Rav Shai's Torah on the Grow

What would be sold at a Back to Shul sale? Different prayer books? Customized head coverings? Air Pods? (Air Pods are wireless headphones so discrete as to be obscured by a full head of hair, but not so discrete as to escape the attention of most college professors and rabbis.)

Part of the excitement of coming back to school is seeing old friends but having new teachers and new classes. Maybe there will even be new faces among the student body. At shul, we see old friends and the occasional new face. But there’s more consistency with our teachers and classes than at school. That’s mostly a good thing. At school, the goal is learning; at shul, the goal is serving God.

Doesn’t it feel a tad pretentious to think that we can serve God? But Judaism, unlike some other religions, accords astonishing power to human actions. Services in shul are designed to prepare us for serving God outside of shul. Part of the preparation is shavat vayinafash/rejuvenation; and part of the preparation is learning, and reviewing, how we are to serve God outside of shul. Rejuvenation tracks on to those things we are bidden not to do on Shabbat and the holidays. Learning tracks on to the ritual and the content of the prayers. The trick is to prevent the learning from becoming what Rashi calls “stale dictates.”

From the Torah to today, our covenant with God has had one principal goal: to live long on the land that the Lord, our God, has given us. As the psalmist suggests (six times), singing a new song keeps things fresh. The occasional new song might even encourage some folks to leave their Air Pods at home.