I love and am fascinated by Birkat Hamazon, the Jewish grace after meals.  If you click over to my other website, you’ll find my full, singable English translation, as well as several short blog posts about different features and traditions of Birkat Hamazon.  Many of the posts come with playable music, and you can download a simple musical arrangement of a familiar Birkat Hamazon chant with singable English appearing right under the Hebrew.  Among the amazing features of Birkat Hamazon, the Talmud places it in a very small category of prayers which we are to say in our vernacular language if we don’t understand Hebrew.  After all, the commandment to give thanks can only mean giving thanks in a language we understand.

You’ll also find audio and video of my award-winning sermon on Birkat Hamazon, “Grace and Uncertainty.”  To tell you the truth, I think I did a better job on the audio than the video, but you be the judge!  The sermon was my entry in the 2014 Billings Preaching Competition at Harvard Divinity School.  Although Birkat Hamazon speaks of the certainty of having enough to eat, I believe it was written of, by, and for people who knew food uncertainty.  That gives rise to a nuanced and beautiful theology, which is available to us if we listen to the words of the prayer.

For our purposes in the book, studying the text of Birkat Hamazon leads us, among other places in the richness of the liturgy, to a clear appreciation of the priority the Rabbis placed on avoiding shame.  Issues of finance — of having enough, not enough, or too much — are touchy issues and cause shame.  The Rabbis, having probably lived on both sides of that experience, knew how important it is to go to every length to avoid putting our fellow community members to shame.  Shame causes us to clam up, affecting not only financial barriers to entry into the Jewish community, but also our level of comfort asking for funds that our organizations need, and that donors might be very happy to provide.  Feelings of shame can also get in the way of financial transparency, so we need consciousness that an organization’s finances are everyone’s business, regardless of that person’s socioeconomic station or place in or out of leadership.

Talking openly about shame, as we do in the shiur for Chapter 6, helps us see that shame is a natural reaction to conversations about money.  In turn, that helps us take sensitive and proactive steps to avoid it, following the example of the Rabbis, which helps us give more money, raise more money, and ultimately lead more effective organizations.