How often have we said or heard, “Gezuntheit”
or “God bless you” after a sneeze? We have been taught to say it, but do we
think about what it means? Probably not — we’re being polite.
This week’s parashah, Naso, includes
the most famous blessing of all time. In fact, its words comprise the earliest
inscription of biblical text that has been found. Nearly 15 year ago, two
amulets dating to the late seventh century B.C.E. were excavated in Ketef
Hinnom outside the Old City of Jerusalem. Archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon wrote
of them:
This is now the earliest occurrence of
a Biblical text in an extra-Biblical document, significantly predating the
earliest of the Dead Sea Scrolls. It is also the oldest extra-Biblical
reference to YHWH, the
God of Israel. (In Life in Biblical Israel
by Philip J. King and Lawrence E. Stager, 1987, p. 306.)
Today, you can find pendants inscribed
with this blessing, facsimiles of the Ketef Hinnom amulets.
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| Ketef Hinnom amulet |
This blessing has been invoked by many
people in many situations. On the big screen, the president of the United
States, as played by Morgan Freeman in Deep
Impact, invokes this blessing when
he informs the nation that an approaching 7-mile wide comet may lead to the
extinction of humanity.
By now you may have guessed that I’m
talking about Birkat Kohanim, the
Priestly Benediction of Numbers 6:22-27.
God spoke to Moses saying:
Speak to Aaron and his sons saying, Thus shall you bless the Israelites: Say to
them:
May God
bless you and protect you.
May God cause the divine light to shine upon you and be gracious to you.
May God raise the divine countenance to you, and grant you peace.
May God cause the divine light to shine upon you and be gracious to you.
May God raise the divine countenance to you, and grant you peace.
Thus they shall link My
name with the people of Israel, and I will bless them.
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| The Priestly Benediction: Numbers 6:22-27 (The first letter of verse 25 is a letter missing from this graphic image of the Torah text. I don't know why.) |
Birkat Kohanim has been studied, discussed,
analyzed and explicated more times than I can count, through the lenses of
history, halakhah, linguistics,
psychology, Kabbalah, and even geometry. I won’t review them here, but rather
note the structure I see and three things I learn from it.
First,
structure. The three lines confer three separate blessings — protection, grace,
and peace — the components of the life we all want to live: safety, comfort,
and serenity. The most elemental is protection or security. Without a sense of
basic security, life is out of control, chaotic, even savage. With safety
reasonable secured, we can dare to hope and pray for grace, the gifts of heaven
in whatever form they come (health, family, friendship, prosperity). With
protection and grace, we have a shot at shleimut,
genuine wholeness or peace.
To
offer the Priestly Benediction is to offer what we all want and need, but
cannot always assure for ourselves. We can forge loving relationships, pursue meaningful
projects, and perform righteous deeds, but we cannot guarantee for ourselves protection,
grace, and peace. Birkat Kohanim is all-encompassing;
it’s about the really big stuff.
Next,
three things I have learned.
First,
we might be tempted to ask: why do we need priests to bless us? Why do we need
anyone to bless us? The Bavli (Babylonian Talmud, Berakhot 7a) provides insight
here. The Rabbis imagine that God prays, just as we do. They therefore ask, as
we would, “What prayer does God say?” Like good trial lawyers who never ask a
question they cannot answer, the Rabbis tell us that God prays for the ability
to control divine anger and approach us with mercy rather than strict justice.
In other words, God prays for self-control. But apparently prayer isn’t enough,
because God visits the High Priest R. Yishmael b. Elisha in the Holy of Holies
and asks for a blessing. R. Yishmael has the perfect blessing for God, just
what God needs and wants: “May it be Your will that Your mercy may suppress Your anger and
Your mercy may prevail over Your other attributes, so that You may deal with
Your children according to the attribute of mercy and may, on their behalf,
stop short of the limit of strict justice.” Even God needs, and benefits from, a
blessing. So much more so do we. We all need one another’s blessings — good wishes
and expressions of love and caring, reminders of what is important, and the
hope that God and the world will meet our needs and desires.
Second,
blessings remind us that, in fact, we are already
blessed. The trick is to be able to recognize our blessings. The Rabbis speak
of hakarat ha-tov, recognizing the
good, because the more we do so the happier and more satisfied we will be. Ben
Zoma taught: “Who
is rich? Those who are content with their portion” (Pirke Avot 4:1). In other
words, when we are pleased with what we have, we are rich with satisfaction. Rabbi
Julian Sinclair tells a wonderful story of a rabbi whose hakarat ha-tov extended to bushes. In Rabbi Sinclair’s words:
Hakarat hatov extends to inanimate
objects as well. Moses famously did not strike the Nile to catalyse the plague
of blood for that would have shown a lack of gratitude to the water which had
conveyed him in his ark to Pharoahs [sic] daughter. A modern-day example is of
the late Rabbi Yisrael Zeev Gustman, head of Yeshivat Netzach Yisrael, who used
to water the bushes in front of the yeshivah. For when fleeing Vilna, he had
hidden behind some bushes and always felt a debt of gratitude to them, be they
in Vilna or Jerusalem. Neither Moses nor Rabbi Gustman credited water or bushes
with the will to chose to save them, but they recognised that to destroy or
disregard something that once helped you is indeed a base trait.
Think
for a moment: what are you grateful for? How have you been blessed, and by whom?
Third,
counting our blessings leads to anava (humility).
Humility is perhaps the greatest and most difficult middah (personality attribute) to cultivate, but the one that is
the genesis and nexus of all middot. Ego
is part of our natural make-up and, indeed, necessary for survival. We must
value and appreciate ourselves. An overblown ego, however, separates us from others and
from genuine happiness. It is natural to be proud of our achievements, but it
helps to remember that we
are all blessed with talent and potential. We didn’t earn them; they came
installed with the hardware. We get credit for developing our potential and using
our talents productively.
Torah
doesn’t say when or how Birkat Kohanim
should be conferred. The Rabbis, however, decided that it should be said at shacharit and musaf, as well as at Ne’ila,
the closing service of Yom Kippur, ensuring that it is recited every day, year round. Even on Tisha
B’Av it is recited at minchah. Not a day goes by that we are not blessed in
some way. And perhaps not a day should go by that we do not extend, in some
way, a blessing to another.
What blessing will you give someone else today?
©
Rabbi Amy Scheinerman
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