Tag Archives: prayer

March 6, 2023 · 6:30 am

Ending Kaddish

by Pam Adelstein (Newton, MA)

Eleven months of showing up and standing up. The days blur together, sometimes feeling short, and other times feeling endless. People tell ME that it feels like I’ve been saying Kaddish forever. I think in response, it has been longer for me than it has been for you.

Countless Kaddishes feel like exposure therapy for public acknowledgment of grief.

I feel vulnerable and exposed each time I rise and hear the Kaddish uttered from my lips, as my voice fills the room.

In the traditional call and response, the kahal overpowers my voice. I know they are listening to me. Me –  one tiny insignificant mourner among centuries of Jewish mourners around the world.

Humbled and grateful, I take comfort in our togetherness. A daily minyan, where I stand with a group of mourners, who implicitly understand, no questions asked. I march blindly forward in their footsteps, often the youngest in the room. This has the effect of making me feel way too young to have lost my dad.

At our evening services the shliach tzibbur reliably inquires, “Is anyone observing a yahrzeit who would like to speak about their loved one?” Each time I stare blankly back, thinking, “Nope, still a poor schlepper.”

Finally, I learned what I have dubbed “the paragraph.” The talmedei talmedehon of the Kaddish D’Rabbanan.

Though I no longer feel nervous trepidation, sometimes while reciting the Kaddish I still feel as if the poetic Aramaic words are rocks in my mouth, projectile phrases from my throat, lyrics from my grieving soul.

The Kaddish words sometimes come out differently with every recitation. Someone jokingly asked if the words rearranged themselves on the page. I shared that reciting an imperfect Kaddish reminds me that my grief is imperfect. Like the Navajo people, who intentionally weave a flaw into their rugs to show that only a Supreme Being can produce perfection.

The end of my daily Mourner’s Kaddish is here. I have ordered my life around this prayer. I have observed the sun and the moon, the snow and the rain, and the day and the night through the skylight of Gann Chapel. Thinking about and searching for my father. Is he out there somewhere, looking in?

It feels as if a cliff’s precipice awaits me. A leap of faith, knowing that the sages thought we mourners would be okay at the eleven-month mark without the daily scaffolding of coming together briefly in community. Without those snippets of conversation before we return to our daily lives outside these walls.I wish those sages could guide me through the next phases of mourning, of integrating further back into regular life, as I ask: what do I do with my grief now?

Pam Adelstein is an active member of her Boston-area minyan. She is married, has two children, and is on the verge of becoming an empty-nester. She enjoys hiking, yoga and kayaking, and works as a family physician at a community health center. Writing is a way for her to express the emotions around her work and personal experiences, connect with others, and be creative. Her writing can be found at Pulse Voices (search Pam Adelstein), at WBUR, Doximity, and STAT.

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January 23, 2023 · 6:30 am

Reflections on a Wall

by David Drimer (Kingston, NY)

Every time I visit Jerusalem, it feels like the first time.

There is a force, a powerful magnet, always drawing me to the Kotel. No matter what prosaic thing I may be doing in the city, it’s always on the fringes of my consciousness. As I wander the streets of the Old City, inching ever closer, the pull becomes stronger.

As much for this reason as for any other, this is the essence of why I make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem every few years.

Finally, I approach the Wall in silence, if not awe. I enter the Plaza and move closer, keenly aware of those around me. Immediately I put my forehead against the Wall, my hands above my head, feeling the heat of the rock. I instantly marvel: “How many tens of thousands – hundreds of thousands – of my Jewish forebears have prayed here in this very spot?” Suddenly, I am – as I once titled a poem – “alone amongst them.”

Candidly, my thoughts quickly turn introspective and soon lead to grief. I unbury my personal pain, the pains of my loved ones, the pains of the world. I consider each in turn. My emotional response is far from unique. As David Wiseman wrote for the Israel Forever Foundation, “If tears could melt stone, the Kotel wouldn’t be standing.”

