"Not Upon Our Merit"--Elul 28

In the daily siddur we pray:

Master of all worlds! Not upon our merit do we rely in our supplication, but upon Your limitless love.  What are we?  What is our life?  What is our piety?  What is our righteousness?  What is our attainment, our power, our might?  What can we say, Lord our God and God of our ancestors?  Compared to You, all the mighty are nothing, the famous nonexistent, the wise lack wisdom, the clever lack reason.  For most of their actions are meaningless, the days of their lives emptiness.  Human preeminence over beasts is an illusion when all is seen as futility.

But we are Your people, partners of Your covenant...

This is the paradox we stand inside everyday, but with a greater sense of urgency during the Days of Awe.  It is there, between "We are nothing" and "We are Your people," that our prayers of petition, praise, and thanksgiving rise. There is no surer place to stand.

"Purify Our Hearts to Serve You in Truth"--Elul 27

Once again, within the eight words of this prayer, we find the inner and the outer, the heart and the deed, bound together. Not prayer or tzedakah.  Not ritual or ethics.  Both prayer and tzedakah is our refrain.

Once again, in this brief prayer, we find the individual bound up in the communal "our." 

Once again, in these words, we hear a call to do heshbon ha nephesh, to take an honest look at ourselves before the Creator and True Judge of All and ask ourselves, Whom are we serving? And are we serving for recognition, for ego, or "in truth"?

"Purify our hearts to serve You in truth."  A lifetime would not be enough to plumb the wisdom of these eight words. 

"Purify our hearts to serve You in truth."  When all other words fail you, lean on these as your prayer and repeat them ceaselessly.

"Purify our hearts to serve You in truth."  When your mind wanders during services, bring it back to center, back into communion, with these words of beauty and holiness.

"Purify our hearts to serve You in truth."

Making Peace with the Dead--Elul 26

It is customary all through the month of Elul to visit the graves of one's ancestors and relatives.  I've often wondered about this custom.  I could understand the tzedakah part of it--distributing tzedakah to the poor who would congregate near the graveyard for this reason. But what were people actually doing when they fell on the graves making supplication? Were they asking God to overlook their sins for the sake of the merits of their ancestors?  Were they avoiding their responsibility as individuals by lumping themselves for judgment with their pious family, people in good standing?  If so, these theologically suspect practices were not to my liking at all.

Here's what I do understand:  We all carry conflict, hurt, alienation, resentment, fear, and other disturbing emotions toward others in our lives.  If we are blessed, we have an opportunity, or we make opportunities, to turn toward these others in love and forgiveness before it is too late.  That is one of the gifts of the Days of Awe--to make us aware of the urgency to do just this before the Gates of Healing close.

But what do we do if we have missed all those opportunities with a significant person in our life, and they have died?  Visit the grave, and take the opportunity you were not ready to take before.  Talk your heart out.  Make peace between you.  If you cannot visit the grave, have this conversation before a photograph of the person. If you do not have a photo, seclude yourself and sit across from an empty chair and start talking.  

The call to teshuvah, repentance, turning toward the other in love and forgiveness, transforming life into greater wholeness, is not limited; it encompasses all our relationships, with God and animals and the earth as well as humans, with the dead as well as the living. 

Praying Selichot and All Prayers with Strength--Elul 25

Tonight near midnight Ashkenazim begin Selichot, reciting psalms and prayers that ask for forgiveness, selicha, in order to soften and awaken our hearts for the Days of Awe. Why midnight?  Because of David, who says of his practice, "At midnight I will rise to give thanks unto Thee because of Thy righteous ordinances" (Psalm 119:6). And also because by midnight the energy of our bodies has abated enough to allow us to concentrate more intently on matters of spirit. 

Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav's advice for how to pray is good advice for how to pray the penitential psalms and supplications during this midnight watch (and all during the Days of Awe services) so that we don't fall into rote recitation but let the words carry us beyond ourselves:

Rabbi Nachman admonished us strongly to put all our strength into the words of prayer.
     He said that a person must force himself a great deal when he prays.  A minority opinion holds that a person shouldn't force himself in prayer.  But this is not right--a person must force himself with all his strength when he prays.
     Rabbi Nachman also said that when a person prays with feeling--that is, when he connects his thoughts to the words, paying attention and listening to what he is saying--his strength is automatically drawn into the words of prayer.  This is because a person's strength automatically waits and looks to be drawn into holy words.
     When a person prays with feeling, all his powers are drawn into his prayer.  Then he prays with great strength, even though he isn't forcing himself.
(The Chambers of the Palace:  Teachings of Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav, ed. Y. David Shulman, 119-120)

Piety and the Scope of Tzedakah--Elul 24

Tzedakah is our obligation to act justly to those who are in need. Another way to think of those who are in need, beyond economic need, is to think of those who are vulnerable to injustice and thus bear a disproportionate burden of suffering in the world.  To all those we owe justice, and we can do justly in relation to them in many ways. 

