I'm A Fundamentalist: Berakhot ("Blessings") - Vayyiggash 5785

Inspired by the current Broadway revival of Thornton Wilder's Our Town: How to live a more meaningful life through Jewish statements of praise. A new installment in a VERY sporadic series.

During our recent visit to New York, we were fortunate to see the Broadway revival of Thornton Wilder’s landmark play, Our Town. It’s one of those plays which are foundational to the American theatre (think Death of a Salesman, A Streetcar Named Desire), beloved by high school drama teachers and community theatre groups. This version starred an old buddy of mine, Jim Parsons, with whom I used to do cheap warehouse theatre in Houston, back when I was a chemical engineer and he worked at Whole Foods. It’s a pleasure to see how Jim, who is and always was a magnificently talented actor, has made it.

Our Town is an unusual play. Through two acts it meanders innocently through the lives of a couple families in the fictional town of Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, a place similar to where I grew up in Western Massachusetts, where everybody knows each other and lives have a predictable arc and expectations. The “Stage Manager” (Parsons’ role) narrates through the play, sometimes as a participant, but usually directing traffic perfunctorily, and with a subtle dose of humor.

It is the third act, however, which takes place entirely in the Grover’s Corners cemetery in a conversation with its deceased residents, which features the hard-hitting moments that make the play a classic. I will come back to that.

Something that was quite surprising about this production was that the very first word we heard when the lights went down, though, was in Hebrew: “Shema.” In what was apparently an attempt (perhaps completely gratuitous) to recast Grover’s Corners as a multicultural, multi-religious place, “An ‘Our Town’ for all of us,” as the New York TImes review put it. A brief minute of the Abraham Jam’s multi-faith musical pastiche, “Braided Prayer,” played, with Hebrew, Arabic, and English prayers intertwining. It was a bizarre moment, unexpected and a bit jarring, considering Wilder’s faithful portrayal of small-town New England in 1938 (the Stage Manager mentions all the churches in town, but somehow fails to note the existence of a synagogue or mosque). Nonetheless, hearing the most central statement of belief in Jewish life at the start of the show, the literal imperative to listen up, certainly pricked up my ears.

As some of you may remember, I have an ongoing, extremely irregular sermon series called, “I’m a Fundamentalist,” in which I remind us all of the essential pieces of Jewish life. Past “Fundamentalist” installments have featured Shabbat, kashrut, tefillin, tallit, and God. Today’s topic is berakhot, often inaccurately rendered as “blessings.”

But first, a word from Parashat Vayyiggash. Perhaps one of the most emotive moments in the Torah is when Yosef is standing before his brothers in this parashah, revealing himself many years after they were convinced that he was dead. Yosef can suddenly no longer stand the deception, and breaks down (Bereshit / Genesis 45:3):

וַיֹּ֨אמֶר יוֹסֵ֤ף אֶל־אֶחָיו֙ אֲנִ֣י יוֹסֵ֔ף הַע֥וֹד אָבִ֖י חָ֑י
Yosef said to his brothers, “I am Yosef. Is my father still alive?”

Now, what is curious about Yosef’s question is that he knows his father is still alive because the brothers have told him so earlier. (That is why the JPS translation in our ḥumash says, “Is my father still well?”) But Yosef is not really asking if his father is still alive. Rather, as the 16th-century Italian commentator Seforno says, Yosef is thinking, אי אפשר שלא מת מדאגתו עלי, it is impossible for my father Ya’aqov not to have died from worrying about me.

Implied in Yosef’s question, הַע֥וֹד אָבִ֖י חָ֑י / ha’od avi ḥai, is the idea that while Ya’aqov may still have been “alive,” he could not possibly have been “living.” That is, he could not appreciate life without his favorite son. His meals must have been tasteless, his relationships with his other family members must have seemed incomplete, his nights sleepless.

There is merely living, and then there is living, in boldface - experiencing life as joyous and meaningful and filled with passion and wholeness and understanding.

In the third act of Our Town, Wilder lays out before us the idea that we do not understand and appreciate the moments of our lives, the day-to-day shuffle, the relationships, the brief interactions we all have as we wander from one day to another. The dead survey the living and ask, “Why don’t they get it? Why do they not appreciate how wonderful life is - what a pleasure to enjoy a sunny day, to converse with friends, to take in all the sensations that surround them?”

One of the dead characters, who in the first two acts had been the conductor of the church choir, puts it bluntly:

That's what it was to be alive. To move about in a cloud of ignorance; to go up and down trampling on the feelings of those about you. To spend and waste time as though you had a million years. To be always at the mercy of one self-centered passion, or another.

