AVINU MALKENU – OUR FATHER, OUR KING The Talmud tells us that once a series of fasts was ordained after a prolonged drought. On the last of these, Rabbi Eliezer prayed twenty-four prayers and was not answered. Rabbi Akiva prayed a short prayer, beginning with the words “Our Father, our King,” and was answered (Ta’anit 25b). That was the origin of this prayer. Its power consists of the juxtaposition of the two phrases, “our Father” and “our King.” We are related to God in two primary ways. He is our Father and we are His children. He is our King and we are His subjects. The first bespeaks a relationship of love and compassion, the second of law and justice. It was Rabbi Akiva’s genius to place these two words next to one another, giving primacy to the first, to God’s love over and above His justice. The Nobel Prize–winning physicist Niels Bohr is said to have arrived at his Complementarity Theory – his explanation of the fact that we perceive light both as waves and as particles but not at the same time – when his son committed a minor crime. He found himself able to think of his son in two ways: as a judge in court passing judgment on his act, and as a father with compassion for his child, but not both at the same time. It is some such perception that lies behind Rabbi Akiva’s formulation. We are, he says to God, Your subjects, and we understand that You are judging us. But we are also Your children, therefore do not judge us: give us help instead. At that moment, rain fell. The idea that God loves us as a parent loves a child sounds obvious. Did God not tell Moses to say to Pharaoh: “My child, My firstborn, Israel” (Ex. 4:22)? Yet it was revolutionary in the ancient world and remains challenging in an age of scientific rationalism. Love – the concrete love of a parent for a child, as opposed to agape, the generalized love of all things, or eros, physical desire, – defines Judaism and is one of its greatest contributions to the imaginative horizons of humankind. Avinu Malkenu had its origins in public fasts for lack of rain. Therefore it is not said on Shabbat, even on Yom Kippur, since on Shabbat we do not pray for specific needs, nor do we give expression to distress.

גְּזֵרוֹת קָשׁוֹת Harsh decrees. Jews have often suffered harsh decrees, from Haman to Hitler. Those who have sought to deny God have focused their attack on the people of God.

שׂוֹנְאֵֽינוּ…אוֹיְבֵֽינוּ Those who hate us…our enemies. Jews have been attacked sometimes for religious reasons (“those who hate us”), sometimes for political and economic reasons (“our enemies”).

סְתֹם פִּיּוֹת Close the mouths. Assaults on Jews have almost invariably been preceded by false accusations.

לְמַֽעַן הֲרוּגִים For the sake of those who were killed. This and the following lines are the mark left on our prayers by the many Jews who went to their deaths rather than renounce their faith.

כִּי אֵין בָּֽנוּ מַעֲשִׂים Though we have no worthy deeds. This last line is paradoxically often sung to a joyous tune. The Ba’al Shem Tov said: The servant who sweeps the courtyard of the king sings a cheerful song. So we, when we sweep the courtyard of our deeds, sing a song, for we too are in the courtyard of the King. What is the worst thing the evil inclination can do? Make us forget that we are a child of the King. (Rabbi Shlomo of Karlin)

FULL KADDISH Kaddish has its origins in the Beit Midrash, the House of Study. Originally it served as the conclusion to a sermon or exposition, with its prayer for the establishment of the Kingdom of God – that is, His manifest sovereignty in the world – “in your lifetime.” It is written for the most part in Aramaic since that was the vernacular of the Jews of Israel in Second Temple times and immediately thereafter. So powerful was its language and so fitting an ending to an act of religious devotion that it entered the synagogue as a way of marking the conclusion of an act of prayer. Kaddish exists in a variety of forms: (1) the Full Kaddish said at the end of the Leader’s Repetition of the Amida, (2) Half Kaddish said at the end of a subsection of prayer, (3) the Mourner’s Kaddish, said by those observing a period of mourning, (4) the Rabbis’ Kaddish, said after an act of study, and (5) the Kaddish of Renewal, said only at the conclusion of a tractate of the Talmud or by a child at the funeral of a parent. This, the Full Kaddish, is marked by the line “May the prayers…be accepted” a prayer after prayer for the reception of our prayers, a final footnote to our devotions.

