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Blessed art thou, o Lord... A christian Understanding of the Jewish Blessing
Carmine Di Sante
According to rabbinic tradition, the believing Jew is required to recite at least a hundred blessings a day. These are brief concentrated formulae with which we "bless" God for the blessings bestowed on us. So, for example, before eating bread the believer says: "Blessed art thou, 0 Lord, Our God, King of the Universe, who bringest forth bread from the earth"; before drinking wine: "Blessed art thou... who hast created the fruit of the vine"; looking at ears of wheat: "Blessed art thou... who createst food from the earth"; when putting on perfume: "Blessed art thou... who Greatest perfumed plants"; as the Sabbath draws near: "Iilessed art thou... who hast given us the gift of the Sabbath"; reading the Torah: "Blessed art thou... who sanctifiest us with thy precepts"; contemplating hills, mountains and streams: "Blessed art thou... who completest the work of creation"; observing the ocean: "Blessed art thou... who hast made the sea"; building a new house or buying new furniture: "Blessed art thou... who hast made us exist and made us arrive at this moment"; seeing a friend again after thirty days: "Blessed art thou... who hast kept us alive and made us reach this day"; meeting an ape, an elephant or a screech owl: "Blessed art thou... who makest the various creatures"; etc.
Finally there even exists a blessing in cases of physiological need which came to be part of the Siddur itself (Prayer book): "Blessed art thou... who hast created man with wisdom and hast supplied him with openings and spaces. It is known and manifest before thy glorious throne that if one of them became blocked, or if one opened that should be closed no creature could subsist even for an hour. Blessed art thou, physician of every being, who workest marvels".
Because the blessings occupy such an important place in the Jewish tradition, the first of more than thirty tractates of the Talmud (in both the Babylonian and Palestinian editions), is entitled Berakhot (Blessings) (1).
Reciting Blessings is not a practice of the distant past but is still alive and actual today, even among scholars. It is related that S. Agnon (1888-1970), on being informed that he had been awarded the Nobel Prize in 1966, recited this blessing: "Blessed art thou... who art good and doest good". On seeing the King of Sweden on the occasion of the bestowal of the Prize, he pronounced: "Blessed art thou... who renderest mortals sharers in thy glory". It is also related that when a storm broke out during a course in Rabbinics in Paris, the professor left the rostrum quickly and went to the window to recite this blessing: "Blessed art thou... whose force and power fill creation".
A Language to Interpret
There are two possible attitudes, which are opposites but mirror images, in face of formulae like these which are derived from individual rather than synagogal piety (the latter being the expansion of the former). They can be considered rationally, that is to say, as deprived of any truth dimension other than a subjective one; or they can be interpreted devotionally or "religiously", that is, as referring only to God and the speaker, without involving others or the world.
However a third attitude is possible which, while considering these formulae as neither "ingenious" nor merely "religious", grasps their meaning at the ontological level. In proclaiming: "Blessed art thou, Lord, who bringest bread from the earth", the person praying is not performing an act of piety but an epistemological action, belonging to the order of episteme, that knowledge which, as its root indicates, is the foundation of other forms of knowledge, which can only be knowledge insofar as they "stand" upon it (istanai = stand; epi = upon).
However there is need for precision. The knowledge which the blessing expresses belongs to that "radical knowledge" which is not linked with logos (2) (in the sense that it is not derived from it nor primarily involved with it), but is linked with that immediate, receptive and pre-thematic experience which precedes logos, and offers itself asa datum of thought. This is that "radical knowledge" — (etymologically the meaning is the Italian sapere, to savour, to taste, to feel, to experience) — which gives savour, that is to say a goal and a meaning to all other knowledge. Therefore it is not a knowledge opposed to others nor an irrational knowledge, but a knowledge which is "wisdom", revealing the meaning of existence. Embodied in symbols (narrative or gesture) it asks reason to welcome it receptively and think reflectively about it. This "radical knowledge" is that primary experience (affective, pre-logical and as it were connatural) with which we "feel" that we are in the world even before becoming rationally conscious of it.
The 'Knowledge of the Blessing
The prayer of blessing is the objectification par excellence of the "radical knowledge" (in the double sense of relish and understanding sapere and sapere) (3) of the Jewish People. In pronouncing a blessing, the one praying embodies an experience which can be analysed according to the triple categories of trustfulness, earthiness and justice.
Trustfulness: The Good Earth
In pronouncing the benediction, the Jew "speaks well", enters into the realm of that speech which tells of what is good. The "speaking-well" therefore, is that "speaking" which is articulated over what is good, which proceeds from it and lets it shine through, renders it luminous and sends it forth into the universe of language and existence. Unlike "beautiful speech", which is poetic or aesthetic speech, "speaking-well" belongs to the order of the "good", of the "just", of the "dignum et justum est" (as the introduction to the Roman Preface in use before the reform of Vatican II put it).
