ESSAY: The Priestly Blessing (Parashat Naso)

יְבָרֶכְךָ֥ ה’ וְיִשְׁמְרֶֽךָ׃
May God bless you and protect you!
יָאֵ֨ר ה’ ׀ פָּנָ֛יו אֵלֶ֖יךָ וִֽיחֻנֶּֽךָ׃ 
May God shine God’s face upon you and deal graciously with you!
יִשָּׂ֨א ה’ ׀ פָּנָיו֙ אֵלֶ֔יךָ וְיָשֵׂ֥ם לְךָ֖ שָׁלֽוֹם׃
May God lift up God’s face towards you and grant you peace!
(Numbers 6: 24-26)

Birkat kohanim, the Priestly Blessing, is an invitation into an alternate divine realm that can offer us nourishment as we make our way in this often troubled human world.  

Filling the Void

 יְבָרֶכְךָ֥ – May God bless you.  Brachah refers to a sense of plenty, of cornucopia, of superabundance, like a breichah, “a pool” whose waters are overflowing.  

We often feel a sense of lack in our lives.  We feel needy and unfilled, empty, dissatisfied, as if something is always missing but we can’t quite put our finger on what.  We search around for ways of filling this hole, but it’s still there, a perpetual hunger and restlessness.     

 יְבָרֶכְךָ֥ – May God bless you and fill you. Only God can fill this hole. We run around and try to fill it in a thousand ways, but only God can truly fill it.   Sabeinu mituvekha – fill us up, satisfy us, with your goodness, God.   It is only You who can fill us.  There is no scarcity on the divine plane.  We are filled and overflowing.  

Feeling Safe

וְיִשְׁמְרֶֽךָ– May God protect you.  This blessing of protection comes not just to physically protect us, but maybe more importantly, to help us feel safe.  Much of our suffering comes not from the danger itself, but from our constant preoccupation, worry, dread and anticipation of it.  All that hypervigilance and control leaves us exhausted and in many ways, still full of fear.  What if we really leaned into the idea that God is our refuge and our shelter, that God has commanded angels to guard us who will carry us over rough ground (Psalm 91)? Lo ira ra ki atah imadi.  “I fear no evil for You are with me (Ps 23).”  You are with me.  Whatever happens, we are not alone, and that accompaniment helps us feel calmer in our moments of fear.

There is perhaps another element of divine protection that can nourish us as well.  We are also often preoccupied with emotional security, keeping ourselves guarded and defended in order to protect our fragile selves from insult, on the alert to ensure that we are treated with proper honor and admiration in a clinging, oversensitive way.  But maybe this blessing of divine protection offers us another way of thinking about ourselves: God has our back.  In the divine realm, there is no possibility of injury; we are always fully respected and held by God in love and tenderness.  Secure in this knowledge, we are indeed protected in this world, far less vulnerable than we had imagined.  No one can really hurt us.  

God Sees Our Light

יָאֵ֨ר ה’ ׀ פָּנָ֛יו אֵלֶ֖יךָ וִֽיחֻנֶּֽךָּ׃ – May God shine [ya’er, from the root or] God’s face upon you.  Or, light, was the first thing that God declared good in this world.  God’s light is a symbol of goodness, and a symbol of the divine ability to see the good.  For God to shine light upon us means for God to look at us and see in us the good, for God to declare us, too, tov, good, our own divine light reflected in the light of the divine countenance. The Torah says that Moshe’s mother saw that he was good when he was born, and the midrash explains that the house was filled with or, with light (Rashi on Exodus 2:2).  God is like such a mother to us, beaming at us in delight at our own light, seeing how it fills us, fills the house, fills the world, believing in that light in us and helping us believe in it, so that we, too, can grow to our full light-giving potential like Moshe. 

We don’t always feel that way about ourselves.  We are often mired in self criticism and self loathing, viewing ourselves harshly, as if through dark shaded glasses. This blessing invites us to put on God’s light-filled glasses, to look at ourselves through God’s eyes, to feel the warmth of that beaming divine gaze, and to know our own light, to inhabit our own radiance.  

