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Echat She’alti: “One thing do I seek, only this do I ask…”

Rosh Hashanah 5780 September 30, 2019 Rabbi Yoel H. Kahn

Note: ♫ indicates that the song Echat she’alti (or some portion) was sung at this point.

Shanah tovah.

We are so glad to see you here. Even if we don’t get to greet you individually over the course of the holidays, we are excited to be sharing this high holy day season and its project of spiritual renewal with you. We especially welcome those who are watching via our live stream at Piedmont Gardens, Belmont Village and at home.

Take a moment to ask yourself :What is my spiritual work for these High Holy days? Where do I need to turn with renewed attention, teshuvah, in this New Year?

This year, at Beth El, we are lifting up the two, complementary themes of tikkun atzmi and tikkun olam. Tikkun atzmi - the repair, the healing, the completion of the self; and tikkun olam, the repair, the healing, the completion of the ever widening circles outside the self...extending to the planet and this human project.

Authentic prayer, the act of naming, speaking and reflecting on our most fervent yearnings and our deepest and most honest truth, can point us towards this work of teshuvah and tikkun.

We have spoken, from time to time, about two different dimensions of communal prayer. Sometimes, as we read, recite or sing our prayers, we discover in their words and language - whether ancient and polished by the centuries or newly arranged, contemporary voices - we find in them our own truth, the things that we know to be true or yearn to say but have not formulated into language. The words of prayer give voice to what is within us but unformed and perhaps even hidden or unknown. Has this ever happened for you? The text of the prayers become “the words of my mouth” because they reflect

“the meditations of my heart.” ♫

There are other times when the words and expression of the communal prayer are really just the vehicle for our own, private prayer; it's the melody, the feeling of participating in something ancient and precious, the sounds of the syllables, which are more significant than the words themselves. These become the vessels that we fill with our own deepest prayers; and they are carried by the words, the

music and the experience of being in sacred community. Have you had such an experience in prayer? ♫

What gets in the way of this, of course, is when we get stuck. We look at a text and ...it just doesn’t work. We cannot read metaphorically or poetically, or something just doesn’t make sense. The moment of spiritual connection and intimacy is lost and we are suddenly self-conscious; what am I reading or saying? What am I doing here? The spell is broken. Has this ever happened to you?

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I’ve been going through this for the last month, as I’ve tried to make sense of what has long been one of my favorite parts of the High Holy days season. Starting in the middle of the 18th century, Ashkenazi Jews initiated the custom of reciting the 27th Psalm during the days preceding Rosh Hashanah, reading it every day - morning and evening - for the entire Hebrew month of Elul. As part of my own practice, I’ve been trying to pay more attention to the recitation of the Psalm this year.

This Psalm was no doubt chosen because its verses speak to the intensity of this season - and also include a profound plea for connection:

Adonai is my light and my salvation, whom shall I fear? Hear, O Eternal, when I cry with my voice. Do not hide Your face from me… Hope in the Eternal, be strong and let your heart take courage, hope in the Eternal. I really love when we sing an excerpt of this Psalm at every service during Elul during the High Holy days! Except that when I started to pay attention, it turns out that the words of the verse that we always sing are really problematic.

ל־ימי חיי י בבית־יהוה כ בת ה אבקש ש י מאת־יהוה אות אלת אחת שלו׃לחזות בנעם־יהוה ולבקר בהיכ

One thing I ask of the Eternal, only this do I seek: to live in the house of the Eternal all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the Eternal, and to frequent God’s palace.

Now, I do spend a lot of time in this building - even in this room - but I’m sure you will understand if I say that I don’t want to spend all my time here now - and probably not eternity either. The modern Orthodox commentator Samson Raphael Hirsch noted at the end of the 19th century: Even the Kohanim, the Priests of ancient Israel, were not in the Temple permanently! Does anyone really want to spend all their waking hours “in God’s house”? It is a fundamental principle of Judaism that the life of holiness, of intimacy with God, the life of covenantal commitment begins, as Martin Buber teaches, “in the life of the individual but is only fully be realized” in the shared space of living community - not through withdrawal from them. So what am I asking for?

