With so much snow and so many snow storms that seem to give us no rest, the last month or so has been challenging for us. The challenges have been economic and educational, with our work schedules and schools hampered by the weather and with our mobility severely curtailed. Travel has become inconvenient and hazardous, whether using trains, buses or cars, and almost especially when walking about. At times like these we are heartened when we witness acts of kindness and sharing, neighborly assistance and help from utter strangers. The adversity serves to pull us together.
But this is not always the case and it is not the case with all of us. Another major challenge has been psychological and emotional. The constraints we suffer can close in on us and become oppressive or depressing. Our spirits can become fatigued and we are not always able to express our best selves.
I witnessed a horrible scene one evening when I was given a lift to my home by a helpful congregant. We live on a narrow street. In the best of weather parking is allowed on only one side, so as to allow one lane of traffic in each direction. But the accumulated piles of snow had narrowed the street even further. Our helpful congregant stopped in the street to let me get out.
Cars came toward him from one direction and cars behind him drew right up to his car’s trunk. Instead of holding back a bit until he had discharged his passenger, the other cars closed out any room for maneuvering. There was not enough room for everyone to drive through. I then saw a man standing on the sidewalk, watching the brewing traffic jam. He slowly moved to the car. I was sure that he was going to calmly and wisely direct the traffic and help my erstwhile chauffeur to squeeze through the narrow straits without causing anyone any damage. But, to my shock, he began screaming at the driver, berating him for not pushing forward. I tried to defend the driver, but others chimed in with nasty calls and remarks. Eventually people had to admit that they had no choice but to back up a bit so as to allow for the car to get through. The driver finally escaped the ugly scene. I entered my home shaken and depressed.
What had happened during this harsh incident in which, thankfully, no one was hurt and nothing was destroyed? I had seen an eruption of ugliness of spirit poured out for a completely senseless cause. Each person vented their anger and self-righteousness. Each person wanted the other to get out of their way. Each person was avidly attacking the other person’s intelligence and human dignity. Unfortunately, for those few moments, decent people had transformed themselves into livid beasts. For what?
We have a prayer about this.
In my continuing series of essays on our traditional set of daily prayers I have moved through the first few blessings we recite each morning. (Please see my monthly columns in Kol Emunah since October.) After we recite the catalogue of short Morning Blessings, we recite a longer, concluding blessing. It begins by praising God “Who takes away sleep from my eyes and slumber from my eyelids.” Now this would seem to be anticlimactic, since we have already thanked God for helping us wake up, wash up, get dressed and get ready to go out into the world. Why mention slumber again?
The blessing continues, not in praise, but as an appeal, a plea. We ask that God help us to become trained to behave in accordance with God’s Torah, so that we may become habituated to act in accordance with our best, most generous instincts, so that we will not be dragged down by our base instincts. The blessing ends by praising God “Who bestows great gifts of loving kindness upon His people Israel.
The conclusion of the blessing bears comment. We need to know an important rule about how blessings are written. In long blessings, such as this one, the beginning and the end must be unified. Since every blessing is meant to focus our attention on one thing out of many, the blessing should start and end with the same point. That means that the removal of slumber that we mention at the start of the blessing must have something to do with the loving kindness we mention at the end. It means that the slumber we seek to shake off is not physical sleep, but the sleep of the human spirit. Unlike the old saw, “Let sleeping dogs lie,” the message of this blessing is closer to that of the great artist, Goya, who graphically warned, “the sleep of reason produces monsters.” If we do not awaken our spirit to the challenge of following God’s example of bestowing loving kindness, we will sink to the level of cruelty and selfishness.
Does this message apply only to Jews? Why does the blessing end by saying that God bestows these gifts specifically to Israel? What about everyone else? Is this challenge not a fundamentally human one? I believe that this is a universal issue. And, in fact, the original version of this blessing does not end as we have it. This blessing is found in the Talmud (Berakhot 60b). As printed, it, indeed, reads as we have it in our prayerbook, as quoted above. But this is a later historical development, enshrined by the printing press. Early manuscripts and the versions quoted in early medieval sources explicitly read: “Who bestows great gifts of loving kindness.” A respected medieval authority reads the ending as: “Who bestows great gifts of loving kindness to all His creatures (- livriotav).” It is simply a fact that God is generous to all (consult the prayer Ashrei) and we are commanded to emulate God’s generous nature, ourselves, towards all God’s creatures.
This message is reinforced by a short meditation that follows this blessing. It asks God to save us from having to deal with difficult people, people who are angry, disrespectful, who are not friendly or neighborly, “whether they are members of the Covenant or not.” We thereby recognize that the challenge of acting “like a mensch” is a universal one. Failure and success in meeting this challenge belongs to no specific group. We are all human, capable of cruelty worse than animals, yet also capable of love and goodness, like God.
This blessing and meditation are recited precisely as we are about to engage the real world, a world full of encounters with others. Who will we meet? Who will we have to work with? How we will handle difficult situations? Should we meet up with harsh people, will we, too, be tempted to act harshly? The risk is always there. But we are capable of awakening ourselves to this challenge.
The morning prayer is that wake-up call.
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I’m so happy I read this because I had a similar experience this week, and didn’t know whether to apologise or react defensively or walk away or smooth troubled waters…Sometimes it’s hard to show positive strength in the moment. But you are so right about ‘acting like a mensch’, it is both an individual and collective struggle and one I am still struggling to live by instead of acting unjewishly on impulse 🙂