This order of the "good" which shines through the blessing can be interpreted on a triple level, the first of which is subjective. If the person praying speaks "well" it is because he/she is "well"; it is because he/she perceives him/herself within the horizon of the "good", sheltered from chaos, uncertainty and meaninglessness. But this "wellbeing", (and we are at the second level), does not concern the person praying as a spiritual subject, but rather as a needy being necessarily related to the earth: bread, wine, rivers, mountains, institutions and, above all, to other persons. The horizon of the "good" in which he/she perceives him/her-self is the horizon of the "mundane", the "earthy", woven of concrete and familiar forms which have the colour of the sky, the taste of food, the warmth of friendship. Let it be noted that not only is the Hebrew blessing never addressed to objects (unlike the custom established in the Christian tradition), but not even to God in an abstract fashion. It does not "speak well" of God in him/herself, but as "bene-factor", who "does good" in giving good things, that is to say, in "creating". And so we are at the third level of goodness affirmed by the prayer of blessing: it witnesses to an experience of positiveness linked not only to the perception of the subject and to the presence of good things, but above all to the principle of goodness that undergirds and transcends them. It is this principle that the blessing gathers up and expresses and that constitutes the horizon of the "good", in which the one praying "feels" enveloped, even before he/she has willed it or thought about it.
The blessing, then, is the objectification of a unique and triple experience of goodness: firstly of human existence; secondly of an earthly existence; thirdly measured and defined by the goodness of God. From this follows the perception (or feeling) of a world not as chaos but as cosmos, not as threat but a familiar space, the pre-thematic consciousness of being in a good and ordered world which can be trusted and to which one can entrust oneself because it is a gift of love (the Creator's love), which cannot prove false. This is the "radical" knowledge that Israel lives and hands on through the practice of benedictions, and whichis at the origin of all its other "knowledge".
The originality of this "knowledge" appears in all its challenging and contemporary force when it is contrasted with the original "knowledge" of Greece, of Gnosticism, of Apocalyptic, where in different degrees and for different motives the harmony between human beings and the world is broken and the fundamental experience becomes that of schism between two realities, of an exile of uprooting which can no longer be overcome, except by flight into interiority or beyond it.
Earthiness: The Earth for Humanity
But this affirmation of the goodness of the earth demands further development since its meaning differs substantially from that established in some parts of Christian tradition — those most bound up with the neoplatonic and plotinian tradition. For that tradition the earth is good because it is the reflection of divine perfection which "appears" in it in order to call and attract the human being to itself. In such a perspective the meaning of the earth is twofold: its issuing forth from God (understood as diffusive goodness), and its turning towards God (understood as eros or beauty which attracts). Therefore it has in regard to humanity a "semiological" function: to speak about God beyond itself. It follows from this that the ultimate reason for which it had been willed is to "speak of God" revealing God's perfect goodness and celebrating God's irradiant glory. Certainly the human being always has a relationship of need with regard to the earth, not being able to do without it and its good things, but it is not on this axis of earth-need that the neoplatonic and Christian tradition reads the ultimate meaning of the earth, but rather on that of seeking God through it. Itinerarium mentis in Deum (the way to God in heart and mind): this is the radical meaning of earth and realities ("faces" and "objects") which inhabit it. They are good insofar as they come from a fountain of goodness and lead back to it.
However it is not to this goodness that the person at prayer makes a reference when reciting a blessing, but to a goodness that is truly "other". Even if he/she sees in things divine goodness, it is not a question of goodness overflowing from itself, nor as self-revelation, but rather as a will to the good; not Goodness as Bonum which is naturally effusive and spontaneously attractive, but that of Benevolence which freely and gratuitously bends down to the otherness of the other in order to give life. In pronouncing the blessing the Jew who prays thus discovers the ultimate meaning of the earth not in its possibility of revealing God (good because it reflects God's perfection), but in that of giving life effectively and completely to the human being, who is a needy being.
But here a further and paradoxical deepening is called for. The reason why (in the logic of blessing), the earth and human need are balanced with one another is not to be sought in the one or the other but in a principle external to them, the principle of divine goodness, which transcends both and destines the one for the other. In pronouncing the blessing, the one praying breaks the immediate connection between his/her own needy being and the earth, and places between them —God — who redefines the horizon of the one and the other. "The earth is mine and you are strangers and sojourners with me" (cf.Lev.25:23).
Between the human person as needy being and earth as a object of gratification there is the goodness of God who is Lord of the earth ("the earth is mine"), not for its own sake (because, for example, it reflects God's glory), but rather to give it to the one who is God's other, to the human person as needy being. The blessing, which removes things from the human being by affirming that they belong to God, thus introduces the horizon of gift, the horizon in which human beings live, not in virtue of their own plans and their own possessions, but from a gratuitous love that goes before and envelopes each and all without distinction. In this horizon they find that they are guests because entertained by God who is the host. Being "strangers and sojourners" on earth does not indicate (as later Christian spiritual tradition understood) the world's inadequacy to fulfil human need (a need for the infinite), but the consciousness of the radical gratuitousness in which and from which humanity is called to live.