Then, this sacred biblical text - just around the part where I’m really leaning into the melody - becomes even muddier! “Just one thing am I asking for, only this…”.and then there are three different items on the list:

ל־ימי חיי י בבית־יהוה כ בת ♫ ש I want to chill all the time in the sacred precincts - but do I?

; לחזות בנעם־יהוה ♫ let me see Your Beauty, encounter Your presence; and finally,

לו׃ ♫ ולבקר בהיכ - I want to visit Your palace. It’s lovely - but I’m really confused. Are these all the same thing or three different requests? Is the goal leisheiv, to dwell there, or just l’vaker, to visit, dropping in from time to time? How about just on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur - will that do?

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I long for equanimity and inner peace, for spiritual connection and closeness to God. I love singing this prayer because it both articulates this yearning and, for the moments when we’re singing it together, I experience a taste of it ...but what is it I’m asking for and how do I find it?

As I find so often, I’m not the first person who has been troubled by this question. Rashi, the preeminent sage of medieval Judaism - he lived in the Champagne region of France between 1040 and 1105, just under a thousand years ago - was bothered too. It appears that he did the same thing as me: he went on google to research what earlier commentators had said and passed on to us the interpretations he learned.

About a hundred years before Rashi, Jewish scholars in 10th century Moslem Spain, were busy compiling grammars of the Hebrew language. One of them, Dunash ha-Levi ben Labramt explained that the meaning of the phrase ‘l’vaker b’heichalo does not mean, l’vaker, to visit or frequent - as we use it in modern Hebrew - but is a verb related to the word boker, morning. What the ancient poet wants, taught Dunash, ליראות שם בכל בקר ובקר, to be seen there every morning.

ה אבקש י מאת־יהוה אות אלת אחת ש

One thing do I seek, this do I ask: to be seen each morning.

Well, at first blush, it could mean that he wanted the neighbors to think highly of him, notice how pious he was - the author’s dream was to have other people see that he was at shul every morning!

Perhaps.

But do we not all want to be seen fully and completely, to be known and accepted, kol boker v’boker, every day? On these high holy days, we speak of this exceptional time of encounter with the sacred, with the presence of God - la’chazot b’noam Adonai, to see the beauty of the Eternal. We wish to see and, even more perhaps, we want, each one of us, to be seen. Indeed, this is how we begin the ritual of Kol Nidre, the most sacred moment of our calendar. We declare, as the ritual opens: “Whoever you are, wherever you have fallen down in your own eyes, we welcome you to enter this sacred community - and so we need not hide any of our disappointments, any of our failings, any part of ourselves. Echat sheali’....just this I ask for: la’chazot b’noam Adonai, to look and to be seen with the lens of God - to be seen, by myself and by you, the way God sees me..., accepted and held, in my brokenness and in my wholeness, embraced and loved as the “work in progress” I am, every day.

One reason why Dunash ben Labrat may have yearned so much to be embraced and seen, is that he was himself embroiled in a lot of social conflict, especially with his contemporary Menahem ben Jacob ibn Saruq. We don’t know much about ibn Saruq, who also lived in Spain in the 10th century, beyond the fact that he vehemently disagreed with Dunash about everything.

Not surprisingly, Ibn Saruq offers a completely different interpretation. Drawing on a parallel use of the same verb elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible, Ibn Saruq explains that l’vaker means to seek, to discern, to distinguish between and, specifically, it means to distinguish between good and bad. “Dwelling in this house,” then, is to be engaged in the activity of justice-seeking and justice-making. We come to Beit Adonai to sharpen our discernment around values, to reflect on our own commitments, and to learn and resolve how to act with moral wisdom.

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ל־ימי חיי י בבית־יהוה כ בת י.....ש אלת אחת ש

Only one thing do I ask...to dwell in Beit Adonai - the House of the Eternal all the days of my life.

