Sacred Words in Liturgy and Life

On the Uvekhen Prayers

Shira Billet, Assistant Professor of Jewish Thought and Ethics, and Director of the Hendel Center for Ethics and Justice, JTS

In a 1958 lecture[1] on prayer, Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote, “It takes two things for prayer to come to pass—a person and a word. Prayer involves a right relationship between those two things. But we have lost that relationship . . . We do not think about words, although few things are as important for the life of the spirit as the right relationship to words.”

Beyond the realm of prayer, this elusive “right relationship” between persons and words is central to our ability to have relationships at all. “Words have become clichés, objects of absolute abuse. They have ceased to be commitments. We forget that many of our moral relationships are based upon a sense of the sacredness of certain words.”

What Heschel worried about in 1958 is even more concerning in 2024. Human communication, the commitment to taking words seriously, is further imperiled in an age where our words are mediated through the technologies of social media and artificial intelligence, and the crippling social phenomena of political polarization and widespread mistrust.

Heschel argues that taking seriously the words in our liturgy is part of a broader process of reclaiming the gravity of words. From prayer and liturgy, Heschel believed this morally important relationship to words would permeate our lives more broadly.

This High Holiday season is an ideal time to work on reclaiming our relationship with words, beginning with the liturgy in our mahzor. I want to call attention to a liturgical poem that appears in the Amidah on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, a series of three paragraphs that begin with the word uvekhen (ובכן). Typically translated as “so then,” according to an old Jewish tradition, ובכן is in fact a name of God, or alternatively, the alphanumerical equivalent of a phrase that refers to the divine-human relationship itself.

These paragraphs were introduced into Jewish liturgy in the period of the Babylonian Talmud. The first paragraph begins “uvekhen ten pahdekha” (ובכן תן פחדך). It was this very paragraph, where we envision a human world completely united in its awe and fear of God, that inspired Protestant theologian Rudolf Otto, who spent Yom Kippur 5672 (1911) in a Jewish synagogue in Morocco, to describe the Yom Kippur liturgy as “a liturgy unusually rich” in hymns that express his concept of “the numinous”—the profound, nonrational experience of the presence of God as a tremendous mystery.

In this paragraph, it is the fear and awe of God that leads “all of God’s creatures” to collectively submit to God, and to become “bonded together as one” to do God’s will “with a full heart.” For Heschel, this very paragraph in the High Holiday liturgy reflects the broader essence of prayer itself, which is an effort “to make God immanent,” to bring God’s presence into this world.

Heschel writes:

The true motivation for prayer is . . . the sense of not being at home in the universe. Is there a sensitive heart that could stand indifferent and feel at home in the sight of so much evil and suffering, in the face of countless failures to live up to the will of God? . . . God Himself is not at home in the universe. He is not at home in a universe where His will is defied and where His kingship is denied . . . To pray means to bring God back into the world, to establish His kingship for a second at least.

The payoff comes in the next paragraph: “uvekhen ten kavod” (ובכן תן כבוד). After coming together to bring God’s presence back into this world, we feel a sense of dignity (kavod) and hope (tikvah tovah) for the future; there is “happiness in the land and joy in the city.”

Let this new year, 5785, be a year in which we recommit to taking seriously the sacred value of words. We can learn this value through attention to the words we say in prayer and their meanings, which reflect, in turn, the very essence of prayer. Let us pray the words in our siddur and mahzor with seriousness.

From the High Holiday season back into daily life, let 5785 be a year of speaking and writing words that are carefully considered—words that we can truly own and stand behind. This involves engaging in deep and extended conversation, not the kind mediated through social media—with words that are our own, whose authorship has not been outsourced to technology. This involves listening carefully to the words of others, assuming goodwill, asking questions for clarification, and expressing disagreement frankly and honestly, but also thoughtfully and respectfully, in a way that preserves relationships. When we do this, we can hope that others will do the same for us, and over time, if we continue to take words seriously both in prayer and in daily relationships, we can become a unified community, even across differences. Perhaps we will experience again that hope, dignity, and joy that we see in the Uvekhen prayers—for the Jewish people together with the broader community of humanity.

[1] This lecture can be found in The Insecurity of Freedom (pp. 254–261).

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