Prayer from Awe
Last year, on second day Rosh Hashanah, I gave a sermon on Tefilah, Teshuvah, Tzedakah (Prayer, Repentance/ Return, and Charity). It wasn’t on topic with the theme that we had chosen, but I felt like I couldn’t be a real rabbi if I buried the lede for the High Holy Days.
Our parshah this week includes the Ten Commandments. We first heard them back in the book of Exodus, which we were reading over the winter months. In Exodus we were told to remember the Sabbath day. Here we are told, instead, to observe the Sabbath day. Otherwise, we have the same commandments.
The parshah also includes the opening line of the Shema and the first paragraph, the V’Ahavtah. If I didn’t mention them, once again, I would feel that I had buried the lede. But now, having mentioned them, I am going to set them aside and talk about something else.
The Shema is the Jewish prayer. You might not be familiar with the Ashrei, or the Barkhu, or the Amidah, the Kadish, the Kiddush or Hamotsi, but you likely do know the Shema. Va-ethanan is about prayer, but it is also about the why of prayer. The parshah begins, “I pleaded with יהוה at that time, saying, “O Lord יהוה, You who let Your servant see the first works of Your greatness and Your mighty hand, You whose powerful deeds no god in heaven or on earth can equal! Let me, I pray, cross over and see the good land on the other side of the Jordan, that good hill country, and the Lebanon.”
The medieval Torah commentator Rashi describes Moses' words as a prayer. Moses is asking for a freewill offering from God. In traditional Judaism the righteous, through their good deeds, accumulate Divine reward. They could cash in on that reward in this life. However, the value of that reward in the world to come is far greater, and so they hold off. For this reason, Moses asks God to fulfill his personal wish out of kindness alone, not by "cashing in." His request is denied — Moses’ faults (hitting the rock instead of speaking to it), not his merits, are answered for.
The hasidic Torah commentator, Mordechai Yosef Leiner, the Izbicy Rebbe, in his commentary, “Mei Ha-Shiloah,” also speaks about the quality of Moses’ prayer. He wrote, “Moses showed them what his prayers achieved, implied by the active-reflexive mood of the word ‘Va’etchanan’ - I became prayerful. Moses found himself full of supplication, and the words of his entreaties flowed with unusual fluency; always proof that God is sending the impulse to pray. And when God inspires man to pray, surely those prayers do not return unanswered. This is hinted at in the phrase ‘at that time.’ “Although God had sworn not to let me into the Land, I did not hold myself back from praying.’ As we read in the Talmud: ‘Hezekiah, King of Judah, told the prophet Isaiah son of Amoz, ‘Complete your prophecy and leave. For this is something I have received from my grandfather: nothing stands in the way of mercy.” From the detail of that narrative, the Talmud derives that during prayers… a person must never let anything interfere with his prayer, and must never allow himself to grow discouraged, even when it appears the decree has already been signed and sealed by God.”
According to Rashi, Moses models humbleness in his prayer. According to the Izbicy Rebbe (also referred to as “the Ishbitzer”), Moses models a different approach to prayer where one continues speaking to God even with no expectations.
The Ishbitzer is known for his modernity. He is saying that one should never despair over one’s prayers. They might help, even if they cannot bring us our specific desires. If we can keep from giving up when a good result is impossible it will certainly be easier to persist when things look bad, but not impossible.
The source of all prayer is in awe rather than in desire. The easiest place for us to experience awe is in nature. Hopefully, you have had this experience. Picture postcards can render these experiences trivial. A spinner rack with sixty different views of Niagara Falls and fifty identical examples of each is an empty experience next to the power of the Niagara river as it swells up right before it shoots over the edge. Awe is a product of our radical amazement when the wonders of creation confront us.
In the first verse of our parshah we understand that Moses is praying. In the second verse, Moses recounts the argument that he made to God for why God should heed his prayer: “O Lord יהוה, You who let Your servant see the first works of Your greatness and Your mighty hand, You whose powerful deeds no god in heaven or on earth can equal!”
