My Talmud class has been going for almost 40 years; it’s been a stable feature throughout my rabbinate, ‘Thursday mornings at 9.30,’ and I love it. Luckily, many of the participants love it too, and some have been there for all, or almost all, that time.
As anyone who studies Talmud knows, some passages are difficult, some are intense with a logic hard to unpick, some are morally inspiring, some are ethically challenging, lots are full of issues we still struggle with today, some spring straight from the page to the heart, and some are simply beautiful.
It was such a section that we hit upon yesterday, Berachot 16b – 17a, a daf, or page, about peace and hope which we fortuitously arrived at on the anniversary of VE Day, and amidst the troubles that beset our people and our world. The passage consists of the supplications that rabbis of the Talmud would add after they had completed their amidah, their obligatory communal prayer. Their words reach out to us across almost two millennia because what they longed for then, we long for too today.
Rabbi Elazar used to say: ‘Our God, may it be your will to cause love, fellowship, peace and friendship to dwell wherever we are apportioned.’ Perhaps even then communities were known for their fractiousness. Or maybe, as I prefer to believe, Rabbi Elazar was only reflecting back to God the comradely reality he experienced around him, together with the wish that it should continue thus.
He adds a stirring thought which none of the other rabbis include in quite the same way: ‘May our heart, when we rise in the morning, be filled with longing to experience awe before your name [and presence].’ Sometimes, when the alarm goes off, one gets up still weary, with a headache, not quite all there, or anxious. But on certain mornings, as dawn breaks a deep sense of wonder fills one’s spirit, as if, as the Zohar puts it, one’s soul had been taken by God on a visit to the Garden of Eden in the night.
Rabbi Yochanan’s prayer is more down to earth. He beseeches heaven to take note of how grim human life and the lot of the Jewish People can be, and calls on God ‘to clothe yourself in your mercy, garb yourself in your might, cover yourself in your loving kindness, gird yourself with your graciousness, and summon your qualities of goodness and humility.’ It’s as if there’s a conflict even within God: be tough with the world, or gentle and forbearing? Be kind to us, God, Rabbi Yochanan pleads, just as one’s partner might say during a bad patch: ‘I just need you to be nice to me today.’
Rabbi Chiya’s prayer is different again: ‘May it be your will, God, that your Torah be our occupation and that our hearts don’t become depressed or our vision darkened.’ Those words are so simple, and so close to the bone: Down here on earth it’s hard to keep our spirits up, so help us maintain a sense of hope and purpose and guide us in your Torah’s laws of justice and compassion.
‘What’s the take-away?’ one of the participants asked me after we had studied those prayers. Part of me wanted to answer, ‘Plus ca change! It was the same old world back then as it is now.’
But there’s a better response. Those teachers, immersed in Torah, well understood the challenges of the human condition and faced their difficulties with honesty, courage, and the hope that, somehow, the world would be guided by God in the direction of harmony and compassion.
That’s why their supplications speak to us today, not just as if they were, but because they truly are, our own.