CyberTorah

Exercise: In providing practices for each section of the Amidah, there is a risk that the practice will become too extensive. Feel free to spend more or less time on each exercise as they stack up.

Begin as before. Take a few long breaths. Engage with last week’s exercise about generations and human connection, either through the words of the liturgy or your own meditation. End with the blessing, barukh atah adaoni, magan Avraham u’phoked Sarah, Praised are You God, shield of Abraham and the One who remembers Sarah.

Now I invite you to think of a time when you felt your own limits. Perhaps it was a time when you were sick, or failed at something. Perhaps it was a moment of confronting aging and the way that changes our bodies and their capacities. Now imagine that in that moment, in the feeling you now have of it, there is a loving presence that wants to hold you and lift you up. It promises that there is more than we can know, that our existence is bigger than we think it is. Allow yourself to feel however you do. Maybe you feel frustrated, or doubtful. Maybe you feel loved and comforted. Then say: Barukh Atah Adanai, Mikhayei HaMeitim, Praised are You, God, who restores life to the dead. Take three long breaths.

Conclude as before with Oseh Shalom.

A Story: I went to my first shiva as a young adult. A teacher of mine had lost her daughter to cancer at 30ish. Though I had never met the deceased, I felt my teacher deserved my loyalty and respect by being present at the Shiva. Her husband led the service that night. Ashrei, the beginning of the Amidah, he led competently and well. Then he got to “m’khal kel Chayim”, the second paragraph of the Amidah. That paragraph says God brings and also takes life. It promises that God brings the dead to life. He literally choked on those words. He said them, sobbed, and tried again. It took two or three attempts and then he continued the rest of the Amidah as though nothing had happened.

I had never met him before and it seemed the wrong time to ask what was going on for him as he sobbed like that. Since his wife was my teacher, I never saw him again. I have always wondered. Did he cry out of belief? My daughter will live again or her soul will flourish eternally? Did he choke on the promise, not knowing if he believed it or not? Or was he mad, God, how dare you promise me the giving and taking of life and expect me to pray those words after my daughter was taken from me. I won’t ever know what he was thinking.

Background: I know that for me I always think of this story when I say these words. I wonder. What will happen to me when I die? What did the people who wrote these words really think? The Amidah, quoting from various Biblical verses, promises us that God supports the fallen, heals the sick, and keeps faith with those who sleep in the dust.  I love the idea of God supporting us when we fall. I believe in a divine energy that can lift us up and heal us. Yet I struggle to think “God keeps faith with those who sleep in the dust.” I have been to my share of funerals. I don’t feel the presence of the person in their body.

To me the funeral is an act of love and respect, to lay the physical manifestation of the person to rest. But I don’t know that the person is there. I don’t believe there is something for God to keep faith with. And yet: I feel there is a value in confronting my mortality, my finite existence, every single day. It’s worth wondering if there is something here I don’t understand and perhaps can’t know. It is meaningful to me to assert every single day that God’s love and caring transcends even death.

Shabbat Shalom,

Rabbi David Booth