When my wife Judy and I moved to New York from California and joined Minyan M’at, one of the first things that we noticed was the enthusiasm with which the congregants sang “El Adon,” one of the opening prayers in the Shabbat morning service. The minyan members know a number of different melodies, some faster and more rhythmic, others slower, but they all mark a moment of vivid emotion in the service.
The poem itself, dating likely to the Middle Ages, is an example of the genre of piyyutim. Written as an acrostic, starting with aleph and moving through the entire Hebrew alphabet—a technique which not only favors learning of the text, but also marks the broad ambition of the poet to encompass the universe: no letter could be lacking in its account. It speaks of the angels and other heavenly beings that praise God and proclaim God’s sovereignty, joyously following divine commandments. It directly references the “lights” which God created, the sun and the moon and the numerous other lights. The lines which begin with mem and nun describe these lights: “Full of splendor, they radiate brightness. Their brilliance adorns the universe.” The following lines speak directly of their orderly movements: “Rejoicing in rising and exalting in setting, with reverence they obey the will of their creator.”
These other lights may simply be stars, or they may be astrological references to the planets. The poem names specific divine attributes (justice, mercy, goodness, purity, and so forth), which can be aligned directly with the visible planets—a tricky balance for Jews, since idolatry is so severely forbidden (the Talmud often uses the phrase “servants of the stars” to refer to pagans), but the order of the divine creation is open to our attentive examination and to the exploration of the clues offered in our texts, particularly the visions of angels contained in Isaiah and Ezekiel.
Is this poem simply an opportunity for us to encounter the deep piety of our forebears, for whom angels were real presences in the world, evidenced to them by text and experience alike. We are distant both from their worldviews and their connections with the skies. The daily and annual cycles of the sun shaped their lives much more than ours, and the moon—always full at Sukkot, Purim and Pesach—marked the approach of the holidays for people who did not receive synagogue newsletters in their inboxes. The night skies over even the largest of the medieval cities would have been dark enough for numerous stars to be visible.
I think that we can find something more, something that speaks to our current lives and concerns. Surprisingly, Manhattan is an unusually privileged place to see the movement of the sun from its southernmost position at the winter solstice in December to the northernmost point at the summer solstice in June: we can see its movement through the grid of buildings if we are attentive, not merely at the twice-annual occurrence at Manhattanhenge. The moon, too, is a presence in our skies. For those of us on the Upper West Side, Riverside Drive offers numerous spots with open views to the west, where the crescent moon and the evening star are visible. I invite you to join me in subscribing to EarthSky, earthsky.org, a nonprofit which sends monthly updates on the planets that are visible in the night sky. Venus and Jupiter are bright enough to be seen nearly all the time in our neighborhood, urban though it may be; Mars and Saturn often are as well, and Mercury can pop into view with the simplest of binoculars.
These reminders to stop, to look up and to wonder have helped build my awareness of the lights in the sky. I do not think of them as literally obeying divine commandments, but their movements are inspiring nonetheless, testifying to the regularity and coherence that govern the universe.
The medieval poet understood that we humans inhabit a vast universe, with the earth below and the heavens above. In that view, our earth is often chaotic, and forces like human willfulness, greed and hatred create destruction, while the heavens—directly visible above us, displaying a profound harmony and order—are a source of reverence and hope.
We, too, are keenly aware of the greater order elsewhere in the solar system, galaxy and universe than down here on earth. Indeed, we understand the disturbances in our earthly realm as extending into the atmosphere that we have been filling with greenhouse gasses. (As I write, the sky outside my window is a hazy color, due to smoke from wildfires in Nova Scotia.) Though our view of order is different from the poet’s, we both live on an earth from which the heavens are in view. The skies can show us—as they showed the poet—the opportunities for our actions to restore on earth the order that is in plain sight above.
- Ben Orlove, JCAN NYC member