings, and even in silence.  All the while, each of us will be simultaneously tasked with engaging wholeheartedly with a liturgy written many years ago, written by people whose lives were in many ways very different than ours, but whose deepest hopes still reflect the deepest hopes that we have, the dreams for forgiveness, reconciliation, love, acceptance, salvation, understanding, prosperity, health, and peace.

Recently I saw the movie The Greatest Showman for the first time.  As I listened to the words of the opening song “Million Dreams,” it seemed to me that more than a song it was a prayer.  Its words are:  “I close my eyes and I can see, the world that's waiting up for me, that I call my own
through the dark, through the door, through where no one's been before, but it feels like home.  They can say, they can say it all sounds crazy, they can say, they can say I've lost my mind
I don't care, I don't care, so call me crazy, we can live in a world that we design, cause every night I lie in bed, the brightest colors fill my head, a million dreams are keeping me awake
I think of what the world could be, a vision of the one I see, a million dreams is all it's gonna take, a million dreams for the world we're gonna make.” 

Like many prayers, it begins with “I,” and ends with “we.”  Let us all join our “I’s” into a we, as we combine our dreams and even more so our efforts into making this the world of our dreams.   

Fri, March 29 2024 19 Adar II 5784