Tag Archives: God

The twenty first day of Elul

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Rabbi Eliezer was known to be very severe and rather domineering with his pupils and his colleagues. He was inflexible and deeply conservative. But he was also recognised to be a great scholar and a worthy leader within the community.
During one particularly bad drought, Rabbi Eliezer led the community in prayer for rain. 13 different fast days were instituted in order to show penance to God, to beg for forgiveness and life giving rain. But still the sky stayed clear. As the people were preparing to leave the synagogue on the last day, Rabbi Eliezer called out to them “have you prepared graves for yourselves?” a question so shocking and terrible that they began to cry, and only then the rain began. (Ta’anit 25a-b)

The Talmud tells a second story, where again Rabbi Eliezer led the community in a long and extended amidah prayer while they all fasted, but his prayers were still not answered. Then Rabbi Akiva, a student and friend of Rabbi Eliezer, added his prayers – five sentences each beginning with the phrase “Avinu Malkeinu”. At that moment, the rains began and the famine was averted. The rabbis began to ask why the young Akiva was successful in his prayers whereas the great Rabbi Eliezer was not. And a bat Kol, a heavenly voice was heard to say that the issue was not one of greatness, but because Rabbi Eliezer was exact and demanding whereas Rabbi Akiva was relaxed and forgiving, and God had responded to each according to his personality.
How do we both create and receive the forgiveness we seek? Our liturgy quotes God as saying (as God said to Moses in Numbers 14:19-20 after Moses begs God to forgive the people who rebel after the report from the spies) “Pardon, I pray, the iniquity of this people according to Your great kindness, as You have forgiven this people ever since Egypt.” And GOD said, “I pardon, as you have asked – Salachti kidvarecha. “Salachti kidvarecha” – the answer is in the word kidvarecha – the thoughts and feelings we have and we express as we search for this elusive yet much wished for state. Maybe we have been a little too much like Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus, a little too inflexible, rigid in our attitudes and stubborn in our analyses. Maybe we have been more concerned with our status and how things look to others than we should have been. There is no question in the Talmud that Rabbi Eliezer didn’t pray – simply that his prayer was not conducive to being answered. In the first story the people finally comprehend that they have come to the end of the road – if their prayer is not answered this time they will die – and it is that realisation that gives their prayer the added dimension – urgency, depth, honesty – that means it will be answered. But it is from the second story that we learn something new, that God treats us as we treat others. If we refuse to forgive others, we too will have a hard time attaining forgiveness from God for ourselves. The same message is found elsewhere in the Talmud in tractate Rosh Hashanah 17a, where we find the statement “Whose sin does God forgive? The one who forgives sins (against themself)” – the person who is forgiving to others is more easily forgiven by God, who responds middah k’neged middah – measure for measure – towards each person according to their own behaviour and personality.

The nineteenth day of Elul

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The first use of the verb “k.p.r” is in the story of Noah, when God instructs Noah
עֲשֵׂה לְךָ תֵּבַת עֲצֵי־גֹפֶר קִנִּים תַּעֲשֶׂה אֶת־הַתֵּבָה וְכָפַרְתָּ אֹתָהּ מִבַּיִת וּמִחוּץ בַּכֹּפֶר׃
“Make yourself an ark of gopher wood; make it an ark with compartments, and cover it inside and out with pitch.” (Genesis 6:14)
Here the root of the word appears to mean both“ to cover”, and, since the word for pitch uses the same root – “pitch – some kind of waterproof and protective covering- so we can extend this meaning to “to protect”
We find an echo of Noah’s “ark” in the ark made for the tent of meeting, the place where the presence of God will hover: For this “aron” too is to have a protective covering – the kapporet (exodus 25:17-21) – the mercy seat that covers and protects the ark and the stones within it, decorated with cherubim to the sacrifices of atonement to be made by the high priest.
When we come to the more usual formations of the verbal root, it is generally found in Temple artefacts and ritual – almost always in the plural and in the piel or hitpael binyan , and almost always to do with the sacrifices to be made there to atone for the sins of the people, either as individuals or as a collective.
Altogether the root appears over a hundred times in Tanakh, and from its earliest and most “material” form in the “kal” binyan that we find in Noah, it grows to have meanings or undertones of “covering” or “protecting”, “appeasing”, “ransoming”, or a “reconciliation”.
What does it mean for us today, that we name our holiest day of the year after this verbal root with meanings of to cover over and protect, to appease and to ransom, to reconcile?
I think it means that we recognise that we cannot undo the past – but we can come to terms with it, and we refuse to allow it to define us and our future. We can create a kapporet – a protective “lid” or closure between us and what has happened– to enable us to let go of the damage or pain we have been carrying, and to accommodate out reality as we move into the future.

