The Grammatical "You"

There is a tendency among a certain kind of modern rabbi to equate davening with eastern meditation. I have even heard some rabbis speak of the health benefits of davening as including the lowering of blood-pressure and an increased sense of well-being. But I consider the two as distinct disciplines. Though davening may involve a descent into the interior of one's soul, it has a liturgy that is far more complex than the invested syllable of the mantra. The primary source of the liturgy is the biblical book of Psalms, the collection of hymns described by some commentators as a catalogue of every possible emotion. As I davened that morning, I realized that I was attempting to gather myself up into the language of the liturgy; to become a heightened being; so that I might speak the fullness of myself to the grammatical "you" that is the recognized audience of the prayers—God.

During the lapses in my prayer I glanced around the room. I saw an old man in a shtreimel, slouched in an armchair, reading with a weary and serious face from his siddur. His white beard was thin and wispy, and there was a triangle of liver spots beside his right temple. A young boy approached him, took the old man's right hand in his little hands, and kissed it, while the old man looked down at him through affectionate eyes. This was the Bostoner Rebbe.

Much of what I know about Grand Rabbi Levi Yitschok Horowitz I learned from his website. In a sermon on teshuvah, often translated as the process of repenting of sin, the Rebbe offers a redefinition. "We might better understand the issue by recognizing that the actual translation of teshuvah is not 'repentance,'" he writes, "but 'return.'" He compares the situation to that of a person returning from a long trip to a foreign country: "The moment he begins his drive to the airport, he is a ‘returnee’; he begins the process of return. The fact that he is still on some island in the Pacific, that his plane is still on the ground, that thousands of miles separate him from his family, does not change his status as a 'returnee.' The spiritual 'return' of teshuvah is much the same; it, too, is a process, one made up of numerous, and sometimes tiny, steps."

Impressed as I was by the emotional sensitivity of his writings, there are aspects of his work that give a liberal reader pause. A man with AIDS requested that the Rebbe make a healing prayer on his behalf. The Rebbe accepted the plea and made the prayer. But then he counseled the dying man to set up a fund for brides in Israel—to help forge the sanctified marriages that his lifestyle had flouted.

Then there’s his position on the Israeli-Palestinian "peace process," as expressed in a letter he sent to the editor of the Jerusalem Post in the fall of 1998, claiming the Israeli government had "unconditionally abandoned its ideological commitment to the territorial integrity of the totality of the land of Eretz Yisrael." He argued that "even when faced with a real and actual threat to the lives of the citizens it was elected to protect, this government will set aside nothing in its heady desire to make deals with our enemies."

It is with a shudder that I read elsewhere in his writings his unwavering assurance that the Holy Temple will once again stand on its hotly disputed mount.

But in the first throes of my davening in his court that morning, I was not concerned with the contradictory impressions that the Bostoner Rebbe's writings brought to mind. Instead I was captivated by the davening itself and by the mythos of the hasidic court.

Halfway through the service, the flow of personal prayer was interrupted as the aron was opened and a Torah scroll hastily removed for the weekly reading. The Torah was carried among the rows as the men sang and expressed their devotion to the holy law that it embodies by kissing it, either putting their lips to the fringes of their talisim and then touching these fringes to the scroll, or, under the sway of a greater passion, kissing the embroidered cloth cover of the scroll directly with their lips. Then the Torah was carried up the one short step to the bimah and undressed, and the naked yellowish-white parchment was laid down on the lectern.

As a reader chanted the sidra from the ornate letters scratched in black ink on the parchment, rendering the traditional melody sharply and accurately, we followed the drift of the text in our chumashim. The portion was "Ki Tavo," toward the end of the book of Deuteronomy:

"And thou shalt come into the priest that shall be in those days, and say unto him: 'I profess this day unto the Lord thy God, that I am come unto the land which the Lord swore unto our fathers to give us." (26:3) "And Moses and the elders of Israel commanded the people, saying : 'Keep all the commandments which I command you this day. '" (27:1) "But it shall come to pass, if thou wilt not hearken unto the voice of the Lord thy God, to observe to do all his commandments and his statutes which I command thee this day; that all these curses shall come upon thee, and overtake thee." (28:15) "The Lord will smite thee with the boil of Egypt, and with the hemorrhoids, and with the scab, and with the itch, whereof thou canst not be healed. The Lord will smite thee with madness, and with blindness, and with astonishment of the heart."(28:27-8)

I felt the elation and mystery of my davening collapsing under the rude force of these words. Here was the promise of the sovereign territory of Israel in exchange for allegiance and adherence to the desert God. Here was the God who commanded obedience and who smote deviance with plagues of the body, mind, and soul. Here was the strict Judaism of the Bible.

At this very moment I suffered a sudden crisis of faith. Was it to this God that I had been speaking myself in prayer, this absurd, petty and territorial deity that I did not even believe in?