Today, the 29th day of the Hebrew month of Cheshvan, 50 days after Yom Kippur, Ethiopian Jews celebrate the festival of Sigd. The name of the festival comes from the Amharic word sgida, which means "prostration", and the holiday is their way to renew the Israelite covenant with God and preserve Jewish identity.
The covenant is the stepping stone of the Israelites’ relationship with God, which began long before we were established as a people. It began as a personal relationship among our forefathers and their God, who was powerful, emotional and interventionist. A God who answered to prayers and caused changes in people’s lives.
In today’s parashah, Sam just read that Itzhak prays to God on behalf of Rivkah, so that she could conceive. She doesn’t ask for this, but God answers to Itzhak’s prayer. Rivkah gets pregnant with twins and suffers during her pregnancy, as she inquires God:
אִם־כֵּ֔ן לָ֥מָּה זֶּ֖ה אָנֹ֑כִי
“If so, why this is me?”
Itzhak prayed for children, God listened to him, and Rivkah, who didn’t ask for it, gets pregnant.
On the other hand, Sam read his haftarah today. His because, for a heavenly coincidence, his name was chosen because of the story that he just read, which the Reform Movement in the UK chose for this shabbat. In the story Hannah was desperate for a child and prays in such a state to God to bless her with a son, that the priest got the impression that she was drunk. Understanding the profound pain of this woman, the priest assures her that her plead will be listened and she will have her son. Samuel, the prophet, priest, judge of Israel is her son, who she dedicated to the Temple. Hannah asked, God intervened.
Her prayer is considered so powerful that the Amidah is recited in silence to mirror her. The Rabbis teach that, as Hanna once did, we should recite the Amidah quietly enough so that others cannot hear us. In fact, the idea is to allow each person to move at her own pace, to infuse the words of their heart with the words on the established prayer, creating a mental space to share words and ideas with God. Throughout our silent Amidah we can each make the effort to keep our whispers to a minimum and to stand at a distance from our neighbours, in order to allow each of us more of that space and silence.[i]
If during biblical times there was an understanding of a personal God, one who would listen and intervene, nowadays, especially after the Shoah, we are trying to establish our sacred relationships and renew our covenants with an absent God, who does not change what happens in the world, to whom we pray, but we cannot establish a direct correlation between prayer and what happens to our lives. We do not rationally believe in an interventionist God, but we keep praying. Why?
In the view of rabbi and theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel, God is intimately involved in the affairs of humanity, as a partner in redeeming the world. As a refugee from the Holocaust, he knew human brutality all too well. In his view, since God's involvement in the world does not mean that God will save us from our most destructive impulses, we are called upon to be partners with God in transforming the world. God is not solely responsible for the consequences of human behaviour, but neither are we left alone in the universe. God is in search of humans who will make the world what God conceived it to be.[ii] Prayer would be that moment of encountering God, feeling their presence, touching base to guide our steps and find comfort.
Mordecai Kaplan, another rabbi and theologian who survived the second world war, proposed that, instead of a "being" acting independently in the world, God is the transcendent power that we experience in the everyday miracles of our lives, and the best and highest ideals of the human mind and heart. In Kaplan's view, there is no external God who intervenes in our lives in any way. God, rather, is reflected in the choices we make in our lives, specifically choosing good over evil. When we enact goodness in our lives, we become living embodiment of God. Prayer then would be the moment of reflection, the connection with our inner divine spark.
It doesn’t matter if one prays for the interventionist God, partner God, or inner godly spark. The important part of prayer is connecting with something good within us, with all our hopes.
Today we are here, gathered in community and prayer, focusing on our possibilities of being God’s partners and building a better world, finding holiness in the small things of everyday life and connecting with our possibility of choosing good over evil. Today, in Israel, there is a mass celebration in the Armon HaNatziv neighbourhood of Jerusalem, gathering Ethiopian Jews in prayer, hope and joy. A people within our people, who suffered a lot, and still joins every year to pray and reestablish the covenant, the relationship with God.
May we find hope to hear each other’s voices and respect each other’s silences. May we renew our covenants today and every day in our prayers.
Shabbat Shalom.
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