It’s a sucker-punch to the gut. The Stage Manager concedes that only “the saints and the poets” might realize the value of life while they live it. And we in the audience are suddenly ashamed - ashamed because we know it’s true. We simply do not have the wherewithal to value what we have, as we muddle through our daily grinds, to understand that someday it will all be gone.

But wait! Maybe Wilder was not entirely correct. Because we, the Jews, have a tool for that job, a ritual device for awareness: Berakhot. Statements of praise.

How do you turn eating an ordinary sandwich into a holy moment, in which you appreciate your food, what it took to bring it to your table and all the people involved in the process? By reciting:

בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה יְ‑יָ אֱ‑לֹהֵינוּ מֶלֶךְ הָעוֹלָם הַמּוֹצִיא לֶחֶם מִן הָאָרֶץ
Barukh attah Adonai, Eloheinu melekh ha’olam, hamotzi leḥem min ha-aretz.
Praised are you, Lord our God, Ruler of the universe, who brings forth bread from the earth.

How do you turn the moment of joy at seeing a rainbow in the sky into a reminder of gratitude for God’s having created the world and maintained it? By saying,

בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה יְ‑יָ אֱ‑לֹהֵינוּ מֶלֶךְ הָעוֹלָם, זוֹכֵר הַבְּרִית וְנֶאֱמָן בִּבְרִיתוֹ וְקַיָּם בְּמַאֲמָרוֹ
Barukh attah Adonai, Eloheinu melekh ha’olam, zokher haberit vene’eman bivrito vekayam bema-amaro.
Praised are you… who remembers the covenant, is faithful to it, and keeps His word.

And how do you turn admiration of incredible people who are filled with wisdom for which ordinary mortals like me yearn (think Einstein, Marie Curie, Stephen Hawking) into an acknowledgment that God occasionally imparts such brilliance to human beings? By saying:

בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה יְ‑יָ אֱ‑לֹהֵינוּ מֶלֶךְ הָעוֹלָם, שֶׁנָתַן מֵחָכְמָתוֹ לְבָשָׂר וָדָם
Barukh attah Adonai, Eloheinu melekh ha’olam, shenatan meḥokhmato levasar vedam.
Praised are you… who distributes His wisdom to flesh and blood.

There are of course berakhot for performing mitzvot, like putting on a tallit or lighting Shabbat or Hanukkah candles. But there are also berakhot for sights, sounds, smells, for traveling, for seeing an old friend, for hearing good news or bad news, for beholding breathtaking sights and being in the presence of a human king or queen. There is a berakhah for seeing trees in bloom, and one for witnessing the restoration of a destroyed synagogue. The one that makes everyone snicker is that which you say after leaving the bathroom, but it’s not a bad idea to be grateful that all your organs still work, don’t you think?

In short, what the framework of berakhot offers is awareness of what we are experiencing right now. Most of us are not saints and poets, but we have many opportunities every day to step away from ourselves and our egos, to take a breath and exhale a note of gratitude for what we feel, what we sense, what we understand. It’s never enough, of course - life is simply too rich to appreciate it all. But if you do this with regularity and intent you may find that your life feels more whole, more grounded. You can find these berakhot in any weekday siddur, as well as on Sefaria. (If you get the Sefaria app, you can easily access these on your phone, so they will be with you 24/6!)

I mentioned earlier that, while it is common to translate the term “berakhah” as a blessing, one of my liturgy professors at the Jewish Theological Seminary, Rabbi Debra Reed-Blank, insisted that this is an inaccurate understanding. When we recite a berakhah, we are not “blessing” anything, not the bread or the rainbow or the wise person, and certainly we would not have the chutzpah to be blessing God.

Rather we are making statements of praise. God, we say, you are praised for giving us all this wonderful stuff, these holy moments, these pleasant scents and lofty vistas. We offer praise for maintaining the holiness in humanity, for compelling us to be filled with gratitude, for the ability to appreciate what we have. Gratitude and praise are intimately intertwined.

One of the joyous Psalms of Hallel includes a line which we sing with gusto on holidays, verses which very much presage the third act of Our Town (Psalm 115:17-18):

לֹא־הַמֵּתִים יְהַלְלוּ־יָ-הּ וְלֹא כָּל־יֹרְדֵי דוּמָה: וַאֲנַֽחְנוּ נְבָרֵךְ יָהּ מֵעַתָּה וְעַד־עוֹלָם הַלְלוּיָה
The dead cannot praise God, nor any who go down into silence. But we will praise God now and forever. Halleluyah!

We who are alive can offer words of praise, and that is a fundamental piece to living Jewishly. Perhaps, when the director of this revival (not a Jew, I think) chose the opening word of the play to be “Shema,” “Listen!”, he was subconsciously telling us, “Listen up, folks, and find this framework of praise through which we make every moment count.”