A Nother New Beginning

A(nother) New Beginning


This Shabbos which leads us into our Jewish High Holy Days will be our last Shabbos Torah Study Group – UNTIL Succot begins on October Third. And, this Shabbos is another new beginning in our learning. This week will only be an introduction into our studies and learning on Jewish Prayer. And what we will be learning is The Art of Jewish Prayer [Yitzchok Kirzner with Lisa Aikens].

We shall be learning about the central Prayer(s) in our liturgy: The Shemoneh Esrai. There are Jews who have been fortunate enough to have been raised with a solid Jewish education, and there are Jews who are either new to the world of Jewish prayer, or who have rarely studied prayer in any way that was/is meaningful. Our greatest link to our religion is through our prayer services. There are Jews who disavow any link to the religion of our forefather, but for our new line of learning, we will not consider what it is that they know or do not know. Certainly what they do not know is very meaningful and a great loss to them – and an even greater loss to the Jewish people. But we are here to learn and they are not. Our ‘Social Action’ and our ‘Our Outreach’ must be confined to a different aspect of our lives… unless you personally know someone who may benefit by becoming part of this group.

As I mentioned, our greatest link to our religion is through our (Communal) Prayer sessions. Still, you may leave our Shul raised to a higher level – or you may leave feeling no moore inspired or spiritually aware, or awake, than you were before davenning. The purpose, then, of this undertaking is to make our Jewish prayer more comprehensible and more relevant to all of us, whether we come from traditional frumm families, we are Baal Teshuvah, or we have little or no Jewish education.


--------


This last session of STSG then is an introduction (and a teaser) to our new series of learning. So this is our last session – as I said – until after the H”H. And so we begin by looking at the Purpose of Prayer.

What let me ask you, do you perceive the task of prayer to be? Is it, as many think, to get HaShem to change? Is it, as many pray, to get HaShem to give us what they want [or what they think they want]? Or is it to help ourselves to become better people through reaching out in order to be closer to HaShem?

If we ask HaShem for something and we actually receive it, we are reinforcing ourselves into thinking that we deserve it and HaShem gave it to us because we were ‘entitled’!!! And that word “entitled” is very important to our understanding to what our relationship to HaShem is and on what it is based!!! This word that we hear everywhere on the street today [“But, I’m entitled!”], is so dangerous and stupid that the concept should be banned to mankind. And what has this to do with our study of the Shemoneh Esrei?

Well, perhaps when we receive a gift from HaShem we might consider it as: HaShem intended it so that we would elevate ourselves spiritually; instead of seeing it as a satisfaction and a justification of our physical and material – our hedonistic - desires.

The purpose, then, of prayer is not to get HaShem to change simply because He does not change. Ever. The purpose and the task then is for us to become better through our encounters with HaShem.

We are supposed to pray three times a day – as ordained by Chazal for these reasons: When we awaken we need to recognize that this new day is, indeed, another gift and we should therefore include HaShem in our lives. That awareness helps us to be better more ethical and loving people because we appreciate this gift. By the middle of the day we have been busy at work or doing the daily routine and chores and we tend to forget our relationship with HaShem, so we pause and insert our second prayer session making a statement that we see our success and our abilities as blessings from HaShem. Finally, in the evening hours we learn from our evening prayer that, although we have not accomplished everything that we wanted to, that He will grant us new opportunities for accomplishments in the morning.

If we only prayed when we felt like it, we would soon be far removed from prayer and the source of our being. All of this is a preview of, and introduction to, the Shemoneh Eshrei which the Great Assembly redacted for us – and for Jews at all times and places – with both prophetic knowledge and with divine wisdom.

If you will take the High Holy Day season as a time to reflect upon these prayers remember that the Hebrew word lihiparrel, which is usually translated as: “to pray” also means: “to judge oneself”. Think, at this time: “What am I doing with my life and how can I adapt it to improve my spiritual growth?” “Avodah shebelev”, or the work of the heart, calls for prayer to transform us. The traditional Jewish understanding of the heart is that it is the center of da’at – of knowledge and of understanding. The head does not rule our true understanding – it is centered in the heart, with love.

If we continue to ask HaShem for ‘things’ because: “I want it. I need it. I am entitled to it!” we are only feeding our narcissism and that, my friends, is not prayer.

When we return to our learning we are going to first consider why we need to vocalize – to verbalize – our prayers. Until then, may you be written in the Book of Life, may you have a meaningful Fast, may you accept my apology for anything that I may have done, knowingly or not, to anger you or cause you anguish.

b’Shalom,
James

Fear of HaShem - What does it mean?

We Have Nothing to Fear
Except…

To Fear G-d. And just what does that mean? Why should we fear HaShem? We are taught from a young age that G-d is Loving and Kind, full of compassion and all those wonderful attributes. These are the kind of attributes that we, hopefully, saw in our parents. So why should we ‘fear’ a G-d that we know is even better than our “bestest” and most wonderful parent?

The rabbis wanted to teach that we should fear G-d but they did not know how to teach that we should fear a beneficent G-d who was invisible and ultimately unknowable. How could they communicate this concept to the average Jew? G-d was an abstraction and, was and is everything that we know about G-d and at once nothing that we know about G-d. A conundrum.

Then a rabbi sitting the far corner suggested this: “If we are summoned before the king, we have absolutely no idea why. The only thing that we know about the king is that he has absolute control over all of his subjects… he alone controls whether we live or die [think about what you would feel if a couple of black suits and dark glasses showed up at your door, talking to their sleeve, and said that you will go with them. Now!].” “So,” the rabbi continued, “if HaShem is like our King, we should fear Him because He, too, has absolute control over every aspect of our lives.”

HaShem, as we say in our H”H liturgy, controls who will live and who will die; who be fire and who by sword; who by earthquake and so on.

It seems then that that rabbi was right. If for no other reason than the uncertainties of life, we should fear G-d. But is that the only reason? Are there other aspects of ‘fear’ that we should consider?

Someone suggested that we should think of ‘fear’ of HaShem in terms of the ‘awe’ in which we hold Him. I disagree. Awe is a term that has been degraded in usage. We stand in awe of the Grand Canyon – okay, that is HaShem’s creation; but we also stand in awe of Lance Armstrong’ achievements: 7-time winner of the most grueling bicycle race in the world/testicular cancer survivor and return competitor in the same race and still coming in to stand on the podium with much younger men! Maybe you can say that that too is HaShem’s achievement and it is because Lance, with the help of G-d overcame his cancer and it was really G-d who gave Lance the ability in the first place. But is he had not stood in the ‘fear of G-d’, perhaps he would never have made those goals.

So what other words in the English language might give us a better idea of what it means to ‘fear G-d’? From the thesaurus we find: Terror; Dread; Fright; Trepidation; Wonder; Admiration; Respect; Amazement; Surprise; Wonderment; Astonishment… how about this quotation?

“We serve the deities… by drawing near to our ancestors, by purifying ourselves of our sins and stain, in leaving self behind to unite with the public, and in 'dying to self' to become one with the ‘State’.”
From the Japanese Kokutai ni Hongi. Sacred Texts of the World1982, "Purity and Awe" (Ninian Smart and Richard D. Hecht (eds.)

“Think about it…”


This was the presentation to our Shabbos Torah Study Group. We had a lively discussion. (pro & con) Much was left to be considered and discussed further... One comment was; "Not all rabbis got 'A's' in class."

The one thing that was NOT found was - Where did this statement FIRT originate?