I bring little notes of prayer to place in the Wall. One is to my mother Doris/Devorah Leah (z”l), the other is to my father Gideon/Moishe Gidon (z”l). What I know of unconditional love, I first learned from my mother. She was sick for a long time, suffering in acute pain daily for many years. I have often looked for meaning in her suffering. I have still not found it. On my father’s 90th birthday, his last, I wrote him a card that said, “Whenever I have a tough ethical decision to make, I think, ‘What would my father do?’” It was true then. It remains true to this day. It’s a hard path. It has cost me. These are the mysteries of life, my road to travel. I consider the totality of their lives and speak my heartfelt prayers to them partially aloud, but sotto voce.

In this quiet period of meditation, I ask for guidance in solving my and my family’s problems, guidance on how to be a better man, a better father, a better husband. I seek guidance on how to best serve the interests of the Jewish community. It’s my career, it’s my calling, my hope is to do it the best I can. My single biggest remaining ambition is to bring my and my wife’s hopes for our Holocaust Awareness Initiative to full fruition. I pray unabashedly for help.

Time spent at the Kotel sobers me up a little. I start to breathe easier and become more cognizant of the peace of the place, more aware of the simple grandeur of this plain stone wall, a literal wreck for thousands of years.  I begin to sense relief. I have put down my burdens.

I finally remember to pray for the Mets to win the World Series. It can’t hurt. (NOTE: It didn’t work; eliminated in the first round of the playoffs.) I don’t bother with the Jets anymore. That ship sailed long ago.

My feelings now drift towards an increasing feeling of serenity and joy. Look at this amazing place. This phenomenal tradition. The spiritual power of this Wall calls people of many religions to dip their toes in the waters of Judaism.

I no longer think of myself as an especially “spiritual” person. Figuratively, I’m the man who blocks the door, while others behind me pray, at least temporarily but blissfully unaware of the looming threat of the outside world. I choose to be alert while others seek transcendence.

But in this place, just before we greet Shabbos, its transcendental for me, as well. It has also been written, again by Mr. Wiseman, “If hopes and dreams could make these stones fly, there would be a wall floating around somewhere in space.”

Eventually – I have no idea how much time has passed – I turn away.  The women of the wall (“My women of the wall”) have yet to emerge. I learn later my daughter went back to pray twice. My wife, who lost her mother just one year ago, finally emerges teary-eyed. I know precisely what she was praying about. But they are tears of joy. Her mother was a remarkable, powerful woman. My wife is the living embodiment of her mother’s very strong Jewish values. Ina Frey/Chaya Tsura (z”l) looms over our lives every day.

We leave, refreshed. Renewed. Reinvigorated. More inspired by our faith than when we entered. We exit the Plaza more committed to our cultural imperatives of Tzedakah (Charity) and Tikkun Olam (Repair the World).

Such is my “tongue’s poor speech,” as the 11th century Spanish Jewish poet Solomon ibn Gabirol wrote, on praying at the Western Wall.

David Drimer is the executive director of the Jewish Federation of Ulster County (UCJF) and a co-founder of the National Holocaust Awareness Initiative (NHAIonline.org). He had been national executive director of the Zionist Organization of America, (ZOA), and Associate Publisher/General Manager of the Forward newspaper. He had been a longtime executive and publisher at Knight Ridder newspapers and the Economist Group. He was recently named a Human Rights Commissioner by the Ulster County legislature. He also serves on the Ulster County Task Force for Preventing and Responding to Domestic Terrorism.

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January 9, 2023 · 6:30 am

Sanctuary

by Alison Hurwitz (Cary, NC)

Incongruous, that towered height among the holly, butternut, 

hydrangea, along the oaks, camellias, black-green laurel hedge —

there it rose, so tall it steepled everything, as if to say, remember,

pray to what grows green above us.

A field-worn, furrowed man called Shorty came knocking once. He said

when young, he’d planted a young redwood seedling there, brought back

from California, vaguely hoped that it would someday grow to be 

a landmark. He’d removed his crumpled hat, his hand a map of years, 

his eyes as wide as forests, asked if he could go and touch the trunk, 

already girthed to temple, breathing dusk. My mother understood,

she a tree parishioner, so both of them remained a while in silence.

When Shorty went away, he left his story grafted to its branches. 

