What an optimistic title, as if anyone could discuss all the problems with one of our prayers in a single post. Ha!

One of the themes of Aleinu is a wish that all people should become monotheists. As Yitz Greenberg has pointed out, great progress has been made in fulfilling this wish. Some Jewish and Muslim authorities maintain that Christians are not monotheists, but most Christians that I know believe they are monotheists, and I think it’s best to accept what a believer says about his or her belief. Hindus are monotheists, too, by the same logic. Yes, they have a reputation for worshipping lots of gods, but (as a Hindu friend once explained) these are gateways to the divine.

The Jewish opinion of Christianity was a big deal in the Middle Ages, when some learned folks held that the Jews were making snarky comments about Christianity. Aleinu includes a quotation from Isaiah: “for they worship vanity and vacuity and pray to a god that can’t help.” In some communities, the Christian authorities made us remove that line; it didn’t help to say that the quotation could not possibly refer to Christianity since it was written so long before Jesus.

There was a quaint custom in some communities to spit at the word “vacuity” (which in Hebrew is close to the word for “spit”), and maybe some people would spit to spite the Christians, even though Isaiah’s words came before Christians. Hey, he was a prophet; you never know, maybe he was prophesying about some future belief system. I don’t think so, but what do I know?

But the big problem with Aleinu is the other part, which seems to talk about the difference of the Jewish people from others: “We are obliged to praise the Boss of everything, to ascribe greatness to the one who formed Creation, who did not make us like the peoples of the other lands and did not place us like the families of the earth.” It makes Judaism seem like a triumphalist religion, and I’m a post-triumphalist Jew, so I don’t like that.

One way to address this is to change the spelling of the negative particle in “did not.” In Hebrew, the sound is “lo.” Without changing the sound, you can make it mean “to him” or “for him,” like the ethical dative (as we used to call it) in English. So instead of making the Jewish people different, we could say that God made them just like other people and did it for God’s own benefit or purposes, which we may or may not understand. After all, when you sing along with everyone else, you can say what you like if it sounds the same, and nobody can tell you think you’re singing the opposite of everyone else.

Another way to avoid triumphalism is to claim that Joshua composed the prayer, to articulate the mission of the Jewish people when they conquered their land in Joshua’s time. That conquest was a one-time event; the nations who occupied the land in those days no longer exist (so, I’ve heard, Jewish tradition tells us). So there was a time when we had a different mission than others and had to distinguish ourselves from others, but that time is long in the past.

A third way to look at the problem–it’s a problem for me, and maybe not for you–is to think about what it means to be an individual. Does each person have a unique destiny, a unique contribution to make to our planet? Am I just like 100,000 other people or is there something different about me? I know people who are like me in one way or another or several, but not in every way, at least not as far as I can tell. I don’t think being different means being better or worse, but it may mean having different obligations.

I like what Lionel Blue says about Jewish prayer: for a moment we talk about what miserable creatures we are, and then how wonderful we are to enjoy God’s love. Our prayers sometimes hold two contradictory views. And maybe that’s the best defense of Aleinu: we’re special, but we’re still like everyone else. How can that be? Let’s leave our prayer service (which always concludes with Aleinu) with this question in our minds, and spend the rest of our time seeking an answer.