Category: Machzor

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Machzor Blog: The Holy Days? Yup, It’s Time…

CloudsOur congregants usually know a good bit about the link between a Pesach Seder and freedom, that to be in a sukkah is to celebrate the beauty and fragility of our lives in nature, and that we honor bravery and frivolity on Purim, dedication and faith on Chanukah.  When asked about the High Holy Days, most know to focus on what it means to begin again with a New Year, to pray for the future of our world and community, and to do soul searching work in our strivings to try again to hit the mark.

Why is it that on these Holy Days our synagogues are full to overflowing – do they come just to observe the New Year and repent in public?  It is true; they gain strength in connection to one another and find comfort in doing the sacred work with others. I know that many of us lead great worship – but that can’t be the reason so many show up.  The cynic in me could say it’s because they’re “supposed to.”  But I have to believe that some are coming because they are searching for God. 

What kind of God, I don’t know – and perhaps they don’t know either.  But if they might not always articulate it, during the Holy Days our people are looking for a deeper understanding of God.  Our liturgy is certainly focused precisely on God – more so than the other holidays we celebrate; prayer after prayer, kavanah after kavanah, vidui after vidui.  Many of my congregants will tell me that they don’t believe, or that they believe in something more general and of the “spirit” — still they come and sit through hours of recitation, song, and sermon – all of which are focused on God.

What does this mean for us cantors and rabbis?  We often get so caught up in the choreography and the theatre, the seamless cues and flawless singing, the profound yet intimate sermons and reflective iyunim – that we forget that our congregants need tools to find their way to the Divine.  Do we as clergy focus enough on the challenges and opportunities we all have with the God of this liturgy?  Do we give our congregants the tools to dig deep into the realm of belief and faith?

They come to us with questions, even if not openly articulated: If God created this world, on this New Year, why is it so broken?  If God asked Abraham to sacrifice his beloved one, is the pain that I experience in life to be considered a sacrifice as well?  How can I be written into the Book of Life if I do not “believe” in the way I think I’m supposed to believe?  

We, as clergy, always find the timing of the Holy Days difficult (but they’re always right on time) – perhaps our frustration is also with the fact that we don’t have ample time to teach about these Days, to dig deep, to study the rituals and texts, to examine Un’taneh Tokef and B’rosh haShanah yikateivun – how can we live with such a powerful God, and still hear the kol d’ma’ma daka? 

IMG_2568The High Holy Days get lost in the shuffle of summer’s transition into fall.  We should use them as an opportunity to directly engage in a conversation about God, and the new machzor may be the tool with which we can initiate these conversations with our congregations: Conversations about belief, faith, and the different pathways to, and expressions of God in our lives. 

A few years ago Rabbi Rachel Cowan spoke to the Commission for Worship, Music and Religious Living, and reflected on the fact that many congregants don’t feel comfortable talking about God – they assume we, their clergy, have the God thing all figured out and therefore are embarrassed that they don’t and don’t know how to ask us.  Maybe now is the time to begin these conversations using the unique texts of our Machzor as our guide and facilitator.  Let’s begin again.

Cantor Rosalie Boxt is the cantor of DC-area Temple Emanuel in Kensington, Maryland, is the Director of Worship for the 2013 URJ Biennial, serves as a member of the URJ Adjunct Faculty and is on the faculty of Hava Nashira.  She is a past vice-president of the ACC, and serves on the Executive Committee of the URJ Kutz Camp.

Learn more about the new CCAR Machzor.  For more information about participating in piloting, email machzor@ccarnet.org.

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Books Machzor Prayer

Machzor Blog: Waiting All Day for Yizkor

imagesThe hour of the day is late, but the seats in my congregation on Yom Kippur are full.  It is time for Yizkor, and despite the exhaustion and hunger draining us all, everyone is all here.  Many have been waiting all day – some, all year – just for this moment.

