RabbiO
הרב יונה בן זכריה
Rabbi Kermit ben Frog would tell you, “Sing, sing a song, sing out loud, sing out strong.” Ellen Naomi Cohen, better known as Eemah Cass Elliot would advise that, “You’ve gotta make your own kind of music, sing your own special song.” The psalmist put it as “Shi-ru l’Adonai Shir Chadash – Sing to Adonai a new song.”
For some of us, the, for want of a better term, standard service achieves all that it is meant to – conversation with G-d, conversation with the very core of our being, and connection to one another in holy community. But apparently for the vast majority of us, it is far less. How else to explain that only 10% of Jews say that they attend services regularly. Yet, many of the remaining 90% have actively sought to express their Jewishness in other ways as they continue to participate in the life of the Jewish community. How do we explain this almost total disconnect by the majority of Jews from what has always been the core element of Judaism?
It would be a gross error to romanticize life in the shtetl and other areas where Jews were forced to live in times past. Lives were hard, class lines and gender lines were rigid and unyielding. The only benefit, if such it was, was that one was a Jew all day, all the time.
As we have been reminded so many times in the past, we live in an unprecedented period of secular societal opportunities for Jews. There is a literally a world of competing activities for our time and our attention. We find ourselves increasingly compartmentalizing our lives and we seek to cram as much as possible into those compartments in the least amount of time.
One of those compartments is the time we allot to worshiping as Jews. We are determined that if we are going to worship, we’re going to do it right. We’re going to it authentically. Yet even those who go to services more than once or twice year often leave services empty, and those who do show up just for the High Holy Days often simply have their conviction that services have no regular place in their lives reinforced.
The problem is two-fold. We may not be physicians, but told of a diagnosis we do research about our illness. We read up on the possible treatments, the options, so that we can knowledgably discuss the situation with our doctors and determine the course of action we will follow. When buying a new car we read up on the various makes and models, their plusses and minuses, invoice prices, dealer invoices, rebates, hidden incentives – all so that we know which is the best car for us and we can get the best price at a dealership. Yet many of us within the more liberal movements of Judaism remain ignorant about services, the structure and the rhythm, the purpose of the prayers. We expect the prayers to do all the work and engage us. It doesn’t really work that way. The siddur has been called the greatest compendium of Jewish history, philosophy, theology and prayer, but how many of us approach it in that spirit?
But there is another problem. Rabbi Judith Seid, the first woman ordained by the Secular Humanist Jewish movement, tells the story of a fellow she knew who took it upon himself to learn Hebrew. Shocked at the disparity between the translations in his siddur and the actual Hebrew which he did not subscribe to, he stopped going to services.
There is a marvelous moment in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. When it appears that the two young lovers, hapless Hero and slightly dense Philia will be parted forever, Hero declares, “For us there will never be happiness.” To which Philia replies, “Then we must learn to be happy without it.”
We treat the services in the siddur as textus receptus. It is as if we believe that when Yochanan ben Zakkai was smuggled out from the city of Jerusalem in a coffin in 70 C.E., he carried with him at least one copy of the Art Scroll Siddur, probably the one belonging to Moses. The religious genius undergirding our services is so great that many prayers continue to immediately resonate in us. Many other prayers can, if we look at them in a fresh manner. But many of the prayers express values that many of us no longer hold, express views many of us no longer can accept. However we seem unwilling to deal with that issue. We seem to take the attitude that we shouldn’t do anything. This is the service, live with it. We shouldn’t attempt to substitute something else, because that wouldn’t be authentic. And so we grow comfortable and complacent in our discomfort.
Some of us distrust the word innovative when talking about services. But innovation is not untrue to our tradition. The dynamic tension between keva and kavannah is not new. Some examples. You may know that the core of the Kabbalat Shabbat service is a series of psalms. The words of those psalms are indeed ancient, but the service itself, the selection of psalms and their order is the gift of Moses Cordovero, one of the Kabbalists of Tzat in the 16th century. And although the Talmud tells us that Rabbi Hanina would exclaim on Friday at sunset, “Come and let us go forth to welcome the queen Sabbath” and Rabbi Janni would say, “Come O Bride. Come O Bride” it was Cordovero’s brother-in-law, Solomon haLevy Alkhabetz who wrote Lecha Dodi in 1529. Adon Olam is often credited to Solomon ibn Gabriol, the poet of the 11th century, but whoever the author, it seems to make its first appearance in siddurim in the 1500s. And as for Magen Avot, Rashi explains that at the time of the gemara, synagogues were not in the villages, and during the weekdays Jews would pray Ma'ariv at home. On Shabbat evening they would come to the synagogue. In order to prevent latecomers from being dangerously left alone, the sages decreed that Magen Avot should be added in order to lengthen the communal prayer service (and allow latecomers to catch up and leave with everyone). And although Magen Avot was later to be given another purpose, a chazzan who missed mincha could use Magen Avot as a substitute, the fact remains that the prayer was originally meant as “filler.”
We read in the Talmud that if a man makes his prayer a fixed task, it is not a true supplication. And the Talmud defines a fixed task as prayers that consist of a fixed liturgy with nothing new added. If we simply recite prayers because it is a tradition, simply because it’s what we think we are supposed to do, then how are we different than the descendants of the conversos, the Marranos, who, compelled by family traditions but for reasons they do not understand, on Friday evenings draw the curtains of the homes shut, bring out wine and bread and light candles?
