The Priestly Blessings
In 1979, in Ketef Hinnom, a group of archaeologists under the direction of Gabriel Barkay was exploring an ancient burial site southwest of the Old City of Jerusalem in the area now occupied by the Menachem Begin Heritage Center. At first, the caverns and burial chambers seemed to be bereft of objects of interest, but a persistent thirteen-year-old boy helping the team discovered that beneath the floor of one of the caves was a hidden chamber. There the group found almost one thousand ancient artefacts, including two tiny silver scrolls no more than an inch long.
They were so fragile that it took three years to work out a way of unrolling them without causing them to disintegrate. Eventually the scrolls turned out to be kameyot, amulets, containing, among other passages, a section from Parashat Naso: the priestly blessings. Scientifically dated to the early sixth century BCE, they come from the time of the prophet Jeremiah, just prior to the destruction of the First Temple, built by King Solomon. So ancient are they, that they are written not in the Hebrew alphabet as we recognise it today, which dates from the Babylonian exile, but rather in the ancient paleo-Hebrew script, a direct descendant of the first alphabet known to humankind. Older by far than the most ancient of biblical texts known hitherto, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the amulets can be seen today in the Israel Museum, testimony to the ancient connection of Jews to the land and the continuity of Jewish faith itself.
There is something almost poetic in the fact that it should have been this text that survived. It is among the oldest of our prayers, yet we still recite it daily.1At the beginning of the morning prayers and during the reader’s repetition of the morning Amida. Many say it at night as part of the bedtime recitation of the Shema.
It was used by the priests in the Temple. It is said today by the priests in the reader’s repetition of the Amida, in Israel every day, in most of the Diaspora only on festivals. It is used by parents when they bless their children on Friday night. It is often said to the bride and groom under the ḥuppa. It is among the shortest of blessings, a mere fifteen words long, but marked by beauty and simplicity. Here is how the Torah sets them out:
The Lord said to Moses, “Tell Aaron and his sons: This is how you are to bless the Israelites. Say to them:
The Lord bless you and protect you;
the Lord make His face shine upon you and be gracious to you;
the Lord turn His face towards you and give you peace.
So they will put My name on the Israelites, and I will bless them.” (Num. 6:22–27)
The literary structure is precise. In the original Hebrew, the first line has three words, the second, five, and the third, seven (these prime numbers have special significance throughout the Mosaic books: three-, five-, and seven-fold repetitions always signify a keyword). Equally precisely, the first has fifteen (3 × 5) letters, the second twenty (4 × 5), and the third, twenty-five (5 × 5).
What is the meaning of the blessings?
The Lord bless you and protect you: Blessing in the Mosaic books always means material blessing. Against the idea basic to many other faith systems – which embrace poverty, asceticism, or other forms of self-denial – in Judaism the world as God’s creation is fundamentally good. Religion is neither other-worldly nor anti-worldly. It is precisely in the physical world that God’s blessings are to be found.
But material blessings can sometimes dull our sensitivities towards God. The great irony is that when we have most to thank God for, often we thank Him least. We tend to remember God in times of crisis rather than in eras of prosperity and peace:
Be careful that you do not forget the Lord your God.… Otherwise, when you eat and are satisfied, when you build fine houses and settle down, and when your herds and flocks grow large and your silver and gold increase and all you have is multiplied, then your heart will become proud and you will forget the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery…. You may say to yourself, “My power and the strength of my hands have produced this wealth for me.” (Deut. 8:11–17)
This more than any other factor has led to the decline and fall of civilisations. In the early, pioneering years they are lifted by a collective vision and energy. Then as people become affluent they begin to lose the very qualities that made earlier generations great. They become less motivated by ideals than by the pursuit of pleasure. They think less of others, more of themselves. They begin to be deaf and blind to those in need. They become decadent. What happens to nations happens also to individuals and families.2The Jewish-American singer Neil Sedaka, who achieved great success in the 1960s, in 1975 wrote a song on this theme called “The Hungry Years.”
Hence the first blessing. “May the Lord protect you,” means: May He protect you from the blessing turning into a curse.
The Lord make His face shine upon you and be gracious to you: The word “grace” has such strong Christian associations that we sometimes forget its centrality to Judaism. What is grace?
