The Jewish people recite Hashkivenu every evening throughout the year, but this prayer takes new meaning during the High Holy Days. The prayer asks God to shelter us, and to lay us down to rest, in peace. On Yom Kippur, we deny ourselves food and drink, and we enumerate our own shortcomings and failures of the past year.
We consider the many unhoused living in this city; the many displaced living in this world; the inhumanity of famine. As we pray for God to shelter us in peace, we reaffirm our partnership with God, a commitment to provide the shelter, and the sustenance, and the basic needs that all humans deserve.
What do you dream on an empty stomach? When sleep is an escape from hunger, and waking will only mean making deals with your own body on borrowed strength?
When the kitchen is your bedroom, is your living room, is your life? When the blessing of a larger family means a smaller portion on your plate?
Do you dream of giving up your future for a bowl of lentil soup?
Do you dream of sheaves of wheat bending their will to you?
Or of seven sickly cows, devouring your healthiest livestock?
I wouldn’t know, to be honest, but I have friends who would, who have, who do.
What is Hashkivenu to a man whose mattress is another man’s sidewalk?
What is the canopy of peace beneath a screaming freeway overpass?
What is Hashkivenu to us, whose only hunger, God willing, may be in these brief twenty-five hours?
Ve’Taknenu be’Etza Tovah Milfanecha. Fix us, repair us, advise us to do good.
Counsel us in wisdom: to clothe the naked, heal the sick, uplift the downtrodden.
Tuck us in with Your tender kiss of righteousness, and, well, we’ll sleep on it.
Hashkivenu l’shalom, lay us down in peace, V’ha’amidenu l’hayyim, and awaken us to our responsibility for life
And in the hours between let us dream.
Dream of feeding the hungry on empty stomachs.