The fourteenth day of Elul

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From the very days of your ancestors you have turned away from My laws and have not observed them. Turn back to Me, and I will turn back to you—said GOD of Hosts. But you ask, “How shall we turn back?” Malachi 3:7

לְמִימֵי אֲבֹתֵיכֶם סַרְתֶּם מֵחֻקַּי וְלֹא שְׁמַרְתֶּם שׁוּבוּ אֵלַי וְאָשׁוּבָה אֲלֵיכֶם אָמַר יְהֹוָה צְבָאוֹת וַאֲמַרְתֶּם בַּמֶּה נָשׁוּב׃

Teshuvah – Returning to the ways that God expects of us, is the theme of these Days of Awe, and again and again our liturgy exhorts us to return to God, and that should we do so, God will return to us. But as the prophet Malachi records – sometimes our response to that exhortation is – I would like to – but how do I do it?

Tradition tells us that teshuvah is not an event, but a process. Maimonides codifies the laws of Repentance in his Mishneh Torah, which begins

(1) All commandments of the Torah, whether they be mandatory or prohibitive, if a person violates any one of them, either presumptuously or erroneously, when they will repent and turn away from their sinful way, they are obliged to confess before God, blessed is God! even as it is said: “When a man or woman shall commit any sin..… Then they shall confess their sin which they have done (Num. 5.6–7), which is a confession of words. Such confession is a mandatory commandment.”

So the very beginning of the process is that a person must have in some way sinned, either deliberately or by mistake, and that they will recognise that they have done so. The recognition then leads to an acknowledgement, in the form of a confession before God.

How do we recognise and acknowledge what we have done / failed to do? The process is called cheshbon hanefesh – literally the accounting of the soul. The metaphor of a cheshbon is deliberate – the word is used in hebrew to describe a calculation, a reckoning, an account, and is the word in modern hebrew for the bill at a point of sale.

So we begin by looking in detail at our past selves, and look at each action – was it something that gave my life more meaning and brought me closer to my best self? Was it something I did carelessly that maybe impacted negatively? Was it something that brought me selfish gain or pleasure but did not reflect well on my values?

It is the first step in a process of return to our best selves, but cheshbon nefesh does not only have to be done retroactively as we reflect on our lives at this time. Cheshbon nefesh can be a useful metric for us to make choices going forward – we can ask ourselves how a particular choice will sit in the accounts book – will it take me closer to who I want to be or will it take me further away?

The thirteenth day of Elul

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This story is repeated in many management curricula, though it is unclear who first told it. The metaphor is powerful and important – how do we think about and set our priorities? A good task for Elul:

A professor in a business school walks into a lecture hall and places a gallon-size empty jar on the table in the front of the room. He proceeds to fill the jar with large stones, as many as he can. “Is the jar full?” he asks his students. “Yes,” they reply. The professor pulls a bucket of pebbles from underneath the table and pours the pebbles in between the large stones. “Is it full now?” he asks. “Yes,” they reply.
Next the professor pulls out a bucket of sand and pours it into the pickle jar, its grains neatly filling the crevices left between the stones and pebbles. “Is it full now?” he asks. A bit more wary, some students shake their heads no. The professor pulls out a pitcher of water and fills the jar to the brim.

“What is the purpose of this demonstration?” the professor asks. The students offer platitudes like “you can always fit a bit more into your schedule,” or “a busy person can always find time to accomplish an additional task.”

“No! That’s not it at all!” the professor says. “The point is that unless I add the large stones first, I can never get them into the jar at all. You have to arrange your life so that high priorities come first, or you won’t find time for them at all.”

What are your Jewish priorities for the coming year?

