Elul -- 5775: On Mishkan HaNefesh

Mishkan HaNefesh (“Dwelling Place for the Soul”) spills its treasures like a bounteous picnic basket on a summer’s day.  It is a delight for the senses, and offers something for everyone.  It will bring us together.

The machzor is divided into two books.  One – golden – is for Rosh Hashanah and the other –  silver  – is for Yom Kippur.  This means that, although they are clock full of offerings, they are quite a bit lighter than our Mishkan Tfilah.

Akin to Miskhan Tfilah, each Hebrew passage is provided in transliteration as well as translation.  

 

The editors have included a cornucopia of interpretive texts for us, representing a wide range of theologies – some quite traditional, others quite radical, and many in between.  The editors don’t expect that each passage will inspire each person.  Rather, they predict that some of the passages will move each one of us powerfully.  That has been my experience in preparing to use Mishkan HaNefesh.  In this way, the book replicates what it means to be in healthy community – there is something for everybody, but no one perspective dominates.  If a passage doesn’t appeal to you or – Heaven forbid – offends you, skip it and move on.  Know that it touched someone else in the room.

Nobody is expected to pray each prayer on each page.  That would require all 10 Days of Awe!  As service leaders, Rabbi Jason, Emily and I are making judicious choices.  Nor do we expect you to pray each offering we select.  You may skip or add as suits your needs.  We are a community of different people, with different needs and beliefs.  Prayer is not “one size fits all.”

New in Mishkan HaNefesh are pages with a grey background.  These include texts for personal reflection.  Pages with a blue background are designed to be studied.  At any point in the service, you are invited to stop praying the text of the page and find another passage to consider.  In fact, this is encouraged!

You’ll find color prints by artist Joel Shapiro (no relation to me) scattered through the pages of Mishkan HaNefesh.  That’s because some of us respond more directly to image than to text.  When you encounter one of the renderings, or need a pause from text, look deeply and consider:  what do you see?  Name the shapes, colors, and textures and the ways they fit together.  How do you feel when you look at the image?  Of what does it make you think?  There are no right answers, only inspirations.

Mishkan HaNefesh is designed to inspire us to reconsider the ancient words of the High Holy Days.  We don’t want them to grow stale and dusty, when they should be fresh and vivid for our lives, for this very moment.  After all, the liturgy does not exist for the sake of tradition.  It exists for our sake.  It exists so that we living Jews can pause, reflect, and repair our lives.

May our new machzor live up to its own aspiration, articulated in the opening of the Erev Rosh Hashanah service:

May we renew our words of prayer tonight –

Restore their luster,

Bring them to life.

Let song and shofar-sounds

Awaken our souls.  (21)

Gates of Repentance -- 5775

The High Holy Days are about change.  We strive to become better people than we were, and we work to heal our relationships through tshuvah, the act of introspection and repair.  The date on the calendar changes automatically; transforming our souls takes work.

Change is complex, and we each relate to it in our own ways.  Some people thrill to change; others dread it.  Some plan and organize; others jump in.  What’s your approach?

This year, synagogues across North America will be changing their machzorim.  We say goodbye to the familiar crimson Gates of Repentance, the words of which we know so well even though we only said them once a year.

Here are some of my favorite passages:

With the setting of this evening’s sun, united with Jews of every place and time, we proclaim a new year of hope.  May the light of the divine shine forth to lead us, to show us the good we must do, the harmony we must create. Let the fire we kindle be for us a warming flame, whose brightness shows us the path of life.  (p. 49)

What can we say before You, who dwell on high?  What shall we plead before You, enthroned beyond the stars?  Are not all things known to You, both the mysteries of eternity and the dark secrets of all that live?  You search the inmost chambers of the heart, and probe the deep recesses of the soul.  Nothing is concealed from Your sight. (p. 270)

Time, like a river, rolls on, flowing year after year into the sea of eternity.  (p. 294)

I didn’t grow up with Gates of Repentance, but I’ve gotten so comfortable with it.  I’ve never lead High Holy Day services from any other book, and I remember as if it were yesterday working through it my first time, making notes, deciding how to annotate it.  (I still use that system.)  Gates of Repentance has become part of who I am.

