Rabbi Rachel Gurevitz

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Category: holiness

#BlogElul 1: What are we doing here?

August 26, 2014 /

You are probably aware, if you’ve sat through High Holy Day services in years past, that these worship services run longer than most other days of the year. If you have not really studied or examined the words on the pages closely before, you may not be aware of all the ‘extras’ that are part of the High Holy Day liturgy. Of course, the Shofar service is one of the most immediately recognizable additions. And the singing of Avinu Malkeinu. And you may have spent many a year struggling with the medieval piyyut (poem) U’netaneh Tokef (that’s the one that contains those uncomfortable lines, ‘who will live and who will die’). We’ll get to that one in a future posting.

But perhaps you don’t remember a series of paragraphs that are inserted into the Amidah that extend the section known in Hebrew as k’dushat Hashem – the Sanctification of the Name. That is the section where we repeat 3 times, kadosh kadosh kadosh… holy holy holy is the Eternal God of Hosts.

The reason why this section of prayer is extended with some additional paragraphs is because the ‘sanctification of God’s name’ was, historically, a big theme of the Jewish New Year. In ancient times there would be an official day of the year to celebrate and honor each year of a king’s reign. Think of Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain. There was a lot of fuss and fanfare as her Diamond Jubilee was celebrated back in 2012.  Something of this ancient ritual was borrowed in Jewish ritual – one day a year we recognize and honor the coronation of the King of Kings.  In our Rosh Hashanah liturgy we do this when we ‘sanctify God’s name.’ But what does that mean exactly?

The three additional passages that become part of the sanctification prayer over the High Holy Days each begin with the word u’v’chen, meaning ‘therefore.’ What follows in the 3 passages are an ancient liturgists idea of what the world would look like if we all acted in ways that demonstrated our attempt to bring a sense of God’s holiness into our world. First, all of creation would feel a sense of awe and reverence for God. Second, the Jewish people would no longer struggle because they would receive honor and respect and, third, we’d all be acting righteously and we would no longer be witness to evil.

Now, putting the history lesson and the ancient language of kings aside for a moment, what we have here, right in the center of one of the central prayers of our liturgy, are words that remind us that we’ve really failed to do much of meaning if we dutifully sit in synagogue and mindlessly recite words, unless the time we spend in reflection and connection remind and inspire us that, when we get up, we make meaning by doing.

That’s why I love some of the alternative, contemporary readings that our upcoming new machzor, Mishkan haNefesh, has placed across from the three traditional u’v’chen passages emphasize the centrality of our actions if we really want to do honor to God’s name and bring holiness into our world.  My favorite of the passages is one that I intend to make the focus of this section of our worship this year – it is an adaptation of a prayer first written by Rabbi Jack Reimer and published in New Prayers for the High Holy Days in 1971. It begins:

We cannot merely pray to You, O God,
to banish war,
for You have filled the world with paths to peace
if only we would take them.
We cannot merely pray
for prejudice to cease
for we might see the good in all
that lies before our eyes,
if only we would use them…
And, following additional passages in a similar mode, it concludes:
Therefore we pray, O God,
for wisdom and will, for courage
to do and to become,
not only to gaze
with helpless yearning
as though we had no strength.
So that our world may be safe,
and our lives may be blessed.
I know how easy it is to feel frustrated in the ritual of sitting and praying over the High Holy Days. I know how easy it is to look around a room and wonder how many of the people we see will leave the sanctuary after a couple of hours of reciting righteous words and exert themselves to live according to those words. I know how it feels because I have had those thoughts and feelings, sitting as a congregant in years past. But I have come to appreciate that with all things in life, I most often act and do with greater care and greater impact when I have first taken sufficient time to contemplate and consider all aspects of the task that lies before me – not only what needs to be done, but who needs to be included, what challenges face us, and how we can achieve something collaboratively.
So it is with the High Holy Days. There are a great many words on the pages that lie before us. But they are there not to numb us into mindless recitation, but to prod and cajole us into action. Action that, when we rededicate ourselves to our purpose each New Year, might be that much more energized, thoughtful, and effective, because we took the reflective time that the High Holy Days gift to us to do better.

#BlogExodus, Nisan 2; Chametz – the good & bad of leavened bread

March 25, 2012 /

This is day 2 of #BlogExodus, and our theme is Chametz – the term that refers to leavened foods – the opposite of matzah (unleavened bread).  The Torah commands that, as part of our observance of Passover, we remove all chametz from our homes and refrain from eating it for the duration of the festival.

As is the case with so many of our Jewish rituals, we have many layers of interpretation that we can delve into from across the centuries to explore the practical and symbolic meaning of chametz and the importance of its absence during this holiday.

