Siddur (Orthodox, Ashkenazi**), Weekday, Shacharit/Morning Prayers, Preparatory Prayers

This text is derived from Mishna Peah (2nd-3rd c. Palestine), adapted for recitation during daily prayers.

*Definitions:

• Peah – the agricultural practice of leaving the corners of your fi eld unharvested to be available for anyone to access.
• Bikurim/the offering of the first fruits – the practice offering a portion of the fi rst fruits each harvest cycle to the Temple.
• Ra’ayon/the appearance offering – the three holiday sacrifi ces: Passover, Sukkot & Shavuot

**this prayer appears almost universally across movements and traditions (e.g. reform, Sefardi, etc.), with very slight variations in wording and translation.

Questions:

• What feels easiest to you on this list to enact and what feels the hardest?
• What do you make of this list as instructions on how to show up to the community? What does it enable? What’s challenging? What would you put on the list?
• What does it mean to you to think of these actions as mitzvot/commandments, and as core to what it means to be Jewish?

From “The Amen Effect” by Rabbi Sharon Brous (US, 2024)

The challenge is to imagine a fundamentally different reality: a world in which we recognize and fight for each other’s dignity (61).
As I look back at the last twenty years, I see the fi lm reel speeding through tragedy and triumph, heartache and harmony. But what appears in my mind’s eye in slow motion are the moments of human connection between and in the midst of the wind, the earthquakes, and the fi res, when we, lost in our heartache, yearning, confusion, take one another’s hand and make our way through the forest together.

Holding hands at the bedside as we help usher a beloved from this world, giving them permission to go, promising they’ll never be forgotten.

Witnessing love-skeptics find their way into one another’s hearts and celebrating that sometimes, in life’s radical unpredictability, we get love.

Locking arms in the center of a downtown intersection, lifting our voices in solidarity and song, weeping, and dreaming of a different future.

Kneeling at the graveside and, with our own hands, placing earth on the wooden coffin of a loved one, taken from this world too soon. Crying out from the depths of sorrow, and singing together from that same sorrow.

It’s in these times that I feel the weight of the work, the privilege of being alive, the blessing of being so close to raw beauty and pain. And it’s there that I have learned the power of saying “Amen” to one another’s grief and joy, sorrow and celebration with our very presence. Of being witness to profound suffering and protesting injustice with our very presence. Of comforting and consoling, surviving and thriving with our very presence… I have seen how knowing that we are not alone can both heighten our joy and help us endure unimaginable hardship. (xii-xiii)

From “Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care” by Kelley Hayes & Mariame Kaba (US, 2023)

By building community and cultivating a sense of belonging between alienated people, we can begin a courageous process of dreaming new possibilities into being. We can also invite people to imagine what’s possible by modeling and rehearsing the world as it should be in real time, in the spaces, groups, and relationships that we build.

Many people have no real sense or experience of community. They may think of communities in purely geographic terms – their town, their neighborhood, their school. But to build community in a relationship sense we must overcome the isolation imposed by society – an isolation that stifl es our problem-solving abilities and leaves us dependent upon structures that in times of crisis are inadequate at best and, at worst, plainly destructive.

Concretely, what does it mean to build community? In simple terms, a community is a group of three or more people with whom we share similar values and interests and with whom we experience a sense of belonging… 2

What becomes increasingly possible in spaces where people experience belonging, imagine new ways of living, and practice those kinder, more just beliefs in relationship to each other, is the cultivation of hope. Because if we can experience other people as co-strugglers – not as competitors or fearful enemies – we can act on the values of the world we want to build. We can experience moments of justice, peace, and liberation and in so doing realize that these concepts are not fantasies but realities that can be constructed. (38-40)

These practices of cultivating hope and joy as a matter of survival, under extremely oppressive conditions, are instructive in these times. We must throw our energy into building active relationships with other people whom we refuse to abandon and who refuse to abandon us. To resist the erosion of empathy, we must invite people to participate in acts of care, defense, aid, and rescue. We must normalize acts of mutual aid amid the everyday crisis of capitalism and build these mechanisms into our organizing work at the ground level. (44)

Questions:

•  What are the values of care that these texts are identify?
• Do you see these values in our Mishna? Where?
• What in these texts feels inspiring? What feels like an impediment to taking the kind of action they describe?

Acts of Loving Kindness and Mutual Aid

Questions for the following texts:

• How does/might the author understand “acts of lovingkindness”?
• Where do they come from?
• How could we recognize an action as an “act of loving kindness”?

Babylonian Talmud, Sukkah 49b, 6-8th Century Babylon

Bartenura on Mishnah Peah 1:1:5, 15th Century Italy

This is a commentary written about the first text above, exploring what, exactly, are “deeds of loving kindness/gemilut hasidim” and what it means that they “have no measure”.

From “Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care” by Kelley Hayes & Mariame Kaba

Rather than recruiting people to fi ll in roles that we envision for them, Dixon stresses the importance of learning what people are passionate about and ‘fi nding an intersection’ between someone’s interests and the work at hand. ‘Relationship building is also a process of hearing what people’s needs and dreams are and creating space for people to collaboratively or collectively take care of each other,’ Dixon said. ‘So I think a lot about starting with asking, ‘what do you want? What do you need? How can I help? Here’s what we’re working on. How does that sound to you? What are we missing? What else is needed?” (45-46)

From “The Amen Effect” by Rabbi Sharon Brous

If the sweet spot for the couple who gets arrested on Thursdays is the intersection of mutual concern and shared purpose, I want to root in a community that stands at the same intersection. Such a community sees every ritual, every service, and every gathering as an opportunity for a deepening of connectivity. It invests in people as complicated, multifaceted, wounded, beautiful individuals, each one essential to the greater whole. This kind of community is fueled by questions like “who are you, and what brings you here?” rather than “where do you work” and “Oh, you also have a screenplay?”. This kind of community establishes regular spiritual anchors – regular opportunities for people to pray, sing, grieve, learn, and refl ect together. It recognizes the collective power of people of good will working to help and heal the border society and prioritizes creating pathways for the holy work to be done. It invests in the creation of sacred space that fosters not inclusion, but belonging, intimacy and authenticity, love and accountability. (41-42)