Rava said: After departing from this world, when a person is brought to judgement for the life he lived in this world, they say to him in the order of that verse: Did you conduct business faithfully? Did you designate times for Torah study? Did you engage in procreation? Did you await salvation? Did you engage in the dialectics of wisdom or understand one matter from another? And, nevertheless, beyond all these, if the fear of the Lord is his treasure, yes, he is worthy, and if not, no, none of these accomplishments have any value. There is a parable that illustrates this. A person who said to his emissary: Bring a kor of wheat up to the attic for me to store there. The messenger went and brought it up for him. He said to the emissary: Did you mix a kav of ḥomton, a preservative to keep away worms, into it for me? He said to him: No. He said to him: If so, it would have been preferable had you not brought it up. Of what use is worm-infested wheat? Likewise, Torah and mitzvot without the fear of God are of no value. (Shabbat 31a)

Look at the questions again. The first is about our ethics in our interactions with others – not about rituals or religious observance. The second about making time for our spiritual nourishment. The third about engagement with the continuation both of Judaism and of the world, reminding us that each of us is responsible for creating something lasting that will live on and nurture the world after us – as the sages ask of us- “were you engaged in planting seeds?” The fourth – did you continue to hope and not to despair? Did you find ways to nurture hope in yourself and others or did you join those who claim hope is pointless? The fifth question asks about our clinging to the primacy of moral discernment – of knowing what is right and what is wrong an holding to the principles of righteousness.

And finally – did you act in the world not mechanistically or without a sense of the value of our world, but with an awareness that we must do more than “just enough” because our world deserves more than that. Whether you see ethical actions as stemming from a belief in God or a belief in the value of humanity – to do them without any value system but only as a way to make material success or to evade the judgement of others is to minimise their importance.

Whatever priorities you choose in the coming year, take a look at these and the order they come in (From the rabbinic interpretation of Isaiah 33:6) – begin with ethical actions and find your way to God through nurturing your spiritual life, your relational life, your engagement with the world and your hope in the future – tradition offers a pathway that is worth exploring

The ninth day of Elul

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“And God lifted me out of the pit of destruction, etc.” Did David really descend into a pit? Rather, David said, “I was already on my way down to the pit, and God did not let me fall.” And so it says (Psalm 16:11), “You make known to me the path of life.” Therefore it is said, “God lifted me out of the pit of destruction,” and not only that, but God lifted me up to a high place, as it says (Psalm 18:34), “God made my feet like the feet of deer and set me secure on the heights.” Why did God do this for me? Because of my hope in God. God did not desire sacrifices or offerings, but rather hope. (Midrash Tehillim 40:2)

The Midrash on psalm 40 reminds us that we are not alone, that the universe is neither random nor intentionally cruel. That if we continue to strive for hope, even in the face of what may feel a lot like despair or destruction, then God will not be far away.

Nachman of Bratslav- a famous depressive – is reported as having said it is forbidden to despair:

At the time he spoke the torah on Va’etchanan, which was published in Likutei [Moharan], Part II, section 78, and he’s speaking there about it being always forbidden to bring oneself to despair, however things are, heaven forfend. And he said it this way: “Men tor zich nisht m’ya’esh zayn. Gevalt! Zayy aych nisht m’ya’esh!” [It is forbidden to despair! Oy! [or: Bloody murder!] Don’t despair!” And he really drew out the word “gevalt” as one who does who cautions and cries out from the heart’s depths. (Chayei Moharn 49)

The main thing is to encourage oneself in every way possible {for there is no such thing as despair! (What he said was: Kein yiush iz gor nit fahr-handin !) He drew out these words Kein yiush…, and said them emphatically and with very amazing and awesome depth, in order to instruct and hint to each and every person throughout the generations not to despair under any circumstances, no matter what happens to him.} And be what may, even if one has fallen to where he has fallen, God spare us, since he encourages himself with something, he still has hope of repenting and returning to God.(Likutei Moharan, Part II 78:7:1-3)

It is indeed important not to despair – but maybe it would be easier to remind ourselves to continue to have hope. That, as the midrash says – God does not want our sacrifices or our offerings – God wants us to have hope.

Eighth day of Elul

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In the Talmud there is a discussion about what happens after we die. We go to Sheol – a Hebrew word deriving from the verb “to question” – and there we are interrogated. We will be asked four questions about the life we have lived. They are good questions and I want us to ask – and even to try to answer them for ourselves. They are questions that can stay with us as we prepare for the Yamim Noraim – and as we move into the coming years.

The previous three questions can be found in the previous three posts

The last question the soul is to be asked is this “Tzipita l’yeshua?” do you anticipate redemption, are you living in a state of hope?