Dad cut back the deck each year, to give the redwood room to ring. Rare 

days when grandparents sat dappled on the deck, polite and tightly furled,

Jews and Catholics baffled past translation, they sat in shade below it, and 

in stillness, shifted into softening; green a common tongue between them. 

At seventeen, I’d park with my first love across the street, and kiss until the night 

dipped branches dark with longing. When, same car, same street, same boy, 

time wrenched us into ending, the tree stood by to witness, a shelter until 

my loss let go its spores, until my heart referned with undergrowth.

Ten years later, beneath the tree, my new husband and I stood quiet while my parents, 

faces filigreed with leaf-light, planted blessings in us. They prayed we’d tend

a sapling, make a small repair, something to green the broken world. My parents’ hope 

could sing the music out of wood.  Mitzvot and Meritum. Their reverence, ringed.

The day after my father died, when all I had was absence, I stumbled out to sit 

below our redwood tree. There, grief burrowing among its roots, I stayed until 

I found a seed and held it in my palm. I breathed and felt the way that branches 

lifted into blue, its birds built nests, the fledglings flew, each ending bending to beginning: 

holy as the timeless sky.

Alison Hurwitz’s work has appeared in Global Poemic, Words and Whispers, Tiferet Journal, Writing in a Woman’s Voice, Anti-Heroin Chic, Book of Matches, and The Shore, and is forthcoming in Amethyst Review, Rust and Moth, Thimble Magazine, Academy of the Heart and Mind, and SWWIM Every Day. She writes gratefully in North Carolina. To read more about her and her work, visit alisonhurwitz.com

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March 14, 2022 · 6:52 am

An Invitation

by Linda Laderman (Commerce Township, MI)

Invited to a friend’s grandson’s Bar Mitzvah I am divided,

directed to sit behind a gauzy white screen in the balcony.

My Siddur lies on my lap open to a random page.

Ancient words in a language that still feels foreign to me.

Yet I stand on command, a stranger in my old house.

Near the end of a long hardwood pew by the exit

I watch a round-faced woman, young enough to be my

granddaughter, hair hidden under a shiny black sheitel.

A bevy of blue ribboned ponytails nestle their restless bodies

close to her. In a meditative moment she stands and presses

her back against a wall. Eyes closed, she rests her fingers

in the sliver of space between her breasts and burgeoning belly,

then turns and gazes at the five fresh faces looking at her.

Each one returns her gaze, leaning toward her like a chain of flowers.

She pulls a fistful of candy from her pockets & passes pieces

of the sweets down the row, then beckons her girls closer.

Locking arms, they rise and follow her out to begin the long-skirted

walk home. Too late to catch her eye, wishing I could have told her how

I once sat & fished rock candy from my mother’s pockets, my tight

ponytail pulling at my forehead. I think of what it is to want and not want,

to separate from what is given. Boxed & bowed, waiting for me to open

the lid to take what’s there, a package I have been unwilling to unwrap.

After the last prayer is recited, I hurry down the stairs. For a minute,

I imagine I have time to catch up with the mother and her five Shana Maidelas.

 Linda Laderman grew up in Toledo, Ohio, where she has wonderful memories of walking to services and sitting in the balcony with her mother and grandmother at the old B’nai Jacob Synagogue. She earned an undergraduate degree in journalism from the E. W. Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. Her news stories and features have appeared in media outlets and magazines. She returned to school in the 1990’s graduating with a Master’s of Liberal Studies and a Juris Doctor degree from The University of Toledo. Her memoir piece, “Grandmother’s Warning” was published in the summer 2021 edition of the Michigan Jewish Historical Society Journal, and later reprinted in the Detroit Jewish News. Her poetry has appeared in The Jewish Literary Journal, The Bangalore Review and The Sad Girls Literary Blog and is forthcoming this spring in The Scapegoat Review, The Write Launch and Beyond Words Literary Magazine. Linda currently lives in the Detroit area. For the last decade, she has volunteered as a docent at the Zekelman Holocaust Center, where she leads adult discussion tours and is a member of the Docent Advisory Committee. 

