Bless This Year
To this point in our exploration of the Amidah, I have suggested meditations to awaken a connection with each of the 19 blessings of the weekday Amidah. I believe daily prayer that allows us to express our deepest feelings, fears, and hopes is essential to whole living. For me, taking time each day to orient myself towards my deepest values and self makes me a better person. I feel obligated to pray because otherwise I struggle to live meaningfully.
For this next blessing, I want to offer a different approach. We say, bless this year as the good years of old. Partly, the prayer is for sustenance and rain, for rich crops and overflowing fruits. Yet today grocery stores, international commerce, and our own wealth insulate us from real hunger to a remarkable degree. Even in deep drought years in California, the grocery stores are overflowing with produce of all kinds. Hunger is a real problem in our area and throughout the world, but it's become a distribution and wealth issue rather than a rain and weather concern.
I do have times where I pray for the year to be good in financial ways. I remember several moments (and by moments, I mean years) of our capital campaign in which I did with sincerity pray for God to help us raise the money we needed to build our new building. It felt slightly crass but was genuine and heartfelt.
When I arrive at this prayer I often unsure what I mean or want, unsure what it is that I am expressing. One thought: its easy to take our sustenance for granted. There is such an abundance of food in this era. We easily fail to notice how much of a blessing that truly is. So one approach would be to feel in this prayer gratitude, gratitude for grocery stores and produce stands and farmers markets. Gratitude to water from the tap that never runs out.
A second thought: the hamotzi prayer over bread says an odd thing. We praise God who brings forth bread from the Earth even though there are so many human processes involved in bringing wheat out of the ground and then turning it into bread. That prayer hides a theological truth in plain sight, namely that God is the ultimate cause of everything and the proximate cause of nothing. This prayer reverses and asserts God’s involvement more directly in the natural world. So maybe we are being invited to set aside our sophistication and complex theologies and allow ourselves to experience the world as filled with God’s spirit. That somehow in ways we cannot even understand God is moving those natural forces and can for a moment be experienced as being directly engaged in nature.
Lastly: we pray for a year that is good. Perhaps this blessing invites a moment to get in touch with goodness. God created a world that is very good. Can our prayer, even in a time of war, help us more fully connect with the goodness hidden in creation? Maybe by inviting a year of goodness we can orient our own hearts to become partners with God in helping the world be more evidently visible as tov meod, as very good.
Barukh Atah Adonai, Mevarech HaShanim. Praised Are You God, who exists outside of time and nevertheless blesses the year. May we see abundance and goodness in this year reminding us of the best of times in Jewish and human history. Amen.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi David Booth