ALEINU – IT IS OUR DUTY An ancient prayer, ascribed by some to the biblical Joshua, by others to the Men of the Great Assembly, and others to the third-century Talmudic sage Rav. Originally it served as the prelude to Malkhiyot, the Kingship section of the Musaf Amida of Rosh HaShana, where it still appears. Around the twelfth or thirteenth century it was adopted as a conclusion to the daily prayers as well. Essentially it is a testimony of monotheistic faith against idolatry – hence its antiquity. It belongs to an age in which Jews were the sole monotheists, a lonely island in a pagan sea. The first paragraph is an affirmation of that faith and the singularity of the Jewish people in holding and proclaiming it. The second is a prayer that one day all humankind will share our belief in the oneness of God. In the first line of the Shema, the last letter of the first and last words – in a Torah scroll, written larger than the other letters – spell out the word “ed” (עד), meaning “witness.” The first and last letters of the Aleinu prayer spell out the same word. This recalls the great passage in Isaiah in which God declares “You are My witnesses…and My servant whom I have chosen… You are my witnesses – declares the Lord – that I am God” (Is. 43:10–12), which the sages interpreted as meaning: “If you are My witnesses, then I am God, but if you are not My witnesses it is as if I were not God” (Midrash Tanna’im; Pesikta deRav Kahana). It is our task to bear witness to God on earth, to be His ambassadors to humanity. That is the Jewish vocation. At times of paganism it involved the fight against myth and the idea that the universe was the arena of a cosmic struggle of heavenly powers, played out on earth in the form of wars, battles and a hierarchy of power. At times of secularism it means insisting that the material universe is not the only, or even the most important, dimension in which we live; ultimate reality is not blind to our existence, deaf to our prayers, and indifferent to our fate; and morality is not simply what we choose it to be. To insist otherwise, that there is only one God and we are each in His image, has often meant shouldering a heavy burden, attracting the scorn, sometimes the violence, of others. Yet this is the message we are called on to bear witness to, and Aleinu expresses it with great power. Given this background we can understand why it became associated with martyrdom. It was, according to eyewitnesses, the last prayer uttered by the Jews of Blois in 1171 when they went to their deaths because of their faith. Despite the many centuries of persecution, Aleinu, in its strategic position at the culmination of the service, continues to testify to our sacred vocation as living witnesses to the living God.

לְדָוִד, יהוה אוֹרִי וְיִשְׁעִי Psalm 27. A psalm of surpassing beauty expressing our faith that those who place their trust in God need fear no enemy. This does not mean that life is free of risk, nor that we have no enemies. It means that those for whom God is a living presence in their lives have access to a source of strength greater than themselves, that faith is the antidote to fear. It is said during the month of Elul and up to the end of Sukkot because of an interpretation given by the sages: “The Lord is my light” on Rosh HaShana, “and my salvation” on Yom Kippur. “He will keep me safe in His pavilion (besukko)” refers to Sukkot (Mateh Efrayim581:6). לְךָ אָמַר לִבִּי On Your behalf my heart says. This is the voice of God within the human heart. כִּי־אָבִי וְאִמִּי עֲזָבֽוּנִי Were my father and my mother to forsake me: were they to die (Ibn Ezra), or, when I leave home (Radak). לוּלֵא הֶאֱמַֽנְתִּי Were it not for my faith. Some commentators link this to the previous verse – my foes and false witnesses might have prevailed had it not been for my faith. וְקַוֵּה אֶל־יהוה Hope in the Lord. Judaism is the voice of hope in the conversation of humankind. Because we are not alone, because there is a God, and because He cares, we have hope. The Jewish people kept hope alive, and hope kept the Jewish people alive.

אֲדוֹן עוֹלָם Lord of the Universe. One of the simplest and most beautiful hymn-like celebrations of Jewish faith. It has been attributed to several possible authors, among them Rabbi Sherira Gaon and Rabbi Hai Gaon in the tenth century. Most scholars, however, believe it was written by the poet and philosopher Rabbi Solomon ibn Gabirol (born Malaga, Spain, c.1021; died Valencia, c.1058). Little is known about Ibn Gabirol’s life or death, except that he spent several unsettled years wandering from town to town and that he died comparatively young. He was the author of a philosophical work, Mekor Ḥayyim (in Latin, Fons Vitae), and was one of the first since Philo ten centuries earlier, to synthesize Judaism with Greek philosophy. Apart from the limpid simplicity, what gives Adon Olam its power and enduring popularity is the way it moves seamlessly from God, Creator of the universe, beyond time and space, to God who is close and ever-comforting, each day as I sleep and awake.

