Russians at Rosh Hashanah
FACKENNEIM, EMIL
Russians at Rosh Hashanah EMIL FACKENNEIM The Russians are coming! In astonishing numbers they already have come. However, no more than 10 percent went to shul on Rosh Hashanah, No wonder. For...
...Certainly not in the country from which these newcomers had come, fleeing in fear of pogroms...
...Perhaps some new olim who stayed with the liturgy uttered the first real prayer of their lives toward the end of the day: Today, give us strength...
...Wonder gives rise to strength...
...It is hardly surprising that only 10 percent attended shut on Rosh Hashanah...
...And most certainly divine rule is not manifest in the Arab country whose rulei had jtisi vowed to "liberate" Jerusalem and—if necessary in die process—to incinerate half of Israel...
...and that is just what they did: They have been lost ever since...
...Emit Fackenheim reflects that although only one In ton may have prayed in a shu...
...Here, perhaps, an old-timer can help out...
...The zichronol may heap biblical verse upon biblical verse, affirming divine memory, but these prayers studiously avoid biblical verses in which God is accused of having forgotten...
...But what of those who did attend...
...In contrast, the return of those other lost ones, the new Russians, is happening before our eyes, right now...
...And Russian Jews have burning memories of the Shoah...
...More importantly, what about the ones they left behind who now may never make it...
...Can their understanding teach the rest of us something about Jewish prayer that we either never knew or else had forgotten...
...The core of the Rosh Hashanah liturgy is the three sections of prayers known as tnakhuyot, zichronoi and sho-farot, celebrating, respectively, divine kingship, the faithfulness of divine More than 300 Russian immigrants arrived at Sen Gurion Airport on this flight, April 27, 1990...
...These new Russian olim (im-migraiits) have hcltri rlaim to such laments...
...may every breathing thing prt>claim: "The l,ord CSod of Israel is king, and his kingdom rules over all...
...For decades, secular Israelis have lamented that, since they were never taught how to pray, they would never understand Jewish prayer...
...C^an their insistence on the steadfastness of divine memory be understood in any terms other than as a faith defiant of historical evidence...
...So there are Jewish prayers that are not composed of words uttered by lips—prayers implicit in Jewish lives...
...This being stuck, however, happened to them in Jerusalem, the place where they bad chosen to come...
...Can one blame these Russians if they could make nothing of the zichronat, God never forgets...
...Witiiout that defiance in faithfulness neither the 10 percent of Russian Jews nor we, the oldtimers, would be here in Jerusalem together, praying on Rosh Hashanah...
...One wonders whether, perhaps, on reading this prayer, these olim suddenly understood Jewish prayer in a flash...
...The Russian Jews were also intended to be lost Yet the difference is while they indeed assimilated, a great many of them have now come here to Israel, even to Jerusalem...
...How did they feel reading texts unknown to them—reading them in Jerusalem...
...The zictmmot prayers heap biblical verse upon biblical verse to affirm the trustworthiness of the divine memory...
...Why did our ancestors, we may ask, although well acquainted with those other verses, avoid them on Rosh Hashanah, even after a year of pogroms, ever after a year of ouuight massacres...
...What must those newcomers have felt as they recited: Kingship is the Ijord's, and He rules the nations (Psalm 22:29...
...For thousands of years there has really been no case comparable to that of these Jews—not since the lOtribeswere carted off to Assyria in 721 B.C.E...
...But where does this kingship exist...
...The sages tell us that there are no miracles without human action...
...What about themselves, for these 70 years...
...That (rWewill return can lie believed only for the End of Days, and even then (to use a Kierkegaardian expression} only "by virtue of the absurd...
...but rarely was it as special as last year, the year of Saddam Hussein and the year also of these new Russians...
...Every Rosh Hashanah is special in the Holy City...
...True...
...If the newcomers got stuck on this text, who can blame them...
...The makkuyot keep heaping biblical verse on biblical verse, asserting divine kingship...
...Yet we could not help feeling something special, we could not help thinking, while reciting our own prayers, of those newly arrived Russians, the 10 percent or less who came to shut, they who had never read these prayers before...
...To the old-timers among us the prayers were, of course, familiar...
...memory and that ancient shofar once blown at the Sinaitic revelation as well as that other one, yet to be blown, at the eventual redemption in the messianic days to come...
...While this does not require faith by virtue of the absurd, it produces, or t night to produce, a sense of great wonder...
...The lost in Assyria...
...on Rosh Hashanah—the wonder of their aWyah in the face of Saddam is itself a prayer...
...Nor in the country to which they came, engulfed, as it is, in petty squabbles among those who do the actual ruling...
...Hundreds of thqu-sands more, we are told, are yet to come...
...That is the prayer—human action—that these olim understood...
...For these Jews had been robbed of things Jewish: no memories, no traditions, no language (Yiddish or Hebrew), no meaningful Jewish identity and, needless to say, no prayers...
...The Assyrians intended that those tribes would assimilate and vanish...
...This did not deter them: May every existing being know that thou has made it...
...Isn't their aliyah— knowing of Saddam and yet being here in Jerusalem—itself a prayer...
...How can we pray of divine memory...
...Before coming, they had heard about Saddam Hussein's threats...
...A verse in shofarot must have struck the new Russian olim as it has not struck any Jew at prayer before: Ot) that [messianic] day a great shofar sh;tll be sounded: Those who were lost in the Land of Assyria...shall come and worship the I i ml on the holy mountain in Jerusalem...
...This sense of wonder will be needed by Jews in Jerusalem—Jews everywhere—in these difficult times...
Vol. 16 • April 1991 • No. 2
