Repentance = Prayer and Tzedakah--Elul 21

There is another reason why tzedakah is singled out to represent the mitzvot that bear witness to a life lived turnged and turning to the One. Repentance as turning involves the two-fold action of praying and doing justice.  When we turn from our false ego to the Holy One, we turn with our inner selves and our outer selves. We turn in the deep center of our hearts directly to the One Who Calls Us, communing with the One,  and we turn in and with our actions to the image of the One in the other, creating the beloved community of the One in our world. 

Prayer without justice is escapism, hypocrisy, worse. 
Justice without prayer is possible, but it lacks the sweetness it has when  it is the fruit of prayer. 

R. Eleazar would first give a copper to a poor man, and then pray, explaining:  It is said, "Through charity I shll behold They face" (Psalm 17:15). Bava Batra 10a. 

Teshuvah is prayer and tzedakah vitalizing each other, communing with God, communing with the other, for one cannot separate God and the world.

But repentance, prayer, and tzedakah...--Elul 20

"But teshuvah, tefillah, and tzedakah can avert the evil decree."

Tzedakah is an obligation. Tzedakah comes from the word for justice or righteousness, tzedek, as in “Justice, justice [tzedek] you shall pursue.” (Deuteronomy 16:20)  Fundamentally, tzedakah means doing acts of justice or righteousness.  And this doing, as the rabbis were well aware of in our economically unjust world, entails giving money to those in need.  "Jews are to give at least 10 percent of their annual net income to tzedakah."  (Maimonides, Mishnah Torah, “Laws Concerning Gifts for the Poor,” 7:5)

Here's a question:  Why, out of all the other obligations that could have been listed with teshuvah and tefillah, is tzedakah singled out during the Days of Awe, the Days of Turning?

Tzedakah is not an addition to the life of faith. It is not just another obligation.   It is the heart of the way of life we call Judaism. Without tzedakah there is no Judaism and no turning to the Way of Life. The rabbis teach: “Tzedakah is equal to all the other commandments combined.” (Talmud, Bava Bathra 9b).
 
When we say "tzedakah" in this threefold litany, therefore, we are using shorthand:  We mean following the teaching of the Torah, the Way of Life.  Giving to those in need is not singled out from the other mitzvot; rather, it is the part that stands for the whole--to act as the image of God, reflecting God's deeds of compassion for the poor, feeding, sheltering, protecting, and defending those who are most vulnerable among us.

Beyond Formal and Spontaneous Prayer, Words and Silence: "I Am Prayer"--Elul 19

This is what Rabbi Bunam said concerning the verse in the psalm: "And I am prayer."
"It is as if a poor man, who has not eaten in three days and whose clothes are in rags, should appear before the king.  Is there any need for him to say what he wants?  That is how David faced God--he was the prayer."
(Martin Buber, Tales of the Hasidim II: 253)

Siddur Prayer--Elul 18

Whenever I open a siddur or a machzor, I am amazed at the beauty and wisdom of the prayers in the litrugy.  I'm a writer and a theologian, which means that the poetry of language and the adequacy of our language to the complex reality we call God are both important.  Yes, I'm annoyed by the unrelentingly masculine language for God that we still see far too much of in print and hear too much of from the bimah. But this aside,  time and time again I am overwhelmed by the beauty and deep of the truth prayers in the liturgy.

Take Avinu Malkeinu.  This phrase is the perfect paradox of what is traditionally called, immanence and transcendence, or love and awe,  or the One Who Dwells Among Us and the One Who Surpasses All.  Like all Jewish prayer, this phrase does not ask us to choose between our two ways of experiencing the One; it invites us to experience the paradox of the One who exists beyond all our reason and reckoning. To me this is refreshing in an age where many translations and prayerbooks have swung to the side of immanent language for God in an attempt to make God more meaningful and accessible, or in an attempt to combat the imperialistic and two-dimensional transcendence of many fundamentalists.