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December 20, 2021 · 7:30 am

The Word of God

by Eric Gabriel Lehman (New York, NY)

It was another Yom Kippur day a year and a half into the pandemic, and for a second time I davened in my dining area’s pop-up shul within sight of my kitchen sink. I scrolled through the Hebrew prayers on my phone, while up on my laptop the cantor, six-sided Keppel on his head and in sneakers, raised arms to his invisible congregation. Forgive our transgressions and our sins; claim us for Your own. The cantor’s music was no easier to resist than some memorized pop song and I sang along, even if the idea of sinning evoked my cigar-smoking grandfather’s sternness rather than my understanding of atonement as reflection and reconsideration. The day plateaued at the Musaf service, after seventeen or so hours of not eating or drinking, brain soft and eyes blurry in the dreamy afternoon light. Later, the dimming sky mirrored the melancholy of a year turning toward fall as we moved toward Ne’ila, whose final shofar blast would end the day like a mighty period. The ark’s opened curtain bared its theatrical cast of Torah scrolls in their embroidered vestments, each pair of rollers adorned with silver rimonim like jewelry. The chanting of the Thirteen Attributes, a threnody enumerating God’s compassion, mercy and grace, always rose like a collective sigh when sung live in the synagogue; my solitary rendition competed with ambulance sirens and the occasional car alarm, yet each attribute pulled me deeper into Ne’ila’s twilight. By the time we approached the edifice of Avinu Malkeinu, I felt ready to slip out of my body. Our Father, Our King, we have sinned in Your presence. Our Father, Our King, we have no sovereign but You. The prayer’s repetitive drumbeat inched me closer to an abyss, just when the seven repetitions of Adonai is God caught me and the final shofar sounding gathered me in its empyrean updraft. That’s when a familiar voice sounded within, half reminder, half reprimand, all party-pooper: You know you don’t really believe. 

2020’s initial laptop Yom Kippur experience was imbued with a valiant sense of making do and struggling against the odds—so Jewish. The familiar service was invigorated with novelty. This year’s, however, felt resigned. After an optimistic spring, the emergence of the Delta variant prompted my synagogue to cancel in-person services. Online or no, I donned pants and a dress shirt, in addition to tallit and kippah, as I had the year before, and I set my laptop upon a white tablecloth. Yet the forced retreat to the screen dampened my mood and tarnished Yom Kippur’s messages of hope and regeneration. Each freeze and lag reminded me how artificial the set-up was. When those permitted in the sanctuary laughed at the rabbi’s occasional joke, it sounded canned. The day’s cycle of prayers could have been a recording of the previous year’s services and the bima’s varied offerings of music and talk, a taped rehearsal. I began second-guessing my reactions. Would Avinu Malkeinu with its objectionable image of God as a ruler, bring tears? Would chanting the mantra-like Kaddish still connect me with my father, our relationship as problematic as the Kaddish itself, with its inventory of adulation for a God I’d always found hard to acknowledge? The High Holiday’s through-line of God as king/deliverer/judge demanding appeasement before granting life and health for another year felt like something out of a bad relationship: if I do x for you, regardless of how conflicted I am about it, you will love me. Each time I sang out the name of God I felt either hypocritical, sentimental or just plain lazy, performing by rote. Why, I asked myself, Passover’s wicked son, should a non-believer even utter the name of God at all?

My freshman year of college found me laying tefillin and eating on the kosher meal plan. I was pious enough to balk at singing out Jesus’s birth of a virgin in the Catholic Mass the university’s choir was going to perform in a crucifix-equipped church. (I eventually made my peace by humming the offending text.) I spent many Saturday mornings at the local Chabad House, tucked into a cozy building originally a Taco Bell, where I was drawn into the Lubavitcher’s bracing Chassidism, initially unsettling as a guest who’d shown up at the restrained supper of my Conservative Jewish upbringing and got everyone dancing on the table. The English major I was looked forward to the textual analysis of pilpul—as well as the rib-sticking cholent stew—after Shabbos services. Gradually, however, without my knowing why and unable to stop it, God began fading away. The Chabad rebbe’s express-train mumble of davening came to mean less and less. I couldn’t view Torah as holy writ any more than I could Shakespeare, however fascinating. I enjoyed being in a community of Jews, but like children coming to resent a parent’s interference, I questioned whether God had to be there. Complicating all this were the increasingly louder rumblings of a sexuality I knew the Torah condemned. Was I about to go Reform, with its goyish organ music and English prayers, or worse, become that ultimate sell-out, that pale imitation and oxymoron—the secular Jew?

