Chus V'Rachem Aleinu

Good morning everyone. Welcome back to Learn to Daven - Day 240.

Today I want to fix a translation, because the standard English of this line commits the classic siddur crime: it makes two different words sound like the same word said twice.

"Have pity and mercy on us." Chus v'rachem aleinu. That's the plea at the heart of Shema Koleinu in the siddur most of the Ashkenazi world davens from. And read in English, it sounds like padding - pity, mercy, compassion, whatever, pile on the synonyms. But Hebrew does not repeat for free. Chus and rachem are two entirely different kinds of mercy, coming from two entirely different places, and the day you can tell them apart, this line stops being filler and becomes one of the most vulnerable sentences you say all morning.

Start with chus, because the Tanach itself defines it for us, in the last lines of the book of Yonah. Yonah is sitting outside Ninveh, furious, and God grows a kikayon - a leafy plant - to shade his head, and then kills it, and Yonah is heartbroken. And God says: atah chasta al hakikayon - "you had chus on the plant - which you did not work for and did not grow." And then the punchline of the entire book: va'ani lo achus al Ninveh? - "and I should not have chus on Ninveh, that great city?"

Look carefully at what chus means there. Yonah didn't love the plant. The plant wasn't his child. His feeling was: something I benefited from, something that existed under my care, is being destroyed - what a waste, what a loss. And God's answer is the craftsman's version of that feeling: Ninveh is Mine. I made those hundred and twenty thousand people. My work is in them. A carpenter can't watch a table burn - not because he loves the table, but because his hands are in it.

Chus is the mercy of the maker toward what he made.

Now rachem. Rav Hirsch - who built a whole method out of listening to the roots of Hebrew words - points to where this one comes from: rechem. The womb. Rachamim is not a judge's clemency and not a craftsman's protectiveness. It is womb-love: the feeling of a mother toward the person who came from her own body. It's the mercy in the verse k'rachem av al banim - "as a father has rachamim on his children." It doesn't ask what you deserve. It can't help itself. You came from Me; therefore I am moved for you. That's the entire logic.

So now say the line again: chus v'rachem aleinu. It's not one request, it's two, and they're aimed at two different relationships we have with God at the same time.

Chus - deal with me as Your handiwork. Some mornings that's all you can claim. You look at your week and there's no merit to point at, no performance to invoke. Fine. But You made me. Your work is in me. Don't let Your own project go to waste. Notice that this is a plea that requires literally nothing of us - even Ninveh, at rock bottom, qualified. Even the cattle of Ninveh qualified; God says so in the very last words of the book.

Rachem - but don't stop there. Deal with me as Your child. Not the maker's loss-prevention, the mother's ache.

And here's what our own siddur does with this, and I find it moving. The Alter Rebbe's text, which we saw yesterday, doesn't actually say chus here. It reads Av harachaman, rachem aleinu - merciful Father, have rachamim on us. The Nusach Ari edits out the craftsman and goes straight to the parent. As if to say: when a Jew stands in Shemoneh Esrei, don't open negotiations at the minimum. You're not the kikayon. You're not Ninveh's cattle. Lead with Father.

But I'd tell you to keep both words in your pocket, whichever siddur you hold. Because davening has weather. There are mornings when rachem feels true - when you can stand there as a child, close and claimed. And there are mornings when you feel so far from everything that "child" sounds like someone else's word - and on those mornings, chus is the rope. You don't need to feel like a son to say: You made me. Don't waste me.

Two mercies. The floor and the embrace. The siddur asks for both, in one breath, so that no morning - and no version of you - is left without a door.

Tomorrow: we ask God to accept our prayer, and the siddur uses two words for that too - b'rachamim u'v'ratzon - and the second one is asking for something almost audacious.