Ki eyn banu ma’asim – Even though our actions may have no merit -

Asy imanu tzedaka vahesed – deal with us through your supremely loving ways

Why do we say these words, or sing them, with such fervor, on Rosh Hashanah? And what are we called to do with them?

Despite the fact that we seem to be saying something negative about ourselves, through these words, and others we say during this time of year, we are opening ourselves up to finding joy in tragedy, light in shadow, and hopefulness in the face of hope’s absence.

We are not the first generation to question certain aspects of the High Holiday liturgy. Jacob ben Wolf Kranz, a famed 18th century preacher known as The Maggid of Dubno questioned why we say such a seemingly negative phrase and others like it, during our HH prayer-fests. “If we want to approach God for mercy, why do we introduce our petitions by announcing that we have done no good deeds? Aren’t we putting our worst foot forward, and creating a bad impression? At least let us enumerate before God some of our mitzvahs and good deeds that we have performed during the past year!”

In the spirit of the Maggid of Dubno, our own member Bill Marker raises a similar question with me most years, at this time, with regard to the Vidui, or confessional section of the Yom Kippur liturgy. Why is our focus negative, he asks? Wouldn’t it be more salutary to provide a positive review of the past year?

The human condition …

and here I attempt to offer you the fulsomeness, the richness of the ellipses on my page. The human condition… sometimes, a concept or thought is best represented in this way. A similar uncompleted thought was canonized in the 27th Psalm, the plaintive Psalm for Elul, the month of preparation for the Days of Awe. We continue reading and singing this psalm through these next ten days, and it offers, if not an answer about the human condition, at least a critical framework for guiding us through our teshuvah, our work of reviewing and renewing ourselves.

The phrases with sing in this psalm are lovely, but I want to draw your attention to the closing verses, which are traditionally chanted at the close of the psalm’s private recitation in services. The penultimate verse of the psalm reads: Were it not for my belief that I’ll behold God’s goodness in the land of living ….

The sentence, the thought, is never completed. Yet the next verse, the last one of the psalm, declares: Hope for Adonay, have strength and courage in your heart; and hope for Adonay.

In the ellipses, the psalm wants us to see hope. Yet most often, in the ellipses of despair, we take in its opposite. The spaces in life’s stories are often filled with unbidden or unfair challenges, and, as the news often grimly bears witness, unspeakable terror.

Let me reprise a passage from the story we heard earlier:

“Elder Bob, how do you have so much hope?”

Elder Bob began to tell his story of a life languishing, and then stopped, and removed his sunglasses, his gesture the equivalent of the psalmist’s ellipses.

“We fill our heads with nonsense,” he picked up. “And we spend the rest of our days unlearning it all. Finally we realize what we knew at the instant of our birth: that every moment, every drop of water, every single breath we take is precious.”

As Elul unfolded, I read a different version of this story in the painful reporting on the tragedy of Middle School # 1 in Beslan, Russia.

One young survivor of this vastly unspeakable horror, in which hundreds of children and their teachers and caregivers died or were terribly injured, spoke while being cared for by his family. Asamaz Bekoyev, age 11, escaped, along with his brother and mother, and described a harrowing tale culminating in their terrifying scramble to freedom from the chaos of explosions and shooting.

He laid in bed, wincing from the traditional medicines being applied to his burns by his aunt, Zalina Basiyeva. And as she rubbed filament of eggshell to his wounds, she said that everything the people of her town thought they knew had changed. Said Aunt Zalina: “We never knew how happy we were.”

Every drop of water; every single breath; every moment with a loved one. The insights of Elder Bob and Aunt Zalina are simple yet significant, and hard to take in. We want to rail against circumstance, fate, wrong values, right choices gone awry, anything and everything that seems to stand in the way of hopefulness, and seems to lead us to despair

Yet here we are, guided through the preceding month, and now these ten days, with the words of Hope offered by the Psalm, punctuated with its ellipses.

