I want to thank Adath Israel for the privilege to talk to you tonight. Much has happened since our last Rosh Hashanah together, and I am thankful to have us as a community to process the sadness, madness and miracles of the past year.
A story is told // about a shoemaker // who was a follower of the Rebbe of Ger, Reb Yitzchak Me’ir Alter. The shoemaker// approached the rebbe to know what he could do// about his prayer. “You see, rebbe,” he said, “I am poor. My customers are poor. They only own one pair of shoes. I pick their shoes to fix late at night, when they arrive from work, and I work on them for the night and a part of the morning, so I can deliver the fixed shoes to them before they have to go to work. How should I make my morning prayers? Should I just pray quickly in the morning, rushing, alone, with no intention, so I can go back to work and deliver the shoes? Is that even prayer?”
“What happens, asked Yitzchak Me’ir Alter, “when you can’t pray?” “Oh, rebbe, I raise my hammer every so often and sigh a great sigh, and say “woe is me, I haven’t prayed yet”. “Sometimes”, said the rebbe, “a sigh is more than prayer itself.”
A sigh – more than all the words in the morning prayer, but just sometimes.
And according to Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, “God lives in a word.” But, he added, “Words can only open the door, and we can only weep on the threshold of our incommunicable thirst after the incomprehensible.”
These words of Abraham Joshua Heschel and this story of the shoemaker have been in my mind a lot this past year, since the incomprehensible. I thirst to be able to approach God. And yet.
October 7th weighted heavily througout the year.
And it still does – truthfully I only feel I have got used to the weight, but it is still there, a deep hole of despair and sadness that is reinforced with every hostage that is declared dead, with every interview with a survivor. To be completely transparent, my spiritual survival this year had a lot to do with our daily minyan. To be in community, even if it is to share in the flabbergastedness, even if only to share the heavy news as each day brought details, even if only to say kaddish for countless souls – that was a life saver. Or maybe a spiritual life saver.
And some people asked me – but rabbi how can you pray?
And the question is really not a “how” question. It is not a nuts-and-bolts question. This is a “why” disguised in a “how”.
How can you pray: that is a simple thing – you open your heart and you pour it out to the One that is always listening, even if you are hurt, even if you are angry, even if you are numb and can barely get any feelings out. How is a simple thing: Jews pray with words, most of the time. Either the ones our ancestors honed for the past 2100 years, or your own, or a combination, or a poem you find somewhere – or soetimes, like the shoemaker, Jews pray with a sigh. Tears can be prayer. Or laughter. Or joy.
The how, as I said, is simple – maybe not easy, but simple.
But the question is not a “how”. It is a “why”. Why do you pray, rabbi? Why, in front of such a disaster, do you pray?
The real problem is that we, humans, tend to hide so much of whom we are from other people, that when it comes to talk to God we are in real trouble, as we can’t even show to ourselves who we are – so what does it mean to open our hearts and pray?
And some can say – there is no God, rabbi, wake up, if there was a God, the Holocaust woudn’t have happened! If there was a God, October 7th wouldn’t have happened!
Well, that is not a reason for God not to exist, I’m afraid. There is no reason why God should interfere with what people do to one another, do with one another. The fact is, we are still here.
We, the Jewish people. Through destructions, through expulsions, through pogroms, through massacres, /// here we still stand. If you need a proof of the existence of a miracle, look no further than our own people. The Egyptians? Gone. The Assyrians? Gone. The Babylonians? Gone. The Romans? Gone. But we, our Torah and our prayers? We remain. Ich bin doh, here I am, said the camp survivor visiting Auschwitz 40 years after the liberation. Hineini. Here I am.
When I was at camp Ramah this past summer, one of my classes was with eleven year olds, in which I would discuss theology and God.
Theology is a big scary word, so I changed it to “thoughts about God”. And I explained to them that we need to revisit what we think about God every so often. When you were five or six, I asked, what were your abilities in math? How big were the numbers you could sum? And in English? What kind of sentences did you know how to write? And they all agreed that, if now, at fifth or sixth grade they would present the same work that got them high praise when they were six, there would be no praise. If at age 15 you still think like when you were 10, that’s no badge of honor. Kids know this as “growth mindset” – and what I mean is: we will talk about what you think about God, but do not let this be calcified in your soul, in your heart, in your mind. Let it grow and develop. This is true, just as your growth in language and math is true. You learn, you appreciate, you live more – and you change, and so your relationship with God changes as well.
And then I tell them the story of my grandfather – a wonderful, loving, beloved man who had no use for God whatsoever. I’ll give you the cliffnotes, as some of you may have heard this story before: when I was seven, I flew back to Brasil, seeing my grandfather for the first time in six months. And boy, was I excited to see him. I wanted to share all the wonderful things I had experience flying, all I had seen. He listened patiently, while I was sitting on his lap. And then he asked: but did you see God up there? And I had NO IDEA what he was talking about. That was one of the things that we didn’t do in my house: we did not talk about God. So I asked him what did he mean? And he asked again: well, did you see a man, with a long beard and a scepter, sitting on a throne, up there? And I said no, I had not seen anything like that. To which he replied: this proves to you: God does not exist.
And the funny thing was that already then I did not believe that image of God. And later, of course, I understood – this is an image that every four and five year old has about God. It is the image that the Sumerians had about the gods.
Any Sumerian god is a guy – that goes without saying – ten thousand times more powerful than you, so it makes sense to worship that god and hope he won’t create too many problems for you when he is angry, and hope that he will help you when you need help. That is a fine idea when you are 5 years old and in a concrete phase. You need mental images. But you see – that does not work so well after you are 5 or 6 years old, because life grows, things happen, in my grandfather’s case his father dies, he is left taking care of the family at the age of ten, in a poverty stricken situation so bad that he and his brother had to share one pair of shoes to go to school.
