On Angels, Sinai and Beethoven's Ninth

One of the things that has emerged for me in davening daily in our minyan is a curiosity about both the structure and the content of our prayer service. Paradoxically, there is actually something about the "rote" nature of our daily prayer ritual — what the rabbis term the centuries long ceva of our practice — that provokes a curiosity, a questioning in me…that in turn seems to enhance the kavanna (the intentionality) of my prayer practice.

For a while now, I've been trying to get my prayer head around the blessings that immediately follow the barechu and precede the Ahavah Rabbah…in particular Kedusha Diyeshiva when the angels proclaim God's holiness, but we do not rise ourselves to do so as we do in the Amidah. (Pages 68 thru 73). Rabbi Hammer in Entering Jewish Prayer argues that the three paragraphs of the Shema are not our prayer or supplication to God, but rather our twice daily chance to imagine we are hearing God's voice…literally to HEAR or LISTEN O Israel. Affirming God's love for us in the Ahavah Rabbah expressed through giving us the Torah (which we are about to recite from in the Shema) immediately before the Shema makes sense. But what is the significance of the Yotzer Or prayer and this virtually unimaginable scene where "all the ministering angels…standing in the heavens' highest realms…give voice to the words of the living God…and [having received] upon themselves, from each to each (zeh mi zeh), lovingly give to one another the permission to declare their maker holy?"

On Shavuot morning, I leyned the Aseret HaDibrot, something I'd never done before. As I prepared my psukim starting with Exodus 19:14 in which there's "thunder and lightning and a dense cloud on the mountain and the sound of a ram's horn, intensely loud, and all the people in the camp shook…," I found myself asking myself where else have I read something similar and felt something similar? Who is blowing "the ram's horn [that] grew louder and louder"? And I began to think that the Malachim must have been present at Sinai, just as they are in welcoming and praising God's greatness before we recite the Shema. And that our particularistic revelation at Sinai in which God expresses his love for us through giving us the Torah would not have been possible without the universal revelation of God's creation of the world and humankind.

So for me, perhaps, this is the logic — the reason — underlying the order of our service: everything following the barechu and before the Amidah calls us to imagine God's presence in our individual worlds, a kind of daily revelation before we read the words of Torah that are embodied in the Shema, just as we strive to imagine in our mind's eye "the luminaries you have made, in honor of your name, your principal celestial ones, quaking in holiness…in celebration of your handiwork."

Last summer, Shelley and I were sitting at Caramoor at an incredible performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. As the famous Ode to Joy fugue started with bass cellos, then moved to each instrumental group, then finally exploded in choral voice, I sat spellbound and found myself thinking that this piece of music was a way of imagining the angels and luminaries "quaking in holiness…in celebration of God's handiwork."

It reminded me that sometimes the kavanna that emerges from our prayer is the opposite of an act of understanding of why we say something or why it is here in the service. Our liturgy is also literature…it is also art that can engender the radical amazement that Heschel refers to in his theological works. So when we get to the words of Isaiah's seraphim today "Holy, holy, holy! The Lord of Hosts! His presence fills all the earth!", my imagination may struggle to picture what is happening but I will be shaking my head in radical amazement.