A “Font of Every Blessing”

I recently ran across a post I had written for this blog around the end of my first year of Judaism, despairing of ever understanding the Jewish approach to mysticism – known generally as Kabbalah – and, I’m sorry to say, poking fun in little ways at that which I did not understand.

Fast forward nearly two more years and I have not made tremendous progress understanding Jewish mysticism. But it is quite true that “when the student is ready, the teacher appears” and I do believe that I have found a teacher – a group of them, really, in the form of the ALEPH Ordination Program – who may finally help this soul connect to its mystical roots. 

I have recently started reading Rabbi Marcia Prager’s beautiful book The Path of Blessing, which takes an exhaustively detailed look at the six words that introduce a whole category of Jewish prayers known as b’rakhot: “barukh attah Adonai, Eloheinu melekh ha-olam” (typically, but as always without capturing the full sense of the Hebrew, translated as “blessed are you Lord Our God, ruler of the universe…”)**

Rabbi Marcia explains how the word “barukh,” composed of three Hebrew consonants beit-resh-khaf, can represent three types of container: beit, house, a container for our lives; resh, head, a container for our mind; khaf, open hands, a container for that which we self-consciously receive. In a way, it is the perfect description of all of those blessings that come to us: something that first enters our lives, then is comprehended by our mind, and then finally is received in a self-conscious way. She describes us as being, in this way, part of a great fountain of blessings, all trickling down from their Source, with us returning a bit of that energy upward each time we say a b’rakhah. 

This is not the first time I have encountered this particular truth. I recall once sitting in a Friends Meeting for Worship and gazing out the window at the sun glinting off the leaves of the plants outside. I recalled how sunlight provides energy for the growth of the plants, how the plants then provide nourishment for animals, and how those animals serve as food for yet more animals. In this way the sun’s energy ultimately provides the fuel for all life on earth.

In that moment, I had a flash of insight: the divine energy that Friends term The Light must work in a similar way. It flows from the Source to those of us who open our souls to it, and then from us to those who we open our lives to, and from them to yet others, so that eventually the Light of God provides spiritual energy to all lives on earth, the Love of God serving as the beginning of a great “food web” of compassion and care. 

And this connection has unlocked the first gate of understanding between me and the Kabbalah. If I approach Kabbalah not so much as an attempt to define God but as an attempt to explain how God’s divine energy flows into the world, it suddenly begins to make sense to me. 

In the beginning, Kabbalists say, all was God and there was nothing that was not God. To create, they say, God had to contract, to pull back a bit to create a space that was not-God, and then pour God’s energy back into that space to create a universe. This description of the moment of creation, it occurs to me, is not entirely inconsistent with the modern cosmologist’s Big Bang Theory!

Fast forward an eon or several and God is still creating each new moment of time, still pouring divine energy into our universe, such that we do not pray “blessed are you who created…” (past tense) but “blessed are you who creates…” (present tense).  

Looked at from this point of view, I can see the classic ten s’phirot of Kabbalah not as a complex description of God’s multiple personalities, somewhat akin to the Christian Trinity, and more as a map of how the energy of an infinite God makes it into the continuous process of creating our finite world. 

And this also ties into one of the things I love about Judaism: the assertion that we get to be God’s partners in this process of creation. We are not passive spiritual consumers, but active participants. We get to repair the world, tikkun olam, broken as it is in places. And we get to, as Rav Kook once put it, “make the old new and make the new holy”.

We have God to thank for all of this, and thank we do. Every time we say a b’rakhah, according to Rabbi Marcia, we return a bit of that divine energy back into circulation in thanks for having had the chance to experience it ourselves. 

And that brings me back to the fountain metaphor, for every fountain needs some way to return water back to the top so it can keep trickling down. And it brings me back to the title of this post: an old Christian hymn titled “Come Thou, Font of Every Blessing.”  I guess not every good idea is exclusively Jewish. :-)

And so I say: blessed are you, oh God, who gives us the chance to participate in your great fountain of blessings. 

And as they used to say at my UU church: Amen, and blessed be!

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** it is, parenthetically, one of the things I dearly love about the Hebrew language that you can write an entire book on the deep inner meanings of a mere six words