These have been difficult days for me to pray. Somehow, watching the images of the utter devastation and chaos has placed a trace of cynicism in my heart, a cynicism that pierces the words I say, shattering them into individual letters. These letters float toward the heavens alone, isolated from one another, empty of meaning in their solitude. I intuit that prayer is the right response, but it has felt different, a bit more strained and angry. But really, what else do I have? I can donate money and organize relief shipments, but after that check is sent, my soul is left to stir about restlessly in that same dark room into which it retreated as each new story of destruction and trauma made its way out of Haiti. But sometimes, prayer is not about me. It is not about my soul, with its angst and anxieties and its wonder. Sometimes, prayer is the telling of a story, the beginning of which was recorded thousands of years in our Torah, the middle of which was written on the parchments of our chachamim, the ancient sages, and the latest chapter is added in our voices. In this way, prayer is like the weaver’s quilt, with many patches of clashing colors and un-corresponding designs, yet somehow complementary to one another. These discordant patches need not be harmonized. It is precisely because they are discordant that the story prayer tells is simple while nuanced, intelligent and passionate, hopeful yet skeptical. Prayer is not univocal because human experience is not predictably singular. People are not emotionally steady from year to year, month to month, or even day to day. When we remove the doubt and anger from the story in order to sanitize it, we end up doing violence to the very notion that prayer is avodah she’balev, the utterance of the heart.
One of the patches on this quilt was written by Moses. In the two verses before our parsha, he lashes out at God in anger and frustration. He screams:
?אֲדֹנָי לָמָה הֲרֵעֹתָה לָעָם הַזֶּה
Lord! Why did you bring harm upon this people?
?לָמָּה זֶּה שְׁלַחְתָּנִי
Why did you send me? Ever since I came to Pharoah to speak in your name he has dealt worse with this people, and you still have not saved your people!
Moses is furious with God. “Not only didn’t you redeem your people, but you made their pain and suffering worse! It would have been better to leave them enslaved as they were!” Moses doesn’t hide his anger. He doesn’t beat around the bush with God, he prays his anger. God responds, but with a seemingly detached rejoinder. “I am Adonai! I appeared to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as El Shaddai, but I did not make name Adonai known to them.” What? What kind of response is that to Moshe’s protest? It sounds a lot like, “Hey, I am God- who are you to question me?”
In 11th Century France, Rashi sews the next patch onto our quilt, right next to Moshe’s patch that blazes with anger and disappointment. Rashi’s patch has a different tenor to it. It continues the story and adds to the prayer by revealing a deeper well of God’s compassion than was apparent to Moshe. Rashi tells us that when God says these words to Moshe, he doesn’t intend his words to be taken literally. Rashi suggests that in saying, “I am Adonai,” God is saying that He did not make certain characteristics associated with that name known to the patriarchs. The actual words that Rashi put into God’s mouth and sewed onto our quilt are, “I did not make Myself known to them in My aspect of utter truthfulness and reliability, which is represented by my name Adonai, for I made them promises but I did not fulfill them.” According to Rashi, God’s response to Moshe is stunning in its compassion and support. God is pointing out that He made promises to the patriarchs that they did not see fulfilled in their lifetime, but Moses, he will see these slaves redeemed and brought into the land he swore to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He tenderly reassures Moses that this plan will come to fruition; he will see his people escape the brutality of slavery.
Prayer contains both of these voices: the anger and fury of a man who watches injustice swell throughout the world and a God who seems to only make matters worse, and the hope felt by the man who knows that redemption is at his fingertips, that it is a dream that he will one day see with his own eyes and feel with his tired fingers. We live with both of these emotions at one in the same time, and because they oppose one another, we grow weary trying to sort them out and keep them separate. It’s better not to try. It’s okay to be furious with God. It’s okay to look at the chaos and destruction that this earthquake wreaked and still feel hope, that redemption is around the corner. It’s okay to feel both of these things at the same time. That is, after all, part of our story. Even the angels live with this conflict. Rabbi Barry Katz pointed me to a teaching of Elie Holzer, a wonderful Jewish educator. He points out that in the kedusha for Musaf there is a curious literary and thematic construct. The angels declare that God’s presence is everywhere as they boldly assert: Kevodo Malei Olam, “God’s glory fills the earth.” Yet without missing a beat, they quite literally doubt this assertion when they immediately ask one another, “Ayeh mekom kevodo? Where is God’s glory?” Even the angels live in the tension of feeling the absence of God’s presence while simultaneously sensing the immanence of Gods’ glory. In the rabbinic imagination, the creatures closest to God, God’s heavenly court, sanction this human experience of feeling both doubt and connectedness at the same time.
As I said earlier, I was reminded this week that prayer isn’t always about me and the longings and uncertainties of my soul. Prayer at its best forces us to do tzim-tzum, to contract our own needs while we focus on others. In Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel’s book Between God and Man, he suggests that even for the most inward focused person who prays the longings of his soul, prayer must transcend his own personal needs. He writes, “Genuine prayer is an event in which man surpasses himself. Man hardly comprehends what is coming to pass…At times all we do is utter a word with all our heart, yet it is as if we lifted up a whole world.” This is what we desperately need today. We can startle ourselves and each other with the realization that we human beings have the power to lift up the world, to place the power of healing on Haiti. During these days, prayer is an act in which our personal needs disintegrate as we attempt to lift Haiti out of the depths of the hell into which it has been shattered. With Heschel’s words, I am reminded that prayer in its most potent form is an expression of solidarity.
Today, I find Moshe’s accusation, Moshe’s prayer to God from a few thousand years ago on my lips:
?אֲדֹנָי לָמָה הֲרֵעֹתָה לָעָם הַזֶּה
Adonai, why did you bring harm upon this people, this nation already living impoverished and in desperate need of your outstretched arm and your compassion?
In the silence after my prayer, I take comfort in the heights not of heavenly compassion, but of human kindness and solidarity.
As we lift Haiti up from its wreckage by praying with our feet, by aiding and digging and collecting and giving and rescuing and hugging and crying, I take comfort.
As we mark Rosh Hodesh, the new month of Shevat, I take comfort. The waxing and waning of the new moon reminds me that rebirth that always follows death, that redemption is built into the natural world.
I will conclude with a prayer written by an Israeli writer, Bradley Burston, as a reminder that during these difficult days, prayer, somehow, is a beautiful human response.
"A prayer for the people of Haiti"
By Bradley Burston
A prayer for the people of Haiti,
who, on a good day,
must take heroic measures just to wake the next,
And who must now find a way
to live through the end of the world:
Lord who speaks in earthquakes
Speak now in miracles.
I thank you, that first prayer begins. Modeh Ani. The words spoken for the marvel of having woken up alive.
Lord whose relief work is beyond our capabilities
Breathe life today into those buried alive
I lie grateful before You, this King who lives and endures, for having brought me back this soul inside me, and with compassion.
Lord who speaks in childbirth, hear Your children now.
Hear those who have yet to be saved,
Hear those who have been saved but whose limbs and lives are crushed, Hear those who pray for those who can no longer pray for themselves.
Lord who invented the language of love
Teach those who, in Your name, who, calling themselves men of God, can find it in their hearts to speak only blasphemy and cruelty and scorn.
Lord who speaks in apocalypse
Armor the souls of those who call out now in rescue
Lord who has taught us by example the language of loss
Send strength to those who, with their last strength
Now seek nothing more than finding loved ones
Teach Your children by example, to comprehend the last line of that first prayer:
Your faith
is immense.
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