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Ha-yom harat olam — today is the birthday of the world.
This Rosh Hashanah prayer felt like a fitting way to return to the newsletter after our office’s two-week break. The Jewish New Year begins tomorrow at sundown, marking the start of 10 days of reflection and prayer. I enjoyed listening to Rabbi Sharon Brous parse some of the prayers associated with Rosh Hashanah and the High Holy Days in her conversation several years ago with Krista. She has a way of bringing out not just the literal meaning of each prayer, but also the ways they might open us to self-reflection: “Today is the birthday of the world” may be interpreted as a literal declaration of Rosh Hashanah, but it is also a call to remember that “each one of us participates in creation every single day, when we make a choice about how we want to live in the world.”
Ritual, tradition, connection — the many powerful roles of prayer also happens to thread through this week's On Being episode, featuring poets Marilyn Nelson and Pádraig Ó Tuama. In their conversation, they discuss this quote from Pádraig's book:
“Prayer is rhythm. Prayer is comfort. Prayer is disappointment. Prayer is words and shape and art around desperation and delight and disappointment and desire.”
I was equally struck by Marilyn Nelson’s response. She describes prayer as the experience of being “quiet enough to feel held, to feel the embrace of the divine, to realize that I am a part of something vaster than vast; and to feel that, to recognize that, to feel thankful for it, and to hope that by opening myself to that awareness, that I am allowing some of that to come through me.”
How beautiful is that? Reading and listening to these discussions, it occurred to me that the very attempt to grasp at what prayer might be in each of our lives could be its own form of prayer. To quote Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel:
“Prayer is our humble answer to the inconceivable surprise of living.”
Yours,
Kristin Lin
Editor, On Being Studios
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