Kol Nidre 2023 at Congregation Agudas Achim
“How to Connect to the Machzor”
Rabbi Talya Weisbard Shalem
One of the great ironies of American Jewish life is the import accorded to the high holidays. Jews flock to synagogue more for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur than any other time of year. This trend is true here at Congregation Agudas Achim as well as in the wider world.
And yet, the liturgy of the machzor, the special prayerbook for these holidays, is some of the hardest for any of us to relate to. So many prayers about God, kingship, and judgment.
In a compilation of essays about the machzor, Rabbi David Stern writes about this
As if this whole enterprise of naming [God] weren’t challenging enough, we’re now going to stir the contradictory brew of verbal necessity and verbal inadequacy with a royal scepter. We’re going to take our good twenty-first century Jews – already struggling with the notion of God – and we’re going to give a bonus challenge: the notion of divine sovereignty.
If you thought addressing God as “Hey You” was bad, try saying “Hey You” to a God who hangs out on a throne. Try triggering every modern ambivalence about authority, or zealousness about personal autonomy, or wariness of submission, or vigilance about the oppressive narrowness of gendered language. If our tradition had to go and name the un-nameable, why did we have to pick a name that would end up being so damn complicated?[1]
High holidays are hard. The language and metaphors of the machzor are hard. Seeing God as a king or ruler is especially hard.
For me, the machzor, this book, is a human creation. It reflects many of the deepest questions humans struggle with year-round. Why do people die? Why do bad things happen to good people? Why does it often seem that acting badly is rewarded in this world? How can we cope with the realities of the imperfect world that we live in, and go on to have hope and be energized for the future?
What we have here is a compilation of approaches of many different smart people from the past, accrued over centuries, philosophers, poets, legalistic-minded people, social-work minded people, artisans, and more.
They all projected their own realities into the text, imagining God as themselves and those around them – a shepherd, a potter, a parent, a teacher, a ruler.
Our ancestors, the authors of these prayers, lived in a world of existence subject to often flawed human kings and queens. For them, they held out the essence of what it might be to be a purely good, fair ruler, possibly something they had never encountered in their lives, and ascribed that to God. It gave them as aspirational way to be in the world, to imagine that even if life is unfair on earth, perhaps it is (or will be) fair in another realm. This hope drove them to try to be fair and good in their own lives, to try to create the world they wanted to live in, as much as they could in their daily realities.
For us today, we don’t have to literally believe God exists, or that God is any one of these metaphors, to appreciate the many metaphors these different authors, to teach us how to aspire to be the best people we can, to act justly in the world whatever our role.
One of my favorite ways of imagining this interplay comes from Yehuda Amichai, a contemporary Israeli poet, who passed away in 2000, from his final book, called Open Close Open. He wrote:
Prayer created God,
God created human beings,
human beings create prayers.
Amichai staked out a way to be an atheist and still remain in deep conversation with our liturgy. You may choose to agree or disagree with his theology about God’s origins, but either way, the truth that prayers are human creations still stands.
Prayers are our human way of attempting to make sense of what is going on around us, to tell a story that helps us feel like we have some control, or something to hold onto as life swirls on. They are a way to express our fears and our aspirations, to pass on values to future generations, to continuously inspire hope that the world could be better, and that we each can individually act to make it so.
We have chosen to sprinkle our services with many many images of God, from Ki Hinei KaChomer – “just like a lump of clay”, to Ki Anu Amecha – for we are your people.
I would like to invite each of you to go on your own personal journey tonight and tomorrow. Try to find one image or metaphor that speaks to you, right now in this moment in your life. Feel free to read around the machzor – when we are singing in Hebrew, you can read the translations or the commentaries on the page, or flip your way through the supplement. Do you find anything compelling?
Does anything make you angry? If it does, pause there and reflect. Why does it make you angry? Why is it so loaded for you? Is it because some part of you believes what the text literally says? Because you are sure the book is wrong? Because you wish the world were different (and better) than it actually is?
How do the varied tunes of the service affect your experience? Do the sadder minor tunes encourage you to investigate harder aspects of your life? Do the upbeat tunes help sustain you?
What, if anything, do you find inspiring? What gives you the energy to keep on going, engaging in the world and trying to make it better?
Once you have found something to think about, try to set it in your mind to remember it. Then come back and tell me about it sometime this year, perhaps on a regular Shabbat or holiday like Purim or Chanuka. I would love to hear your thoughts, and to engage throughout the year, on joyful and fun days as well as tonight.