When the Amtrak train taking me back to school—and to Chabad—after winter break slowed to yet another interminable stop in upstate New York, I found myself before a snow-covered field spread like the blank page of a journal awaiting my pen. I didn’t really know it then, but I was on a long and winding road toward claiming a Jewish identity without God. It would mean improvising and reinventing and some stumbling, but Jews had figured out how to remain Jewish without a temple and survived the Spanish Inquisition, hadn’t they? The snow stretched toward a lonely horizon line; I would miss Chabad House’s rowdy little stetl across from campus, cholent and all. The train’s sudden jostle into motion registered surprise at my conclusion. I had been brought up to believe in the evils of intermarriage and the ultimate sin of conversion, which my eight-year-old self once envisioned as lifelong exile from our apartment into the drafty, grimy hallway of our building in the Bronx. Yet even cast out into the cold, the air would be the same, I reasoned; I would keep on breathing. Even more surprising than this conclusion was how obvious it was. I wouldn’t experience anything as exhilarating yet straightforward until I came out.

Years later, beside him during an Orthodox High Holiday service after my mother died, my father commented that he never once heard me praying, even though he knew I read Hebrew. His was scanty; he depended on me to speak to God for the both of us. But I refused, determined to remain true to my Amtrak revelation. I should have realized that hearing the prayers out of my mouth might have soothed not hearing his wife’s voice from the other side of the mechitza, where she’d always sat. So there we were, two Jews stranded on islands of stubbornness and sadness, close enough to hear each other’s silence amidst so many full-throated affirmations of a God my father and I couldn’t or wouldn’t address, respectively.

This Yom Kippur, God’s name sounded especially distant through my laptop’s speaker. An all-powerful being able to create or destroy at will, unbeholden to any principle of justice other than its own, seemed unfathomable, even cruel, in the age of COVID. Such a God, supremely untouched by day-to-day turmoil, a remote, disinterested party, the very definition of a stranger, seemed unworthy of Yom Kippur’s abundant praise. Jonah’s story, read that afternoon, came across as an object lesson in the arbitrary nature of divine intervention, by turns micromanaging or else absent when needed. Such a mercurial, prissy God dipped no more than a toe into the messy world he was credited with creating, if systemic racism, climate catastrophe and imperiled democracy worldwide—for starters—were any indications. Like those able to retreat from COVID-plagued cities, he skipped town. 

The concluding prayers, with their many references to the book of life closing and the gates of heaven shutting, lent the gloaming of this past Yom Kippur a particularly end-of-time, Götterdämmerung feel. The yahrzeit candles lit for my parents had already burned low, the sounds of traffic out my window sank to a hush and the cantor’s voice sounded roughened by thirst. As the time for Avinu Malkeinu and the seven repetitions of Adonai is God approached, an ecstatic yearning I recognized from sitting cross-legged on a yoga mat chanting the Gayatri mantra or some other trayf snippet of Hindu spiritual embroidery overcame me. This troubled year, however, my mood gave me pause. Once, fearful of blasphemy, I resisted evoking the name of Jesus in the Mass, whose Latin I understood, but could I utter the name of God with a full heart in another language I knew if I didn’t really believe?

There in my dining area, body and mind—and for all I knew, soul—fragile and bowed beneath the full weight of the past eighteen months, I did what I hadn’t done in that Riverdale shul beside my father: utter the name of God. The God I named was no omnipotent force or intercessionist agent but what Sufis refer to as The One, the perfection of love, the embodiment of wisdom and compassion I might also embody. Such a name was shorthand for the divine in all of us; those Thirteen Attributes were our birthright, after all. The name of God I repeated seven times in a hoarse voice acknowledged the ineffable in lives often too encumbered and limited by what we are so sure we understand, sometimes to catastrophically shortsighted effect. I let myself tear up singing the Avineu Malkeinu loud enough to drown out my neighbor’s barking dog, part catharsis, part resolve. I will do better. We must do better. Then I recited the Kaddish’s many praises of God not only for my parents and grandparents and two cousins and a friend and someone from work but for my world in mourning, in pain, and sorely in need of healing.    

