A Way with Words

Some people have a way with words. The Talmud tells us,

בן זומא ראה אוכלוסא על גב מעלה בהר הבית אמר…ברוך שברא כל אלו לשמשני.

Rabbi Ben Zoma once saw a gathering of Jews while standing on a stair at the Temple Mount. He immediately recited… Blessed is the One who created all these to serve me.

These do sound like audacious, maybe even disdainful words to come from such a sage. Knowing this possibility of interpretation, and wishing to teach, as rabbis do, Ben Zoma explains himself.

הוא היה אומר כמה יגיעות יגע אדם הראשון עד שמצא פת לאכול חרש וזרע וקצר ועמר ודש וזרה וברר וטחן והרקיד ולש ואפה ואח”כ אכל ואני משכים ומוצא כל אלו מתוקנין לפני…כל אומות שוקדות ובאות לפתח ביתי ואני משכים ומוצא כל אלו לפני.

Explaining his custom, he would say: How much effort did Adam the first man exert before he found bread to eat: He plowed, sowed, reaped, sheaved, threshed, winnowed in the wind, separated the grain from the chaff, ground the grain into flour, sifted, kneaded, and baked and only thereafter he ate… And I, on the other hand, wake up and find all of these prepared for me. Members of all nations, merchants and craftsmen, diligently come to the entrance of my home, and I wake up and find all of these things before me (BT B’rakhot 58a, translation from Koren).

There is no disdain here— only deep, heartfelt appreciation for the simple things in his life. On observing a crowd of fellow Israelites, he recognizes them not just as people gathering, making noise, and perhaps distracting him from his Temple experience. He recognizes them as people who all make a difference in his life, in some way, somehow. This shape of thinking results in blessing. Positive thinking results in blessing. And the best part is blessing leads us back to positive thinking.
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Prayer works the same way. Most of us do not believe that God will actively step into history and change the laws of physics on our behalf, just because we prayed hard enough. This is not what I believe prayer to be. I believe that prayer is a vessel towards positive thinking. It is a statement of feeling, but one that frames it in a way that recognizes where we are and moves us to a better place.

Rabbi Harold Kushner teaches, in When Bad Things Happen to Good People,

We can’t pray that God makes our lives free of problems; this won’t happen and it’s probably just as well. We can’t ask God to make us and those we love immune to disease, because God can’t do that. We can’t ask God to weave a magic spell around us so that bad things will only happen to other people and never to us. People who pray for miracles, usually don’t get miracles any more than children who pray for bicycles, good grades, or boyfriends get them as a result of praying. But people who pray for courage, for strength to bear the unbearable, for the grace to remember what they have left instead of what they have lost, very often find their prayers answered. They discover that they have more strength, more courage than they ever know themselves to have.

Sometimes we experience a feeling, and don’t quite know what to make of it, or how to handle it. This is one instance where prayer might come in handy. There is a blessing for almost everything – every experience, and every emotion (and, there’s an app for that (Daily Blessings, by CCAR Press). Let blessings, at home or here at the Temple, bring insight to your thoughts and holiness to your experiences. And just maybe, the next time you look around, you’ll perceive this world in an even more positive light.

Originally published in Temple Emanu-El’s June 2015 edition of Kolaynu.