In the symbolic arena, many have referred to chametz as a sign of puffed-up ego, or yetzer hara  more generally.  Yetzer hara  is usually translated as ‘evil inclination’, but that gives a strong impression of something negative that we must rid ourselves of.  The problem is, we are allowed to eat chametz for the other 358 days of the year.  So it doesn’t make a lot of sense, even symbolically, to assign chametz a meaning that is ‘bad.’  In some of the earliest collections of rabbinic midrashim we find acknowledgments that yetzer hara is better understood as will or desire.  We all need it in healthy doses – without it we would not create anything, make love, enjoy food etc. But, as with all things in life, we need balance – too much yetzer hara isn’t good for us or for our society.  Just as too much leavening makes for a sour taste when we bake bread, so too much yetzer hara turns everything we do sour.

Nevertheless, why do we have to rid ourselves of it completely for Pesach?  On a less symbolic level, some have suggested that, like the unleavened cakes that were part of the Temple offerings in ancient times, each of us turn our homes into mini-Temples.  We don’t do the Pascal lamb sacrifice at the Temple any more, but our homes have become the new location for the rituals that we do to celebrate the holiday. So our homes are now sanctuaries for increasing our awareness of God’s presence, just as the Temple that once stood in Jerusalem was where everyone was expected to go for the major holidays, because the intensity of God-awareness was greatest when everyone focused on one special place.

Back to the symbolic level again, I recognize that full freedom comes not only from the social and political environment we might live in, but from an inner state that requires trust and faith, and which I am more aware of when I participate in rituals or actions that make me more God-conscious.  Rabbi Nachman of Breslov taught that it was not that the unleavened bread was holy and the leavened bread was absent of holiness; rather that the puffed-up nature of leavened bread represented a world where the inner essential holy sparks of all things can be disguised by the complexities of the material world.  That is the world that we live in.  But perhaps we become more adept at navigating our way through that material world if we can take a week to strip away some of the extraneous things, simplify our subsistence, and look for the inner essence within ourselves and others.

In today’s world, we often lose sight of the opportunity that Pesach gives us to simplify – we go overboard with seeking out ‘kosher for Pesach’ foods that we truly do not need to sustain us for 1 week.  How ironic that we have symbolically turned an entire category of ‘appropriate for Pesach’ foods into a kind of spiritual chametz – it gets in the way of the task that Pesach is designed to help us do spiritually.

So this year, perhaps take more time to think of the symbolic and spiritual meaning of chametz and use this as a guide to figure out what to throw out and what to buy in preparing for the Passover holiday.
Rabbi Rachel Gurevitz

5th candle: Raise it up!

December 15, 2009 /


The 8 blogs of Chanukah. Each night a new blog from the community of Congregation B’nai Israel.


Tonight, the fourth blog of Chanukah is brought to you by Rabbi David Nelson.  Rabbi Nelson will be our scholar-in-residence, March 19-20, 2009.  He is Rabbi and Visiting Assistant Professor of Religion at Bard College. He is a Fellow at CLAL-The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, and was the Associate Director of ARZA, the Association of Reform Zionists of America. He is the author of Judaism, Physics and God: Searching for Sacred Metaphors in a Post-Einstein World, published by Jewish Lights.

You probably know that each night we light a Hannukah menorah (also called a Hannukiyah in Hebrew), we light one candle the first night, two the second night, three the third night, and so on. But you probably don’t know the origin of this practice. In the early days of the period of the Talmud (that is, the first few centuries of the Common Era), there was a dispute between two groups of rabbis, one called Beit Hillel and the other called Beit Shammai. Beit Shammai held that the proper procedure was to light eight lights the first night, and to decrease by one light on each successive night of the holiday, while Beit Hillel claimed that we should start with one light on the first night and increase by one each night until all eight are burning on the last night. As we know, Beit Hillel won the argument, and theirs is the procedure that we follow. But the question is “why?” 

Beit Shammai based their ruling on a similarity that they saw between Hannukah and the festival of Sukkot (Booths – the harvest festival that we celebrated earlier in the fall). The law required that 70 animals be sacrificed in the Temple during Sukkot, starting with 13 on the first day and decreasing by one each day (so 12 on the second day, 11 on the third, and so on). Beit Hillel based their view on a general Jewish principle that we may increase in holiness, but we may not decrease.  

This general principle, which we see in clear, visual terms as the nights of Hannukah progress, strikes me as a wise rule for life in general. Each of us holds dear something that we consider “sacred.”  It may not be something “religious” in the traditional sense. It could be the love we feel for those close to us, or the passion we have for learning, or the commitment we have to improve the state of our world. The principle articulated by Beit Hillel directs us always to increase the amount of that holiness in our lives.

Whatever it is that we care most about, we should always try to do more of it in the future than we have done in the past.

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