Recently our midrasha students, and frankly some of our adults, have asked me why we have a week day minyan. Why bother? they say, It’s boring. It doesn’t speak to me. I don’t understand any of it. I feel like an outsider. What’s the point? I will let you in on a little secret. Sometimes I feel that way too. During rabbinical school we would gather to daven everyday. I didn’t like to go. While I am spiritual, that service didn’t speak to me. It was too traditional, too pro forma. As a commuting student, I had business phone calls to return, some social justice activity to run, cramming for an afternoon class or frankly I needed the opportunity to eat lunch, catch up with friends or close my eyes for even just five minutes. I was too busy. I didn’t need to daven, or so I thought. By the end of school I discovered I did need it. Mincha-Maariv was “the pause that refreshes” and it made my afternoon classes and the long drive back to Massachusetts more bearable. It wasn’t just because I was studying to be a rabbi. It was deeper than that. But how could I explain this need to students?

In keeping with the words from the Talmud, “I have learned much from my teachers, more from my colleagues, and the most from my students.” So I asked our students why, why do we come to minyan, why do we place such emphasis on learning to daven. Our 2nd–6th graders answered. It was an incredible moment. Adults who were present that morning stopped in their tracks, mesmerized, and listened. Those kids fulfilled the mission of our school, the one that the school committee rewrote last summer, more eloquently than anything written in books on Jewish liturgy. They understand that we have a minyan to join with community, to have a conversation with God, to center ourselves, to find peace, to connect with the Divine, to find closure (yes a 6th grader really did say that!) and  to allow people to be able to say Kaddish. All of those reasons are true. Notice that the last reason given was to allow people to say Kaddish. While that is part of the function of a minyan, that is not the only reason we gather.

Why a minyan? Why do we need 10 people to say certain prayers, including but not limited to the Kaddish. Because when Abraham was bargaining with God to save Sodom and Gomorrah, he got down to 10. If there were just 10 righteous people (men really) then God would spare Sodom and Gomorrah. They didn’t find ten and we know the rest of that story. But 10 became the minimum number to have a community.

Why are we commanded to daven three times a  day? What is unique about the evening service? The rabbis teach us that there are three daily services to correspond with the sacrifices offered in the Temple in Jerusalem, those very sacrifices we study this week in Leviticus.  They also teach that each one corresponds with each of our patriarchs. Abraham taught us about morning prayer when he arose early in the morning to take his son, Isaac up the mountain. Isaac was walking and meditating in the field in the late afternoon before meeting Rebecca for the first time, thus giving us the afternoon mincha and Jacob prayed at night when he came to that place, that makom (another name for God) and put his head on a rock before he went to sleep and dreamed about the angels ascending and descending.

Let’s talk about the putting our head down and dreaming. What makes the maariv different from the other services? Even 2000 years ago when the rabbis were compiling what would become the Talmud and when they were transitioning Judaism from the sacrificial system in the Temple to a religion of prayer and study centered around the synagogue, they knew something. They knew that night could be a scary time so they added an extra blessing to the blessings surrounding the Sh’ma, one about God as Creator, one about the God who shows love for us by revealing Torah and one about God as redeemer when we survived the parting of the Red Sea and sign Mi Chamocha. The extra blessing asks that we get through the night in peace. Who among us has not struggled with settling down after a long work day, turning off our brains, not worrying about some problem or other and drifting off to sleep. Or who has not woken up with a nightmare or even just tossed and turned. You are not alone! With the current economy, more Americans are losing sleep and turning to prescription sleep aids, about 1 in 10 according to the federal statistics from 2010. Stressors, lost jobs and lost careers, promising businesses failing, deferred college acceptances, declining health all contribute to 3 in 10 Americans experiencing occasional sleeplessness..

