It Is Upon Us to Praise

Good morning everyone. Welcome back to Learn to Daven - Day 289.

Today we open the prayer that ends every Jewish service on earth. Shacharis, Minchah, Maariv, weekday, Shabbos, Yom Kippur - whatever else changes, Jews walk out through the same door: Aleinu.

And I want to start with its resume, because Aleinu might have the strangest career of any prayer in the siddur.

Start with the author. The tradition recorded in the Rishonim - you'll find it in the Kol Bo - attributes Aleinu to Yehoshua bin Nun. Yehoshua. Moshe's student. If the tradition is right, this is the oldest prayer in your siddur - older than the Amidah by nearly a thousand years, composed as Israel crossed into the Land. The Men of the Great Assembly gave us the Amidah's eighteen blessings; Aleinu comes, by this tradition, from the man who watched the Yarden split.

Now here's the strange part of the career. For most of Jewish history, Aleinu was not a daily prayer at all. It had one home, and it was the most exclusive real estate in the calendar: Rosh Hashanah Musaf. Aleinu is the grand opening of Malchuyos - the section where we crown God King - in the liturgy tradition attributes to Rav, the great sage of Bavel. Once a year, at the peak of the Day of Coronation, with the shofar waiting, the chazzan would begin: Aleinu l'shabei'ach. That was Aleinu's moment. That was its whole job.

And then, in the Middle Ages, something happened: communities began saying it every day, at the end of davening, until it settled into the permanent closing slot in every rite in the world.

So the question is obvious. Who takes the climactic aria of the holiest day of the year and makes it the exit music for a random Tuesday?

Rabbi Sacks, who wrote beautifully on Aleinu in his siddur commentary, would frame it this way: the siddur is telling you what a Jew is supposed to carry out. Think about what a closing statement is. Every craftsman of communication knows the last thing said is the thing remembered. The siddur had one slot left - the final ninety seconds before you re-enter the world of traffic and email - and it chose to fill that slot with the Rosh Hashanah coronation. Meaning: the thing you're supposed to walk out holding is not a request, not even gratitude. It's mission. The whole davening funnels down to a statement of what we're here for.

And look how the statement begins - with its very first word, which is the whole prayer in miniature. Aleinu. "It is upon us." Not "it would be nice." Not "we feel moved to." Upon us - the Hebrew of obligation, the language you'd use for a debt or a duty. To praise the Master of all is framed as something we owe.

But read the next words and see what kind of duty. L'shabei'ach la'Adon hakol - to praise the Master of ALL. Laseis g'dulah l'Yotzeir b'reishis - to ascribe greatness to the Author of creation itself. The scope is total: all, everything, the whole of existence. And who says this cosmic sentence? Aleinu - us. This little people. The audacity of the first three words is breathtaking when you slow down: the smallest of nations assigning itself the job of PR for the Creator of the universe. It's the claim we saw at the end of Psalm 148 back on Day 87 - the universal chorus, carried by one small people standing close - now compressed into a single opening word.

There's a reason communities under crushing pressure sang Aleinu - it entered daily prayer in an era when saying "He is our God, there is no other" cost something real. A prayer born, by tradition, at the entry to the Land became the prayer Jews carried through every exit since.

So here's this morning's reframe. When you reach Aleinu today, you're not winding down. You're doing the same thing you do when the shofar is about to sound on Rosh Hashanah - crowning a King - except you're doing it on a weekday, in street clothes, which in some ways is the bigger statement. Anyone can crown a king at the coronation. Aleinu asks you to do it on the way to work.

Tomorrow: the line right after this one, and it's the most politically incorrect sentence in the siddur - we thank God for what He did not make us. We're going to face it head on.