For Hanukkah / Thanksgiving from Reb Zalman

Dear Friends: The following is transcribed from Reb Zalman’s talk last week at Nevei Kodesh, which was also broadcast on the internet (and is still available for download). In it, Reb Zalman references the updating of liturgy which has happened as part of Jewish Renewal in our time:

“Very soon we are going to have Thanksgiving and when you sit after you eat a wonderful meal, you really need to do THANKS-giving and do birkhat hamazon and bentsch afterwards.

“In Birkat Hamazon, we include on special holidays Yaaleh v’yavo to say, ‘And we thank you,’ for Pesach, Shavuot, Sukkot, for Rosh Chodesh; sometimes we say we thank you for Hanukkah, for Purim.

“So, I wrote one, ‘I thank You’ for Thanksgiving and it would be good to have it when you have a Thanksgiving dinner so you can really do the bentschen including that which has become for us a source of THANKSgiving.”

And here are links to the updates Reb Zalman has provided:

For Hanukkah: על הניסים / Al Hanissim and מעוז צור / Maoz Tzur

For Thanksgiving: a Birkhat Hamazon insert and an Amidah Insert

In addition, here is a transcription of a portion of Reb Zalman’s talk from last week, (good yom tov!):

Thank you, Nevei Kodesh! You give me an opportunity to witness:

It was last week that I was able to give you the witness of how I understand where we came from. At the end of the time I didn’t have a chance to speak enough about where we are today so I need to begin with where we are today, what is our achievement and what do we look forward to.

So many of the things that we have engendered are already being emulated, copied, redone, (as it were), by other people.

I have to begin with a witness about davenology:

How did I get to that? I had a congregation in New Bedford, Massachussetts, and I had to do some things with people in English. And as I was doing that, I felt that the dry way of reciting was too Episcopalian for me: “Grant, oh Lord, that we may lie down in peace secure in Thy protecting love.” It’s wonderful language but it wasn’t fully alive.

In order to be able to lead the people in the davennen, I had to, myself, davven in English. You know what I mean? Up until then, I had always davvened in Hebrew. But [I needed to explore], what did it really feel like, not to conduct services, but to actually davven in English?

And it wasn’t too long that I began to use melodies along with the English and then I brought this to the people and they got it, that you could still, even if you can’t read Hebrew and you don’t understand what it says, you can still wrap yourself in a tallis, and you can still say those things with a bit of a melody and with kavvanah, with feeling.

As result of those things, I recorded a morning service with Hebrew on one channel and English on the other channel. Those of you, who have ever had it, felt that this was helping them. The left ear was with the Hebrew going to the right hemisphere and the right ear was with the Hebrew going to the left hemisphere and  if you hear that at the same time, both in Hebrew and in English, it creates something in your mind that you [will find helpful].

Well, how did I get to do that, [how did I figure that would be useful to people? The answer is] because I did it myself. When I was saying the English, I could see the words in Hebrew also at the same time and I could put in the feelings that those words demanded.

That led me to updating liturgy and when you update liturgy there are certain things that you don’t feel like saying. One would come out like this: “Dear God, will you please rebuild the temple so we can offer You the sacrifices we used to offer in the past?” I didn’t want to see a slaughterhouse in Jerusalem in that place anymore; animal sacrifices wasn’t it.  So, then, changing the words: Once we began to change the words so that they should have meaning, so that we would pray for the temple in which we would want to worship together with other people, “For my house shall be called a house prayer for all people.” That’s so wonderful, it’s an important way to envision that Temple.

So the liturgy had to be updated and along with it, also, there had to be gender equalizing. Oy! The many things we tried to do, and none of them really worked. It feels always so forced because Hebrew is a gendered language and despite the fact that we know that in prayer we are addressing the sh’chinah and there’s a sort of feminine [association with it], how will this be expressed?

So we did what we could and I think it’s not bad what we have but it’s not finished. The Shalshelet / chain from generation to generation really will need another way doing better what we did. We created some good siddurim in which we made those changes. And Reb Daniel Siegel did a remarkable Siddur and we have that weekday siddur that some of you have begun to use in English and I wish that you would know more about that because that happens to be the DAILY connection logging in as it were; the whole day is different when you have something to do in the morning and later on in the evening again.

In the Siddur, we did something else: The name yod heh vav heh must not be pronounced by us. So what did we do? We always started to say, “Adonay” and that came about because the Septuagint translated the Name as Kyrios which means “lord”, “boss”. In the Hebrew, Adonay means the same thing, it has the word “din” / law in it, in other words, the one who is the arbiter of law. But when we want to ask for compassion and mercy, that wasn’t the best name to use, especially according to Kabbalah, so we moved to pronounce name “Yah” [for saying this name, YHVH out loud] and Yah is a good name that we can use because you always find it in hallelu-JAH, and that one we can use, and that was another innovation that we did.

Then, we created liturgy for special events:

Very soon we are going to have Thanksgiving and when you sit after you eat a wonderful meal, you really need to do THANKS-giving and do birkhat hamazon and bentsch afterwards. In Birkat Hamazon, we include on special holidays Yaaleh v’yavo to say, “and we thank you for Pesach, Shavuot, Sukkot, for Rosh Chodesh”; sometimes we say, “We thank you for Hanukkah; for Purim”.

So, I wrote one, “I thank You” for Thanksgiving and it’s on the web if you want to get it and it would be good to have that when you have a Thanksgiving dinner so you can really do the bentschen including that which has become for us a source of THANKSgiving.

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