Eric Gabriel Lehman has published novels, short stories, and essays. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Brooklyn Rail, Raritan, and elsewhere. He teaches at Queens College/CUNY in New York, where he lives. You can find him online at Twitter (@eglehman1) and can reach him via email: Eric.Lehman@qc.cuny.edu

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December 6, 2021 · 7:30 am

When I Think About Prayer

by Rachel R. Baum (Saratoga Springs, NY)

We did not belong to the synagogue my grandparents attended

On the High Holy Days I stood next to my father

Surrounded by anonymity in dark suits

He mumbled the Hebrew fussed with the slippery borrowed tallis

As I followed the dots and lines of text with my finger

My father elbowed me “Look at that” he stage whispered

A diamond ring my sister would call a third eye

Dangled from a well-dressed woman’s finger

“I’m her” he teased, knowing how the benediction he bestowed

On any female with enviable money, talent, beauty, would be

Hurtful to my sister and me, and then “Read! Read!” he insisted

Though we both knew we were there to gossip not to pray

Real prayer was the cluster of swaying bearded men

We were observers gazing from the rim of an alien civilization

Although we rose for the silent Amidah

We vied to be the first to finish and sit

My mother admonished us for our whispered disregard

She turned the pages of the Siddur

As she would an album of photographs

Reciting the Hebrew from transliterated words

We left early to avoid the rabbi’s sermon

The Bema a distant stage with its costumed Torahs

An usher collected the pledge envelope

At the tollbooth of a sanctuary door

At home, another yarmulke was added to the drawerful

That my father forgot at shul to remove and return

Evidence of our yearly pilgrimage

Marking the passage of time and of faith.

Rachel R. Baum is a professional dog trainer, former librarian, licensed private pilot, kayak angler, and Covid Long Hauler. She is the author of the blog BARK! Confessions of a Dog Trainer and the editor of Funeral and Memorial Service Readings: Poems and Tributes (McFarland, 1999) Her poems have appeared in High Shelf Press, Ariel’s Dream, Drunk Monkeys, Wingless Dreamer, New England Monthly Poetry Digest, Poetica Review, Bark magazine, and Around the World anthology. To learn more about Rachel’s work, visit: https://rachelrbaum.wixsite.com/my-site

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November 29, 2021 · 6:00 am

My Grandfather’s Prayer Book

by Rick Black (Arlington, VA)

Detached cover.

Brittle, yellowed pages.

Partially erased, Hebrew letters.

His crumbling prayer book is mine now.

Stooped over in his living room, dovaning.

His white, short-sleeved shirt and shock 

of white hair; his thin, willowy frame.

The cigar stub between his lips.

The Bronx.

Roasting brisket and a shelf of pills. 

A Yankee game on the television console. 

Red geraniums.

A pale, florescent light.

Narrow, sickly-green vestibule 

with a picture of his youngest son,

killed in World War II.

We play checkers.

He nudges a checker to another square. 

Tobacco-tinted fingertips.

He doesn’t let me win. 

Now, I hold his prayer book

in my hands by the yahrzeit plaques,

by the tarnished and the yet to be tarnished, 

by the lit and the yet-to-be lit.

Rick Black is an award-winning book artist and poet who runs Turtle Light Press, a small press dedicated to poetry, handmade books and fine art prints. His poetry collection, Star of David, won an award for contemporary Jewish writing and was named one of the best poetry books in 2013. His haiku collection, Peace and War: A Collection of Haiku from Israel, has been called “a prayer for peace.” Other poems and translations have appeared in The Atlanta Review, Midstream, U.S. 1 Worksheets, Frogpond, Cricket, RawNervz, Blithe Spirit, Still, and other journals. 