Take the recurring metaphor of God as Judge coupled with God as the Father of Mercy. Again, instead of handing us a God we are comfortable with, a God who is all sweetness and light, the prayers forge these two into a single reality: righteousness and mercy. No cheap grace here. 

Take the poem/song/prayer Labrit habet.  Its superabundance of metaphors for God and humankind in relation to God invites all to enter, no matter what their experience, and it calls attention to the many faces of God that we encounter.

Take the Al Chet, a work of theological genius. Jews are fond of claiming that we don't teach the doctrine of Original Sin, but this exhaustive catalogue of sins--sins of omission and commission, internal and external sins, sins of thought, word, and deed, individual and social sins--shows the seriousness with which take the yetzer hara, the inclination to evil in all human beings, without exception.  We are not afraid to confess the incredible depth and scope of our propensity to harm others, ourselves, and the One.  We do not minimize the damage we cause.  We do not avoid responsibility for the ills we cause.  We do not make light of how difficult it is to repair the brokenness we bring into the world. We look unblinkingly into the heart of darkness that we may turn, now, wholeheartedly, to the light. 

I love the liturgy for the Days of Awe.  Certainly one can pick it apart and find something jarring to our cultural or personal sensibility; but word for word, prayer for prayer, page for page, it speaks to the depth and complexity of hearts turning toward the One.

Spontaneous Prayer--Elul 17

Formal, public prayer took hold in Judaism after the destruction of the second temple in 70 C.E., when the rabbis substituted prayer for the sacrifices in the temple. It was never intended to drive out spontaneous prayer of the heart.  The rabbis were clear that Channah, the woman praying so hard for a child on the temple steps that the priest thought her drunk, is the model for prayer.  Moshe's stuttered prayer for his sister Miriam when she is stricken with leprosy is another model: "God, please, heal, please, her."

Since the days of the Torah, spontaneous and personal prayer has surfaced periodically, testifying to its centrality.  Through the ages, Jewish women, who were not obligated to fulfill time-bound mitzvot, wrote techinot, prayers from their hearts that spoke to their needs, just as Channah had done.  Their beautiful prayers range from supplicating God for a child to petitioning for safety for their family to thanksgiving and praise.  Here is one techinah written for Rosh Chodesh Elul by Sarah bat Tovim:

With lovingkindness and great mercy, I entreat You to do with me; accept my petition....I pray that You may accept my tears as You did those of the angels who wept when Abraham, our father, bound his dear son; but the tears of the angels fell on Abraham's knife, and he could not slay Isaac [Genesis 22]. So may my tears before You prevent  me, my husband, my children, and good friends from being taken from this world....'All gates are closed, but the gate of tears is not closed.' Merciful Father, accept my tears....wash away our sins with the tears and look on us, with mercy, rather than with justice. Amen.

And this one for the Days of Awe:

May the four matriarchs' merit, the three patriarchs' merit, and the merit of Moses and Aaron be present for us at judgment....We beg our mother Sarah pray for us at the hour of judgment, that we may go free....Have mercy, our mother, on us your children, and pray for our children, that they are not separated from us. You know the bitterness of a child taken from its mother, as you grieved when Isaac was taken from you.  Pray now, at the blowing of the shofar of the ram, so God may remember Isaac's merit who let himself be bound as a sacrifice. Ask for mercy on our behalf.

I beg mother Rebecca to pray for her children and that our father and mother be not separated from us.  You know how strongly you long for a father and mother, as you wept greatly when you were taken from your father and mother to your husband Isaac.

(Written Out of History: Our Jewish Foremothers, ed. Sondra Henry and Emily Taitz, pp. 193-194)

The women who spoke techinot were not inhibited by the formal prayers of the tradition.  They had the courage to commune intimately with their Merciful Father, unafraid to speak of their daily lives and specific needs.  They, too, are a model for prayer today.

