By Rabbi Dr. Israel Drazin
PIKESVILLE, Maryland — We need to question everything, even our prayers. By questioning, we learn; by learning, we improve ourselves and help improve others and even inanimate items. An example is a seemingly silly statement in one of our prayers.
Many Jews follow a meal that includes bread with a rather long collection of blessings to God. It is called Birkat Hamazon in Hebrew, “Grace After Meals” in English, and Bentching in Yiddish. The Grace thanks God for the food, the land, and the blessings of daily life.
The long Birkat Hamazon is recited only after consuming a meal with at least a relatively small amount of bread. Shorter versions, called Al Hamichyah or Borei Nefashot, are recited and give thanks after other foods when bread is not included.
The Birkat Hamazon contains over half a dozen long paragraphs, with additional paragraphs for special occasions such as the Shabbat, holidays, and weddings. Overall, the many paragraphs express our recognition that all we have is the result of God’s creation.
A joke makes this clear.
A boy tells his dad he is going outside to play ball.
“Who are you playing with?’
“I’m playing with God.”
“With God?!”
“Yes. I throw the ball up to God and God throws it back to me.”
While this is a naïve, childish understanding of the laws of gravity, it contains some truth. God created the laws of nature, including gravity. God is the ultimate cause of the ball falling to the child.
It is the same with the Grace after the meal. We recognize that all we have comes from God.
Since this is the theme of the Grace, the seemingly simple sentence near its end is surprising. The sentence states, “From when I was young until now, I have never seen a pious person who was abandoned and his children begging for bread.”
This makes no sense. Many people are insensitive to others. We have seen pious people who are not helped by others. What is the sentence saying?
I could not think of an answer. But remembering that we need to question everything and that when we do so, we learn and improve, I decided to ask my son, Stephen, if he knew what the sentence was saying. My son, Stephen, is very bright.
Stephen replied that he also did not know. But he continued and gave me the next step to unravel the mystery. “You need to see where this sentence appears, and the contexts will clarify the matter.”
He was right. The sentence is the penultimate verse, the next-to-last sentence in the lengthy Grace. The last sentence summarizes the preceding paragraphs: “God gives strength to His people and peace.”
I saw my mistake. I understood the penultimate sentence refers to humans. I should have understood that, like the entire Birkat Hamazon, it relates to God. It says that God does not abandon people.
I then understood that the word “pious” in the sentence means an individual who sensibly accepts life, as a person should. In the final sentence, I also understood that “strength” refers to the gift of human intelligence, the “Image of God” that Genesis 1 states God placed in humans.
Maimonides wrote in his Guide for the Perplexed 3:28 that people mistakenly believe that Divine Providence means that God watches over people, interferes with the laws of nature, and aids people when they need help. He explains that Divine Providence is the intellect that God placed in humans. He wrote that people are helped by the intellect that God created and placed in humans to help them, and the person with more intellect gets better help. His words are, “Divine providence is in each instance proportional to the person’s intellectual development.”
So, the penultimate sentence in the Birkat Hamazon is not senseless. It and the other paragraphs of the prayers recognize that God provided everything on earth. We thank God for what he gave us and in the last two sentences we see a summary – if we use our intelligence and do not allow ourselves to be overcome when life is difficult, realize that if things are easy they are probably wrong, difficulties can encourage growth, and the use of intelligence can give us peace – we will see as the sentence said, God has not abandoned us. He gave us the solution to our problems.
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Rabbi Dr. Israel Drazin is a retired brigadier general in the U.S. Army Chaplain Corps. He is also the author of more than 50 books.