Examining the Priestly Blessing

Rabbi Shai Held:

The threefold priestly blessing (birkat kohanim) is among the best known and most deeply treasured passages in the Torah. It is recited in Jewish prayer every day and for the past several hundred years it has been recited by parents at the beginning of Shabbat as a way of invoking God’s blessing upon their children. Part of the blessing’s power lies in the simplicity of its structure, which Bible scholar Jacob Milgrom describes as “a rising crescendo”: There are three words in the first line, five in the second, and seven in the third; fifteen consonants in the first line, twenty in the second, and twenty-five in the third. The sense conveyed is of increasing, overflowing divine blessing.

Rabbi Shai Held:

We know only too well that religion—and here, sadly, Judaism is no exception—can constrict our hearts and minds rather than expand them, can legitimate cruelty instead of kindness, and can turn God into an idol who hates precisely the same people we do. The Talmudic Sage R. Joshua b. Levi poignantly tells us that “if one is meritorious, the Torah becomes for him an elixir of life, but if not, it can become a deadly poison for him” (BT, Yoma 72b). A life of commitment to Torah can make us kinder and gentler, more loving and more present, but it can also render us cold and merciless, less loving and attentive to others instead of more. As R. Abraham Joshua Heschel pungently notes, “There has, indeed, been so much pious abuse that the Bible is often in need of being saved from the hands of its admirers.” When we pray for blessing, then, we also pray for protection, lest our blessings become

destructive curses.

Rabbi Shai Held:

Sometimes it is more difficult to receive blessing than to give it. The Israelites, still only recently liberated from slavery, are about to resume their journey to the Promised Land. They are devastated on many levels—slavery is so utterly ingrained in them that freedom is intolerable; the suffering they have endured is so profound that accepting God’s bounty is impossible. It is no easy matter for this heavily traumatized people to receive the blessings God seeks to grant them...At the deepest level, you cannot receive blessing against your will; without at least a modicum of openness and receptivity, blessing becomes impossible. According to Alsheikh, the task of the priests is to help the Israelites allow present blessings to penetrate the fog left by the past.

Rabbi Shai Held:

The Torah wants to underscore the fact that the priests are not the source of blessing. They are, rather, its conduits. “The blessing issues solely from [God]; the priests’ function is to channel it.”3 The same point is driven home by the (syntactically unnecessary) repetition of God’s name (YHWH, “the Lord”) as the beginning of each line of the formula—these are actions which God and God alone will perform. To imagine that the priests are themselves the source of blessing, or to assume that they have some mysterious capacity to guarantee it, is to expose them to the ever-present danger of grandiosity—and worse, it is to open the door to exploitation of the weak and vulnerable by those believed to have magic powers at their disposal.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks

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.

Ketef Hinnom Scrolls

https://www.imj.org.il/en/collections/198069-0