Shabbat Experiment - Week 6: Blessings

Before discussing this week's theme, let me remind you that following Kiddush after services there will be an opportunity to reflect on the six weeks of experimenting with the first part of services. Please join us, as your reactions will be important for our thinking about the future.

This week our theme for Shabbat morning is blessings. How do we become more aware of the blessings in our lives?

Judaism has a traditional practice of reciting a berakhah/blessing before we eat food. Saying a berakhah-- a blessing is meant to bring us to awareness. For the rabbis, the first level is awareness of God.

Our rabbis have taught: It is forbidden for a person to enjoy anything of this world without a berakhah... R.Levi contrasted two texts. It is written, "The earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof" (Ps. 24:1) and it is also written, "The heavens are the heavens of God, but the earth God has given to human beings!" (Ps. 115:16). There is no contradiction: in the one case it is before a blessing has been said in the other case after. [Berakhot 35a]

The rabbis begin with a notion that God, as creator, has made this world and all that it contains. Whoever eats without saying a blessing is like someone who robs from the Holy One. This notion conveys an important statement about God and about humans. Despite all our strivings, our sustenance is only partly the result of our own endeavor. We are little more than tenant farmers on this planet. Even if we don't believe in God, saying blessings remind us that we are "lucky" to have what we have.

A Resurrection of Sorts

From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the boy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward
signs painted Peaches.

From laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.

O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.

There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

- Li-Young Lee, "From Blossoms," from Rose

Blessings

The line from the liturgy: Barkhi Nafshi et Adonai: Let my soul praise/bless Adonai reflects the importance of the week's theme of blessings. Rabbi Larry Kushner writes the following about blessings:

Blessings give reverent and routine voice to our conviction that life is good, one blessing after another. Even, and especially, when life is cold and dark. Indeed to offer blessings at such times may be our only deliverance.

We have specific and unique phrases by which we bless a sacred book before we read it, our children at the Sabbath table, our hands while washing them, the bread we eat, the moon, the fact that we are not slaves, and that the rooster can distinguish between night and day. We bless everything. Or, to be technically correct, we bless the Holy One who stands behind and within them all.

Blessings keep our awareness of life's holy potential ever present. They awaken us to our own lives. Every blessing says, "I am grateful to be a creature and to remind myself and God that life is good."

With each blessing uttered we extend the boundaries of the sacred and ritualize our love of life. Everywhere we turn, everything we touch, everyone we see.

Shabbat Shalom
-- Rabbi Michael Strassfeld