I’m not a morning person, but on April 8, I’ll actually be excited to wake up before dawn. Yes, it’s the morning before Passover begins, and I’ll still have a long to-do list of cleaning and cooking to purge our home of chametz and prepare for the seders, but that’s not why I’ll rise with alacrity. Rather, it’s the once-in-a-generation opportunity to say Birkat Hachamah – the blessing of the sun – that has me enthused.
The Talmud quotes an earlier rabbinic source that teaches: “One who sees the sun in its season says: ‘Blessed is the One Who makes creation – Baruch oseh bereishit.’” The timing of “in its season” is explained as being when the sun returns to the same position it held at the start of its existence, on the fourth day of creation, which re-occurs every 28 years on a Wednesday in the spring. (Mark Mietkiewicz referenced some websites that elaborate on the technical details behind this calculation in his Jewish Highway columns in the past two issues of The CJN.)
Later Jewish law specifies the full text of this blessing – “Blessed are You, Eternal our God, Sovereign of the universe, who makes the work of creation” – and that this blessing should be recited upon observing the sun at sunrise or soon thereafter, until noon at the latest. Over the centuries, a short service grew around the blessing to include poetic selections from the Torah, Prophets, Psalms, Talmud, and the siddur.
Admittedly, part of my eagerness for Birkat Hachamah derives from the mere obscurity and infrequency of this mitzvah. Although I’m traditionally observant and make many blessings each day, I’ve never performed this ritual before, and I won’t be able to do so again for quite some time. However, the identical words are also prescribed for viewing scenes of exceptional natural beauty such as lightning, mountains and rivers. As an avid hiker and traveller, I have felt inspired by my surroundings to pronounce this same blessing many times before. So the overall experience of Birkat Hachamah will be new for me, but its central component, the blessing, will not.
My excitement about Birkat Hachamah really stems from something deeper than its novelty. It’s the Jewish opportunity and obligation to recognize how reliant we are on the sun – and by extension, God – for everything we have on our planet. In lighting our world, the sun provides a steady rhythm in time upon which humanity plays our great variety of tunes.
In Genesis, God says, “Let there be lights in the expanse of the sky to separate day from night; they shall serve as signs for the set times – the days and the years.” It would be difficult to overstate the necessity of the sun. As science writer Oliver Morton recently put it in the New York Times, “An unending spate of pure luminous energy pours from the sun in all directions. Eight minutes downstream at the speed of light, part of this extraordinary flux crashes down on the Earth in a 170,000-trillion-watt torrent… It is this sunlight, endlessly refreshed, that allows the grass to grow, the birds to sing – and you to live.”
Like all Jewish blessings, Birkat Hachamah can raise our consciousness of both the physical and the spiritual dimensions of life and sensitize us to the majesty of the natural world, which the Torah directs us to “serve and protect.”
It’ll be well worth waking up early to say Birkat Hachamah.
Rabbi Aaron Levy is organizing a new, grassroots, downtown Jewish community at the Kiever Synagogue in Toronto’s Kensington Market.