My prayers have felt different here. I find daily prayer so soothing, such a good spiritual and emotional exercise. Sometimes I wonder if this can be true for people who are under great stress. Reciting the words of the Amidah with the victims of the Holocaust in mind takes things to a whole new level. As I recited atah chonen, the passage about praying for wisdom, I thought about Professor Berk’s teaching about the choices available to Warsaw’s Jews in 1939. Leave because of the Hitler/Stalin Pact? Or stay? Leaving meant the uncertainty of trying to find a safe place in an increasingly unsafe world. Staying mean remaining where you had a known network available to you. It’s easy for us to know today that the right choice was to leave – as tens of thousands did. And that the wrong choice was to stay – as hundreds of thousands did. Asking God for wisdom every day is a comforting task – but sometimes wisdom is a life or death matter – that affects generations. What do we know about these kind of decisions?
And the passage about our enemies – V’lamalshinim al t’hi tikvah – to my enemies give no hope – does this offer some solace? Or merely more terror? The many passages that appreciate the greatness of the world in which we live and its creator – did they make people’s lives more livable at impossible times? Or did they give them a false sense of security? Or a disheartening sense of abandonment?
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