The Movement for Reform Judaism

At this time of year, when we are approaching a new beginning, perhaps without feeling enough strength or hope to make that new beginning real, I often turn to the letters of the German poet Rilke. The notion of a new beginning can all too easily feel like Square One–again. Rilke is the only poet I know who can make Square One seem a potentially fruitful place. He is the poet of infinitely renewed beginnings. Anyway, I was looking through his letters again, and one sentence stood out sharply. I had marked it before, but this time around it felt unusually close to the bone, particularly in the context of this season, when our relation to ourselves, to others, and to God, is, so to speak, ‘on the line.’ ‘I look,’ he said, ‘for some person who will understand my need without taking me for a beggar: which I most fear.’

‘I look for some person who will understand my need without taking me for a beggar: which I most fear.’ Our deepest need, or perhaps the need that surfaces most powerfully at this time of year, if we let it, is in a sense just that–to be seen, to see ourselves, to be know, and to know ourselves, fully, not just as we are at work, or at dinner with our friends or family, but as we are alone at four in the morning with our most ancient, persistent and unshiftable misery, or when we stare dully into an empty afternoon and the whole of our life seems stale, flat, empty and unprofitable, or when we’ve just behaved shabbily and grudgingly to a friend, or perhaps simply when we are ill and frightened. We need, I think, to see and be seen, to know and be known, to understand and be understood, and still not be ‘taken for a beggar.’

What is it to be ‘taken for a beggar,’ and why is it such a source of fear? A beggar, we perceive, especially if we look at ourselves in that light, is exposed, vulnerable, importunate, empty-handed, at the mercy of others’ random generosity, powerless, tricky and desperate. And even worse–humiliated. So appalling is the prospect of being seen that way, or seeing ourselves that way, that most of us would, and do, go to considerable lengths to avoid any hint of being so perceived. We find it humiliating, and grind our teeth at the bare thought.

Between our own often hostile and contemptuous self-scrutiny, and a sad, almost inevitable residue of mean-spiritedness in all of us, we can’t always, or even often, provide each other, or ourselves, with the kind of understanding Rilke is talking about. We can do so sometimes, and then it feels like a miracle, or grace, or at the very least a moving surprise.

But in Judaism, our failures, our imperfections, our inadequacies, are always, on one condition, susceptible to work, to learned insight, to redirection. Moreover, we are given a solid base to work from, and solid structures to work within. We neither have to reinvent the wheel, spiritually speaking, not passively await the inscrutable grace of an inscrutable God. We see this most strongly at this period of our festival cycle, which is so concentrated on helping us to establish, or re-establish, our soundness, our wholeness, our loving efficacy toward ourselves, each other, and the world.

Part of that base and that structure–and it is what brings us here together tonight–is the liturgy, our public, communal prayer. At the same time, it is precisely that which many of us find so difficult, and for so many different reasons. All our festivals are marked by services, but most of them have a dense cultural surround, so it is possible (though perhaps odd) to celebrate them without paying much attention to services. This season is different: the liturgy is intimately connected to the processes of acknowledgement and renewal which are the substance of these festivals.

Formal prayer is in general difficult to get our heads around. We find the language of supplication difficult, partly because we are so uneasy about ‘being taken for beggars,’ partly because our necks are stiff indeed, which is somewhat different, and partly because we cannot bear the apparent silence that meets our supplications. We frequently find the language of praise and gratitude difficult, and certainly the language of awe. Often we do not know to Whom, if anyone, we are speaking, or why. I don’t think we will get anywhere unless we acknowledge all that.

Nevertheless, public, communal prayer functions in at least two ways immediately relevant to our search for ‘a person who will understand our need without taking us for a beggar.’ First, we engage in communal prayer as equals. We are all in the same boat, existentially speaking. As persons praying, none of us is privileged over the others of us. We speak in the second person plural, and never, even in the most penitential prayers of Yom Kippur, abjectly. It is built into the structure and the language of the liturgy that there are, as it were, no beggars in the sight of God, so beginning on a strictly formal level, none of us as we stand here together can be taken for one, by ourselves or by each other.

Consider the following line. It appears, I believe, in every morning service, and deserves a commentary in itself, but for the moment just consider it. ‘Give us integrity to love You and fear You. So shall we never lose our self-respect, nor be put to shame, for You are the power that works to save us.’ These phrases, in which we speak both as independent persons and acknowledge our need for help, are concentratedly characteristic of Jewish public prayer. Such radical democracy in prayer has consequences I’ll come back to.

Second, public prayer does, or can, provide a strong thematic, linguistic and emotional structure for our more inward work. Of course, precisely because it is public and communal, it can only ever be approximately congruent with the needs of any given individual. For many women, indeed, it is a good bit less than approximately congruent. So our individual relation to formal public prayer will always be somewhat mediated–by interpretation, translation, distance, and often a sense of struggle.

That does not mean that those of us who care about such things will stop trying to make public prayer (within certain parameters) ever more congruent. Also, the liturgy is already that most powerful of tools: an integrative model. We could see it as a rule, imposed on us somehow from without, but in reality nobody is imposing anything. The model exists. It is ours. It is structurally sound, but not cast in stone. We can enter it, claim it, begin to engage with it at any point, and at no point more appropriately than now.

I said earlier that our failures, our inadequacies, the wrongs we have done were all, on one condition, susceptible to work, to learned insight, to redirection. That one condition is our profound acknowledgement of those failure, inadequacies, wrongs, our willingness to see and feel ourselves clearly. But for that we need help. Left to ourselves, either we evade, or we judge ourselves with harshness, even brutality. That is not clarity, but rather leads to paralysis or to running around in circles, which are much the same thing. Left to ourselves, if we allow ourselves to feel our need, we too easily begin to feel like beggars. Everyone seems to ‘have’ more, or ‘be’ more, or other.

But if we come together, and each move toward our own acknowledgement, within the supporting arches of this ancient yet living structure, the liturgy, which can sustain us even as it cannot precisely speak for us, then something else can happen. Just as an example, more and more it seems to me that the function of those powerful but schematic communal confessions, the Al Het and the Ashamnu, is to support and sustain our attempts to reach a more inward, private openness. If we all share in the public confessions, knowing that we both do and do not participate in their generalized catalogues of human evil and misdirection, then it is perhaps less galling and less threatening to open ourselves in the personal confessions, either the ones we pray together or the ones we each make in silence.

We bumble through the year, neither admitting our need nor truly empowered, dreading to be taken for beggars. But if we can engage with the model of human experience given to us in this season, we may find that our need has been understood, that we have not been taken for beggars. Rather, we may find that we have access to a fragment of vulnerable strength that is enough to be going on with. It doesn’t matter, really, under whose clear and loving gaze we stand when our work, for this season anyway, is completed–our own, or that of the other people who stand with us here, or God’s. For me those are different facets, different dimension, of the same reality.

Work well.

Sheila Shulman

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