Birkat Ha-Gomel: A Blessing For Well-Being

For the twelfth installment of An Illumination Of Blessings, I’ve chosen to interpret the Birkat Ha-Gomel, a blessing that I did not have the presence of mind to recite when I really needed to do so. A few months ago, I was involved in an automobile accident that nearly totaled my car. Fortunately, I was not seriously injured , escaping with minor bruises and aftershocks of a mental earthquake. But at that time I should have intoned this blessing of well-being in appreciation for having experienced and recovered from a life-threatening situation.

 The Birkat Ha-Gomel originated in the Talmud (Berakhot 54b) and was drawn from Psalm 107 which describes four situations that merit recitation of this blessing: when one has safely completed a sea voyage, crossed a desert wilderness, recovered from illness or childbirth and been released from captivity. When the Temple stood in Jerusalem, anyone who experienced these situations would be required to bring a live sacrifice (korban) of thanksgiving, but the Birkat Ha-Gomel is now an acceptible alternative. According to Rabbi J.H. Hertz, former chief rabbi of the British Empire, it may be recited after any extraordinary escape from danger. In the Orthodox tradition, this blessing is also meant to be recited publicly among a minyan (quorum) of ten men; although Conservative and Reform traditions include women in this number so that an entire congregation may acknowledge an individual’s survival and recovery from one of the above situations.

Whether I visually interpret a Torah parashah, a passage from Talmud, a folktale or as in this case, a blessing, I like to explore such texts on multiple levels so that you are not seeing merely a literal illustration, but rather one that invites you to draw your own interpretations or ask more questions.

And so here is the Birkat Ha-Gomel blessing with it’s attendant symbolism reflecting the situations named here along with their spiritual counterparts. While I hope you will never find yourself in any precarious situation that requires its recitation, it might not be a bad idea to keep a copy at hand…

For those of you that missed the funding deadline, but would still like to have a copy of the book or gicleé prints from the illustrations, don’t fret. You can visit this link to place pre-orders for the book and to specify which blessings you would like to have made into prints: http://winnlederer.com/blessings/index.htm It’s back to work for me now onto the next blessing! As always, your questions and comments are welcome!

Parashat Bo: The Masks Of Light And Darkness

AS I reflected on Bo, this past week’s parashah in The Book of Exodus, its lurid descriptions of the final three plagues inflicted on the Egyptians (locusts, darkness and the death of the firstborn among the Egyptians) caused me to wonder about our perception of the nature of good and evil. When we blithely attribute occurrences of good or evil to forces beyond ourselves and therefore beyond our control, are we forgetting our innate capability to influence them from our miniscule place in the tapestry of humanity?

The creation stories of each major religion maintain that we are modeled after One Who ’embodies’ good and evil among myriad other attributes and has called us into existence. If so, then we too are creatures that embody these attributes to some lesser degree. And if we accept this idea, then we must shoulder our part of this great responsibility. We cannot entirely shift it onto our Creator without denying the autonomy of free choice, a trope hotly debated, but never resolved over the centuries by religious scholars.

When I first read the phrase in which G-d tells Moses, “Go to Pharaoh. For I have hardened his heart and the hearts of his courtiers, in order that I may display these My signs among them, and that you may recount to your sons and to your sons’ sons how I made a mockery of the Egyptians and how I displayed My signs among them — in order that you may know that I am the Lord.”, I was cynically inclined to see the players in this epic drama as pathetic puppets whose human frailties were being manipulated by unseen forces as an end to their own means. Was this part of some vast cosmic game played by said entity (ies) for their own amusement? If so, then who was playing whom’? Could the players in the epic drama of the Exodus be archetypes meant to teach us that we and the ‘One’ mirror each other?

Or, were these events but a series of horrific natural phenomena occurring within the Earth’s evolving biosphere as scientific researchers have attempted to demonstrate? Are the scientific and religious interpretations (as cause and effect punishments for human misbehavior) of these natural phenomena mutually exclusive? What a classic illustration of  ‘right brain vs. left brain’ thinking!

Given our distant remove from these events and the effects of diaspora living, perhaps the above questions are clues to their own answers. If we believe that ‘the devil made me do it’ excuses evil behavior or if we insist that we are but victims of natural disasters, then our human frailties can become excuses for despair and inaction. In which case, we are denying our true capabilities as the ‘crown of creation’ and stewards of this planet as evidenced by the plethora of blogs out there.

In sum, I prefer to think that both sides are a kind of duality; dependent on their discrete functions to validate each other. In the way that we wouldn’t understand the properties of good and evil if they didn’t exist to define each other.  So, I’m inclined to believe that if the story of Moses’ righteous deeds and Pharaoh’s intractable stubbornness was intended to inform the metaphorical book of our spiritual and cultural development, then we ought not stop at any of these interpretations. The mystery of it all is too vast to comprehend in thousands of lifetimes, but each lifetime grants us more clues to its solution.

Our sages agree that Torah is to be viewed as the blueprint of creation, its stories as instructions for living with each other on this planet. And as we continue to interpret the dualities (multiplicities) embedded in its intricate diagrams, we will comprehend more of how they apply to us individually and as a nation. And in this evolving understanding of our humanity and spiritual mandate will the true nature of our power be made clear.