How I came to say בְּרָכוֹת every day, and the seduction of theistic language

[lethargic_man]

Eight years ago I never uttered בְּרָכוֹת (benedictions) outside of synagogue or festive meals on Shabbos or yomtov. Within about five years, I was saying בְּרָכוֹת many times a day, and davening a minimum of once a day too. I don't think I've ever blogged about how this happened, or the insidious theistical shift it resulted in in me without my even realising it at the time.

The first בְּרָכוֹת I started saying were those on food. Nowadays, we take so much of the food we eat for granted. In previous days, a failed harvest would have meant really tightening the belt; multiple failed harvests would have meant mass starvation and death. Artificial fertiliser and global markets have brought an end to that: if harvests fail in one part of the world, prices merely go up a little.

But we should not allow this to make us blasé. We still are dependent on the proper functioning of the natural world. There's a novel by John Christopher called The Death of Grass (or No Blade of Grass in Vespuccia) about a virus which kills grasses. No more rice, no more wheat or barley. As the virus spreads around the world, countries turn to potato farming... but do so too late, and civilisation collapses. I originally read this novel as science fiction as a child, without being greatly moved by it; it was only much later that I realised the scenario depicted in it is scarily possible. Think about the rise of HIV in our lifetime, and how prevalent that is, and yet still completely uncurable many years later—and that is a not strongly virulent virus.

So I came to wish to express gratitude for the food I eat. And the way to do that, for me as a Jew, is to say בְּרָכוֹת over it—it's the way my culture expresses this gratitude. Actually, this was not a forgone conclusion for me. I thought a little bit before I started about how I might wish to express this gratitude; and came to the conclusion I wished to do so orally. I would have felt foolish saying something in English, so came up with my own formulations in Hebrew, but after a little while switched to using the traditional בְּרָכוֹת. As Rabbi Dr Louis Jacobs once said (possibly misquoted), "I don't put on tefillin because God commanded it; I put on tefillin because that is the language of worship of my ancestors." So it was for me. And Reconstructionist^* thinking allowed me to square that with worries about my integrity in praying to a God I wasn't sure I believed in. (I describe myself as a meta-agnostic: I'm not sure whether I'm agnostic or not.)

* Reconstructionism is a form of Judaism, founded by Mordecai Kaplan in the United States, that keeps the ritual and throws away the traditional idea of God. The Cabbalists talk about God as אֵין סוֹף, the Infinite, a being with whom mere mortals can have no relation or connection. What humans can connect to in Cabbalism (a field which, as a rationalist, I otherwise have no truck) is the Divine Attributes, such as Mercy, Justice, Lovingkindness, etc. The Reconstructionists' view is similar, only they throw away the concept of God אֵין סוֹף, and consider G-d as the spiritual energy that emerges from within a community. (Thus, rather than God making Man in God's image, they make God in the image of what they aspire to.)

Thus, it didn't strictly matter to me whether this gratitude for my food was expressed to a traditional God or not. What's important is that I express the gratitude, and do so in a way continuing yet also adapting the tradition of my ancestors. (This is, of course, how all streams of Judaism work: reinterpreting the religion for each new generation. They only differ in how much reinterpretation they do.)

Having started to say בְּרָכוֹת over food, I similarly started saying the benediction אֲשֶׁר יָצַר after going to the toilet, because I am grateful my body works—having friends who have Crohn's Disease, and so forth, the correct functioning of my body is something I felt I should not take for granted.

From there the next step was to start saying בִּרְכוֹת הַשַּׁחַר, the blessings one says first thing in the morning, which include gratefulness that one has had one's soul, and one's sight, restored to one (i.e. not died or gone blind in one's sleep), etc. Originally I started saying a subset of בִּרְכוֹת הַשַּׁחַר, and gradually expanded towards all of the blessing (but not the study passages, barring the initial one of the Priestly Blessing).

Since this constituted the start of שַׁחֲרִית, it led me on into saying bit by bit more of שַׁחֲרִית: the שְׁמַע and its בְּרָכוֹת (using the extremely cut-down version of the first one found in the earliest siddurim for use when davening בְּיָחִיד), then an (almost) halachically minimal version of פְּסוּקֵי דְּזִמְרָה beforehand (בָּרוּךְ שֶׁאָמַר, ‎ אַשְׁרֵי, Psalm 150, and יִשְׁתַּבַּח), then the עֲמִידָה with הַבִינֵנוּ at weekends, and צָרְכֵּי עַמְךָ on weekdays, and finally עָלֵינוּ.

What I didn't realise until some time after I'd been saying all this is that without realising it I'd been seduced into using theistic language. I consider myself a deist: I believe God is to be found through ratiocination, not revelation, but I also hold views that, though not tightly bound to deism, often go along with it: that God does not intervene in the running of the universe—or, at best, does so very subtly indeed. (I cannot square any other possibility with the fact of what's happened over history to my people; or at least not without resigning the axioms of God's omnipotence or benevolence, which are more deeply ingrained in me still.) And yet by praying the traditional Jewish prayers, I'd been inveigled into using theistic language in my prayers.

I suppose for me it wasn't such a big deal, given that I used this language whilst davening in shul on Shabbos anyway, but it was a bit of a shock to me to realise it. The problem is that the traditional Jewish liturgy is very highly theistical; it doesn't really hold a space for non-theistical language. (Some prayers can be rendered non-theistical through creative translation—there's a wonderful non-theistical translation of אֲשֶׁר יָצַר on the wall of the toilet of (the London) Moishe House—but this definitely does not go for all prayers.)

[ETA: Once again, a discussion around this post seems to be taking place on Facebook rather than LJ or DW; follow this link to participate in it.]