Our First In-Person Shabbat—Recognizing the Role of Unpredictability in the Universe
What a day this past Shabbat was. It was the first time we gathered as a whole community on Shabbat since March 7, 2020—by my count seventy-one weeks of Shabbat in exile from our beautiful, sacred sanctuary. Now, as we know, in exile doesn’t necessarily mean “lesser than.” Wow, did we hold some beautiful experiences over the course of those seventy-one weeks: meaningful discussions, creative approaches to prayer, putting names to faces and faces to names. But being back in-person, together, certainly reminded us of an extra dimension that comes with being in the presence of another, feeling their energy, finding time for small (and yet holy) talk, schmoozing after services, hearing one another’s voices sung together—it was a beautiful thing.
To commemorate our being together we offered two special prayers: first, birkat ha’gomel, and second, an abbreviated version of hallel.
Birkat ha’gomel, which literally means “Blessing the One Who Bestows,” is traditionally said on behalf of one who completes a dangerous journey. In ancient times, it was specifically reserved for someone who had returned from a sea voyage, traversed the desert, recovered from illness, or been let out of prison. Over time it came to serve as a blessing on behalf of anyone who made it through a harrowing experience. The words of the blessing are Baruch atah Adonai eloheinu melekh ha-olam ha-gomel l’hayavim tovot, she-g’malani kol tov. Blessed are you Adonai, sovereign of time and space, who rewards those who still have (moral) debts with goodness, and who has rewarded me with goodness.
It’s somewhat provocative language and yet, I think, fitting: it implies that when we make it through to the other side of a harrowing experience (and make no mistake, we are not entirely “through” the harrowing experience of the COVID-19 pandemic by any stretch of the imagination; still, it was momentous that we did feel like things were safe enough to return to in-person worship) we don’t pat ourselves on the back for being the sole determining factors of that safety. We don’t say, “it was because of my fundamental decency that I made it through the experience” thereby implying that others who were not so fortunate lacked that same decency.
Instead, while recognizing our capacity for decency, we also recognize the other ingredient in our feeling safe (at least for the time being): in traditional language we call this ingredient “HaGomel Tov,” the One Who Bestows Goodness. In modern parlance, those of us less theologically minded might call this luck or fortune; we recognize that our fates, our making it through to the other side, both calls on our taking precautions (vaccines, for instance), and, that there is a degree of blessing being bestowed upon us which we may or may not be “deserving” of. It wasn’t entirely (or sometimes at all) our doing that led us to a healthy, or, conversely, a sick outcome. Judaism recognizes the inherent unpredictability in the universe and offers a blessing for that unpredictability.
We are asked, in sharing this blessing, to take note of the factor in the universe that is beyond our control, to reject the hubris that it is entirely up to us, and to call that factor tov—good.
