Circles of Blessing
Every community contains conflict. Whenever people gather, and try to live together, there will be differences of opinion and personalities that clash. I once lived in a community with a kohen who had devised a unique method of resolving conflict. On one occasion it appeared to me that he had a challenging relationship with another individual and when I alluded to that dynamic the kohen was adamant that he was on good terms with each and every member of the congregation so that he could perform the mitzvah of birkat kohanim the priestly blessing of the congregation which must be undertaken “b’ahava” or “with love.” The Mishneh Berurah and other halakhic codes insist that a kohen remove himself from the congregation if he is unable to remove the hatred from his heart for even one individual who would be in the congregation before him.
I was so grateful, as a member of the community, to know that at least one of the kohanim blessing me each yom tov took care to cultivate his attitudes towards the members of the community so that he could bless us without ambivalence.
Rabbenu Bachaya, the 13th century student of Ramban and author of one of the great medieval commentaries to the Torah, shares a midrashic tradition, recorded in Midrash Tanhuma, which traces a primordial history of blessing.
God blessed the first people in Gan Eden and God blessed Noah after the flood. When Avraham is sent on his mission to Eretz Canaan in Parashat Lekh Lekha he is told וֶהְיֵ֖ה בְּרָכָֽה you shall be a blessing, which, according to this midrashic interpretation, means that Avraham was expected to take over from God’s role as the bestower of blessings.
But Avraham does not do this. Seeing Yitzhak and Yishmael before him, recognizing that, in his own eyes, only one of his children was a worthy inheritor of his own spiritual mission, Avraham is silent. Nowhere in the Torah do we see Avraham blessing his children. The midrash criticizes Avraham and compares him to a farmer entrusted by a king with the responsibility to tend to an orchard in which there were two trees: one that grew nourishing fruit and one that grew poisonous fruit. The farmer did not know how he could water the orchard without also watering the poisonous tree. Better to do nothing. But the king did not expect the farmer to assume responsibility for every fruit that would grow in the orchard. The king just wanted the orchard to be watered. .
And so God’s first attempt to hand over the role of bestower of blessing ends in failure due to Avraham’s discomfort with encouraging the flourishing of descendents whose behavior he could not endorse and whose character he could not fully trust.
Yitzhak famously blesses his children under less-than-ideal circumstances and it is not until Yaakov that a patriarch blessed all of his children together. That role, bestower of blessings, is ultimately codified and handed to the kohanim in Parashat Naso.
דַּבֵּ֤ר אֶֽל־אַהֲרֹן֙ וְאֶל־בָּנָ֣יו לֵאמֹ֔ר כֹּ֥ה תְבָרְכ֖וּ אֶת־בְּנֵ֣י יִשְׂרָאֵ֑ל אָמ֖וֹר לָהֶֽם׃
Speak to Aaron and his sons: Thus shall you bless the people of Israel. Say to them:
יְבָרֶכְךָ֥ ה וְיִשְׁמְרֶֽךָ׃ {ס}
יָאֵ֨ר ה ׀ פָּנָ֛יו אֵלֶ֖יךָ וִֽיחֻנֶּֽךָּ׃
יִשָּׂ֨א ה ׀ פָּנָיו֙ אֵלֶ֔יךָ וְיָשֵׂ֥ם לְךָ֖ שָׁלֽוֹם׃
These words are familiar to us. They are included in the amidah during Shacharit each morning, parents say them over the heads of their children on Friday night, and we hear them recited by our kohanim, with love, at each festival.
But the Torah adds a curious suffix to these blessings which forces us to confront the question of ambivalence about the power of our words and our wishes and the uncontrolled ways that they can impact others.
וְשָׂמ֥וּ אֶת־שְׁמִ֖י עַל־בְּנֵ֣י יִשְׂרָאֵ֑ל וַאֲנִ֖י אֲבָרְכֵֽם׃
They shall place my name before B’nai Yisrael and I shall bless them.
Who is “them” in this verse? Who is the subject of וַאֲנִ֖י אֲבָרְכֵֽם׃ ?
The Gemara in Hulin (49) shares a dispute between Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Yishmael on the meaning of this verse:
תניא, ר’ ישמעאל אומר, למדנו ברכה לישראל, ברכה לכהנים עצמן לא למדנו, כשהוא אומר ואני אברכם, הוי אומר, כהנים מברכין לישראל והקב”ה מברך לכהנים
Rabbi Yishmael says: we have learned that Israel receives a blessing, what about the kohanim themselves? When the Torah says “and I shall bless them” that is to say that the kohanim bless Israel and the Holy Blessed One blesses the kohanim.