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September 6, 2021 · 6:48 am

Open, Thou, My Lips

by Rick Black (Arlington, VA)

Three steps backward,

three steps forward,

I bend my knees. 

I struggle to part my lips,

to recite the words,

to offer praise. 

Let me taste rain.

Let me hear windchimes at night.

Let me inhale jasmine.  

How grateful I am,

a temporary resident

amid night stars. 

Rick Black is an award-winning book artist and poet who runs Turtle Light Press, a small press dedicated to poetry, handmade books and fine art prints. His poetry collection, Star of David, won an award for contemporary Jewish writing and was named one of the best poetry books in 2013. His haiku collection, Peace and War: A Collection of Haiku from Israel, has been called “a prayer for peace.” Other poems and translations have appeared in The Atlanta Review, Midstream, U.S. 1 Worksheets, Frogpond, Cricket, RawNervz, Blithe Spirit, Still, and other journals. 

If you’d like to learn more about Rick and his work, visit his website: Turtle Light Press

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July 26, 2021 · 6:55 am

The Sacred Snuggle

by Nina J. Mizrahi (Northbrook, IL)

I didn’t wear a tallit until my first year of rabbinic school when I lived in Jerusalem.  It never occurred to me to wear one until  I saw other women  wrapped in tallitot during prayer. I sensed their closeness with the Divine.  A yearning to share in this experience, to be enveloped by the wings of the Shechinah, arose from the depths of my soul.  Soon after, I remember shopping for my first tallit at Yad Lakashish, which means “lifeline for the old.”  The tallit was made by Jerusalem’s elders, giving them “a sense of purpose, self-worth and connection…through creative work opportunities…”  This added meaning to my Shehecheyanu moment.  

Returning from the Old City to my apartment, I unpacked and examined my new tallit. Aware that this was a significant moment in my spiritual life, I recited the Shehecheyanu, followed by the bracha for donning a tallit, kissed the two sides of the atarah (neckband), and then wrapped myself from the head down.  It was as if I were encasing myself in a sacred cocoon, imagining that I would emerge as my authentic self and be ready to commence my rabbinic studies. 

At first, having no words for that moment, I stood silently in this sacred, intimate space. At some point, powerful, unsummoned memories brought me to tears as I recalled how my father, zichrono livracha, would wrap me in his tallit.  I like to think that his deep faith in God, woven into the very fabric of his tallit, was now woven into mine.  I bathed in the warmth of the memory of these sacred snuggles, feeling deeply loved, protected and safe.  My heart overflowed with profound joy, flowing first to my father, then spilling into the universe, forming a deep connection to something greater than myself. 

So, there I was, a Jewish woman studying in Jerusalem, standing alone in an apartment that had been converted from a bomb shelter, wearing my tallit, holding its four corners in my hands.  It was a lot to take in, and I considered how the mitzvah of tzitzit requires us to look at the strings, knots and twists of the tzitzit with intention and a sense of sacred obligation.  

Committing to the mitzvah of wearing a tallit is both humbling and empowering. Since that first moment in Jerusalem forty years ago, I have wrapped myself in a tallit for prayer and hitbodedut (a solitary, intimate form of prayer offered by pouring one’s heart out to God).  I have wrapped my tallit around or held it like a chuppah over the heads of individuals, couples, families, lay leaders, teachers, and students as a way of welcoming, honoring, blessing, and celebrating. 

In Ahavat Olam, a prayer recited before the Shema, we gather the tzitzit and, imagining being united in peace, we say,”V’havienu l’shalom m’arba kanfot ha’aretz v’tolichenu komemiut l’lartzeinu — Bring us to peace from the four corners of the earth and lead us upright to our land.” 

Decades after my ordination, I attended Shabbat services in a small community where tradition was woven together with new rituals. Just before the Shema, everyone stood up and handed the tzitzit on one corner of their tallitot to someone on their left and another corner to someone on their right.  What a beautiful statement about the importance of joining together in our prayer and in our lives, which is not an easy thing in our complicated world.  Collected into one, we chanted words that the medieval Jewish mystic, Rabbi Isaac Luria (known as the ARI) is said to have recited before praying each day: 

Hareini mekabel alai (Behold, I hereby take upon myself

et mitzvat haboreh (the instruction of the creator)                         

v’ahavta l’rei’acha kamocha (“You shall love your neighbor as yourself”)

Whether or not wearing a tallit is part of your tradition or practice, it is a symbol of the transformative power of Chesed — acts of loving kindness.  We read in the Book of Psalms (89:3): “The world is built through chesed.” 