It is precisely here that the second "knowledge" is embedded in the prayer of blessing (in the sense of that "original knowledge" which precedes and subtends all other knowledge). The truth of the earth rests in its being gift, and it is only in remaining gift that it keeps its meaning; otherwise it becomes empty and alien.
In the Epistle to the Romans Paul speaks about the earth "made subject to futility", and waiting impatiently to be recreated (cf. 8:19 ff). The earth "subject to futility", (precipitated into mataiotes, that is into meaninglessness, into the loss of its intentionality), is the earth in which the logic of gratuitousness has disappeared and which has been replaced (even to the point of prevailing and being considered "natural") by an earth one wants to possess by right. The earth which is groaning like a woman in childbirth, crying out to be delivered, is the earth waiting to blossom again as gift.
Justice, The Earth and the Other
But the knowledge embedded in the prayer of blessing has still more to say about the meaning of the earth as gift, removing it from its reductive interpretations, whether individualistic (the gift God makes to me) or interioristic (the gift concerning the soul or spirituality), which abuses it by making it "unearthly".
Apart from the rupture between the ego and the earth (transforming the latter from "object" to gift), the prayer of blessing operates an even more radical change within the ego, which is no longer defined as "needy being" but rather as "unconditioned responsibility". In saying the blessing (Blessed art thou, 0 Lord, who bringest bread from the earth"), the one praying, while removing things from his/her own dominion, disposes him/herself to uphold the logic of gift underlying the blessing, not in a contemplative manner (saying "Flow beautiful...") but concretely, every day freely giving away the good things that God gives freely every day. In the blessing, the ultimate truth about the human being finds expression: neither a needy being who is to satisfy him/herself by the power of their own ego nor destined merely to benefit passively from divine love, but to be radically responsible in the sense of answering divine love (seen in the gift of the earth) by giving it again to their brothers and sisters. Certainly human beings remain now and always needy beings, but henceforth it is within a new identity as a being called to responsibility. It is just here, in the "transubstantiation" of the human being from needy being to responsible being, that there emerges the deepest significance of the Jewish blessing: responsibility, not (as already noted), towards his/her own ego (needs, desires, plans) but towards the other, the other as other, in biblical terms to the other as "miserable" and "poor".
The Hebrew Bible has a special term to express this dimension of appeal and command which in the blessing establishes the horizon of radical responsibility: tsedekah, justice. Von Rad sees this as the synthesis of the whole Old Testament, and E. Levinas as the soul of all Jewish wisdom, not as understood in the Greek fashion as "immutable order" (remembering that in Plato's city slaves and freemen lived together in harmony by the divine will!) nor in the derivative sense of commutative, distributive and punitive justice, but as free response to the gift of God (the earth) which cries out to be given again. There are therefore two essential and original elements which define the easily misunderstood term Jewish "justice": 1) God's loving will which gives the goods of earth (the primary and fundamental divine "justice"); 2) the loving will of human beings, called to give consent by giving these gifts again (derivative and responsive human justice). Where this "justice" of consent is lacking divine "justice" itself is compromised and "offended". Biblical justice is the peremptory and insistent affirmation of human justice as the free but necessary mediation of the primary "divine justice" expressed in the gift of the earth as the place of happiness for all (shalom).
Now, this is precisely that third and final basic "knowledge" made concrete in the prayer of blessing. According to it the earth flourishes, not by nature according to the fecundity immanent in it, nor technologically in virtue of dominion over it, but thanks to the subjective goodness through which the goodness of God becomes effective: "The earth will flourish through justice" (cf. Is. 32:17).
In this term "knowledge" implied in the blessing, the other two forms of knowledge (of earth as "good" and earth as "gift") are reassumed and completed, and here is condensed the highpoint and the originality of. Jewish thought: at the root of objectivity is subjectivity, that is to the ethical and the "just":
"The world rests on one pillar and its name is Righteous" (Babylonian Talmud, Hagiga 12b)
* Carmine Di Sante is a member of the Sidic Team in Rome and a consultant theologian. He is the author of numerous liturgical and theological publications. The best known is La Preghiera di Israele which has been translated into several languages. The English edition is entitled: Jewish Prayer: The Origin of Christian Liturgy (Paulin Press, N.J. 1991).
This article has been translated from the Italian. It appeared in La Riyista del Clero Italiano, October 1980, LXXI-10).
(1) The two collections of the encyclopedic Jewish knowedge edited about the fifth and sixth centuries. C.E.
(2) Logos here is used in the philosophical sense (i.e. ra- (3) The Italia text plays on the meaning of two similar verbs.