There are many ways that the commentators have understood Moses’ claim. Rashi views the first works as God’s great kindness. Ibn Ezra sees the might of God’s hand. The Bekhor Shor believes that Moses’ means that God has revealed to him God’s greatness through the deeds that God has brought about with Moses’ participation. The implicit meaning of the Bekhor Shor is that the liberation of the Israelites from Egypt is God’s first work, an effort that will conclude with the entrance into the promised land. But I understand Moses differently.
Moses spent forty days and forty nights with God on Mount Sinai. In Tractate Menachot (29B) of the Talmud there is a story about Moses on Mount Sinai. It begins, “When Moses ascended on High, he found the Holy One, Blessed be He, sitting and tying crowns on the letters of the Torah. Moses said before God: Master of the Universe, who is preventing You from giving the Torah without these additions? God said to him: There is a man who is destined to be born after several generations, and Akiva ben Yosef is his name; he is destined to derive from each and every thorn of these crowns mounds upon mounds of halakhot. It is for his sake that the crowns must be added to the letters of the Torah.”
Moses is curious about this man Akiva and God travels forward in time taking Moses along to show him Akiva as he teaches in his Yeshiva. The rest of the story, one of the greatest stories of the Talmud, I will leave for another time. What it shows is that the forty days and nights that God and Moses spent together was far more than just the task of writing out the Torah.
We call the Torah the Five Books of Moses, but Moses only appears in four of them and the conclusion of the fifth follows his death. They are the Five Books because they are revealed to Moses by God. In the Talmudic story all of the words of Torah are revealed word by word. There are other ideas about what this constitutes; they range from "all of the Torah that will be spoken to the end of time" at one end, and at the other end "nothing more than the letter Alef." But what I believe was revealed to Moses was something other than the specifics in words. What God revealed to Moses was God’s work of Creation from the seven days of creation and on into the horizon of time. God showed Moses as much of this as Moses could handle. In the story of Akiva’s Yeshiva, Moses’ ability to understand God’s revelation is challenged. But what Moses does understand is where God’s work began.
For Moses, whose understanding is subject to the limitations of the human mind, God’s work of Creation will reach a crescendo when God’s chosen people enter the Land of Israel, a unique place, invested with special aspects of Creation. What that moment may mean for God, beyond the fulfillment of a promise made to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is hard for us to say, perhaps impossible.
My teacher, Rabbi Alan Lew used the word chiastic to describe the Five Books quite often. I was surprised at how infrequently I heard that description in rabbinical school. A chiastic structure is one that is symmetrical. For the Five Books this means ABCBA. The first and the last, Genesis and Deuteronomy, correspond to each other.
At first glance, this appears to be an unrecognizable correspondence, and yet Moses sees it. It is why his concern about Creation sneaks into so much that he says. Later on in our parshah Moses warns the people against idolatry. He says, “For your own sake, therefore, be most careful—since you saw no shape when יהוה spoke to you at Horeb out of the fire— not to act wickedly and make for yourselves a sculptured image in any likeness whatever: the form of a man or a woman, the form of any beast on earth, the form of any winged bird that flies in the sky, the form of anything that creeps on the ground, the form of any fish that is in the waters below the earth.— the form of anything that creeps on the ground, the form of any fish that is in the waters below the earth.— And when you look up to the sky and behold the sun and the moon and the stars, the whole heavenly host, you must not be lured into bowing down to them or serving them.” (4:15-19). His concern is idolatry, but he describes the wonder of Creation in the reverse order of its occurrence.
The source of all prayer is in awe rather than in desire, but we are not capable of living entirely beyond our desires. Thus, Moses pleading with God ends with an expression of his greatest desire, to see the completion of the task that God had set before him a third of a lifetime ago. He wanted a return to a state of continuous revelation that would match his experience atop Sinai, but this was something that God could only offer outside of the normal space of human experience. This is why God refuses Moses’ prayer. Our experience of Awe points us towards God. It brings us as close as we can come in this world.