And then, if you are expecting that a supernatural being is going to come and make it all better, because you prayed, you begged, you asked so very well and so very much – I have a bridge to sell you.
That same theology, says Melissa Raphael, in her book The Female Face of God in Auschwitz, which is a comparison of women’s theology and men’s theology, that same theology of an “all powerful god that will come and save you and make his presence known as clear as the day”, that theology enables us to understand how come men, in a much higher percentage than women, went through the holocaust and become atheists. Men, she says, were given a theology of a great power that would intercede and make it all better. A hierarchical theology. God as a strong father who will take care of you if he’s not angry at you.
Women, she says, were given a theology that you find God as you help others in a worse situation than you. A horizontal theology. And do you know how many people in a worse situation than you you can find in a concentration camp?
It is not that God is not there – it is that you have to change your thoughts and your relationship to God, and the way you find God and the way you nurture that relationship and that closeness. To me, that also happens through prayer. Prayer is not about just asking things from God. Prayer is in part a moment that helps me to see who am I becoming, what are my deepest impulses, which ones I wish to curb and which I wish to develop. As I go through the 19 blessings of the daily Amidah, most of which are unabashed requests, I watch my impulses and my words regarding repentance, healing, judgment, peace. Where are my feelings? Where are my desires?
It is said that prayer really is our humble answer to inconceavable surprise of being alive. It is all we can offer in return to the Mystery by which we live. It is a small act – this devotion of mine is wrapped on gratefulness for being alive, able to experience a world that is exquisite in its complexity and beauty, dangerous and marvelous, in which hate and love coexist.
Prayer to me is also a hook my own soul to the chain of our ancestors. The words in the machzor were composed throughout our history, and I tend to use them because in difficult times, like this year in particular, they remind me that no matter how difficult my times look like, there is always a time when it was harder for us, Jews. And yet – hineini, here I am, living in a time when America is still the best of diasporas it can be and Israel is still the best of that the holy land can be.
Rabbi Dr. David Weiss Halivni z”l, a survivor of a labor camp called Wolfsberg, remembers being in the presence of a hazan, Naphtali Stern z”l, who transcribed the High Holiday prayers from memory with a pen, on paper torn from cement bags that he purchased at great risk in exchange for bread. Halivni, then 16, was present while Naphtali Stern led the inmates in the high holiday prayers. Halivni tells us that in the labor camps those who prayed did not create new prayers, the torture and fear silenced the creative urge. Those who prayed, prayed like their usual custom and manner. They sought some traditional prayer that would express their deep longing to overcome the forces arrayed against them, and their sense that the suffering and misery around them was the result of evil, of cosmic forces over which they had no control or influence. Halivni points out that they found such a prayer in the prayer “מְלוֹךְ עַל כׇּל־הָעוֹלָם בִּכְבוֹדֶךָ” (eloheinu v’elohei avotenu m’lokh al kol ha’olam bikhvodekha); “Our God and God of our ancestors, reign over all the world in your full glory…” In this prayer, which you can find in the Uvechen section of our Amidah for Rosh Hashanah, we ask God to reign alone, to take the reins of the universe completely, and not allow evil forces to prevail. Sounds about right, if you ask me.
And also – many new prayers and poems and songs have been composed by Jews since October 7th. For all the terrifying things that this year brought about, both in the diaspora and in Israel, we are still able to be creative.
A rabbi friend of mine went to Catalonia, Spain, and he stood in what was the floor of what was once-upon-a-time a marvelous synagogue. And then he realized – when Jewish people prayed then and there, it was a wholly different Jewish experience. Jews in Spain had arguably the greatest of times in Jewish history – until the ascension of kings who did not like Jews or Judaism at all, and expelled all Jews in 1492. But, even before those kings entered, Jews prayed for centuries in Spain.
And when they prayed towards Jerusalem, it was not to a possible place. Sure, some Jews lived there. But going to Jerusalem, under the Otoman Empire, was not a thing, as they say.
And here we are, almost 600 years later, and if we want we can go – many do, and become part of the strand of our people that make alyiah, return, and experience a Jewish government with a Jewish land with a Jewish army in a Jewish capital. Jerusalem mowadays speaks Hebrew, mostly. And even that is kind of new – the last time we hung out in a Jewish Jerusalem, before the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans, we were speaking Aramaic. But we were still praying in Hebrew.
In our many diasporas, the Jewish people created and absorbed many customs and spoke many languages: Judeo-Arabic, Ladino, Yiddish, Judeo-Malayalam in India, Lishan Didan in Urmia, Yeshivish in present day America and many others. And yet, the Hebrew in the prayer book and in the Mishnah was the great unifier, the one constant in all our diasporas.
But what you thought about God when you said those prayers? No so much of a unifier. A friend of mine in Brasil used to say – the only thing Jews agree on is that there is only One God… and we disagree about everything that follows that statement. And some disagree as to whether that One God exists.
So we are about to spend a few hours together throughout Rosh HaShanah. We will go through the Machzor and we will use some of the new texts in the booklet.
Take this time to refine your relationship with God. To refine your relationship with prayer. To refine your relationship with our people. And if you feel like the shoemaker, if you feel that only a sigh will do, then sigh with all your being. If only tears will do, then cry with all your being. If taking to the streets will do, then take to the streets with all your being.
In times of profound dissonance, in times of feelings of deep vulnerability, in times of deep dislocation, in times of radical disorientation – prayer begins with the machzor, but it does not end there.
Given what year we had, may we make this a better year than last year. LeShanah Tovah, no – let’s say this year LeShanah Yoter Tovah – may we all go on to have a better year.
LeShanah Yoter Tovah.