SHMA.COM
This is the pronunciation documented in
the earliest manuscripts, though in contemporary literature, it’s often malkhuyot.
Rabbi Aryeh Cohen, a Sh’ma
Advisory Committee member,
lives in Los Angeles with his
partner, Andrea, and their
children, Shachar and Oryah.
He teaches Talmud at the
Ziegler School of Rabbinic
Studies; davens at the Shtibl
Minyan; and writes about
Talmud, justice, Shabbat, and
gender, among other topics. He
is currently writing a book,
Justice in the City: Thinking the
Just City out of the Sources of
Rabbinic Literature.
Engaging Prayer
ARYEH COHEN
Living on the cusp of the second decade of the 21st century, we Jews are accustomed to the tripartite division of Judaism that
Franz Rosenzweig articulated and popularized:
creation, revelation, redemption. This division,
which both carries and constructs a narrative
arc, has served well in popular thought to limn
Jewish theology and practice. It might be somewhat jarring then, that on one of the holiest
days of the year, the focal prayer of the day —
the musaf of Rosh Hashanah, the home of the
shofar blasts on the “day of shofar blasts” — is
divided into three sections that are not necessarily familiar or comfortable for contemporary
sensibilities. This, though, is not a bad thing.
Prayer is not only the moment when we retreat
into the security of the safe and familiar. Prayer
is also an act of engagement and confrontation.
I find that prayer, to roughly paraphrase
Kierkegaard, is the existential suspension of the
ontological. To actually pray, I need to abandon
the safe ground of “how the world is” and be
open to experiences grounded in a very different world of assumptions. Prayer comes out of
the struggle between these two places: the
place I live and leave (and will return to with
the three steps that I take to end the amidah,
backing out of the place where transcendence is
available) and the place I enter.
Stretching back to at least the third century,
the three sections of the musaf — mentioned
and debated in Mishnah Rosh Hashanah — are
those found in our liturgy: malkhiyot,*
zikhronot, and shofarot. Malkhiyot is rendered
by Herbert Danby, the early-20th-century
Anglican Mishnah translator, as “Sovereignty
verses.” Under this rubric, the liturgist, following the Babylonian Talmud, gathers ten verses
(three from Torah, three from Psalms, three
from the later Prophets, and then a coda from
Torah) that invoke God’s sovereignty over
Israel, all nations, and the world.
One is hard pressed to find a coherent narrative articulated in these quotations. The first
verse is from Exodus, from the Song of the Sea
(one of the oldest texts in Torah), yet it points
to God’s eternal reign: “The Lord shall be king
for all time!” The collection of kingly verses
sticks to the prophetic and the salvific. The
penultimate verse, from Zachariah 14, points to
that day when “there shall be one God with one
name,” while the ultimate verse is the most
present of invocations, the Sh’ma — God’s oneness invoked here and now.
The second section, zikhronot, which
Danby translates as “Remembrance verses,” invokes God’s memory of the covenant — seemingly in order to once again jog the divine
remembrance and bring redemption speedily in
our days. The three, three, three, one series of
verses is repeated here, though with an interesting twist. The third Torah verse quoted is
from Leviticus 26:42: “And I will remember My
covenant with Jacob and also My covenant
with Isaac and also My covenant with Abraham
I will remember, and the land I will remember.”
Though this sounds promising, the context is
Israel’s abrogation of the covenant. Memory of
the covenant here has a dark edge to it. The ultimate verse in this section speaks of God reinstating the covenantal promise of redemption.
Here, for the educated pray-er, the passage of
time from the abrogation of the covenant by
Israel to its later reaffirmation by God is indicated by the intervening verses and even the
summary prayer.
Finally, the shofarot section partakes of the
imagery of Sinai and the end of days, the
themes of trepidation and extreme joy before
the divine and in holiday community. This section’s concluding prayer deepens those themes
with a plea for God to sound the shofar of our
freedom and redemption; to lead us to
Jerusalem in joy and song and to re-establish
the sacrificial service in the rebuilt Temple.
One of the glories of the Rosh Hashanah
liturgy is the sounding of the shofar, which can
be allegorized and metaphorized but not domesticated. It is a bedrock religious moment in
that it touches a deep and visceral chord in us
that has not been smothered by any layers of
bourgeois worshipfulness. It is important for me
to confront and embrace, however tentatively,
God as sovereign. It is important to me to lie
face down on the floor, relinquishing any notion
of control over the world for a brief moment. It
seems to be important to fervently hope that redemption may one day wend its way toward us.
God as sovereign. God as author of the
covenant. God as the triumphalist redeemer
sounding the shofar. These concepts are not
easily set aside. We may need to violently throw
them over — however, we evade that moment
of engagement at our own peril and loss.