When I was a newly ordained rabbi, I had a hard time understanding Yizkor.  I had not experienced death or loss as an adult, thank God, and the power of Yizkor was a mystery to me.  I tried putting on the airs of a knowing wise rabbi, tried to put on my best well-modulated rabbinic voice as I conducted the service, but, honestly, Yizkor was an awkward hour for me.  Today, I can’t say I have any great chochmah about the mysteries of death and mourning much more now, but 15 years later, I do know some of my own losses.  I have sat with many more grieving people, held their loss with them, and shared their pain.  And as I grow older myself, I see the arc of my own life and, more and more, can project how, one day, it will reach its conclusion.  Like the rest of Yom Kippur, Yizkor is our ritual to help us confront our true doubts and fears about life.  As much as ever, we need our Machzor to be an effective tool to help us shape a meaningful Yizkor.

The poetry and readings of Yizkor in the old Gates of Repentance have taught me a great deal.   Their words echo in my mind throughout the year: “Scarcely ushered into life, we begin our journey to the grave…”  “If some messenger were to come to us with the offer that death should be overthrown, but with the condition that birth should also cease…”  “In the rising of the sun and in its going down…”  Gates of Repentance did set the stage for my generation of rabbis by teaching us what Yizkor could mean, how it could affect our lives.

And yet, updates are needed for the new machzor.  The Yizkor of Gates of Repentance (GoR) is crammed too full with words, at least for me.  It feels at times like a dry desert of words, when we need a spiritual pool to immerse in.  It still dwells too much on the martyrdom of the Holocaust, especially at its climactic moments.  The Psalms traditionally found in Yizkor are treated more like obligations than opportunities.  But music is critically important to the power of Yizkor.  The occasions for music in the GoR are almost all from the Classical, composed set, and very formal.   Elegant though they are, I believe today’s congregations appreciate more contemporary music, or music that is paired-down, even at Yizkor, and it would be helpful to have texts that facilitate this kind of music.  I fell in love with the Carlebach “HaNeshamah Lach” in GoR (page 485), and I thirst for more musical opportunities like this in the new Mishkan HaNefesh (the new machzor).  We might even ask:  Can the pages of a machzor encourage the use of niggunim?

IMG_4107Another note: The 23rd Psalm presents its own challenges, because the King James language is so well-known and beloved, but gendered, and the more modern gender-neutral versions are so clumsy (including, in my opinion, the recent attempts by the CCAR).   Leading a recent shiva minyan from Mishkan T’filah for a House of Mourning, I encountered quizzical looks and puzzled faces when we reached the new translation of the 23rd Psalm; the spell of the moment was broken by its awkwardness.  (“Where did ‘the valley of the Shadow of Death’ go?” one person wondered, let down by the new language.)

But the best words I speak on Yom Kippur are at Yizkor when I am simply silent, and just sit down.  A few years ago, I found instructions for a guided meditation at Yizkor that invites the congregation to re-experience their lost ones again, asking them to hear their voices, feel their touch, imagine the words they would share were they to encounter them once again.  We need the white space on the page to offer this experience at Yizkor.  More important than the words of prayer, the Machzor can facilitate our true experience of prayer.

Grief is very often accompanied by intense loneliness.  Sometimes on Yizkor I think the members of our congregations experience it in isolation, even in a crowded Sanctuary.  Our Conservative colleague Rabbi Harold Kushner writes that “the primary message of the twenty-third Psalm is not that bad things will not happen to us.  It is that we will never have to face those bad things alone, ‘for Thou art with me.’”  Although each person’s loss is personal and unique, often beyond expression, if the new Machzor could somehow build bridges among us all during Yizkor, and if it could help us feel that indeed we are not all alone, we would all be stronger.

Rabbi Andy Vogel is the rabbi at Temple Sinai in Brookline, MA, a 300-family congregation.  He was ordained at HUC-JIR in New York in 1998, and is a member of the Machzor poetry committee.

Learn more about the new CCAR Machzor.  For more information about participating in piloting, email machzor@ccarnet.org.