We are the heirs to, and the guardians of, a living tradition. May we be true to it as we seek to find for ourselves, as individuals and as a community of friends, authentic voices.
For some of us, the, for want of a better term, standard service achieves all that it is meant to – conversation with G-d, conversation with the very core of our being, and connection to one another in holy community. But apparently for the vast majority of us, it is far less. How else to explain that only 10% of Jews say that they attend services regularly. Yet, many of the remaining 90% have actively sought to express their Jewishness in other ways as they continue to participate in the life of the Jewish community. How do we explain this almost total disconnect by the majority of Jews from what has always been the core element of Judaism?
It would be a gross error to romanticize life in the shtetl and other areas where Jews were forced to live in times past. Lives were hard, class lines and gender lines were rigid and unyielding. The only benefit, if such it was, was that one was a Jew all day, all the time.
As we have been reminded so many times in the past, we live in an unprecedented period of secular societal opportunities for Jews. There is a literally a world of competing activities for our time and our attention. We find ourselves increasingly compartmentalizing our lives and we seek to cram as much as possible into those compartments in the least amount of time.
One of those compartments is the time we allot to worshiping as Jews. We are determined that if we are going to worship, we’re going to do it right. We’re going to it authentically. Yet even those who go to services more than once or twice year often leave services empty, and those who do show up just for the High Holy Days often simply have their conviction that services have no regular place in their lives reinforced.
The problem is two-fold. We may not be physicians, but told of a diagnosis we do research about our illness. We read up on the possible treatments, the options, so that we can knowledgably discuss the situation with our doctors and determine the course of action we will follow. When buying a new car we read up on the various makes and models, their plusses and minuses, invoice prices, dealer invoices, rebates, hidden incentives – all so that we know which is the best car for us and we can get the best price at a dealership. Yet many of us within the more liberal movements of Judaism remain ignorant about services, the structure and the rhythm, the purpose of the prayers. We expect the prayers to do all the work and engage us. It doesn’t really work that way. The siddur has been called the greatest compendium of Jewish history, philosophy, theology and prayer, but how many of us approach it in that spirit?
But there is another problem. Rabbi Judith Seid, the first woman ordained by the Secular Humanist Jewish movement, tells the story of a fellow she knew who took it upon himself to learn Hebrew. Shocked at the disparity between the translations in his siddur and the actual Hebrew which he did not subscribe to, he stopped going to services.
There is a marvelous moment in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. When it appears that the two young lovers, hapless Hero and slightly dense Philia will be parted forever, Hero declares, “For us there will never be happiness.” To which Philia replies, “Then we must learn to be happy without it.”
We treat the services in the siddur as textus receptus. It is as if we believe that when Yochanan ben Zakkai was smuggled out from the city of Jerusalem in a coffin in 70 C.E., he carried with him at least one copy of the Art Scroll Siddur, probably the one belonging to Moses. The religious genius undergirding our services is so great that many prayers continue to immediately resonate in us. Many other prayers can, if we look at them in a fresh manner. But many of the prayers express values that many of us no longer hold, express views many of us no longer can accept. However we seem unwilling to deal with that issue. We seem to take the attitude that we shouldn’t do anything. This is the service, live with it. We shouldn’t attempt to substitute something else, because that wouldn’t be authentic. And so we grow comfortable and complacent in our discomfort.
Some of us distrust the word innovative when talking about services. But innovation is not untrue to our tradition. The dynamic tension between keva and kavannah is not new. Some examples. You may know that the core of the Kabbalat Shabbat service is a series of psalms. The words of those psalms are indeed ancient, but the service itself, the selection of psalms and their order is the gift of Moses Cordovero, one of the Kabbalists of Tzat in the 16th century. And although the Talmud tells us that Rabbi Hanina would exclaim on Friday at sunset, “Come and let us go forth to welcome the queen Sabbath” and Rabbi Janni would say, “Come O Bride. Come O Bride” it was Cordovero’s brother-in-law, Solomon haLevy Alkhabetz who wrote Lecha Dodi in 1529. Adon Olam is often credited to Solomon ibn Gabriol, the poet of the 11th century, but whoever the author, it seems to make its first appearance in siddurim in the 1500s. And as for Magen Avot, Rashi explains that at the time of the gemara, synagogues were not in the villages, and during the weekdays Jews would pray Ma'ariv at home. On Shabbat evening they would come to the synagogue. In order to prevent latecomers from being dangerously left alone, the sages decreed that Magen Avot should be added in order to lengthen the communal prayer service (and allow latecomers to catch up and leave with everyone). And although Magen Avot was later to be given another purpose, a chazzan who missed mincha could use Magen Avot as a substitute, the fact remains that the prayer was originally meant as “filler.”
We read in the Talmud that if a man makes his prayer a fixed task, it is not a true supplication. And the Talmud defines a fixed task as prayers that consist of a fixed liturgy with nothing new added. If we simply recite prayers because it is a tradition, simply because it’s what we think we are supposed to do, then how are we different than the descendants of the conversos, the Marranos, who, compelled by family traditions but for reasons they do not understand, on Friday evenings draw the curtains of the homes shut, bring out wine and bread and light candles?
We are the heirs to, and the guardians of, a living tradition. May we be true to it as we seek to find for ourselves, as individuals and as a community of friends, authentic voices.
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