Aleinu

            Into the cry of the ram’s horn the Jewish people has poured all our yearnings for a world redeemed and unified.  The shofar proclaims God “king of the universe,” a single majestic consciousness to govern the frightened and fragmented human race.

            The aleinu, composed originally for the shofar service on Rosh Hashanah, God’s coronation day, now stands near the end of every Jewish service, an archway through which we pass from the Jewish particular to the human universal.  “We Jews are different,” this prayer declares in four different ways in the space of the opening verse. But in the messianic closing lines, the holy one sits enthroned and exalted by a united, enlightened humanity.

            Our need for God arises out of our awareness that we are strangers to each other.  Our separations and the distances between us stimulate the religious impulse to translate, to make connections, to show correspondences, and to cross boundaries. 

            We do not pray for difference to disappear.  The distances between us are the empty space at the heart of the loom, across which we human beings will one day weave the whole-cloth of a redeemed humanity.