Every single day in our morning service, we recite a prayer known as Ahavah Rabbah. This paragraph speaks about the deep love that God has for us as a people. Our tradition teaches that because of that love, God gave us the Torah to study, to live by, and to treasure. In that prayer we read,
וְהָאֵר עֵינֵינוּ בְּתורָתֶךָ. וְדַבֵּק לִבֵּנוּ בְּמִצְותֶיךָ. Open our eyes to Your Torah, help our hearts cleave to Your mitzvot
Engagement with Torah is then one of the ways that we connect to God and that we hope to feel God’s love. We hope through opening our eyes to Torah, we will inch closer to mitzvot. Creating a life of Torah and mitzvot is a reflection from us back to God of our own love, our desire to be in relationship and covenant with God.
The idea, from this prayer, is that we will see God’s Torah, our eyes will be open to the teachings from God, and in turn, our hearts will cleave to God’s mitzvot. Sometimes our spiritual lives operate in this causal way, and sometimes opening our eyes to see Torah is simultaneously the very expression of a mitzvah. Our eyes open to Torah as our hearts are already cleaving.
This Shabbat, we celebrate a group of individuals who embody this, who have chosen to open their eyes wide to Torah. We celebrate a group of people who challenged themselves to learn how to chant Torah as a adults, and we as a community get to bear witness to hearts cleaving to mitzvot.
For the past two months, a group of adults learned diligently how to chant Torah, pushing themselves to learn a new skill in a foreign language, to courageously stand in front of our community and sing out the holy words of our Torah. I am inspired and in awe of the dedication of these students and their teacher, Danny Schaffzin, and I hope you will join me on this incredibly special Shabbat to celebrate their accomplishments. Seth Agranov, Mitch Hodus, Stephanie O’Dell, Stephanie Weiser, Lauren Tochner, Rose Ross, and Jen Bear will chant for us tomorrow morning, and as they read, I imagine we will feel their hearts cleaving. I hope they will feel the love from God as they take on a beautiful mitzvah, and I hope they will feel the love from their community, as we get to be a part this sacred moment.
I hope to see all of you over Shabbat, and may we all continue to go from strength to strength.
