Guest Rabbi Dr. Laura Lieber
In multiple places in the Torah, God says “please” (na) to human beings: God asks Abraham to “please” sacrifice Isaac in Gen. 22; He asks Moses to “please” ask the Israelites to despoil the Egyptians in Exod. 11; and in Num. 12, God asks the Israelites—in what seems to be a tone of utter exasperation—to “please listen.” In case you think that God is above having to ask nicely, the Rabbis assure us: “‘Na’ is nothing if not the language of a request”—that is, the Hebrew word “na” means “please.” God may not have to ask nicely, but maybe it isn’t a matter of “must” but “ought to” but setting a good example. I can almost hear Moses asking, “What’s the magic word?” Because frankly, sometimes what God asks of people—leave everything you’ve ever known, sacrifice your first born, trust Me—is a lot. It can’t hurt to be polite. And in truth, “na” is about more than just good manners. Very little of what happens in the Torah can be classified as politesse.
I have been thinking about this little word—na—a lot lately. It is only two letters in Hebrew (נא), a syllable a toddler can babble. It is a word that conveys inchoate want. The English word “please” is, likewise, deeply evocative because it is so unspecified. It is the word that I can pour all my hopes and terrors into. It contains the ineffable: feeling I can’t put to words and faces whose names I hold in my heart, memories I treasure and dreams I have lost, secret wishes unready to share and courageous ambitions needing everyone’s support. All come together in that single syllable: please. Na. A sense of wanting, longing, from deep within our souls. It rises from our lips, or our hearts, and seeks…something—a response? Maybe. An answer? We might not even know what that would look like. All we may know is that we are not quite enough all by ourselves, and we know what we have been told since we were little children is “the magic word”: please.
In the Jewish calendar, the spring is a season full of holidays, and full of prayers. We have Passover, “the season of our freedom,” when we celebrate not only our ancestors’ escape from bondage but our own. And while often this has been understood as a metaphorical journey—how we are bound by our materialism and our ambitions, enslaved to our insecurities or our possessions—this year, many of us are haunted by the knowledge that there are Jews in genuine captivity, and Israel in the midst of war, and we find it hard to lift our voices in songs of Thanksgiving knowing that our redemption is so incomplete. Others may feel anxiety closer to home, or seek in Passover a refuge from all this turmoil.
Nor is Passover the only holiday in the Spring. Following Passover is a cycle of three Israeli holidays, often observed in the US, especially since 1968: Yom ha-Shoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day), Yom ha-Zikaron (Israel Memorial Day), and Yom ha-Atzma’ut (Israel Independence Day). This triad creates a powerful statement: the first, Yom ha-Shoah, takes its date from the start of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, a courageous but doomed rebellion against the Nazis, and is observed by the haunting sound of a siren and then utter stillness as minutes of silence fall across the usually busy, bustling cities of Israel; Yom ha-Zikaron is most powerfully observed in Israeli high schools, where fallen classmates are recalled by their peers in ceremonies that underscore how every community has been touched by the cost of war; and Yom ha-Atzma’ut, the day after Yom ha-Zikaron, is celebrated with picnics, hikes, parades, and not infrequently, protests, as what better way to celebrate living in democracy than making use of the rights it gives you, and demanding that it do (what you judge to be) better?
For each of these holidays, rabbis composed various prayers. Passover, by far the most ancient festival, has accrued the most elaborate liturgical infrastructure, with the Haggadah as well as festival inserts in the regular prayer services, and the special scroll (the Song of Songs), and an abundance of rituals and customs. Indeed, the rituals for Passover can be so exacting (and exhausting) for some that the Rabbis created the prayer bittul chametz (the nullification of leavening) simply so that when the time came, people could perform a ritual that says, “I have done my best; it is good enough.” (I would note, as an aside, this is a useful ritual to keep in mind for other times of the year…) But while the other holidays are all new—less than a century old—modern rabbis have written liturgies for them, as well, so that we would have words to say when we come together as communities to mark these sacred occasions. We are Jews. We don’t like to improvise.
Yet, with everything going on in the world today—close to home and overseas—sometimes the carefully crafted prayers say more than I can process. Instead, if I make it to services, it is because of some sense that “I want.” I want community. I want presence. I can’t even articulate what I want; all I can say is, na—please. Our liturgy is organized, crafted, and elegant—it is the essence of qeva, the fixed “vessel” of prayer; this “please” is a blunderbuss, a crazy kaleidoscope of hopes and anxieties—and this is kavvanah, the spirit that has to fill that vessel. I imagine all my petty fears and giant terrors pouring into the world “please,” seasoned with sparks of gratitude and hope. I often go to a weekday minyan here, and as I read the nineteen blessings that constitute the weekday silent Amidah, I hover over the theme of each blessing and think, “Please” as I contemplate myself, the state of my family and community, the environment, our politics, Israel. I feel an urge to toss it all back at God and then remind myself that I have my part to do, but I need more energy to do it, and so I say, “Please.” Make it so, God, make it so. Please let the world work this way someday, because it doesn’t now. Some days, I feel especially fervent about the prayers that speak to remedying my own flaws; but some days, I admit, I am really glad there is a prayer in Judaism which assures us God will smite our enemies—some days, that one gets an extra emphatic, “Please.”
As a rabbi, particularly a rabbi who has written books about the history and practice of Jewish liturgy, I appreciate the prayerbook in ways that regular people may not—I mean, I really like to “spot the acrostic” during the High Holidays—but that isn’t necessarily a good thing, that’s just a statement of fact. But know that when I encourage you to “pray using the words on the page or the inspiration of your heart,” if you focus on all of your complicated needs and hopes and wants and shove all of that into the silent, heartfelt “please,” that is just as legitimate as anything more conventionally eloquent. When Moses’ sister Miriam was afflicted with a skin disease in Num. 12, he uttered an almost incantantional prayer: “El na refa na la”—“God, please, heal her, please.” Five words, two of them “please”; eleven letters, four of them “please.” Moses, capable of speaking the entire book of Deuteronomy, here speaks like the stutter he once claimed to go. But God listened. God’s children are following the divine example.
All of this is to say, don’t worry if you don’t know all the words, or all the rules. In the Jewish tradition, God says please, and people have a blessing for “I tried my best.” There are always ways to be “extra” for the over-achievers, but for the rest of us, the essence is in being present. Judaism does not promise that our prayers will be answered—even God learns that you can asks nicely but the Israelites still won’t obey—but when we come together, for Passover seder, for Friday night services, for community projects, and Talmud Torah, on all of these occasions when we recite a blessing and say a prayer, and we can stand in those moments and know that we are not alone in what what we wish for. And when the service is concluded, we are with the community that will, if we ask them, likely join us in helping turn that desire into a wish fulfilled.
Please have a happy and sweet Passover!