A Blessing on Your Head – Mazel Tov!
Presented to the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Huntington
December 4, 2005
Rev. Paul Ratzlaff
The word “blessing” is found in many places; some pleasant and entertaining, and some more troubling. Remember in Fiddler on the Roof, when Tevye reports his nightmare in which his wife’s mother, may she rest in peace, surprises him by telling him that his daughter is going to marry someone other than the butcher’s son?
A blessing on your head
(Mazel Tov, Mazel Tov)
To see a daughter wed
(Mazel Tov, Mazel Tov)
And such a son-in-law
Like no-one ever saw
The tailor Motel Camzoil
In the context of the musical, “blessing” is ironic, but it’s a light-hearted catchy melody. Likewise we feel a spot of warmth in our hearts, like a touch of whiskey from the emerald isle, when we hear an Irish blessing, as well as the implicit blessing in Curran’s naming “and may life be for you, one long sweet song.”
Our community interfaith thanksgiving service had as its theme, “A blessed community … where the people dwell as one.” You may know it as “Hi-neh mah tov u-mah na-yim. Shev-et a-heem gam-ya-had.” How good it is and how pleasant for people to dwell together! If only that were so, we would be a blessed community.
However, “blessing” for many of us may have some sour associations. Does you stomach turn when some politician ends his or her speech with “Thank you, and God bless America”? Or singing “God bless America” along with “Take me out to the ball game” during the seventh inning stretch? Why am I troubled? Too often it feels like smug self-assurance. “Look at us – me! We’re so blessed. We are God’s favorites, not like those God-forsaken sinners in other parts of the world.” I get angry because I would like our leaders and our nation to be more humble, to invite the kind of self-criticism that the prophets brought to the kings and peoples of old. “How can you say “God bless America” when your decisions kill thousands abroad, and deepen the poverty and hopelessness of millions here at home?” How about “and God have mercy on us”?
I heard on the radio yesterday another use of “blessed” that troubles me. A mother, whose son was randomly murdered, reported that she had mixed feelings as she reflected back on Maryland’s execution of her son’s murderer some years ago. On the one hand, she wished that he was still alive so that she could learn from him what her son said, and how he acted during his last minutes alive. That door was forever closed. On the other hand, she said she felt blessed by the execution. “Blessed”? In trying to interpret, I think she might have meant “at peace,” or a feeling of satisfaction that the scales of suffering were more balanced by the murderer’s death. But “blessed”?
Once in an interracial gathering to foster building bridges across the racial divide, we were led in a fun song. “When praises go up,” we sang as we stretched our arms high, “blessings come down.” We gestured rain coming down, bending low to the ground. Aerobic gospel, but troubling theology… Is our relationship with the divine a quid pro quo? I do something for God – sing praises – then God does something for me – give me food and health? Are blessings a reward for good behavior? And what does that mean when I get a diagnosis of cancer? Am I no longer blessed? Have I failed God somehow? Am I being punished?
In our UU circle there’s a different use of “blessing.” It comes out of the women’s movement and pagan spirituality. “Blessed Be” is a phrase I sometimes use at the end of a meditation or sermon in place of “amen.” But often it has little meaning, other than as a kind of verbal punctuation, like saying “period!”
So there are many different ways the word is used. Nonetheless, this morning, I propose that there’s something to be redeemed in the concept of blessing, that a blessing consciousness can enrich our lives and spirits. To do so, however we will need to reclaim the word. As I said some weeks ago, here we use words as tools, not dogma. I invite us to consider the word as a tool to help us enliven our spirits.
Do some of you know the book Kitchen Table Wisdom? Its author, Rachel Naomi Remen, a medical doctor who has endured multiple operations because of her own Krohn’s disease, and who now counsels with patients dying of cancer, has compiled more stories in My Grandfather’s Blessings, a book rich with accounts of “strength, refuge and belonging.” In this book, she honors an Orthodox Jewish way of spiritual life along side her own scientific training. Note that I said, “along side!” Listen to her description.
My grandfather was an Orthodox rabbi and he said … all [the daily blessings of Orthodox Jewish life], tipping his black fedora to the Holy many times each day as he dealt with the smallest details of daily life.
