Monday, April 26, 2004

B"H

Three Difficult Prayers

There are three prayers that Jewish men are enjoined to say every
moring that are so difficult to be able to see God's love in them
that many give up and don't say them at all. They are:

Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the universe Who has not made
me a gentile.

Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the univerise Who has not made
me a slave.

Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the universe Who has not made
me a woman.

I am among those who had serious difficulty with those blessings.

Instead of the last prayer Jewish women say:

Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the universe Who has made me
according to His Will (or as His Will).

Because I was able to see a glimmer of love in the fact that the
Hebrew can mean that I am likened to God's Will Itself, I understood
that the other prayers must contain hidden love in them too.

So, I did what I do when the traditional explanation is not
satisfactory - I asked God. In a flash I saw what gentiles, slaves
and Jewish women all have in common - they have to fight doubly hard
to free themselves of the religious/spiritual/mental/social ties that
bind, be the case as it may be in each individual case, in order to
serve God to the fullest possible in freedom. Free Jewish men serve
the Ineffable One without having to peel off excess layers of foreign
tradition, or belonging to someone else as chattel or the
difficulties that a Soul living in a female body must endure.*** Those
Jewish men who understand the prayer correctly understand that they
were made Jewish men because had they been given the above three
challenges they would not have been strong enough to come to God-
consciousness. Far from saying the prayers with hubris, they say them
in the humble realization that they were given optimum conditions
because they needed them.

God loves the Gentile with a special love who, despite having been
born into a tradition which has elements of idol worship, still
struggles and perseveres to serve God as God would be worshipped. As
I have quoted my teachers before (and most certainly will again, God
willing): We are rewarded in direct proportion to the effort we
put in. God knows you will not succeed easily.

Being born a Christian is a particularly difficult test, Eileen. It
is being so close, yet so far. It is much easier to find The
Ineffable One from being a total non-believer as I was, than to have
to unlearn everything you were taught about who you believed was God
and find the Ineffable One. I respect your struggles tremendously and
know that God loves you very much and believes in you implicitly to
have entrusted you with so difficult a challenge.

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***Copying this now, rethinking it (it was originally written on Dec. 10, 2002) I realize that matters for free Jewish men are not nearly so simple as I conceived of them when I wrote this piece originally. They must struggle with their own illusions and delusions and they must struggle to find truth amidst the distortions that have been handed down to us by the Pharisaic/Rabbinic tradition (if they are honest enough with themselves to recognize that there are distortions in the tradition). I would no longer say that the conditions under which free Jewish men live are "optimum" religiously. However, they are certainly easier than for Gentiles, women (Jewish and Gentile), and slaves (Jewish and Gentile) all of whom have to contend with all of the spiritual/mental/physical problems that Jewish men have, in addition to the particular harships they each endure specific to their station in life, as described, in brief, above.

With deep abiding respect,
Doreen Ellen Bell-Dotan, Tzfat