A blessing on your head

 

Judaism is replete with blessings. You begin saying them when you wake up and continue throughout the day. The morning service, along with the afternoon and evening services mandated for Jewish men, (yes, I know! It actually gets worse: see below) contains a number of them, from blessing the Almighty for commanding them to wash their hands and for having “formed man in wisdom” (I rather think, hope, this one means humankind). The blessings follow a formula which begins “Blessed are You (or “art” you in my ancient Siddur or Prayer Book), O Lord our God, Ruler of the Universe …”

In the morning service the Almighty is thanked for, inter alia, “giving to the cock intelligence to distinguish between day and night”. The Lord is thanked also for not making the reader a heathen, for not making him a slave and for not making him a woman … yes, I know! The woman thanks the Almighty for making her “according to thy will”. The blessings continue with both sexes permitted to say them. They include thanking the Almighty for clothing the naked, opening the eyes of the blind, loosening “them that are bound”, raising them that are bowed down and giving strength to the weary, with others rather more obscure.

As you leaf through a Siddur (prayer book) there are blessings on almost every page, some to our eyes strange, others remote, others thoughtful like this one: “Blessed art thou, O Lord … unto whom it is becoming to give thanks”. And tucked toward the back are a flock of them: thanking the Almighty “for creating various kinds of foods” with more specific words for after drinking wine, eating grapes, figs, olives, pomegranates or dates. On “partaking of flesh, fish, eggs, cheese etc. or drinking any liquor except wine” (which has its own special blessing), for creating fragrant woods, odorous plants, giving a goodly scent to fruits, creating different kinds of spices (“divers” in my Siddur which was a Batmitzvah present to me in 1963 from my Grandmother and printed the year before in England). There are blessings on seeing lightning, falling stars, lofty mountains and great deserts, on hearing thunder, at the sight of the sea, on seeing beautiful trees or animals, on seeing a rainbow, on seeing trees blossoming for the first time in a year, on seeing “a Sage distinguished for his knowledge of the Law” and, by contrast, “on seeing wise men distinguished for other than sacred knowledge”. (That’s one to pop into your briefcase should you ever be meeting Dr Karl.)

There’s one blessing “on seeing a King and his court” (I wouldn’t take this one to Canberra myself, but it’s your choice) and another which is my personal favourite, to be said on seeing “strangely formed persons such as giants or dwarfs”: “Blessed art thou O Lord our God who variest the forms of thy creatures.” There’s one on tasting the first fruits of the season, entering into possession of a new house or land or on using “new raiment” (clothes to most of us). And inevitably there’s one you say on hearing “good tidings” and one on hearing “evil tidings”. Put together, I think they form a kind of Jewish Mindfulness because they remind you to notice what’s around you and give thanks for it. So, do I do any of this blessing? I’m more than a little belief challenged so no, other than those which form part of services at home or in the Synagogue.

A word about the name of God. We can’t say it. Only the High Priest in the Temple in ancient Jerusalem could say it, once a year on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. With the destruction of the Temple in 70CE, pseudonyms were introduced. When I grew up we used Adonai, Lord in English, and often just plain God. There’s a strong and to my mind wrong-headed trend now to not use either of these (or if you have to use God you spell it G-d) but to use the expression HaShem, the Name. It’s not the only time in Judaism that something is cocooned by layers and layers of meaning so the more precise word is never used. For example, Jewish rabbinic teaching explicates the law and adds layers of meaning and interpretation to the text of the Torah, the Five Books of Moses; many rabbis have called this a “fence around the Torah”. I cannot bring myself to use HaShem so I use the word Almighty. And a note on the Christian word Yahweh. We know that the sacred name of God was made of four Hebrew letters; we call it the Tetragrammaton, from the Greek. The letters are Yad, Hey, Vav, Hey, so you can see where Yahweh or Jehovah came from. But as we don’t know the vowels, we don’t know how to pronounce the sacred name so Jews stick to euphemisms.

As I mentioned above, in my generation of English/Australian Jews, the word God was familiar. Outside the synagogue we used it as a mantra in a form of the words “God Bless” being run together as something like “Gobless”. My family still says “Bye Gobless” at the end of a phone call or a visit (remember those … when the family got together!).

Even for a challenged believer, Judaism is a wondrous collection of ideas, some very few obnoxious but most admirable. Which brings me finally to the little couplet written it’s believed by English journalist and poet William Norman Ewer: “How odd of God, to choose the Jews”. Needless to say, it drew some endearing ripostes, but for these you need to know that the word Goyim in Hebrew means non-Jews. So the humourist Leo Rosten came back with: “Not odd of God, Goyim annoy ‘im”. Another, possibly by Ogden Nash went: “But not so odd, as those who choose a Jewish God, yet spurn the Jews.” An anonymous reply was “Not so odd, the Jews chose God”. And finally, the US author and journalist Jim Sleeper penned this one: Moses, Jesus, Marx, Einstein and Freud, no wonder the Goyim are annoyed.”

 

Quote of the week from the Chambers Dictionary of Modern Quotations: US comedian W. C. Fields during his last illness: “I have spent a lot of time searching through the Bible for loopholes.”

And as a special treat, some doggerel with a great deal of charm: “Roses are reddish, violets are bluish, if it wasn’t for Christmas, we’d all be Jewish!”