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| On pilgrimage with Rabbi Neil |
“Let me find grace, kindness, and compassion in Your eyes
and in the eyes of all who see me”
The prayer is almost the last of the preparatory prayers
before a person might leave home for the morning and join a community in
prayer. It is one of my favourite prayers in the litany of prayers at the start
of a morning service because it speaks powerfully of a desire to stay clear of
evil ideas and people and to cleave to good deeds for the day. There have been
times in my life when I’ve felt scared or anxious about what or who I might
meet in the day and this prayer always steadied my resolve to meet all of the
days challenges.
Until writing for my friend Father Stuart, as he embarks on
his pilgrimage, I had not made the connection that the phrase I quote above is
also found in the prayer recited by a Jew whenever embarking on a journey.
Every morning, the moment we step outside our house is a
journey full of trepidation and opportunity. And let’s face it, Jews are all
too familiar with leaving home under duress for journeys not of their own
making. It’s no wonder then that we pray to be bestowed with grace, kindness
and compassion in God’s eyes and in the eyes of all who see us.
I do think that prayer is best when it is subversive,
challenging, suggesting a world that is not only made different through the
hand of God but in our actions. I wonder what kind of a world we would live in
if it were indeed filled only with people seeking grace, kindness and
compassion from others and, because of this desire, they bestowed it on those
around them?
A stanza in the poetry collection by Yehuda Amichai entitled
‘Open Closed Open’ reads:
I want a God who is seen and not
who sees, who I am able to lead
And to tell him what he does not
see. I want
A God who is seen and who sees. I
want to see
How he covers his eyes, like a
child playing blindman’s bluff.
It was the idea of being in the “eyes of God and those who
see me” that really struck me in this prayer for a journey. It reminded me of
the verse in the book of Exodus which describes the purpose of a pilgrimage:
“Three times a year all your males shall appear before the
Sovereign, Eternal One.” (Exodus 23:17)
This is the foundation of what the rabbis of antiquity
called ‘Re’iyah’ – appearing. ‘Re’iyah’ is the commandment at the heart of the
ancient pilgrimage to the Temple in Jerusalem - to appear before God on the
Jewish festivals of Passover (Pesach), Pentecost (Shavuot) and Tabernacles
(Sukkot). The heart of a pilgrimage was to be seen by God. What a marvellously
challenging idea – to go to a place to be seen by God. God is without beginning
and without end, with no form and beyond our comprehension, yet here we are
hoping to be seen…and isn’t God omnipotent and omnipresent? Can we not be seen
by God anywhere, at any time, not just in the Temple in Jerusalem on the three
pilgrimage festivals?
From this point, the rabbinic sages of the Talmud reflect on
a painful theological question – a question at the heart of exile: since the
Temple was destroyed in 70 CE by Rome, could it be that God’s face is hidden
from us and we might never be ‘seen’? This is, after all, what Deuteronomy
31:17 suggests, “I will hide my face from them.” We have many sophisticated
answers for the difficulties in life but nothing really fully explains the
unspeakable pain and distress from which so many people suffer and their
anguish in trying to understand ‘why’ life is as it is. And the agony of
absence is the heart of God’s hidden face.
I personally find the pilgrimage through the partially
navigated world of texts offers me a spiritual encounter, if not answers. This
is the classical response to the dilemma of find a place to encounter God. The
Jewish pilgrimage begins to take place in texts not in places. Indeed, the
journey into the Torah, learning together as a community, even for one day is
considered by the sages of the Talmud to be equivalent to the one day of
‘appearing’ before God in the Temple. But there’s something upturned in this
encounter – for where I might think I am ‘seeing’ the traces of the Divine in
our texts, the original pilgrimage was for God to see me. What must it have
felt like to sense the spotlight of scrutiny in appearing before God?
Remarkably, there is quite a radical story described in the
Talmud of Rabbi Judah Hanasi and Rabbi Hiyya who go to visit a blind sage. In
their visit, the sages are told they receive a blessing, “You who have received
the face of one who is seen and who does not see, may you be worthy to receive
the face of the one who sees and is not seen.” (Babylonian Talmud, Chagigah,
5b) This complicated moment suggests something about human relationships and
paying a visit to a friend or scholar can also become a pilgrimage of sorts.
The most profound experience at prayer for me was when a
dear congregant whose wife had just died and wanted to sit next to me in a
Sabbath morning service. In the stillness of space and in the timeless quiet of
a synagogue service, I felt the presence of God’s grace and compassion envelop
us.
Perhaps unsatisfied with the pilgrimage into text or to
visit a sage or friend, yet another story by the rabbis some 1900 years ago
tells how we must interpret signs in the world of the hidden presence of God.
Rabbi Joshua ben Hananya is described as reading the hand gestures of a
disputant in the court of Caesar. God may be hidden from us but, Rabbi Joshua
understands, the Divine ‘hand is str
etched out over us’. In the absence of
direct revelation or speech, we must become quite literally the ‘diviners’ of
God’s presence. I love this story because it suggests the possibility of being
seen is always present, we just have to notice and learn the vocabulary, the
‘code’ if you like. It’s almost as if we’re looking at shadow puppets and have
to work out that God’s hand is stretched out over us, cradling us in the
protective shelter of God’s care.
Perhaps we cannot be seen, for Jews maybe that is the
meaning of the exile in which we find ourselves. Which makes me think: in the
grace, kindness and compassion we encounter along the way and the acts of the
same which we do to others – perhaps that is the closest we can get to being
cradled in the hand of God. And then, maybe we go on a pilgrimage to help
sharpen our senses to God’s presence or at least the intimation of God peeking
out from behind the clouds.
So we pray, we study and even in our trepidation at the
coming day we seek to treat each other with grace, kindness and compassion
because after all, isn’t that what we seek for ourselves?
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