Late Arvit Musings
Dec. 22nd, 2010 09:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rhuWe're a little over a month into the season of the Late Arvit service at my shul. (Once DST ends, the afternoon/evening service is too early for many people, so we have a second, late minyan at 9pm Mon-Thu for the evening service.) I try to go regularly to this service, and I've been pondering it recently.
The service itself lasts about eight minutes. It also takes me eight minutes to walk each way to and from shul. At two minutes to nine the room is empty; at ten past nine the room is empty. We greet each other on the way in and out, but there's not a lot of socializing around the congregating.
And the service would strike most people as odd --- you've got ten to fifteen men, and occasionally one or two women, scattered all over a room that can hold 500 people. (We're scattered because most of us sit in the same spots we choose on Shabbat morning, when the room is mostly full.) No one announces page numbers or what to do; whoever is chosen that night as the leader occasionally calls out something in Hebrew and the others sometimes call out a response, but most of the time we're mumbling or whispering, perhaps with a subvocal drone.
And the text is pretty much the same, night in and night out.
But this is one of the most meaningful parts of my day.
Most of the time, the leader is someone who is in the year of mourning for a parent. Right now we have someone in shloshim, the first thirty days. And my being there supports this person --- not just because my presence, among others, enables the mourner to recite Kaddish, but because my presence, among others, provides that night's link in the 3,500-year-long chain of intergenerational continuity, and the context in which our lives fit as part of something larger and transcendent. (OK, rabbinic Judaism and the recitation of the Kaddish is only 2,000 years old, but still.)
And sometimes we don't have any mourners that night. Our presence, our reciting praise and supplication to the Creator of All, feels different on those nights. We're still part of the arc of Jewish history, and of human history, but we're there less for each other and more for God, and for ourselves.
Because using those ancient texts to talk to God is a daily reminder that what's important is not the number of bugs I fixed that day, or whether the crossword puzzle was easy or hard. What's important is that I have strong ties with my community, that God loves us and we love God, that God established a covenant with us and I have acted -- am acting at that moment -- according to that covenant, that our place is to fight with God's help against the woes of "plague, sword, famine, and grief". That God is the God of our ancestors and our job is to ensure that God remains the God of our descendants. That our true needs are strength of character, rain, health, a guarded tongue, and peace.
And that God is to be praised in many ways --- and I can't translate this because English lacks the verb regularity of yeetba-RACH v'yishta-BACH v'yitpa-AR v'yitro-MAM v'yitna-SE v'yitha-DAR v'yit'a-LEH v'yit'ha-LAL and it sounds stilted in English.
Which words will reach me each night I cannot predict. Some nights, none do, but most nights some phrase makes me stop, and ponder, and understand. The words of prayer are not just our offering to God, they are a mirror that tells us truths about ourselves; usually these truths are merely clarifying, but occasionally they are joyous or painful.
It's partly bein adam la-Makom [between a person and one's Creator], partly bein adam l'chaveiro [between a person and one's fellow], and partly bein adam l'atzmo [between a person and oneself].
The simplicity of the service, the humble arragement of these noble words, we few, lay-led, just doing our duty in a holy tongue, but briefly touching the ineffable and eternal, is my daily touchstone.
The service itself lasts about eight minutes. It also takes me eight minutes to walk each way to and from shul. At two minutes to nine the room is empty; at ten past nine the room is empty. We greet each other on the way in and out, but there's not a lot of socializing around the congregating.
And the service would strike most people as odd --- you've got ten to fifteen men, and occasionally one or two women, scattered all over a room that can hold 500 people. (We're scattered because most of us sit in the same spots we choose on Shabbat morning, when the room is mostly full.) No one announces page numbers or what to do; whoever is chosen that night as the leader occasionally calls out something in Hebrew and the others sometimes call out a response, but most of the time we're mumbling or whispering, perhaps with a subvocal drone.
And the text is pretty much the same, night in and night out.
But this is one of the most meaningful parts of my day.
Most of the time, the leader is someone who is in the year of mourning for a parent. Right now we have someone in shloshim, the first thirty days. And my being there supports this person --- not just because my presence, among others, enables the mourner to recite Kaddish, but because my presence, among others, provides that night's link in the 3,500-year-long chain of intergenerational continuity, and the context in which our lives fit as part of something larger and transcendent. (OK, rabbinic Judaism and the recitation of the Kaddish is only 2,000 years old, but still.)
And sometimes we don't have any mourners that night. Our presence, our reciting praise and supplication to the Creator of All, feels different on those nights. We're still part of the arc of Jewish history, and of human history, but we're there less for each other and more for God, and for ourselves.
Because using those ancient texts to talk to God is a daily reminder that what's important is not the number of bugs I fixed that day, or whether the crossword puzzle was easy or hard. What's important is that I have strong ties with my community, that God loves us and we love God, that God established a covenant with us and I have acted -- am acting at that moment -- according to that covenant, that our place is to fight with God's help against the woes of "plague, sword, famine, and grief". That God is the God of our ancestors and our job is to ensure that God remains the God of our descendants. That our true needs are strength of character, rain, health, a guarded tongue, and peace.
And that God is to be praised in many ways --- and I can't translate this because English lacks the verb regularity of yeetba-RACH v'yishta-BACH v'yitpa-AR v'yitro-MAM v'yitna-SE v'yitha-DAR v'yit'a-LEH v'yit'ha-LAL and it sounds stilted in English.
Which words will reach me each night I cannot predict. Some nights, none do, but most nights some phrase makes me stop, and ponder, and understand. The words of prayer are not just our offering to God, they are a mirror that tells us truths about ourselves; usually these truths are merely clarifying, but occasionally they are joyous or painful.
It's partly bein adam la-Makom [between a person and one's Creator], partly bein adam l'chaveiro [between a person and one's fellow], and partly bein adam l'atzmo [between a person and oneself].
The simplicity of the service, the humble arragement of these noble words, we few, lay-led, just doing our duty in a holy tongue, but briefly touching the ineffable and eternal, is my daily touchstone.
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Date: 2010-12-22 02:58 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-12-22 08:29 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-12-23 01:04 am (UTC)