According to Rabbi Yishmael, having assigned the role of “bestower of blessings” to Avraham and later to the kohanim, God takes back that role and makes sure that the kohanim too are blessed. They should not be the only ones without blessing!
Rabbi Akiva reads the verse in a different way:
תניא, ר׳ עקיבא אומר, למדנו ברכה לישראל מפי כהנים, מפי הגבורה לא למדנו, כשהוא אומר ואני אברכם, הוי אומר כהנים מברכין לישראל והקב”ה מסכים על ידם
Rabbi Akiva says, we have learned that Israel is blessed by the kohanim. But we do not have any source that God also blesses Israel. When the Torah says “and I shall bless them” that is to say that the kohanim bless Israel and the Holy Blessed One confirms their blessing.
Who is correct? Rashi first quotes Rabbi Akiva’s position in his commentary. “I will bless them” means that God will endorse and confirm the words of the kohanim and bestow blessing on Israel. But Rashi also quotes the opinion of Rabbi Yishmael and, indeed, this is one of those beautiful and irresolvable syntactic ambiguities in the Torah.
Ibn Ezra provides the strongest explanation by embracing the ambiguous nature of the word “them” in the phrase “and I will bless them” and sharing his opinion:
לפי דעתי שמ”ם אברכם סימן לכלם כהנים וישראלים
“In my opinion”, Ibn Ezra writes, “‘I shall bless them’ means all of them – kohanim and Israel together.”
Divine blessing is not a zero-sum closed system in which someone has to make do with less for another to have more. The kohanim and the congregation are blessed. And we can model our prayers and hopes and love for others on God’s infinite love. If you have loved a child with infinite and unconditional love…and then welcomed a second child into your family, you’ve experienced this human capacity which is our echo of a Divine capacity for love and blessing to expand infinitely. The same thing happens when we form a new friendship, acquire a new teacher or invest in a new student. The capacity for care and concern and love expands as new people enter our lives.
Similarly, beyond the confines of our community, Ahavat Yisrael and Ahavat HaBriyot, love for our Jewish brothers and sisters and love for humanity are not in tension because our capacity to love comes from God and is infinite.
Birkat Kohanim institutionalises something that Avraham did not understand. In truth, he did not have to choose between a righteous and a wicked child. I think Avraham did love all of his children and he could have learned to bless them too.
But Avraham was worried about an unworthy recipient of his blessing causing harm. Like the farmer in the midrash Tanhuma who does not want to irrigate a poisoned tree, we too are often paralyzed by the inevitable uncertainty of whether our investments of love or of time or of money will be fruitful. Every human endeavor has unintended consequences and no human achievement is total and permanent.
But every Divine blessing flows to someone who is not fully deserving. And only Divine blessing can ensure that we benefit from the goodness we receive from others. This is written into the words of Birkat Kohanim. The opening three-word blessing: יְבָרֶכְךָ֥ ה וְיִשְׁמְרֶֽךָ – means that we wish blessing upon you, and that God should ensure that you are able to benefit from the blessing.
When we bless others, modeling ourselves on this Divine capacity, we offer our words and our wishes, our prayers and our actions, on behalf of others in the trust that nourishing the world with goodness will give rise to more goodness, the negative unintended consequences and undeserving recipients of our goodness will be outweighed by an ecosystem of blessing in which all are blessed.
Avraham said nothing rather than risk nourishing a poisoned tree. That temptation exists for us as well. Better to do nothing than invest in projects that will not succeed. Better to believe in nothing than to have our trust betrayed by institutions or communities that let us down. Better to perfect myself than risk being harmed by relationships with flawed human beings.
Birkat Kohanim institutionalizes a form of communal care and communal investment that can push us beyond those temptations. Instead of evaluating who we like and who we dislike, or even who we admire and who we do not, we can orient ourselves around the question of who can be most impacted by our blessing.
The Kohanim fill their hearts with love and face a diverse and complicated community made up of righteous and wicked human beings and everyone in between. As Mamlechet Kohanim, a nation of priests, we face humanity, friends and foes alike and everyone in between. Our sacred task is to bestow goodness on others in the trust that God will, in turn, bestow goodness on us.
God does not need us to discern who deserves blessing. God asked Avraham, and asks all of us, to be a blessing.
Rabbi David Wolkenfeld 