Light (and God) at the Center

This phrase about light, it is the middle phrase of the priestly blessing.  We have reached the center and the center is light.   And, we should note, the other thing at the center here is God.  In every line of Birkat Kohanim the word for God is at the center, as in yevarekhekha Hashem veyishmerekha.  So putting these two together, what is at the center – of the priestly blessing, of life, and of ourselves –  is God and light.  When we touch our inner central point, our essence, what we find is both divine – the eternal core planted in us by God – and also full of light.  That is our center, who we really are, a divine being emanating light.   

Even When We Are Low

יִשָּׂ֨א ה’ ׀ פָּנָיו֙ אֵלֶ֔יךָ  – May God lift God’s face towards you.  We might worry that we could lose that light. Will God still beam down on us and be pleased with us –  are we still beings of light – when we err, when we collapse, when we are mired and stuck in our human brokenness?  This next line reassures us that the answer is a resounding yes. Yisa Hashem panav elekha – this word, yisa, is often used for forgiveness, as in nose avon vafesha of the 13 attributes.  And indeed Rashi interprets our phrase to mean that God will conquer God’s anger (Rashi on Numbers 6:26).  The sense is that God will continually lift God’s face towards you, will not turn away no matter what you do, but stay facing you even when you are in your lowest, most broken state. 

Yisa, God will lift up, perhaps God will lift you up through that divine countenance, through the light of God’s beaming face.  Maybe you can see yourself crumpled on the ground – we all have those moments, moments when we give up on ourselves and on the world – you can see yourself collapsed there, and then notice God’s face, steadily turned towards you, honoring you and lifting you, scooping you up from that crumpled place with love and devotion, never turning away, no matter what you do. 

With Grace

This forgiveness and holding comes to us for free, hinam, which is related to the next word in Birkat kohanim: וִֽיחֻנֶּֽךָּ  vayehuneka – from hen, grace, God will deal graciously with you, without a scoreboard, unconditionally, lifting you up as an act of pure grace, without reason, as an expression of essential divine goodness and care,  nourishing the world, hazan et ha’olam, behen behesed uverahamim, “with grace, with loving kindness and with mercy.”  Maybe you can feel the steadiness of this nourishment and how independent it is of your action, of your flaws, how much it is an expression of God’s essence to be kind and merciful and gracious. 

Arriving At Peace

וְיָשֵׂ֥ם לְךָ֖ שָׁלֽוֹם  – May God grant you peace.  The verb here, veyasem, means “put” or “place.”  May God place peace upon you like a blanket placed over a shivering child.  The placing implies rest; we can only have a blanket placed upon us if we are still.   We are so filled with restlessness much of the time, but maybe we can pause once in a while to allow this blanket to be spread over our restless, fearful shivering parts, to feel the blanket’s weight, its warmth, its protection, its love, and its peace, and to let all of that gradually seep into us.  

This is divine peace.  It does not negate all that restlessness, all that still needs to be done in the world.  Peace comes to us amidst, within this broken world; only God can grant us that. 

All the other blessings lead here, to peace, to rest.  You are blessed. You are protected.  God looks on you with delight.  God forgives you and lifts you up when you are low.  Come now, come to rest, to peace.  You are whole and loved as you are. 

Each of the blessings gives us the divine perspective that allows us to stop and stand still and feel shalem, complete.   It all leads to shalom, to deep peace, to the knowledge that we are held steadfastly and continually by the divine and therefore need not worry.  The human world and our own human parts may tell us we are less than or that we need to run and worry about a thousand things to make sure all goes well for us and that we are properly admired and safe, but there is another, deeper layer of existence, and in that deeper layer, we can come to know ourselves as God sees us, to feel our wholeness, and to rest, curled up with a blanket covering us.  

These blessings are here for us.   We can offer them to ourselves at any moment.  We can use them as mantras, reminding ourselves of the divine perspective and feeling the blessing of that shift, of learning to inhabit that view. 

Becoming a Channel

Blessings are gifts we take in and also give to one another.  We can become, like the kohanim, a channel for this divine energy, allowing the blessing to flow through us, the sense of fullness and protection and love and light, of forgiveness and peace and wholeness, allowing it all to flow through us and out to all those around us and into the larger world beyond. 

It is Complete

Shalom is the last of the blessings of Birkat Kohanim, and generally the last part of any prayer.  It is like a full stop, asking us to take in the completeness, the shelemut, of what we have done and the completeness of our own selves.  It is enough.  We are complete in this moment.

Photo by Kristina Paukshtite at Pexels