Let’s look at just four words—Ufros Aleinu Sukkat Shlomecha. Spread over us the shelter, the sukkah, of Your peace. This is one of my favorite prayers.  I like the metaphor that peace is as fragile as a sukkah. One big wind could blow it away. It is temporary—lasting only the eight days of Sukkot. And you have to work for it. That is why the Torah teaches us “Seek peace and pursue it.” We need to run after it. It is not enough for it to come to us passively.

But while we are obligated to seek peace and pursue it, this prayer talks about God’s peace. And even though it is fragile, it feels like a loving embrace, like being wrapped in a warm blanket. It doesn’t fit with my rational brain, but somehow when I put my head on my pillow, God will protect me. Psalm 121 seems to agree when it promises, “The God who watches over Israel will neither slumber nor sleep. God will guard our going forth.”

Today the Jewish community paused to mark Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day. I watched as BU Hillel students stood at Marsh Chapel and read the names of victims this morning. They will continue reading until 7PM tonight. But the list of names does not convey the magnitude of the Holocaust nor can it convey the personal stories that each name represents. Anyone who has experienced trauma can resonate with the words of Ufros Aleinu. For Holocaust survivors, there wasn’t a formal diagnosis of PTSD that we use today. They had to muddle through life finding meaning when too frequently they did not receive good after care, needed to rebuild their lives and were riddled with survivor’s guilt. Going to sleep can be especially painful and difficult, with intrusive memories, flashbacks and nightmares…then and now. Yet I can imagine mothers and fathers whispering these very words of Ufros Aleinu to comfort their crying children, trying in vain to soothe them.

The poignant book by Yaffa Eliach, Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust, tells one tale of rescue where we can almost hear these very words:

The death train from Tarnow to Belzec sped through the crisp autumn night. Rabbi Israel Abraham Koczicki was holding in his arms his six-year-old son Zvi. He was whispering to his sleepy child to be strong and courageous for out there in the open spaces was a big God, father of the universe, who watches over all his children. A clink from an iron bar as it was being removed from the cattle car window, a hurried kiss from his father’s feverish lips and Zvi flew from his father’s warm arms into the dark cold Polish countryside.”

Zvi was rescued by a Polish peasant, sent to a hospital, began to recover and discovered by his own mother who then rescued him yet again. She had had, as the story continues, a strange premonition that something terrible was going to happen to her son. Despite nurses’ protests, she hastily dressed Zvi bundled him up in a blanket and with the child in her arms ran out of the hospital. Only when the hospital building was out of sight did she slow down to catch her breath. That night, November 11, 1942, all the people in the hospital, medical personnel as well as patients, forty-four Jews in all were shot to death. Zvi was safe in his mother’s arms in a tiny corner of their ghetto apartment.

There are many reasons and needs that people have when they enter a synagogue. Some want to pray and this is a house of worship, a beit tefilah. Some want to study, and this is a house of study, a beit midrash. Some need to find community and a place to be social and another name for synagogue is a Beit Knesset, a house of assembly. We do all of that here at Congregation Beth Israel. It is important to recognize all the needs that people have. Some come to say Kaddish but the evening service offers so much more. Some of that is being reassured that we will get through the night. So we gather tonight, as a community, to recite these ancient words, these very words that link us with generations gone before us—whether we understand all of them or not. Not because God needs them and not because God cares whether they are in Hebrew or English. As a powerful witness to what has come before. We pause tonight to reflect, to center ourselves, to find peace, to find community and to pray that God will protect our goings out and our comings in from this time forth, now and forever, because we need these words. We need these very words that the rabbis wrote 2000 years ago.  Then we may find that fragile peace that we are actively pursuing—and together find for ourselves the sleep that was so elusive to our ancestors, from our own parents to immigrants fleeing Europe all the way back to Jacob who gave us the tools of finding God in that Makom Kadosh—even if all he had was a rock for a pillow. The night does not have to be scary. We are not alone. We have God and we have each other.

Delivered at Congregation Beth Israel, Andover, MA, Yom Hashoah 5772