Where do you go for help when you are facing a hard decision?
This summer in Israel I had a chance to chat and learn with an old teacher of mine and he told me a story about his own father who left his hometown in Germany in the early 1930s to study at one of the great yeshivot in Poland in a sort of precursor to the gap year yeshiva programs that are so popular among American Jews. At the “Adas Yeshurun” high school in Germany, part of the school system that had been overseen by Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch and the other luminaries of German Orthodoxy, there was not more than 45 minutes of Talmud instruction each week and so the chance to study at a great Eastern European yeshiva was, for many Jews from Western Europe, their first and only exposure to serious Talmudic scholarship. My teacher’s father decided to stay a second year.
And during the second year in yeshiva, right at the beginning of the school year, he was drafted into the Polish army. Many German Jews, my own family among them, were not actually German citizens, but retained Polish citizenship even a generation or more after their emigration to Western Europe. As the clouds of war gathered over Poland in the 1930s, a military draft was instituted and my teacher’s father had no more than a day or two to decide between enlisting in the Polish Army or leaving Poland and returning to Germany. He went to speak to a rabbi at the yeshiva and asked him for advice.
The rabbi said he had no advice to share.. So he went to a younger rabbi, at the time working as an associate to the more senior faculty, and presented his deilmena to him. He too responded that he couldn’t help. But he added, “tonight, during Maariv prayers, when you say “V’Takneinu b’Eitzah Tovah Milfanekha” you can have extra focus on those words. V’Takneinu b’Eitzah Tovah Milfanekha “Direct us with Your good counsel.”
The evening Maariv tefilot that we recite each night of the year, whether it is Yom Kippur or Pesach or Shabbat or the first Tuesday in November, all follow the same format. The first portion of Maariv consists of reciting the Shema, which has blessings before and blessings after. The second portion of Maariv consists of the amidah, the standing devotional prayer. These two sections are, in essence, two different mitzvot that were bound together thousands of years ago. Reciting the evening Shema is one mitzvah and reciting evening prayers is another mitzvah. These two mitzvot are joined together in a liturgical forced marriage. The two mitzvot have different times and different obligations and that awkward partnership produces, at times, awkward results (like the need to repeat Shema after dark on days when we recite Maariv earlier in the evening).
But despite that awkward partnership, the Talmud tells us that anyone who juxtaposes “ge’ulah” and “tefilah” one who is סומך גאולה לתפילה will merit life in the World to Come. This means that there is a strong value in there being no interruption to the full juxtaposition between the blessing “Ga’al Yisrael” which is the final blessing after the Shema and the start of the amidah which is “tefilah” par excellence.
Ever since that idea was expressed in the Talmud, all of the paragraphs in the siddur that seem to violate this rule, because they appear in between the blessing of “Ga’al Yisrael” and the start of the amidah have provoked scholarship and even controversy about whether or not they belong. This is the fraught space in the siddur where the prayer “V’Takneinu b’Eitzah Tovah Milfanekha” can be found, in a paragraph called Hashkiveinu that was already cited by the Talmud for its violation of the principle that we should have no interruptions between ge’ulah and tefilah.
The classic 19th siddur with commentary “Seder Avodat Yisrael,” edited and written by Dr. Seligmann Baer, explains that nighttime is when our thoughts are free to wander from the immediate concerns of the day and so it is a time when we turn to God and request that God should give us good advice as our minds freely associate in the moments before we drift to sleep. Quoting the Biblical book of Proverbs (19:21), Dr. Baer concludes, “there are many thoughts in the heart of a human being but the advice of God will be established.”
According to this understanding of the tefilah, we ask that God send us good advice in those quiet unsettled moments when sleep eludes us and our anxieties and uncertainties creep about. “V’Takneinu b’Eitzah Tovah Milfanekha” is a request that sound ideas, that represent God’s own guidance, should break through the noise and allow us to capture the ideas that will lead us to the future we want.
But how do we know when an idea comes from God?