I was the child of two dedicated socialist, who viewed all religion as the ‘opiate of the masses.’ Although such blessings were never said in my own family, saying them with my grandfather felt quite natural to me. At one time I knew many of them by heart, but I have long since forgotten them. What I have remembered is the importance of blessing life
When I was young, I seemed to be caught between two very different views of life: my grandfather and his sense of the holy nature of the world and my highly academic, research-oriented uncles, aunts, and cousins. … As I grew older and time created a greater distance between us, my grandfather seemed to become an island of mysticism in a vast sea of science. Desperate to be successful and make a contribution to society, I gradually put him in the back of my memory with the other things of my childhood. He had died when I was seven. It would be many years before I would make the connection between his ways and the work of medicine….
As a young doctor, I thought that serving life was a thing of drama and action and split-second judgment calls. A question of going sleepless and riding in ambulances and outwitting the angel of death. A role open only to those who have prepared themselves for years. Service was larger than ordinary life, and those who served were larger than life also. But I know now that this is only the least part of the nature of service. That service is small and quiet and everywhere. That far more often we serve by who we are not what we know. And everyone serves whether they know it or not.
We bless the life around us far more than we realize. Many simple, ordinary things that we do can affect those around us in profound ways: the unexpected phone call, the brief touch, the willingness to listen generously, the warm smile or wink of recognition. We can even bless total strangers and be blessed by them. Big messages come in small packages. All it may take to restore someone’s trust in life may be returning a lost earring or a dropped glove.” (4-5)
I’ll say more about service in a moment. First I want to lift out, the Orthodox practice of paying attention – her grandfather’s tipping his hat to the holy many times as he dealt with the smallest details of daily life. Blessing can help us pay attention!
This can help us truly live our UU seventh principle – the affirmation of the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part. To make this principle vibrant every day, we could learn from the Orthodox Jews who repeatedly say a “barucha” throughout their day. The Orthodox, of course, say “Baruch atah Adonai…” “blessed art thou O God, Lord of the universe, who has … whatever it is, brought us to this season, brought forth the fruit of the earth, brought forth the fruit of the vine, and so forth.” How would our sense of our daily life be different, were we to repeatedly pay attention to how our everyday needs are met. For those to whom God has unbelievable supernatural associations, we might say, turning on the faucet, “How blessed it is that I live at a time when all I have to do is turn a faucet to get relatively safe water.” Think if you did that for each action of the day. “How blessed it is to live with electricity” – and then reflect on all that is involved in getting electricity to your switch. How did the fuel get there to feed the electric plant? Who all was involved in discovering electricity? How about the distribution system that moves power from a plant across the grid to the lines on your street to your house? There’s a commercial that illustrates the 1000s of people that back up your cell phone on the Verizon system. Have you seen it? A person gets up from a table, then notices that the street is packed with thousands of people that move as she moves, following every move. That’s a graphic image, but it’s only the surface. Follow the thread and you will end up with the whole of existence – the interdependent web of which we are a part. “How blessed it is to have warm clothes” – and then reflect on all the living beings, inventions and people involved that make possible a wool sweater. “How blessed it is to live with paved roads, and traffic lights that offer me safety.” “How blessed it is to have a computer that can google information about most anything in seconds.” “How blessed it is to have this building, these people, this history of values and teachers, this inheritance of liberal religion.” I bet that if we lived each day taking just a bit of time throughout the day to ponder how blessed we are – how interconnected and interdependent we are – our spirits would deepen, and our souls would leap we joy. We are indeed blessed.
Can the “baruchas” become rote and empty, a kind of OCD mantra? Of course, they can. Like anything else they can be distorted into empty rhetoric, like the President’s “Good night, and God bless America.” If you rush headlong through your day, without ever pausing to bless your interdependence, our seventh principle can be flat and without significance. But, with intentionality, blessing more of the moments of every day will enliven your heart with profound joy and gratitude.
One way, then, to use “blessing” is to bring our attention to our interdependence in the web of life, which we can celebrate joyfully and gratefully. Another way to use “blessing” is in meeting and serving one another. We can bless one another.
Here’s a story that powerfully illustrates blessing a child, again from Rachel Naomi Remen.
I remember my grandfather dancing only once, in his synagogue, on the holiday of Simcha Torah. … On this holiday the Torah scrolls are taken from the ark, and then the men of the congregation dance down the aisles of the synagogue holding them in their arms in celebration of the covenant with God and the joy of living rightly. … As the men dance past, people reach out to touch the Torah scrolls in their arms and then put their fingertips to their lips in a kiss.
My parents were young socialists who did not favor this sort of thing, and so my grandfather had bribed my nana, who adored him, to bring me to the synagogue for this celebration. It was the first and only time I had ever been to his synagogue. I was four years old.