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General CCAR Machzor Prayer Rabbis

Machzor Blog: Am I Really This Bad? Am I Really This Good?

Once, while prepping for the High Holy Days at a student pulpit, I had the following conversation with a well-meaning cantorial soloist:IMG_0361

“I want to write a new melody for Unetaneh Tokef,” the soloist began. “It’s such a dirge!”

“Well, actually,” I said. “This prayer is about God sitting on the Throne of Glory, deciding who shall live and who shall die.”

“Oh,” the soloist said. “I guess that’s okay then.”

In that moment I realized, not only the importance of educating our lay-leaders, but also our own reluctance to say or do anything in the synagogue that might drive people further away from Jewish life. This is particularly challenging during the High Holy Days, when we are supposed to be engaged in rigorous self-examination.

Given that the High Holy Days are also that small window in the Jewish calendar when we have our community’s undivided attention, both clergy and laypeople are uncomfortable with the discomfort that the liturgy of the High Holy Days is supposed to arouse. However, I firmly believe that the season of cheshbon hanefesh and the call to teshuva are also part of Judaism’s balanced spiritual diet.

Strangely enough, one of my primary concerns during my involvement in the creation of Mishkan HaNefesh has been limiting the discomfort of a new machzor. Given the steep learning curve my congregants encountered with Mishkan T’filah in weekly Shabbat worship, I am concerned with how they will adjust to a new format when they only use it twice each year. As a member of the Alternative Readings Sub-Committee, I sought out texts that were thought-provoking but also “readable.” Our congregation’s pilot group was vigilant about pointing out sections that were difficult to follow.

However, if our mission is really to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable,” we need to retain some of the spiritual discomfort that is endemic to the Days of Awe, so that we might strike a balance between recognizing our flaws and realizing our potential.

The tension between these two elements is beautifully played out in the Vidui in the new Kol Nidre service. As we recited the short confession, my pilot group noticed the shift from the more abstract, “Some of us kept grudges, were lustful, malicious or narrow-minded,”  (Gates of Repentance p. 269), to the harsher, more specific “We corrupt. We commit crimes. .. We are immoral. We kill” (Mishkan HaNefesh Kol Nidre draft p. 45a). Some worshippers were actually offended by the direct accusation of crimes they did not commit.

“Why does it say, ‘We kill,’” one man said. “I don’t kill!”

Just as jarring was the iyyun (reading) encouraging us to praise ourselves al ha-tikkun she-tikanu l’fanecha (for the acts of healing we have done). Set up like the al cheyt, this reading states lists a number of acts of tikkun olam we may have committed in addition to our sins,  “For the healing acts by which we bring You into the world, the acts of repair that make You a living presence in our lives” (p. 49b).

It is a brilliant and beautiful reading, but for us it was just as spiritually troubling as the Al Cheyt. Just as we didn’t like being accused of wrongdoings we had not done, we didn’t want pat ourselves on the back for righteous acts we had failed to do. We felt that the reading should be written in a tense that made it sound aspirational rather than congratulatory. In a way, however, this text also allowed us to engage in cheshbon ha-nefesh, serving as a reminder of all we may have failed to do on that list!

Engaging with this Machzor in its formative state was an incredible opportunity to think about the messages we need to hear—or are uncomfortable hearing—during the High Holy Day season in order to inspire us to perform teshuva. Both the confessional texts and the congratulatory texts allowed us to ask ourselves the same essential questions: “Am I really this bad?” “Am I really this good?”

It also made me think about the messages my congregants hear from the pulpit. I’m told that rabbis give the same High Holy Day sermon, over and over again. I’ve realized that mine is not “you are good” or “you are bad,” but “you can change.”

Leah Rachel Berkowitz is the Associate Rabbi at Judea Reform Congregation in Durham, NC.

She served on the Alternative Readings Sub-Committee of the Machzor Committee. She blogs at thisiswhatarabbilookslike.wordpress.com.