The sanctuaries of the Jewish people have long been called “the house of God.” The Temple in Jerusalem was known simply as ha-bayit, the house. When we walk in the door of the synagogue, we recite the verse from Numbers: “יך ל בו אה ב מה־ט יך יעק שכנת ל׃ מ רא How beautiful are your tents, o.. ישJacob; your sanctuaries, Israel. ….I bow in reverence שתחו ה דשך ,before your sacred palace א ל היכל ק ”.א

Jacob, Our founding father, sets out on a journey. Alienated from his family, he runs away, heading towards a destination he knows nothing about. On his way, lost as darkness falls, he camps ba’makom, in a random place he stumbles across. He goes to sleep in this uncharted territory, lost in the wilderness. Yet it is precisely in this anonymous anywhere that he dreams of transcendent possibility - where he has a vision of what could be and is himself see. No longer hiding in his brother’s clothes and character, he discerns what he needs to do and resolves to set out on his life’s journey.

Newly woke, looking around at the ordinary, undistinguished, unnamed makom, this seemingly generic place, he declares: י׃ עת י לא יד נכ ה וא קום הז כן יש יהוה במ ,Surely the Eternal is present in this place“ אand I did not even notice!”

He calls this anywhere place where he finds himself, Beit El, the house of the Eternal.

We too have gathered here at Beit El. Like Jacob before us, we are searching. Ma tovu ohalecha Ya’akov.

But in this New Year: I invite you to investigate the makom, the place where you are, every single day a,nd ask: Is there a there here? Might this makom, the very spot I am in right now, be the House of God and I haven’t noticed? It may appear to be just a cubicle or the front seat of the car or the kitchen with food and unwashed dishes.

Martin Buber teaches that our encounter with God is mediated and in fact only known through our I-Thou encounters with others. How might we bring this spiritual awareness to our interactions? Buber already acknowledged a century ago that the majority of our communications are transactional and utilitarian. In my own home -let alone out in the world - much of the conversation turns around what is in the freezer for dinner and what is the laundry situation. Yet I have been blessed, and I believe you have too, by conversations and encounters that were holy, even if you would never characterize them that way. All the same, how might we - In our ever more divided world, how might we come to increasingly see no’am Adonai, the beauty of the Eternal, in every person we encounter, each one bearing Tzelem Elohim, the image of the divine? In turn, what can I do to nurture my own relationships and human connections so that I can safely be more fully seen and known? How can we increase the quotient of this sacred place, beit Elohim, the place where we see and are seen, where we listen and where we are heard - how do we make this more real in our lives? Yesh Adonai ba’makom ha-zeh. God is present in this place.

Menachem Ibn Saruq says all well and good - but we are truly in God’s house when we are engaged in the work of justice-seeking and justice-making. Once many years ago, I was at a demonstration about equal rights for gay and lesbian people. It was an inspiring morning but I had a full day planned and was anxious to get back to Beth El. I walked over to say good-bye to another rabbi who was there too. “Sre you participating in the civil disobedience and getting arrested?” she asked me. No, I said, “I have to

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get back to work.” She looked me in the eye: “Yoel, this is the work.” Yesh Adonai ba’makom ha-zeh. God is present in this place v’anochi lo yadati ...and I didn’t even know.

Rashi, the medieval commentator who introduced me to the competing interpretations of this verse, explains that really its all one prayer. He emphasizes the importance of the word, boker, the morning in God’s palace. I want to start my day, he said, in the spiritual search and prayerful connection. This nurtures me when I have it and I am always yearning for it. That is why, we show up, he says, at this makom, this place with regularity. A spiritual practice, unlike a sports or a music practice, is not a warm-up or training for the real thing; the practice is the end in itself. We are living out our practice right here, right now.

But, says Rashi, that’s the morning; that leaves the rest of the day and evening for a fully realized spiritual practice, in which we are truly attentive to honest seeing and being seen, to authentic living in relationship and community; a practice which is also fully engaged in torat tzedek, study and right-action - justice-seeking and justice-making.

Can we wake up our own lives, look around and say: Yesh Adonai ba’makom ha-zeh. The sacred is present in this place; v’anochi lo yadati ...and I didn’t have a name for it.

Walt Whitman challenged us:

Will you seek afar off? You surely come back at last,… Happiness, knowledge, not in another place, But this place—not for another hour, but this hour…

ל־ימי חיי י בבית־יהוה כ בת ה אבקש ש י מאת־יהוה אות אלת אחת ש

One thing I ask of the Eternal, only this do I seek: to live in the house of the Eternal all the days of my

life. ♫