We are accustomed to hearing that it is not enough to give money or food to those in need--those these, too, are good.  We are also to help them learn skills and gain the ability to support themselves.  Here's another way to do tzedakah:  become a vegetarian and/or join the hechsher-tzedek movement.  As Rabbi Morris Allen of Congregation Beth Shalom in Mendota Heights, MN and others have been teaching for years, and as recent news reports have confirmed, the kosher meat industry has engaged in unjust practices against its workers.  Just as rabbis in New York in the early twentieth century pronounced the matzot in Jewish factories treif because it had the blood of the hands of the underpaid and ill-treated women who made it in it, so contemporary rabbis are arguing that the unjust treatment of human beings in kosher meat plants renders the meat unfit for consumption.  They have formed the hechsher tzedek project to ensure that the foods Jews eat are not only ritually kosher but ethically kosher as well. For more information, read Rethinking Kashrut: An Interview with Rabbi Morris Allen.

In these last days of the month of turning and during the Days of Awe that end with a complete fast, let us think about tzedakah and the food we bless on our tables everyday. As the prophets continually remind us, ritual does not displace ethics; the two nourish each other.  The haftarah for Yom Kippur, Isaiah 57-58, puts it bluntly:

6 No, this is the fast I desire:


To unlock the fetters of wickedness,

And untie the cords of the yoke

To let the oppressed go free;

To break off every yoke.

7 It is to share your bread with the hungry,

And to take the wretched poor into your home;

When you see the naked, to clothe him,

And not to ignore your own kin.

Whether eating a Rosh HaShanah feast, giving tzedakah to avert the evil decree, or fasting on Yom Kippur, it is justice, tzedek, we are to pursue, not a false sense of piety that raises us above and beyond our fellow creatures. The test of true piety is this: does it bear fruit in acts of righteousness and lovingkindness?

Tzedakah and Supersition--Elul 23

To make teshuvah, to turn to the One, in part is to become whole, to integrate ourselves as the image of the One.  One goal in this is to bring our inner lives in harmony with our outer actions. This is why we can never be satisifed with sounding the shofar; we must hear the shofar and let it wake up our hearts.  This is also why we can never be satisfied with giving tzedakah in any cursory or calculating way.  Giving tzedakah during the Days of Awe does not pay our debt of sins or bribe the Judge to look the other way or lessen our sentence.  How ridiculous! we might say.  Who thinks that?  Yet we sometimes act as if this were true--as if giving tzedakah in multiples of 18 will ensure a good year.  Yes, pray U'netaneh Tokef, acknowledging it is God who decides who will live and who will die, who and who will suffer in the coming year, but--just to make sure--give tzedakah.  This is superstition and it is incompatible with monotheism.

When we give tzedakah, just as when we perform any mitzvah or act of chesed, we are to act without hope or thought of reward, in this world or the world to come.  We give tzedakah, we "do justice," because this is how those called to walk humbly with God live.  Giving freely means giving generously; it also means giving up all expectation of recognition, reward, or benefit. 

Tzedakah and Charity: A False Choice--Elul 22

To give tzedakah (money) to or do tzedakah (acts of righteousness) for those in need is commonly distinguished from charity, which comes from the Latin word caritas, love. Charity, it is often argued, is something a person chooses to do because she or he feels kind or loving or compassionate toward those in need. In contrast, tzedakah, it is argued,  is an obligation to act toward another in justice, separate from any feeling one might have or not have toward the other; it is not dependent on pity, empathy, compassion, kindess, love, or any feeling.

This is a false choice.  Certainly, if one if offered the choice between having a fleeting feeling for a homeless person but doing nothing about it and giving a homeless person food or money even though one feels no sympathy for them it is better to give without feeling.  We keep repeating this choice as if it we a true one because of the long history of the argument between Judaism and Christianity.  We each want to claim our turf and announce that we got it right.

But Jews have never argued that it is best to give without love or chesed.  What madness would this be?  And Christians do not encourage people to feel without acting in love.  Caritas is often spoken of as a law of Christ, and this law entails feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, helping those in need, tithing. For both, Jews and Christians, the goal is to bring our actions of justice toward others, especially those in need, in harmony with deepest hearts.  No matter where we start and in what direction we are moving, from actions to feeling, or conviction to action, we are all on the way to the same wholeness. 

So when you think "tzedakah," don't think, "not charity" or "better than charity."  Think "God has shown you, O Earth Creature, what is good.  And what does the Lord require of you?  To do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God." (Micah  6:8)