Blood | דָּם |
Frogs | צְפַרְדֵּעַ |
Lice | כִּנִּים |
Flies | עָרוֹב |
Pestilence | דֶּבֶר |
Boils | שְׁחִין |
Hail | בָּרָד |
Locust | אַרְבֶּה |
Darkness | חשֶׁךְ |
Killing of the First Born | מַכַּת בְּכוֹרוֹת |
Yes, I know it is Rosh Hashanah not Pesach, but it is hard to ignore the parallels Between the beginning of the redemption from Egypt and the past few years.
The Nile turning to Blood - 2015 The Animus River turns orange from a toxic waste spill.
Croaking Frogs - The loud sounds made by those who have been oppressed for centuries.
Lice - Remember when this was the major worry of parents about their kids going to school? Now it is violence and disease.
Flies - Gathering around the bodies of the slaughtered in ethnic violence around the world.
Pestilence - As of yesterday, the 6,656,799 cases of COVID in the US and the 30,751,369 cases world wide.
Boils - The sores of those still suffering from ebola and other diseases.
Hail - The growing number and strength of storms coming from the sea and the plains bringing destruction and devastation to our shores and our world.
Swarming Locust - 2015 and 2019 in Israel and here in the west.
Oppressive Darkness - The growing depression, isolation and loneliness infecting so many during this time of physical distancing.
Death of the First Born - As of yesterday, the 197,116 COVID deaths in the US and the 957,360 deaths worldwide.
Our High Holy Day liturgy includes any number of Piyutim. Liturgical poems written to guide our thoughts inward for self-reflection on where we have done well and, more often, where we have fallen short.
In the top five most well known of these Piyutim we find the U’netaneh Tokef. Erroneously attributed to Rabbi Amnon of Mainz during the crusades, it is much older. The words haunt us each year with a surface theology and philosophy we yearn to reject. The image of God sitting high above, pen in hand, with the Book of Life lying open before the throne of justice. God writes who shall live and who shall die, and how they shall die. As we will read sing: “Who by fire? Who by water? Who by illness? Who by sword? And as we will hear, Leonard Cohen adds: Who for his greed, who for his hunger?
If we reject the theology of the Piyut, how then do we deal with these words which seem to be at the essence of these holy days?
Without revealing her name, Rabbi Harold Schulweis of blessed memory, published a letter from a woman with cancer, who left shul on Rosh Hashanah in the middle of U’netaneh Tokef. In part she wrote: the “... liturgy was binding my fate to my behavior; that my illness, seen in this light, has been the result of some terrible unknown transgression, and that the ultimate punishment for failure to discover and correct it could be my death.”
This woman identifies the core problem with the premise of the prayer, that we are responsible for all the harm that befalls us. She got cancer because of some unknown, unrecognized, and thus not repented for, sin. The cancer that ravaged her body was not caused by exposure to cancer causing chemicals she knowingly or unknowingly came into contact with. It was not caused by a simple mutation of her cells. No, this woman brought the disease upon herself. Blame her. It was her own fault.
On the surface, U’netaneh Tokef promulgates this world view of blaming the victim. Today, blaming the victim infects our our society every time a man of color driving is pulled over for having the audacity to drive a nice car. Every time men catcall a woman who dares to dress nicely. Every time a child is bullied in school because their family religion is not our own. Our society defaults to a starting position of blaming the victim. Is this who we want to be?
True, we do bear the responsibility for the consequences to ourselves and others when our choices and actions miss the mark. Before we forgive ourselves we must ask forgiveness from those whom we have wronged. Leonard Cohen’s Who By Fire calls us to this modern understanding of no longer blaming the victim and accept the responsibility of our own choices, our own sins.
But like Kol Nidre or Kaddish, the words of U’netaneh Tokef are less about the meaning and more about the sound and the tradition. The melody and the rhythm in which we intone the words, like Avinu Malkeinu and Kol Nidre help us feel the awe of these Days of Awe, so too, U’netaneh Tokef
Matti Friedman, in his 2012 Times of Israel article; “A Yom Kippur Melody Spun from Grief, Atonement, and Memory” tells us the story of kibbutz Beit Hashita and the Yom Kippur war. Eleven kibbutz members were killed during that war. The day after the end of the war, eleven trucks, bearing eleven bodies came through the kibbutz gates, for 11 simultaneous burials.
Beit Hashita was and still is a secular kibbutz. But in 1990, Israeli songwriter, Yair Rosenblum came to Beit Hashita and felt ongoing the pain of those deaths. He was moved and wrote a new melody for U’netaneh Tokef. On Yom Kippur 1990, the prayer was sung. Friedman describes what happened as a kibbutz member began to sing: “The song was sung at the end of the ceremony on the eve of Yom Kippur…. ‘When Hanoch Albalak began to sing and broke open the gates of heaven, the audience was struck dumb.’… ‘It was like a shared religious experience that linked the experience of loss… the words of Jewish prayer… and the melody.’… ‘When I sang, I saw more than a few people crying,’ Albalak recalled.
“In Israel, it is now one of the most widespread melodies used for the prayer that marks the height of the (Rosh Hashanah and) Yom Kippur service.”
Pain, memory, prayer and song melded to move hearts, to heal hearts.
Toward the end of U’netaneh Tokef, there is a another passage in that is difficult for us in a different way. It reads, “Human beings come from dust, and return to dust, expending their lives in their labor for their food. they are like broken earthenware, like withered grass…”
Admitting that we are broken pieces of pottery and withered grass may flow from the tongue, but is hard to swallow. We love to see ourselves as whole. Sure, we each have some level of physical or mental or emotional impairment, but we yearn to see ourselves, and have others see us with a level of perfection that can only come from being created in the Divine image. The angst created when we fear others may see us as imperfect, serves to further impair us. We fear they will restrict us, hamper us, mock us, take advantage of us. We often end up causing our imperfections to fully define us and feel unworthy of the respect and love of others.
But that should not be the case. Somewhere in the fifth to seventh centuries, Rabbi Alexandri commented on the U’netaneh Tokef in the Pesikta d’Rav Kahana. He wrote: “all of God’s work is done with broken earthenware vessels.” Those broken vessels are us: you and me. We ,who are co-partners with God in creation; We, who solve the mysteries of the world; We are the ones who through art, music, and science bring healing to a world increasingly broken.
When we remember that God’s best work is done with broken tools, i.e. us, then we understand that U’netaneh Tokef calls us to strive to reach higher and heal ourselves through Repentance, Prayer and Tzedakah. In Actuality, this Piyut is a statement of the strength of the human spirit itself. Through that spirit, we embody the potential to heal a world we fractured.
Shanah Tovah
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