I invite you to see it as fitting and proper for us to begin our year, to weave through our Elul and Tishrey prayers, with the acknowledgement that our things, our accomplishments, what we have and what we thought meant everything, is rather: eyn banu ma’asim, without weight, or merit, on the balance scales of Hope.

Our expectation of righteousness cannot be balanced, or measured, on the scales of deeds. Neither our acts nor our prayers are a guarantee of hesed, of loving mercy. Our private acts of love and caring, our public works of tzedakah and gemilut hasadim, of tikkun olam and caring for community, not even these can avert tragedy, or prevent us, or those we love and know, from being hurt or left bereft.

It is not what we do that “counts” in the realm of deserving blessing, or tzedakah vahesed, the gift we beseech from Avinu Malkeynu. This loving, unconditional gift is ours for the taking. We all deserve it. And we all must make room for it, account for it, and acknowledge it, daily, in our lives.

The Maggid of Dubno tells a tale, one of many parables he used to punctuate his sermons, to respond to his own question about why not announce our good deeds of the past year while petitioning for mercy:

A poor man was in desperate need of a coat with which to shield himself against the bitter cold. He went from door to door collecting money so he could purchase enough material to make a coat. When he estimated that he had collected sufficient money he went with his son to the dry-goods store to buy the material. Explaining his dire circumstances and abject poverty to the kin-looking store owner, he begged him to give him the material without charge. The store owner took pity on him and readily gave the poor man the necessary cloth at no cost. The poor man took the cloth, reached into his pockets, and gave the store owner the money he had collected. Then he immediately turned and left.

On the way home his puzzled son asked: “Father, if you intended all along to pay for the cloth why did you ask the owner to give it to you for nothing?”

The man replied: “I was afraid that the money I had collected wasn’t really enough to pay for the actual cost of the material. So I asked the owner to be kind enough to give it to me for nothing. Once he generously consented to do this and was expecting no payment, any money which I gave him would please him and be acceptable to him even if it wasn’t an amount equal to the true value of the goods he sold me.”

“So it is with us,” said the Maggid. “Who can honestly say the he has performed and collected enough mitzvahs and good deeds with which to pay for all the kindness that the Almighty has bestowed upon us throughout the year? We come, therefore, to ask God for mercy for the coming year, but we offer nothing, hoping and praying that in God’s generosity and charity we will once again be bestowed with blessings. Then we can tell of the few good deeds, mitzvahs and acts of charity we have performed. In this way, even the little that we offer we hope will be pleasing. And we pray for the same kindness and blessings for the coming year.”

(Ohel Yaakov, in The New Rosh Hashanah Anthology, pp. 150-152)

So it is, with us. We want our ellipses filled, our pleas responded to in the face of incomprehension and unfairness, and we want what we hold as valuable to be valued thus, unconditionally, by all.

And the best form of “payment” we can offer is to hope, to replace hopelessness with hopefulness, to fill in the blanks with appreciation, acknowledgment, and just plain satisfaction.

Tomorrow when I speak with you again, I’ll take up the challenge of satisfaction by addressing the Paradox, and Power, of Choice. For this moment, I leave you with a message about blessing from a colleague, Rabbi Nancy Wechsler-Azen. Though I knew her as a pulpit rabbi in Toronto, Rabbi Wechsler-Azen started out as a cantorial student in New York, when, one day, she was struck by a taxi while walking on a crosswalk, and endured fifteen operations to remold her face.

She writes: “Although we cannot know why some people face tragedy in their life while others seem to walk away unscathed, what we do know is that our life has meaning. There is a purpose for our being alive in this very moment. We are called by God to be a blessing at this moment. That is why Judaism teaches us to take our life and bring meaning to it. Not for any reward, but rather that is the artistry we are summoned to create.”

Rabbi Wechsler-Azen’s message on blessing highlights the essence of the messages from Elder Bob and Aunt Zalina, and draws out the meaning of the ellipses in our psalm. Have Hope. Know what is precious. And know that you deserve loving-kindness and blessing, this moment, this year, and through all your days.

Shana tova umetuka – May your year be filled with sweetness.