prayer | Sharing Jewish Tradition

We spent a few days at Shaker Village in Pleasant Hill, Kentucky. Ah, the Shakers. Beauty in simplicity, like the superb craftsmanship of their furniture. A Shaker chair is lightweight and sturdy and upright, like a well-lived life. True, it’s a little rigid and uncomfortable; even a Shaker rocker cuts off circulation after an hour or two, but its clean lines and practicality are something to aspire to. You can even hang it out of the way on pegs installed around the wall.

But the Shakers are almost gone. Their communities were once a retreat from the dangerous world, with secure work and food and education in a caring community; today, Americans seem to prefer the pioneering thrill of an urban jungle or suburban wasteland. Is it a tragedy that the Shakers, or any religious community, should live only in a theme park dedicated to their memory?

A politician’s job is to get re-elected; an institution’s mission is to ensure its continuation. Can we seek no higher purpose than to perpetuate the status quo even if we sincerely wish to change it? Surely, if an institutionhas a true mission, its purpose is to make itself obsolete, irrelevant, unnecessary–and then to disappear.

I’m not keen on disappearing.

Every Jewish service ends with a quotation from Zechariah (14:9): “On that day will God be one.” What if that day arrives and people everywhere acknowledge the unity of God? If Judaism were to accomplish its mission to become a “light to the nations” (Isaiah 49:6), would anyone need Judaism?

A dry stone wall, Shaker Village at Pleasant Hill.

There’s a story about a traveler who comes to a little town and sees a man sitting at the town gate. The traveler approaches, and the man seems to have no other business than to watch the world pass by. “Shalom aleichem,” says the traveler. “Aleichem shalom,” responds the man. “Vus macht a Yid?” says the traveler, a Yiddish combination of How’s it going and What are you doing. “You want to know what I’m doing?” says the man, “I’ll tell you. The community hires me to sit here every day and watch, to see if the Messiah comes. It’s not a bad job: it doesn’t pay all that well, but it’s steady work.”

Many of us are pretty sure that the world for which we pray will never arrive. If our prayers were to come true, could we handle success?

The Shakers are almost gone, but perhaps they achieved their mission. They created their own–as they sometimes saw it–heaven on earth. Their example shows that life need not be endless struggle, that a community dedicated to simple living can find security, satisfaction and beauty in work and worship. Celibacy and rigid uprightness are not for everyone, but the

Shaker model has been adapted for other places and times and has much to teach humans everywhere. If these models for living should pass, let’s study their achievements and celebrate their success as much as we mourn their passing.

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.

Could We Survive Success?

The Trouble with Aleinu