Judaism is a religion of intellect: of study, questioning, ideas, argument, and the life of the mind. The historian Paul Johnson described rabbinic Judaism as an “ancient and highly efficient social machine for the production of intellectuals.”3A History of the Jews (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), 340–341.
Yet the book of Proverbs says: “Let kindness and truth not leave you. Bind them around your throat, inscribe them on the tablet of your heart. Then you will find grace and good intellect in the eyes of the Lord and man” (Prov. 3:3–4). Grace (ḥen) takes precedence over good intellect (sekhel tov).
In Kaddish DeRabbanan, the prayer we say after studying a rabbinic text, we pray for spiritual leaders who have “grace, lovingkindness, and compassion.” Once again the power of intellect is secondary to the personal qualities of sensitivity and graciousness. Grace is that quality which sees the best in others and seeks the best for others. It is a combination of gentleness and generosity.
The second priestly blessing is: May God “make His face shine on you,” meaning, may His presence be evident in you. May He leave a visible trace of His Being on the face you show to others. How is that presence to be recognised? Not in severity, remoteness, or austerity but in the gentle smile that speaks to what Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature.” That is grace.
The Lord turn His face towards you and give you peace: To make peace in the world we must be at peace with ourselves. To be at peace with ourselves we must know that we are unconditionally valued. That does not often happen. People value us for what we can give them. That is conditional value, what the sages called “love that is dependent on a cause” (Mishna Avot 5:16). God values us unconditionally. We are here because He wanted us to be. Our very existence testifies to His love. Unlike others, God never gives up on us. He rejects no one. He never loses faith, however many times we fail. When we fall, He lifts us. He believes in us more than we believe in ourselves.
You are in a crowd. In the distance you see someone you recognise. This person is well known. You met him once, briefly. Did you make an impression on him? Does he remember you? Does he know who you are? Briefly your eyes touch. From the distance, he smiles at you. Yes, he remembers you, he knows who you are, he is pleased you are here, and by his eye contact and his smile he communicates these things to you. You are relieved, lifted. You are at peace with yourself. You are not merely an anonymous face in a crowd. Your basic worth has in some way been affirmed. That, in human terms, is the meaning of “May the Lord turn His face towards you and give you peace.”
We speak of “seeking recognition.” It is a telling phrase. More even than power or wealth or success or fame, we long for what we believe these things will give us: standing in the eyes of others, respect, esteem, honour, worth. We can dedicate a lifetime to this search, but it is not a good one. People do not confer respect for the right reasons. They follow politicians who pander to their worst instincts. They feel the charisma of pure power. They flatter the wealthy. They are like moths to the flame of fame.
The recognition that counts is our reflection in the eyes of God. He loves us for what we are and what we could become. He loves the good in us, not the successful or persuasive or charismatic. He ignores the image we try to project because He knows us from within. His is the voice within us that says, “With Me, you do not have to pretend. I know you. I knew you before you were born. I know you because I made you, and I made you because I need you – or more precisely, because the world needs you. There is a task only you can do. Now, therefore, be strong and do it. You need not seek praise, nor shall you be deflected by criticism, for I will be with you every step of the way. When you feel most alone, that is when I will be closest.” That is, metaphorically, making eye contact with God. It is the meaning of the third blessing: “May the Lord turn His face towards you and give you peace.”
There is also a profound message in the concluding sentence: “So they will put My name on the Israelites, and I will bless them.”
In the ancient world, magi, oracles, and religious virtuosi were held to have the power of blessing. They were able to invoke supernatural forces. This is the meaning of what Balak, king of Moab, says to the pagan prophet Balaam:
A people has come out of Egypt; they cover the face of the land and have settled next to me. Now come and put a curse on these people, because they are too powerful for me. Perhaps then I will be able to defeat them and drive them out of the country. For I know that those you bless are blessed, and those you curse are cursed. (Num. 22:5–6)
The biblical story of Balaam is a satire on this idea. Balaam’s contemporaries, and perhaps he himself, believed that blessing or curse lay within the power of the holy person. Nothing more arouses the ridicule of the Bible than self-importance. Balaam is made to see that his own donkey has greater powers of spiritual insight than he does. It is not the person who has power over God; it is God who has the power to reveal Himself to the person – and if He so chooses, He can give it to a donkey rather than to an esteemed religious figure. Holiness is not – though it is often confused with – self-importance. True holiness is transparency to the Divine.