יִגְדַּל Great. A poetic setting of the most famous “creed” in Judaism: Moses Maimonides’ Thirteen Principles of Jewish Faith. Before the twelfth century there had been few attempts at summarizing Jewish faith, not because Judaism has no fundamental beliefs – it does – but because these only tended to come to the fore at times of controversy; at other times they were taken for granted. The Mishna (Sanhedrin 90a) lists several such beliefs, including the Resurrection of the Dead, since this was a point of controversy between Pharisees and Sadducees. In general, the sages tended to use the prayer book as the place where they gave expression to the fundamentals of faith. Faced, however, with a philosophically sophisticated, contemporary Islamic culture, Maimonides felt the need to set out the principles of faith in a structured way, which he did in his Commentary to the Mishna to Sanhedrin 10. So influential was this account that it was summarized, after his death, in both prose and poetry. The prose form, thirteen paragraphs each beginning, “I believe with perfect faith” (אֲנִי מַאֲמִין בֶּאֱמוּנָה שְׁלֵמָה), is printed in most prayer books. The poetic form is Yigdal. The first five principles have to do with the unity, eternity and non-physicality of God; principles 6–9 are about revelation; principles 10–13 are about divine providence, reward and punishment, and end with faith in the messianic age and the end of days when those who have died will live again. From the dawn of civilization to today, mankind has reflected on its place in the universe. Compared to all there is, each of us is infinitesimally small. We are born, we live, we act, we die. At any given moment our deeds are at best a hand waving in the crowd, a ripple in the ocean, a grain of sand on the human beach. The world long preceded us, and it will survive long after we die. How is our life related to the totality of things? To this, there have always been two answers, fundamentally opposed. There have been cultures, ancient and modern, that saw the world in terms of vast impersonal forces. For the ancients they were earthquakes, floods, famines, droughts, together with the processes of nature: birth, growth, decline and death. Today, we are more likely to identify those forces with the world economy, international politics, the environment and global media. What is common to them is that they are impersonal. They are indifferent to us, just as a tidal wave is indifferent to what it sweeps away. Seen in this perspective the forces that govern the world are essentially blind. They are not addressed to us. We may stand in their path; we may step out of the way. But they are unmoved by our existence. They don’t relate to us as persons. In such a world, hubris (the idea that we can change things) is punished by nemesis. Human hope is a prelude to tragedy. The best we can aim for is to seize what pleasure comes our way and make ourselves stoically indifferent to our fate. This is a coherent vision, but a bleak one. In ancient Israel, a different vision was born, one that saw in the cosmos the face of the personal: God who brought the universe into being as parents conceive a child, not blindly but in love. We are not insignificant, nor are we alone. We are here because someone willed us into being, who wanted us to be, who knows our innermost thoughts, who values us in our uniqueness, whose breath we breathe, and in whose arms we rest; someone in and through whom we are connected to all that is. That discovery – that we are the image of, the trace left by God – was utterly explosive in its implications. It meant that the key to interpreting the universe is not force or power, but the personal; and the personal is anything but blind. Everything else in the Torah flows from the attempt to make this fact the foundation of a new social order. The question becomes: What relationships and what kind of society honor the dignity of the person – of all persons in their dependence and independence? We redeem the world to the degree that we personalize it, taming the great forces so that they serve rather than dominate humanity. That was and remains a marvelous vision. It changed and still changes the world. Finding God, our ancestors discovered something new about themselves. Hearing God reaching out to us, they began to understand the significance of human beings reaching out to one another. They began, haltingly at first, to realize that God is not about power but relationship; that religion is not about control but about freedom; and that God is found, less in nature than in society, in the structures we make to honor His presence by honoring His image in other human beings. This much can never be made redundant by science. For God is dispensable only if humanity is. God is reality with a loving face, the mirror without which we cannot see ourselves. / continued on page