The aleinu has always been one of the more controversial prayers in the Jewish prayerbook. Although we see the prayer as a moment at the end of the service to recommit to a vision of a more perfect future, the beginning of the prayer focuses on the idea of being a chosen people, different from others. During the Middle Ages, under pressure from the Church, lines that were construed as critical of non-Jews (“worshippers of mist and emptiness”) were expunged. The Reform movement removed the original wording of the first paragraph and moved up wording from the second paragraph which praised God for being the sole Creator of the world. The Reconstructionist movement, at one point, removed the prayer completely from their liturgy. This summer, at our movement’s youth leadership camp, I spoke with a few students who had decided to remain seated and not to participate when the prayer was sung. They told me the particularism of the prayer was offensive to them.
What does it mean to be “set apart”? To be a chosen people? I would argue that one of the challenges to the relationship between Israeli and Diaspora Jews is that those abroad expect Israel to live up to Jewish ideals and act better than other nations. Israelis reply that they are a nation like any other, and to act otherwise is suicidal. Remember Tevye’s plea, “For once, God, can’t you choose someone else?” We are criticized for being elitist and thinking ourselves better than others, when often the reality is we are set apart from whatever nation we find ourselves among.
The early Reformers decided that we could be uniquely chosen, but that meant we had a special path and task, not that we were better than any others. Our history - from slavery in Egypt, through covenant at Sinai, and continuing throughout our wanderings - gives us a unique insight into humanity. Our sovereignty in Israel ended not as a punishment, not in exile, but so that we could live among the other nations of the earth and teach the message of “what is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor”.
In the end, the aleinu is a message of hope. For the Orthodox, the prayer is a hope for the arrival of a physical messiah who will usher in God’s rule on earth. For us, we believe that our human role is to bring us all closer to a messianic age - an age in which those ideals we imagine are manifest on earth. L’takein et ha-olam b’malkhut shaddai - to repair the world until it reaches the Divine ideal. As Reform Jews, this prayer takes us into the world, rather than out of it. This prayer comes at the end of our service for that very reason - to remind us that whatever we pray for inside the walls of our synagogue will not come to be unless we do the work to make it possible when we go back outside those walls. If our synagogue is a sanctuary, we are not meant to hide here. Instead, we come in to recharge and to rededicate; to strengthen ourselves after a brief respite from our labors.
Bayom hahu yihyeh Adonai echad ush’mo echad - and on that day, God will truly be one and the nature of the Divine will be understood by all.
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