This is the meaning of the verse, “So they will put My name on the Israelites, and I will bless them.” In themselves, the priests have no power. They are intermediaries, channels through which God’s blessing flows.
An ancient midrash says:
The House of Israel said to the Holy One, Blessed Be He, “Lord of the universe, You order the priests to bless us? We need only Your blessing. Look down from Your holy habitation and bless Your people.” The Holy One, Blessed Be He, replied to them, “Though I ordered the priests to bless you, I will stand together with them and bless you.”4Midrash Tanḥuma, Parashat Naso 15.
It is not the priests who bless the people. Rather, it is through them that God blesses the people.
Finally, why was it the priests who were chosen to be vehicles of God’s blessing? One reason is self-evident. The entire being of the priests was within the precincts of the holy. They were the intermediaries between the people and God. But there is another reason offered by the commentators. Apparently prosaic, it has nonetheless profound wisdom.
The priests had no share in the land. Unlike the rest of the Israelites, they had no fields or farms, no businesses, no source of income through the work of their hands. Instead, they were dependent on the gifts of the people. The Israelites gave them a portion of the harvest called teruma. They received other statutory gifts. So when the Israelites prospered as a whole, the priests benefited. They had a direct interest in the prosperity of the nation. More than anyone else, the priests were dependent on the welfare of others. They were able to bless the people with a full heart, because if others were favoured, so too would they be.
This may seem like an appeal to self-interest precisely where it does not belong, in the sphere of the holy, the sacrosanct, the Temple. Yet the genius of Judaism is that it is not predicated on superhuman virtue. It is not addressed to angels or saints, but to human beings in all our fallibility. Though its ideals are surpassingly high, its psychology is realistic throughout.
It was Adam Smith in his masterwork, The Wealth of Nations, who pointed out that self-interest, when properly channelled, led to the welfare of all. Smith himself sensed that there was something religious about this, and he gave it a quasi-religious name. He called it “the invisible hand,” which was as near as he could come to speaking about divine providence – the mysterious yet benign way in which, though each of us may be concerned about our own narrow welfare, we are part of something larger than ourselves, in ways we cannot always understand. Our separate strands are part of a larger pattern.
The great Spanish poet and philosopher Judah Halevi noted that almost all our prayers are in the plural. We do not pray that God should give me something; we pray that he should give us something. “Bless us, O our Father, all of us together.” There is a spirit of community written into the liturgy. We do not ask our God to listen to the prayers of individuals but to those of the Jewish people as a whole. When Moses prayed on behalf of the people, he was answered. When he prayed for himself – to be allowed to enter the Promised Land – he was not.
Halevi adds that there is nothing mystical in this idea. He explains it with the following analogy. Imagine, he says, trying to defend your house against enemies. There are two ways of doing so. One is to build a wall around the house. The other is to join with neighbours and build a wall around the town. The former is more expensive and offers less protection. To act with others for everyone is easier and more secure.5Judah Halevi, The Kuzari, III:19.
So, he says, with prayer: If we pray by ourselves for ourselves, then we rely on our own merits, about which we can never be certain. But when we pray together with the whole community, we combine our merits with theirs. Prayer is like a protective wall, and praying together is more powerful and effective. We do not need superhuman piety – merely enlightened self-interest – to realise that our destinies are interconnected. When we are blessed, we are blessed together. Prayer is community made articulate, when we delete the first-person singular and substitute the first-person plural.
Protection, grace, peace – these are God’s blessings, communicated by the priests. We are what we pray for. If you seek to understand a people, look at its prayers. The Jewish people did not ask for wealth or power. They did not hunger after empire. They had no desire to conquer or convert the world. They asked for protection, the right to live true to themselves without fear; for grace, the ability to be an agent for good in others; and peace, that fullness of being in which each of us brings our individual gifts to the common good. That is all our ancestors prayed for, and it is still all we need.