Rav Kook, the great scholar of Jewish renewal, in his commentary to the Siddur Olat Ra’ayah, anchors his discussion of the entire paragraph of Hashkiveinu in the Talmudic discussion around the sensitive halakhic problems posed by an extraneous paragraph between “Ga’al Yisrael” and the start of the amidah. The Talmud itself (Berachot 4a) explains that once Hashkiveinu was added to the liturgy, it is considered as though it were no more than an extension of “Ga’al Yisrael” a longer exposition on the theme of redemption, and therefore consistent with the call to juxtapose “redemption” and prayer. The Talmud’s answer is almost tautological. We are supposed to juxtapose redemption and prayer. Hashkiveinu is a paragraph in between the blessing of redemption and the onset of prayer, it must be that Hashkiveinu is an extended prayer for redemption. Q.E.D.
But how is that so?
The Talmud’s solution to the Hashkiveinu problem begs the question and Rav Kook helpfully provides an answer. He writes that even though a person is meant to pray with full force on behalf of the collective – and indeed most prayers in our liturgy are phrased in the collective including the blessing of redemption(ga’al yisrael – blessed is the redeemer of all Israel) – one must not ignore the need to pray for one’s own personal redemption. The paragraph of Hashkiveinu, and the prayer V’Takneinu b’Eitzah Tovah Milfanekha that God establish us with good counsel, are prayers for personal redemption that are connected, thematically, and in our own hearts, with the redemption of the world.
If I don’t pray for myself, nobody will pray for me, but if I only pray for myself, what am I?
Rav Kook continues that if there were someone who divided his concerns for the community and its wellbeing and its future redemption, from his or her own personal needs for rescue and redemption, indeed such a person would be inappropriately interrupting that necessary connection between redemption of the collective and that person’s prayers for the future. The path of Jewish prayer is to pray for the collective, and to also pray for our own needs, but to pray for our own needs so that, once they are met, we are able to link our redemption into the mosaic of our people’s glorious future.
Once we arrive at an answer to a question we have been pondering, how do we know that it is the right answer? If God does provide us good counsel, how can we know? I am not sure we ever know for sure, but when we see our personal redemption and the positive direction of our lives linked to kinder world, a world with more Torah, a world with more love, then we can hope and even suspect that the decisions that made that redemption possible where an answer to a prayer.
The perspectives I have shared with you have been very helpful to me and I have brought them into my tefilot this summer every time I have recited the words V’Takneinu b’Eitzah Tovah Milfanekha . And I invite you to do the same.
Let us pray for God’s good counsel. And, let us pray that our own choices, and whatever modicum of redemption that we are graced with in the coming year, will be of service to the collective. Let us pray that whatever future happiness we attain is connected, in at least some small way, to the thriving and success of the Jewish people and to the ultimate redemption of all human beings.
We are about to recite Yizkor. We invite the memories of our deceased loved-ones, parents and siblings, teachers and children, spouses and grandparents to come into our minds and share their own good counsel with us. The message of Yizkor is that the dead continue to shape the world through our actions. They do so through the tzedakah that we pledge in their memory, and they do so, even more powerfully, through their example. And of course the same will be true for us one day. The decisions we make create examples and models which future generations will evaluate and learn from and to which they will respond.
There are some who teach us through their positive example which we strive to emulate. And there are some who teach us through their negative example which we try our hardest to avoid. And we too will leave behind both positive and negative examples. Future generations will determine the contours of our legacy by which of our actions and character traits they choose to perpetuate.
All of these are examples too of the redemption that Rav Kook saw in V’Takneinu b’Eitzah Tovah Milfanekha. A personal redemption that also redeems the collective can be a choice we make this year which will inspire future generations of our family and our community. And, at Yizkor, we can find facets of the lives of our deceased loved ones, and redeem them by integrating them into the work that we do, with others, on behalf of our families and on behalf of our community, and on behalf of the world.
Certain ideas, answers to questions that pop into our minds at night, can be redemptive or turn out, in the fullness of time, to have been redemptive. The clarity they bring us, the bold decisions that they inspire us to make, can be an answer to our prayers. Yizkor is about raising up those redemptive moments that we remember from the advice that we have received from our loved ones and from the examples that their lives represent.
Everyone is invited to remain in shul for Yizkor. Those blessed with living parents who wish them to leave, should do so quickly and silently. Please remain quiet while outside the doors of the sanctuary and do not go far; we will call you back inside soon.
Rabbi David Wolkenfeld 