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 By Rabbi Jill Jacobs
Every morning, Jews traditionally recite a series of blessings that thank God for a series of everyday miracles, such as clothing the naked, freeing captives, fulfilling our needs, and making us free people. When we are feeling healthy and successful, these blessings remind us to give thanks that we can open our eyes each morning, get out of bed, and meet our basic physical needs. When we struggle with our health or our finances, we say these prayers in the hope that our fortunes will change.
These simple but powerful blessings force us to spend the first few minutes of our morning being mindful of our physical abilities and limitations, of our freedom or lack thereof, and of our abilities or inabilities to meet our own physical needs. But these blessings are not simply a means of giving thanks or petitioning God. Rather, these blessings set an intention for our own contributions to the world. We cannot simply thank God for opening the eyes of the blind without ourselves making the world more accessible to those with physical limitations. We cannot thank God for giving us freedom without working to end the enslavement of others. And we cannot thank God for fulfilling our own needs without also striving to fulfill the needs of others.
We often think of prayer as a one-way conversation between ourselves and God. We ask, plead, praise, call out, and hope for a response. For many of us, prayer serves as a means of connecting to divinity, feeling comforted, and expressing our deepest desires. But this picture captures only one aspect of prayer. Prayer also makes demands of us. We cannot simply leave it to God to perfect the world for us. We ourselves have to take on that challenge— but we also ask for help in a task that feels too big for any one person, even any one generation, to complete.
The above excerpt, “Connecting Ritual with Action” by Rabbi Jill Jacobs, is from Where Justice Dwells: A Hands-On Guide to Doing Social Justice in Your Jewish Community. © 2011 by Jill Jacobs. Permission granted by Jewish Lights Publishing, P.O. Box 237, Woodstock, VT 05091; www.jewishlights.com.
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Rabbi Jill Jacobs is executive director of Rabbis for Human Rights–North America. Widely acknowledged as one of the leading voices in Jewish social justice, Rabbi Jacobs is also the author of There Shall Be No Needy: Pursuing Social Justice through Jewish Law and Tradition and Where Justice Dwells: A Hands-On Guide to Doing Social Justice in Your Jewish Community (Jewish Lights). She has been voted to the Forward newspaper’s list of fifty influential Jews, to Newsweek’s list of the fifty most influential rabbis in America and to the Jewish Week’s list of “thirty-six under thirty-six.”
Rabbi Jill Jacobs is available to speak on the following topics:
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Social Justice in Judaism: Historical, Textual and Political Roots, and Their Meaning for Jews Today
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Synagogue Social Justice That Works
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In the Image: A Jewish Take on Human Rights
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Torah in the Workplace: Ethical Business Practices for the Synagogue, School, Home and Business
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Is Slavery Alive and Well? Human Trafficking in North America: A Jewish Approach
Click here to contact the author.
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