In our day, though, formal prayer seems to have eclipsed spontaneous prayer. Many of us have lost the art of praying directly from the heart.  We seem content or cowed, imprisoned or bored or worn out by our formal prayers.  We're no longer agile enough to make the leap to personal prayer at the end of the Amidah. We are amazed when we hear our Christian friends and relatives pray spontaneously around a hospital bed or in a time of fear and crisis.  We are out of practice.

Elul and the Days of Awe are the perfect time to practice spontaneous prayer and claim it once again for our lives.  The formal prayers are not intended to be a barrier to personal and spontaneous prayer, or a substitute for it, but a guide, a path deeper into our heart, an opening in the hard clay of our hearts where our personal words and silences can flower into teshuvah.

Prayer as Resistance and Rebellion—Elul 16

Even solitary prayer takes two:
one to sway back and forth
and the one who doesn’t move is God.
But when my father prayed, he would stand in his place,
erect, motionless, and force God
to sway like a reed and pray to him.

                                            Yehudah Amichai, “Gods Change, Prayers Are Here to Stay,” in Open, Closed, Open
When most people think of prayer, they think of a certain kind of prayer: petitionary prayer in which one asks God for something one does not have.  But prayer takes as many forms as there are persons communing. 
One form that Amichai evokes so beautifully in the image of his father praying is that of prayer as resistance.  Similarly, Isaac Bashevis Singer, in his Afterword to the novel “The Penitent,” speaks of prayer as rebellion.  Other post-Holocaust thinkers have come to similar conclusions, like Eli Wiesel who speaks of the Jews’ ongoing argument with God.  To resist, to rebel, to argue means that one is actively engaged in a relationship with that Presence one can neither control nor comprehend. 
Is this form of prayer appropriate for the Days of Awe?  Don’t we confess, over and over again, as one of our many sins, that “we rebel”? 
Let me ask you this:  If you had a son, a daughter, a partner, a friend with whom you had a misunderstanding or from whom you had grown distant, would you rather they avoid you, keep hostile silence against you, be indifferent to you, or that they start an argument with you and pour out their heart full of grievance and anger in your presence? 
Why do we think that we, human beings, need to protect God’s honor and tell others how to commune with God.  When the Torah was revealed at Sinai, every one of the 600,000 heard God speaking in a voice unique to them.  Theologians like to speak of this as “God’s accommodating” to our limits and limitations in order to pursue a relationship with us.  Surely that God, who is also the Womb of Mercy, the Father of Compassion, is not offended by the sputterings and spittings of troubled hearts or frightened by the anger or even hatred some feel.  Surely the One Who Surpasses All , Encompasses All, and Dwells Among Us welcomes all prayer, all true communing,  in all voices, in all language, in all tones, when they fly from a true heart.

Prayer as Thanksgiving--Elul 15

What was the sin of Adam and Hava in Gan Eden?  That they disobeyed the Lord's command not to eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil?  That they lied, denying what they had done and blaming another?
That they overstepped the boundaries set for them and rebelled?  That they let their desires run away with them? All these answers have been offered through the ages, by Jewish and Christian theologians alike.

Here is an interpretation that I find evocative: the root of Adam and Hava's alienation from God, which sprouted into their lies, rebellion, and unchecked desire, was their lack of trust in and gratitude to the Giver of Every Good Gift.
They forgot to give thanks for the beauty and bounty and love and wholeness that had been so generously given them. 

Prayer as thanksgiving can train our hearts and eyes to see our lives in new ways. It can help us become aware of the gifts that are already ours and help us develop what one of my friends calls "an attitude of gratitude."  Gratitude is one of the core values of Jewish life.  It is exemplified for me in these words of the Hasidic master Yehiel Mikhal of Zlotchov, whose very life had become a constant prayer of thanksgiving: "My life was blessed, because I never knew I needed anything until I had it." (Martin Buber, Tales of the Hasidim I: 156)

During Elul and the Days of Awe, try praying daily in the form of a litany of thanksgiving, silent or spoken, for the many gifts that sustain and enrich your life.  It can transform your life.