My G-d, a Navaho?

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Shabbat Shirah, it’s time to sing. Standing on the edge of a Red Sea that has returned to its roiling nature, drowning the fleeing, terrified Egyptian charioteers, Am Yisrael is ecstatic and, with Moshe, breaks into song. They sang in unison a song that welled up from a prophetic vision of redemption that, our sages tell us, outstripped even the visions of Yechezk’el and Isaiah, both of whom “saw” Hashem enthroned on high. The song so permeated the very fabric of being that it is introduced with the imperfect mood of the verb – Az Yashir Moshe… “Then Moshe will sing”, as though the song is every ringing in the background of our Jewishness.

So what did they sing? Pure poetry, and therefore, as difficult to feel confident in parsing as it must be even to attempt to imagine what they were feeling at that moment. And yet, we reprise it every day in our morning prayers, as part of Pesukei D’Zimra. Every verse of this song is fit for deep reflection; I’ve chosen the following well-known verse to dwell upon this time around:

Zeh E-li v’anveihu, E-lohei avi va’arom’menhu

This is my G-d and anveihu (“I will ???); the G-d of my father and I will uplift Him

What is it that we are committing ourselves to doing here in this verse, as a response to the dramatic redemption of Israel from what they feared was sure death? The context might suggest that anveihu is a synonym of arommenhu, as is so often the case in the Biblical poetic convention of parallelism or symmetry. But let’s look closer at the root of the word, and see what the commentators have to say.

Onkelos translates: This is my G-d and I will build Him a sanctuary. This is based on understanding the key word, anveihu, as stemming from the root nun-vav-heh, meaning “abode, habitation”. The Beit Hamikdash is referred to as Naveh sha’anan, abode of tranquility.

Ramban is evidently uncomfortable with this approach, both because it violates the rule of parallelism and for reasons pertaining to his mystical understanding of precisely what it was that the people experienced. Therefore, he preserves Onkelos’s linguistic derivation but with a twist: I will elevate to His heavenly abode the G-d of my fathers who revealed Himself to them as E-l Sha-dai, but now I will raise Him up to His “full-namedness”!

Rashbam goes in what seems to be a different direction. He understands anveihu as deriving from a different root, nun-alef-heh, meaning “beautiful”. “This is my G-d and I will beautify Him” is how he translates the passage. He, too, wants anveihu to parallel arommenhu - both “beautification” and “uplift” being expression of honoring the divine.

The sentiments expressed in the interpretations of both the Ramban and the Rashbam are such a wonderful responses to the experience of being lovingly snatched from the jaws of destruction – quid pro quo, as it were; the only question is – how? How is this to be accomplished?

A midrash in the Gemara (Shabbat 133b) helps us with this last question:

“This is my G-d and anveihu: beautify yourself before Him with mitzvot – make before Him a beautiful sukkah, a beautiful lulav, a beautiful shofar, beautiful tzitzit, a beautiful Sefer Torah written in beautiful ink with a beautiful pen, by a skilled scribe, and swathed in beautiful silken cloths; Abba Shaul says: anveihu – become a semblance of Him: just as He is merciful and compassionate, so you be merciful and compassionate.

In the midrash on Shir haShirim, the splitting of the Red Sea is described as Yom Chatunato – Hashem’s Wedding Day, as it were. Am Yisrael is the Kallah. We must be clothed appropriately for the occasion, so that everyone who sees us will know, “there goes a bride!”. What garments are we to wear? Outer garments, meant for everyone, and inner garments, meant for our Beloved. The outer garments are the “ritual mitzvot”, the inner garments is the making over of our personal attributes in the image of Hashem. The outer garments are worn over the inner garments, mitzvot are done out of and through a fundamental sense of compassion and mercy for all Hashem’s creatures, and thus become expressive of those traits.

Thus do we bond to our Redeemer, our Covenantal Partner, our Might and our Song (“Ozi v’Zimrat – Kah!). Thus do we make the Name whole as we enthrone Him in His supernal abode, and take our own place up there even as we walk down here.

Anveihu - Aleph-nun –vav-heh-vav. Our mystics teach us that this word is in reality “clipped” form of Ani v’Hu – I and He. Bound together we are, as expressed in the everyday mystery of the union of ordinary and sacred, the here-and-now and the beyond-and-forever, in the act of mitzvah done out of self-transformation.

Aristotle identified symmetry as as key element of beautify. By invoking anveihu, we are summoning ourselves to enhance the beauty of symmetry in poetic expression, in song, by taking it to the level of actions, of soul states, of real being.

I learned from the detective novels of the recently departed Tony Hillerman that Navajo have a ceremony in which they recite the following;

In beauty may I walk
All day long may I walk
Through the returning seasons may I walk
Beautifully I will possess again
Beautifully birds
Beautifully joyful birds
On the trail marked with pollen may I walk
With grasshoppers about my feet may I walk
With dew about my feet may I walk
With beauty may I walk

With beauty before me may I walk
With beauty behind me may I walk
With beauty above me may I walk
With beauty all around me may I walk

In old age, wandering on a trail of beauty, lively, may I walk
In old age, wandering on a trail of beauty, living again, may I walk
It is finished in beauty
It is finished in beauty

Maybe the stories about them being descended from Am Yisrael aren’t so farfetched afterall?