לפניך
Lefanekha
Before You, God
We confess our sins before You. We list them out — the alphabet twice over — and before each one we say: Al het shehatanu lefanekha. “For the sin that we have sinned before You.”
Perhaps there is really one sin — al het in the singular — only one mistake we make in a thousand different ways, and that one sin is our failure to live lefanekha, before You, our failure to feel the Presence of God, to know that we are lefanekha at all times.
All the rest is details, the particularities of how that lack of awareness manifests itself right now — in the way we speak or eat or are false to ourselves and others; we act in these callous ways because we don’t remember; we aren’t conscious of the Presence, of the divine Presence and of our own Presence, our own capacity to feel it and carry it inside us.
The word lefanekha meaning “before You,” has inside it the word panim, face. To be lefanekha is to acknowledge the shining of God’s face upon you, to let it in, to allow and cultivate the intimacy implied by a facial encounter.
With this in mind, it is possible to reread the al het phrase as follows: For the sin that we have sinned le-fanekha, to Your face, to our relationship with You, to our awareness of Your shining light.
On Rosh Hashanah we blow the shofar and proclaim that we “will walk in the light of Your face,” be’or panekha yehalekhun. We pray not just to sit in the light of God’s face, but to walk in it, to take it with us, to remember it when we are hurt or angry or anxious, to feel it flowing through our everyday actions and words and ways of being in the world, to “walk” in its light.
We forget so easily. Please, God, forgive us for forgetting, and give us the capacity this year to walk in the light of Your face always.
Photo by Asad Photo Maldives at Pexels
