Prayer in Response to the Murderous Attacks by Hamas

Rabbi Eli Courante

 Our God and God of our ancestors,

Take notice of our plight as we cry out to You from the bottom of our hearts.
We pray before You, strengthen our spirit in face of the calamity, and the new trials that may await us.

Teach us to stay united in love and mutual respect, so we shall have no need for a brutal enemy
to come from without and put an end to our foolish skirmishes within.
For it is promised: 

And all your children will be students of God, and great will be the peace of your children.

Protect us! Save us, and our people, and all peace loving people of the earth, from vile enemies
and wild beasts, from senseless hatred and wanton destruction.
Let children return safely to their parents, and parents to their children. Reunite our families
with their loved ones. For it is said:

“There is hope for your descendants, - declares God, - And your children will return to their land”.

 God Almighty, we are asking a lot, and we know it. But then, we do go a long way back together.

Protect those who are protecting us.
Give solace to those who experienced senseless loss; mend their hearts that are torn with pain and grief.
Give us courage and strength to support each other and all around us.
Grant our leaders wisdom and perspicacity, strengthen their hands, for they need to be our guiding light on the way to rebuilding and recovering.

 And let us say,

Amen

Shalom Lodzer,

We have just finished something you are only about to start in a few hours; the search for chametz. (Yep, those are both the costs and the benefits of being 6 hours ahead of EST).

The search was, as usual, serving the traditional purposes of obliterating anything leavened, and it came after days of a whole team of us punctiliously koshering every nook and cranny. Once the wooden spoon, the feather, and the candle had served their purpose, they were promptly placed in the bucket along with the last of bread to be burned tomorrow morning.

That was when our Mashgiach and I went into a conversation over the symbolism of destroying everything involved. The spoon of course has to go, as the main receptacle for the found chametz.  It also makes every bit of sense to burn the feather, it’s been sweeping the crumbs off the floor, and some might get stack in between its barbs. Yeah, the feather has to go.

What about the candle though? All it did was provide light. It never touched anything leavened, never did anything untoward or non-Pesachdic. Why burn a perfectly good candle? (I mean, before you’d burn it naturally.)

From there, we both recalled simultaneously an old teaching that says you cannot keep searching for faults and stay above it all. The candle maintained that symbolic stance of fastidiousness. The candle has to go. It’s a great reminder for us all to try and be less judgemental (even if you think you are the least judgemental person in the universe, there’s always room for less).

 A few last pre-yontef thoughts as I wish you and yours Chag Sameach.

Pesach is as controversial a holiday as any.

We celebrate our freedom – and go out of our way to emphasise having been slaves.

We proclaim our ability to live a life of abundance – and limit ourselves to the “poor” matzah bread, just as we force each other to munch bitter herbs.

We drink four cups of wine while praising the sobriety of our spirit and spill some drops in mourning for the suffering of our enemies, the victory over whom we are celebrating.

Tonight, we scrub the darkest corners of our house, clean out any remnants of anything remotely resembling chametz, only to proclaim then that whatever we didn’t notice doesn’t count anyway.

We do everything in our power to surprise our kids, but – just in case they still are not impressed – we tell them what questions exactly they should be asking.

We celebrate the freedom to pass the faith of our fathers to our children – and interrupt the morning service with a grand Exodus right after the Yizkor.

Looking at all those marvels, I can’t help thinking that we are probably Jewish; deliciously hungry for meaning, and perennially confused.

Please stay that way.

Have a happy Passover, the Feast of our Freedom!!!

I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob as El Shaddai, but by My name, God, I did not make Myself known to them

Exodus 6:3

 

Of Death and Loss; a Tribute to Life

            When God is making an appearance from the burning bush, Moses hears that his forefathers knew God by the name Shaddai but not the Tetragrammathon, the Holy Name we usually replace today with euphemism of Adonai. Indeed, Shaddai is the oldest name for God we know in the Jewish liturgical lexicon.

            The history of the understanding of the meaning of the name is interesting in and of itself. Throughout the centuries, it made a 180 degrees turn. Today, when we use the name Shaddai (it is represented, for instance, by the letterש  on your mezuzah), the rabbis teach us its origin is in the words she-dai, i.e. the One Who gives, the One Who satisfies the needs of all the lives. However, its original meaning was understood to relate to the root שדד shadad, i.e. “the robber”; the One Who takes, the One within Whose power it is to expropriate anything on the spot.

            The “Jewish zen” lies in understanding that both concepts are different sides of the same coin, they are in fact the same outlook on matters that are beyond human understanding.

            When we lose a loved one, we say before the funeral: Hashem natan, va-Hashem lakach. God has given, and God has taken away. The One Who gives is the One Who takes. We could not perceive one of those acts without the other. A gift is not understood without realization of at the possibility of loss.

            When we lose a loved one, we are in shock, suffering of trauma, going through the stages of grief. We mourn, we are full of sorrow. For whom are we experiencing pain and regret? It is not for the deceased. They are no more, they are not feeling anything, they want for nothing. Our pity is for ourselves. We are the ones ending with the short end of the stick, the ones who will have to deal with this new gaping hole in our lives and hearts, trying to wrap our minds around the numbing term “forever”. Trying – in vain, of course; our mind is not biologically wired to embrace “forever”, the concept is simply not within our existential, empirical purview.