Gates of Repentance was published in 1978 and revised in 1996.  I loved it when the congregation says different words even as we read in unison, because some people are using one edition and some the other.  I loved the meditations and array of small study texts before each service.

Our use of Mishkan HaNefesh will feel like a loss for some people.  I understand that, and appreciate it.  I will feel it, too.  Although it’s not the same, we’ll be using Gates of Repentance on the Second Day of Rosh Hashanah so that anyone who wants to pray from it will be able to.  Plus, we’ll have copies of Gates of Repentance on hand at the Stake Center, so that you can thumb through it and use it if you’d like.  And Mishkan HaNefesh includes many of the texts and translations we know from Gates of Repentance.  It will be new, but hopefully not foreign.

These High Holy Days, there is change in the air for us all.

Reih -- 5775

I live near the 101, and frequently drive on it and under it.  At every corner, it seems, there’s a man or woman, skinny and ragged, holding a sign and asking for money.  Some smile at passersby; some stare at the pavement.  It must be excruciating in summer.

“There shall be no needy among you,” the Torah declares (Deuteronomy 15:4).  But then, shortly afterwards, we find the statement “if … there is a needy person among you … you must open your hand and lend whatever is needed” (Deuteronomy 15:7-8).  This makes no sense.  How can it be that there’s a person in need when there are no needy people among us?

Perhaps it’s a difference in perception.  Sometimes we notice the need, and sometimes we don’t.

When I drive past the freeway alone, I see the solicitors and an internal conversation starts:  “I’m in the wrong lane.  And he looks young and healthy.  Where will the money go?  I wish I had a bottle of water or a tooth brush to give him instead of cash.  How can I make systemic improvements instead of giving a handout?”  But when I’m driving with my son, it’s very clear:  “We have to give that man tzedakah, daddy.”

I fail to see the need so often.  To my son, it is plain as day:  “If … there is a needy person among you … you must open your hand …”

Eikev -- 5775

Children aren’t punished any more.

For those of you without little ones, the term “punishment” has been replaced by “consequences.”  The switch is made, I believe, to teach youngsters about cause and effect.  The changed terminology is also meant to demonstrate that kids have personal power -- “punishment” comes from an outside force, whereas “consequences” result from our own actions.

I don’t think anyone’s fooled.

Kids know when they are being punished, especially when the consequence doesn’t fit the infraction.  The logical consequence of staying out past curfew isn’t being grounded – its being tired the next day.  The consequence of not eating your dinner is likely hunger – there’s no logical connection between meat loaf and losing TV privileges.

Human beings often attribute causality when none exists.  We are excellent pattern makers and inventors.  The ability to understand cause and effect must have been profoundly important for early hunters and farmers.  It may be a primary distinction between us and the other animals.  But human beings can also see patterns where they do not, actually, exist – witness the constellations, for example, which group together stars that are thousands of light years away.

“And if you do obey these rules and observe them carefully, your God YHVH will maintain faithfully for you the covenant made on oath with your fathers:  [God] will favor you and bless you and multiply you…”   “You shall faithfully observe all the Instruction that I enjoin upon you today, that you may thrive and increase and be able to possess thee land that YHVH promised on oath to your fathers,”  Deuteronomy tells us repeatedly (7:12-13, 8:1, and elsewhere).

I think it’s hubris for us to claim to know the cause and consequence of what happens in our lives.  I don’t believe that anyone is struck ill “to learn a lesson.”  Difficulties aren’t given to us to make us better people.

Illness and other difficulties are not punishments.  Rather, they are experiences through which we learn about ourselves, our community, and life itself.