June 4, 2009
I can think of no greater godsend than to know that we are blessed: not privileged, singled out, or even commanded — none of these conveys the fullness of blessing. No dictionary parallel adequately grasps what blessing is. There just are no synonyms. I like Lady Bird Johnson’s down-home definition: A blessing is “whatever we would most like to live with.”
Given the uniqueness of blessing, it is odd to find how rarely books about God accent God’s role as a “blesser” — not just because the English is wooden. The Hebrew isn’t, and we could translate it felicitously if we wanted to: “the One who blesses” perhaps. More commonly, God is discussed as creator (of everything), lover (of Israel), commander (of mitzvot), deliverer (from Egypt), “bringer forth” (of bread from the earth) — lots of things, but only rarely as “blesser,” the being who distributes blessing among earth’s creatures. Why not?
It cannot be that Jews did not think of God as a blesser. Indeed, God repeatedly blesses our biblical ancestors — most obviously, Abraham (Genesis 12:2): “I will make you a great nation; I will bless you, I will magnify your name, and you shall be a blessing.” Later too (22:17), God says, “I will bestow my blessing upon you and make your descendants as numerous as the stars of heaven and the sands on the seashore…. All the nations of the earth shall bless themselves by your descendants.” Of Sarah too, God promises, “I will bless her; I will give you a son by her.” Yet when we think about God, we focus on what God blesses us with, not the act of blessing itself. Why is that?
The reason is simple. God is no longer in the blessing business, so to speak — God has transferred that business to us.
That reasoning arises from Ba’al Haturim’s commentary on God’s first blessing to Abraham. It contains three terms, he notes, “I will make you a great nation; I will bless you; I will magnify your name.” The number three, he says, is intended to anticipate the three phrases of the priestly blessing in this week’s sedra. Something has happened between the time of Abraham and the priests. In the interim, God entrusted blessing to human agents.
At first, it was just the patriarchs, exactly as God promised Abraham: “You shall be a blessing.” The other patriarchs too have this magical power: Think of Isaac blessing Jacob, and Jacob later blessing his own children. By the time of Aaron, the capacity to bless is extended further, from extraordinary individuals to the priests as a class — again in fulfillment of God’s words to Abraham, this time in the second blessing: “All the nations of the earth shall bless themselves by your descendants.”
How interesting, then, to read about a difference, once upon a time, on the subject of who counts as these descendants. The priestly blessing occurs in the reader’s repetition of the daily Amida. In Eretz Yisrael, only priestly leaders of prayer were allowed to utter it. In Babylonia, any prayer leader could, and the Babylonian tradition became our own. The authority to bless has spread from God, to the patriarchs, to the priests — and now to everyone.
It seems, at times, that we are not very good at it, not if you think we can guarantee such things as riches and relationships or happiness and health. Those are beyond our power to bestow. But the fact is, the priestly blessing offers very little in the way of concrete results. It prays only that God care enough about us to hold us dear, (“May God bless you and keep you”); that, holding us dear, God will be present to us (“May God’s face be turned to you”); that, being present to us, we will know God’s love (“God be gracious to you”); and that by experiencing this relationship with God, we will know peace (“God grant you peace”).
I have pondered the bareness of this blessing when visiting the hospital, embracing victims of tragedy, and enduring my own moments of pain. God’s plan for the universe, apparently, was to turn it over to us, and we are still figuring out how to handle it. The priestly blessing promises that, even as we learn that a divine force in the universe holds us dear, accompanies us, and loves us. Whatever our earthly lot at the time, if we sense that certainty, we will find peace. Lady Bird Johnson had it right. God’s care, presence, and love are indeed the things I would “most like to live with” — as well, of course, as what they guarantee: shalom, “peace.”
Rabbi Lawrence Hoffman, cofounder of Synagogue 3000, is the Barbara and Stephen Friedman Professor of Liturgy, Worship, and Ritual at the Hebrew Union College in New York. He is the coeditor, with David Arnow, of My People’s Passover Haggadah: Traditional Texts, Modern Commentaries (Jewish Lights).
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