Acts of chesed precede all others because they alone are unconditional and unmotivated.  We read in the book of Psalms (89:3) that “The world is built with chesed” (Psalms 89:3) — acts of kindness.   

Rabbi Menachem Creditor, a social justice activist and founder of Rabbis Against Gun Violence,  wrote a beautiful song about this verse when his daughter was born right after 9/11:

I will build this world from love…yai dai dai 

And you must build this world from love…yai dai dai 

And if we build this world from love…yai dai dai 

Then God will build this world from love…yai dai dai 

(VIDEO: http://rabbicreditor.blogspot.com/2012/12/olam-chesed-yibaneh-with-newtown-in-my.html)

I’d like to invite you to wrap yourself in your tallit (or one that you can borrow for a moment). As you wrap yourself in a sacred snuggle, I encourage you to try sending compassion first to yourself and then to others, possibly beginning with those for whom you have positive feelings, and then to those with whom you are struggling. 

You may find your own words or adapt the following phrases as you see fit.  Begin by setting your intention for the recipient of your meditation and repeat this meditation silently: 

May …I/ you/ they……..be safe

May …… I/ you/ they…..be happy/content

May ……my/your,/their  life unfold with ease

May………………….

Click here for a beautiful lovingkindness meditation offered by Sylvia Boorstein, author, psychotherapist and Buddhist teacher.

May you be blessed by who you are and may you always bring blessing to others.

Rabbi Nina J. Mizrahi, a spiritual leader for 35 years, gleans wisdom from ancient and contemporary sources to inspire personal growth, with the purpose of understanding the mystery of being alive and human and celebrating life more fully. If you’d like to read more of Rabbi Mizrahi’s work, visit her website. And if you’d like to reach out to her, you can write via e-mail: ninajanemizrahi@gmail.com.

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April 26, 2021 · 7:08 am

Sunrise at the Wailing Wall

by Brad Jacobson (Columbia, MO)

A man with a black hat and beard asks, “Did you put on tefillin today? How about doing a mitzvah?”

“Ok,” I reply, and he unzips an old blue bag, takes out two black boxes and leather straps.

He reads a prayer in Hebrew and pauses to let me follow.

He places a black box around my bicep, pointing at my heart, and wraps a black leather strap seven times around my forearm, saying it’s the number of colors in a rainbow.

He stands on his tip-toes and lifts my Phillies cap to place a black box on my forehead. It points towards heaven. He puts my baseball cap back. Maybe now the Phillies will win the pennant.

He instructs me to read the Shema. Six holy words.

I close my eyes and recite the prayer by heart.

I recall the story of soldiers who were ambushed during the Six Day War.

The enemy ran away when they saw them wearing tefillin.

They thought the black boxes were bombs.

Brad Jacobson is a volunteer every summer in Israel in the SAREL program. He teaches TESOL at the Asian Affair Center at the University of Missouri, where he has an MEd in Literacy. In the summers he enjoys exploring places with his camera like the Old City of Jerusalem, Tzfat, and the Red Sea where he scuba dives. He has been published in Tikkun, Voices Israel, Poetica, Cyclamens and Swords, and the University of Missouri International News.

“Sunrise at the Wailing Wall” is from Brad’s new book, “Lionfish: The Poetic Collection Of A Traveler’s Experiences In Israel,” and reprinted here with the kind permission of the author and publisher.

Visit the link to see more of Brad’s work: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1946124648/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ref_=pe_3052080_397514860&linkCode=sl1&tag=beeps-20&linkId=b8e4722d77fdd5f0148ae60390d40ec2&language=en_US&fbclid=IwAR3ZBUQsla0CdU7voiaWm5FRPXzEEIglc0tuceGIUFwSsys5u14kBYEscLU

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