…. I have to this day a memory as clear as a photograph of my grandfather, as the rabbi, carrying the largest Torah scroll of all, dancing down the aisle toward me, his face lit with joy. I had scrambled up and stood upon my seat in order to better see what was happening. My grandfather, suddenly seeing me there …, filled with excitement in my new pink dress, my hair in little pigtails with beautiful pink bows, … passed the great Torah to another man, swept me up into his arms and danced with me through the synagogue.
I remember the little silver bells on the Torah handles ringing and everyone laughing as the men danced all around us with their arms wrapped around the books of wisdom. God seemed very close just then. (360-361)
I would wish that each one of us has had that kind of blessing, where another takes such total delight in our being! When you’ve had that blessing it’s easier to, in turn, bless others with delight in their being. But whatever your story, you can be a blessing to others. As Remen says,
The capacity to bless life is in everybody. The power of our blessing is not diminished by illness or age. On the contrary, our blessings become even more powerful as we grow older. They have survived the buffeting of our experience. We may have traveled a long, hard road to the place where we can remember once again who we are. That we have traveled and remembered gives hope to those we bless. Perhaps in time they too can remember this place beyond competition and struggle, this place where we belong to one another.
A blessing is not something that one person gives another. A blessing is a moment of meeting, a certain kind of relationship in which both people involved remember and acknowledge their true nature and worth, and strengthen what is whole in one another. By making a place for wholeness within our relationships, we offer others the opportunity to be whole without shame and become a place of refuge from everything in them and around them that is not genuine. We enable people to remember who they are. (6)
I want to highlight her remark, “our blessings become even more powerful as we grow older.” A blessed life does not mean a charmed life. It means remembering how wonderful and precious life is, even with its pain and suffering. It’s not allowing your life to be defined by death, by betrayal, by disillusion, but still saying “yes” to life, with full knowledge of the totality of life. Remen observes that often people who are dying feel most blessed. In dying all the pretences of life – success, social standing, image, looks, power – drop away and one wants only authenticity. In that spiritually pure place one can bless and feel blessed. One last story:
Many years ago my grandfather gave me a silver wine goblet so small that it holds no more than a thimbleful of wine. Exquisitely engraved into its bowl is a bow with long ribbon streamers. It was made in Russia long ago. He gave it to me during one of the many afternoons when we sat together at the kitchen table in my parents’ home memorizing phrases from his old books and discussing the nature of life. I was quite young then, no more than five or six, and when I became restless, he would revive my attention by bringing out the sacramental Concord grape wine he kept in the back of the refrigerator. He would fill my little beribboned wineglass with Manishevitz and then put a splash of wine into his own, a big silver ceremonial cup, generations old. Then we would offer a toast together. At the time, the only other celebration I knew was singing “Happy Birthday” and blowing out the candles. I loved this even better.
My grandfather had taught me the toast we used. It was a single Hebrew word, L’Chiam…, which he told me meant “To Life!” He always said it with great enthusiasm. “Is it to a happy life, Grandpa?” I had asked him once. He had shaken his head no. “It is just ‘To life! Neshume-le [‘beloved little soul’],” he told me.
At first, this did not make a lot of sense to me, and I struggled to understand his meaning. “Is it like a prayer?” I asked uncertainly.
“Ah no, Neshume-le,” he told me. “We pray for the things we don’t have. We already have life.”
“But then why do we say this before we drink the wine?” He smiled at me fondly. “Grandpa!” I said, suddenly suspicious. “Did you make it up?” He chuckled and assured me that he had not. For thousands of years all over the world people have said this same word to each other before drinking wine together. It was a Jewish tradition.
I puzzled about this last for some time. “Is it written in the Bible, Grandpa?” I asked at last. “No, Neshume-le,” he said, “it is written in people’s hearts.” Seeing the confusion on my face, he told me that L’Chiam meant that no matter what difficulty life brings, no matter how hard or painful or unfair life is, life is holy and worthy of celebration. “Even the wine is sweet to remind us that life itself is a blessing.” (77-78)
Who has blessed you?
Who has assured you that you are precious beyond measure? And that no matter how difficult life can be, we shall bless it.
How might we bless each other? Might we be a community of blessing where our way of being with one another confers wholeness and preciousness beyond measure, like dancing with the Torah – where we create a haven apart from the isolation and competition of the marketplace that saps our souls? Might we be a community that radiates blessing outward into Huntington and beyond?
Blessed Be.
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