Hope:

The theologian and philosopher Emil Fackenheim wrote “to be a Jew is to hope,”

And Rabbi Jonathan Sacks added “to be a Jew is to be an agent of hope”

Future Tense – How The Jews Invented Hope by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks
“Judaism is a religion of details, but we miss the point if we do not sometimes step back and see the larger picture. To be a Jew is to be an agent of hope in a world serially threatened by despair. Every ritual, every mitzvah, every syllable of the Jewish story, every element of Jewish law, is a protest against escapism, resignation or the blind acceptance of fate. Judaism is a sustained struggle, the greatest ever known, against the world that is, in the name of the world that could be, should be, but is not yet. There is no more challenging vocation. Throughout history, when human beings have sought hope they have found it in the Jewish story. Judaism is the religion, and Israel the home, of hope.”

The seventh day of Elul

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In the Talmud there is a discussion about what happens after we die. We go to Sheol – a Hebrew word deriving from the verb “to question” – and there we are interrogated. We will be asked four questions about the life we have lived. They are good questions and I want us to ask – and even to try to answer them for ourselves. They are questions that can stay with us as we prepare for the Yamim Noraim – and as we move into the coming years.

The third question

The third question we are to be asked is this:
Nasa’atta b’emunah? Did you act with honesty and integrity in your dealings with others?
Maybe one of the hardest questions to answer – we may at some level be aware of whether we are connecting to our people and engaging in living Judaism, We are probably aware – if only through feelings of guilt and inadequacy, of our record with family relationships, but our dealings with other people – so many of them – how can we really reflect on each one and ask ourselves this question?

The reality we should acknowledge is that what we say isn’t always what we mean; We need to admit to ourselves that even when we mean to do something and say we will do it, it doesn’t necessarily follow that we actually do it, and so we create a dissonance that we have to address. Once we recognise that we are not living up to our expressed and internal values we are able to take the next step to try to realign our reality to our principles, to behave differently, to try to be that wonderful thing, a mensch. The act of teshuvah is really the realigning of our saying with our doing, the ongoing process of matching our behaviour with our ideals. And here again is the same issue. Nasa’atta b’emunah? Are you going about your business like a mensch? Are you really acting as though you are b’tzelem Elohim, in the image of God?

Nasa’atta b’emunah – were you a mensch? Did you stay true to your values? Did your behaviour make people respect you or did it make them fear you? Did you behave in a way you would like others behave towards you?

The previous two questions can be found in the previous two posts. Tomorrow will bring the fourth question

The sixth day of Elul

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In the Talmud there is a discussion about what happens after we die. We go to Sheol – a Hebrew word deriving from the verb “to question” – and there we are interrogated. We will be asked four questions about the life we have lived. They are good questions and I want us to ask – and even to try to answer them for ourselves. They are questions that can stay with us as we prepare for the Yamim Noraim – and as we move into the coming years.

The second question God asks is this:
Asakta b’priya u’reviyah?
Did you devote yourself to family?
If engaging in Torah is a way of reaching both forwards and backwards in time and of pulling both into our worlds, how much more so is the family the touchstone of our immortality. We inherit so much from our parents and from their parents – not only physical looks and inherited tendencies, not only gestures and ways of being in the world. We inherit all sorts of other things – second and third generation groups will speak of the damage that can be passed through families. Dynasties of musicians or scientists demonstrate the intangibles that get passed on. Social workers can speak of the cycles of abuse or neglect; community rabbis can testify to the many non Jews who come to them to convert to Judaism – because they feel Jewish, because on further research a Jewish grand parent or great grandparent has been discovered, because they just know they have a Jewish soul.
Our liturgy speaks of a Book of Life in which all our actions are recorded. It is a powerful image, a metaphor for the truth that nothing we do – neither good nor bad – is ever really lost in this world, even if we forget. The book of Life exists in a number of ways, it exists within our own souls, but we also write it upon the souls of our family – our children, our parents, our partners, our family relations and the friends who act as our family in this modern more fractured world.
In particular, the book of our life is inscribed upon our children. They take on our pain and they internalise our experiences. They pay for many of our mistakes, and they struggle not to take on our lives and our expectations instead of their own.
The question we are asked after we die will not be did we love our family, or did we leave them well provided for. It is more subtle and complex than that. Rather like the first question it is about how we set our priorities in our life more than the actual acts we did or did not do. So, did we set aside time for Torah means did we engage in Jewish activity and covenant, but it also asks – did we control our time in such a way that we were able to make the choices we wanted to make? Did we fritter away our time or give away the control of our lives to someone else and abdicate from the responsibilities of our freedom? Asakta b’priyah uv’riyah? Means did we busy ourselves with our families, did we devote our energy and our thoughts to them, did we make their needs our preoccupation?
It is a truism that when we look back in our lives, what we regret tends not to be the things we did, but the things we didn’t do. All community rabbis will tell you that no-one regrets not spending more time in the office, but many people regret not spending more time with their families. So here is the question – asakta b’priyah uv’riyah? – did you engage with and invest in your family? Did you make time for them and be with them? Because when you look over your life, you will see that your family provide your structure, your history and your future. You will live on in them and with them; they are the ropes of life into which your soul is bound.

