Many of our tefillot and piyutim over Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur take the form of an acrostic of the aleph-bet. Why do we use this model? When we praise or beseech Hashem using all of the letters of the alphabet, we symbolically strive for completeness, because it’s actually impossible to truly complete the task at hand. If we were to try to praise Hashem with just a few words, we would run into the problem of when to stop, as we see in the Talmud (Megillah 25a), when an individual leading the prayers begins to list positive attributes of Hashem beyond the standard text of our tefillah, and Rabbi Chanina admonishes him: “Have you finished all of the praises of your Master?” We could never possibly finish, so we need to use defined formats – in the case in the Talmud, it was the praises said by Moshe Rabbeinu in the Torah, and in the case of our tefillot, the Hebrew alphabet. By using every letter, we are saying that Hashem is incredible in every way, without limits.
Another example of this model is the Vidui, the confession, that we say again and again on Yom Kippur: ashamnu, bagadnu, gazalnu —we are guilty, we have betrayed, we have stolen, and so on. We are saying to Hashem that we have sinned in countless ways; we can’t enumerate them all. We try to specify exactly what we have done wrong and make amends, but we know that there are too many misdeeds to remember, so we use the alphabet once again to emphasize completeness and to ask for complete forgiveness.
Alongside the importance of reflecting on where we have gone wrong over the past year, Rav A.Y. Kook zt”l teaches us that it is also motivating and empowering for each of us to think about what we have done right, to encourage ourselves to continue to do good in the world. Inspired by Rav Kook, Rav Binyamin Holtzman (Rav of Kibbutz Ma’aleh Gilboa) composed the following positive Vidui: Ahavnu, bachinu, gamalnu, dibarnu yofi –—We have loved, we have cried, we have shown kindness, we have spoken nicely. We have believed, we have tried, we have remembered, we have hugged.
Over this year of so much pain for Am Yisrael, we have also seen so much kindness and caring and love. From the shipments of gear coming from the four corners of the world for our precious IDF soldiers, to the prayers for the hostages, from the countless meals cooked for reservist families, to the clothing drives for displaced families, the Jewish people have come together in so many ways and done so much good. The incredible heroism of our soldiers and their families, the gevura of those who have lost loved ones and yet are a force for goodness and healing for our people, are nothing short of inspiring. Alongside our confession of our wrongdoing and the crucial process of reflecting on how we can do better, Rav Kook encourages us to pay attention to how we have done well, where we have succeeded, and which good examples we want to build upon for the coming year. It is our fervent hope that Hashem will see this as He judges us this year and has mercy, choosing to focus on the goodness of His people, from A to Z.
Rabbanit Sally Mayer serves as Rosh Midrasha at Ohr Torah Stone’s Midreshet Lindenbaum in Jerusalem. She is a member of the Mizrachi Speakers Bureau (www.mizrachi.org/speakers). The RZA-Mizrachi is a broad Religious Zionist organization without a particular political affiliation.