            As I often acknowledge when talking to people who encounter mourning rituals, death is a very awkward thing. That works on many levels, from the totally irrational but entirely understandable survivors’ guilt to the normal, instinctive lack of understanding how to deal with the unknowable. Of all the subjects our society deems taboo today, or used to designate taboo, death is the strongest, and it is also the most consistent one. It beats hands down intimate relations, finances, bodily fluids, gender and race, and whatever may send to our brain the urgent warnings of embarrassment. Some of those subjects, humans routinely get matter-of-factly about. It might be sexual issues in some communities, money in others. But we almost never see death as business-as-usual, not our society as a whole, not on a regular basis. We seldom get used to death, it is not part of our own empirical practice, none of us who died for real had ever come back to tell the story.
            And we are not meant to wrap our mind around death, it is beyond the edge of the table, it is “off the game”. God did not show us that side of life, “I have not made Myself known to them by that name”.

But perhaps we are still able – and even meant, to an extent – to see death as business-as-usual.

The Sages, while acknowledging that death of others may become mentally and socially awkward, did not tell us to fight the feeling. They taught us instead how to handle it. When you come to a shivah, you are not supposed to reinvent the wheel of making any presentations, you don’t even have to say anything (besides the short and clearly prescribed formula and the end of your visit, ha-Makom yenachem). Socially, you take your cue from the mourners and try to match their mode and their mood, whether openly social or reserved and pensive.

The message of Jewish rites is that to accept death as best we can, to see as inevitable part of life, we need to draw clear lines between death and life. (The same, by the way, can be said about the other only certain thing in our world, the taxes.)

We are expected to do the optimal, efficient choices in our lives. The same approach was extrapolated by the rabbis to our rites surrounding death. We are not supposed to waste any extra material resources on a funeral, for the death have no need of them. We are not expected – in fact, not even allowed – to buy expensive caskets (in the countries where it is legal we don’t even use a casket at all, just a shroud and a talles). We never bring flowers to our funerals, as life should not be sacrificed to death. Death is a life-stopper, an emptiness that helps us to recognize life wherever death is not. We signify that, ritually, with a pause for death; the burial procession makes 7 stops on the way to the grave. The participants will not pass the shovel from hand to hand, they will just stick it in the ground when done, creating that same pause, that same little hiccup until the next person will pick it up and start shoveling. We rise for the kaddish. The mourners will fall out of their routine; they put their lives on pause for the week of the shivah. And – just as symbolically – we emphasize wherever that emptiness dares not touch. We draw the boundaries when the mourners get up from the shivah and make a circle around the block, showing the world that the life goes on.

We will all die. You can see those words as a bad omen – because, indeed, everyone who is reading them now will die. Or, you can see them as a good omen; because if you are reading those lines it means that you are wonderfully, painfully alive.

Recognizing that both are two sides of the same coin, that the name Shaddai means simultaneously “God gives” and “God takes away”, is the Jewish Zen. The path to living instead of worrying.

The path to life, LeChayim. To living and being aware of how alive we are, with all the worries, pains, and conundrums that inevitably are a part of our existence.

Rabbi Hanina b. Dosa asked his daughter why she was glum on the Shabbat eve. She said  that she accidentally filled the candles with vinegar instead of oil. He responded: The One Who told oil to burn will tell vinegar to burn. As she lit it, it burned throughout Shabbat and even gave light for Havdalah

Babylonian Talmud, Taanit 25:1
 

There is no fire in Hell; everyone brings their own

Hindu proverb, quoted by William Dalrymple


A little light repels a lot of darkness

Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi


    Chanukah celebrations in my youth were memorable; Moscow is on the same latitude as Edmonton. It gets very dark very early. A few menorahs (technically, it’s not a menorah butchanukiyah, FYI) were smuggled in – but you could never get candles anyway, not the ones that would fit. So, we made our own menorahs.

    Wooden, clay, tin, playdough, and even bread dough; anything went. Shape it, mold it, paint it, go wild! One of my early attempts involved nails going up through a wooden ruler. Once heated, the nails moved about, and the lit candles started dancing. Pretending it was by design got me a prize at the menorah competition.

    For so many of us, adults and children alike, the story of a one-day oil supply that lasted for an extra day is the story of Chanukah, it is in fact everything the festival’s about. Yet that tale is nowhere to be found in the accounts from the days of the revolt. The “miracle of the oil” has no mention in the Books of Maccabees, or in the writings of Josephus, nor the Mishna, nor the earliest Midrashim. The first source of the story is in the Talmud, written centuries after the Hasmonean revolt. Its apparent immediate purpose was to explain the length of the festival.

The Book of the Maccabees itself offers a smooth and consistent narrative; after taking back and rededicating the Temple, it says, the Maccabees celebrated the holiday of Sukkot, which they had missed two months earlier that year because the Temple was in the hands of the Seleucids. Since Sukkot (incl. Shemini Atzeret) is 8 days long, they celebrated Hanukkah for a similar period of time.

An unsentimental anthropologist studying our rites might set out here to explain how the Sanhedrin rabbis were trying to shun out the politically rival priestly party by diminishing the merits of Hasmoneic dynasty and counterposing the miracle of the oil to the original story of unabashed heroics, of Jewish pride and the fight against assimilation, oppression and tyranny.

However, few of us are anthropologists, and none of us are unsentimental. Hence, for us the story of the oil can’t be “just so”; it needs a purpose, a deeper meaning, something we would not get from the tale of the Maccabean valour alone.

Could it be that the legend comes to teach us not to fear starting what needs be done – even when we strongly doubt our own powers to see the task through its end?

And some say that maybe, there was no miracle at all. Not even in the legend. That shortly after taking the painful decision to light the Menorah in spite of expecting no backup kindling for another week, the priests had found another jug – or a bucket – or even a whole barrel of perfectly good pure Temple oil! That way, the moral of the story is even more blatant; rather than waiting about aimlessly, wondering when the Divine blessing is going to befall us from the sky, we must realize that God’s light is always with us. Our job is merely to recognize it, and get it going, and use it well to repel our own demons, doubts, fears, and insecurities. Just let your candles dance along.

Find your light, and go with it.
Happy Chanukah!
RE