The first question can be found in yesterday’s post

Fifth day of Elul

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In the Talmud there is a discussion about what happens after we die. We go to Sheol – a Hebrew word deriving from the verb “to question” – and there we are interrogated. We will be asked four questions about the life we have lived. They are good questions and I want us to ask – and even to try to answer them for ourselves. They are questions that can stay with us as we prepare for the Yamim Noraim – and as we move into the coming years.
The first question is this
“Kav’ata Itim L’Torah? Did you set aside time for Torah?”
Did you set aside time for torah? Not, you’ll notice, ‘did you study Torah’. Nor ‘did you follow all the halachic requirements predicated on torah text?” But did you set aside time for Torah – the question isn’t academic.
Torah you see isn’t simply a book, it isn’t a text that we can learn or a narrative we teach our children. Torah has many more dimensions than that. It is a process, it is a history, it is the ongoing dialogue across generations between Jews and Jews, and Jews and God. So when we get ourselves involved in Torah, when we join the conversation and add the experiences and reflections of our lives to the living narrative of Torah, that is when we fit ourselves into our people and truly enter the Covenant. To set aside time for Torah is to be willing to identify in, to be prepared to challenge our ancestral understanding of God, to be ready to encounter God in modernity with open heart. To set aside time for Torah is to say “I will engage with life as a Jew – and in doing so I hope to enrich Judaism and deepen life. And I will add my link to the chain of tradition that remembers the past, supports the present and reaches out to a future I will not know”.

The next question will be posted tomorrow

The Second Day of Elul

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מוֹדֶה אֲנִי לְפָנֶיךָ מֶלֶךְ חַי וְקַיָּם שֶׁהֶחֱזַרְתָּ בִּי נִשְׁמָתִי בְּחֶמְלָה, רַבָּה אֱמוּנָתֶךָ:
I give thanks to You living and everlasting Sovereign, for You have restored my soul with mercy. Great is Your faithfulness. (Weekday shacharit service, prayers of preparation)
Every morning our liturgy gives us these words of gratitude. Jewish tradition views sleep as being like one sixtieth of death (Berachot 57b) and the Gemara goes on to suggest prayers before sleeping “One who enters to sleep on his bed recites in his bed from Shema Yisrael.. Then he recites: Blessed…Who makes the bands of sleep fall upon my eyes and slumber upon my eyelids, and illuminates the pupil of the eye. May it be Your will, Eternal my God, that You make me lie down in peace …. Let neither bad dreams nor troubling thoughts disturb me…. Enlighten my eyes in the morning lest I sleep the sleep of death, never to awaken. Blessed are You, God, Who gives light to the whole world in Your glory. (Berachot 60b)
Many religions see sleep as being related to death, and describe this observable loss of consciousness as the soul leaving the body; dreams become the experiences the soul encounters, portents from another place. And Judaism is no exception – we thank God for restoring our souls to our bodies upon awakening. But this prayer goes further than gratitude for another day of life. The two words “rabbah emunatecha” – your faith/faithfulness is great” add an extra layer of meaning for us. Most prayers elaborate on our faith in God, or at least our aspiration to have such faith. But here we describe the entity with faith not as the human being grateful to God, but God themself – who has faith in us.
The phrase comes into the liturgy from the book of Lamentations (3:22) and reminds us that however hard we are finding life, however low we might feel, or dislocated from and abandoned by God, God continues to have mercy on us, God continues to have faith in us. All we have to do is to turn and find our way back to God, and God will be ready to greet us. A repeated message in the liturgy of the season of the Yamim Noraim, that God is waiting for our teshuvah. But also a daily message – this may be the season for teshuvah, but the gates of repentance are never closed.
“To recall my distress and my misery/ Was wormwood and poison;
Whenever I thought of them, I was bowed low.
But this do I call to mind, Therefore I have hope:
The kindness of GOD has not ended / And God’s mercies are not spent.
They are renewed every morning— Ample is Your grace!
“GOD is my portion,” I say with full heart; This is the One in whom I have hope.
(Lam. 3 :19-24)