The Bar'chu: Meaning and Movement

Stephanie Friedman
December 1, 2012

I would like to thank Shirley Holbrook for asking me to take part in this series, which seems to me to 

be a wonderful enactment of the idea of being “a congregation of learners.” In preparing this short tal

k, I have learned much about a prayer whose meaning I had never analyzed very deeply before it was assigned to me. I hope that these remarks will spark at least some additional insights and further kavannah for others as well.

All sacred acts require a summoning, the Zohar tells us, and, when a minyan is present, we are summoned to recite the Sh’ma and its blessings by the Bar’chu (Artscroll Siddur, p. 84 n). The prayer leader calls:

Bar’chu et adonai hamevorach [bowing at bar’chu and straightening at Adonai]
Bless Adonai, the blessed one.
Baruch adonai ham’vorach l’olam vaed [again bowing at baruch and straightening at Adonai]The congregation responds, and then the prayer leader repeats:

Blessed is Adonai, the blessed one, for all eternity.

Why this summons? And why in these words, with these motions? What does it mean to call upon the assembled people to bless God, whom, one would think, would be the One to do the blessing, not One who would need to be blessed by mere mortals? If we stop to consider the function of the Bar’chu in the service, and its effect upon us when we pray, some answers begin to emerge.

The Bar’chu comes at a point in the service when we are leaving the preliminaries behind and getting to the heart of public prayer. We don’t need a minyan to recite the Sh’ma when we lie down in the privacy and solitude of our beds, to mention one time and place for reciting the Sh’ma, but when we do so in public assembly, the Bar’chu sets the stage for the Sh’ma to become a communal call to “listen, Israel!” as we proclaim together that “Adonai is our God” and “Adonai is One.” (The same phrases that make up the Bar’chu are used to preface the blessing recited before the Torah is read at each aliyah, another very public moment of faith in action.) I know that I always feel a shift in the service when the Bar’chu comes, and the prayer leader turns away from the congregation for the first time so that all of our words and attention will be directed somewhere beyond this room: like the moment when the conductor raises her baton, an anticipatory pause precedes the burst of sound that charges the atmosphere around us. Then the call comes, we answer it, and the leader affirms our reply. Together, we have moved into a more formal, intentional space.

What about the words that make up this burst of sound? Why do we prepare to proclaim that we all must “listen” with a call to “bless”? Rabbi Elliot Dorff postulates that the root of bar’chu, bet-reish-kaf, could be the word berekh, knee, “since people in antiquity would drop to their knees before a monarch to acknowledge his or her sovereignty” (My People’s Prayerbook, p. 30). The call to bless God, then, is a call to acknowledge God’s sovereignty, and, in so doing, “to transcend our self-centered view of the world and our self-congratulatory stance within it” (p. 31). In other words, Dorff argues, before we can proclaim God’s unity among and to each other, we must recognize that the world has not come into being through our individual strength and accomplishments, but through Adonai hamevorach, a phrase that might be understood as “the Blessed One who is already blessed.” The Bar’chu reinforces that God is the source of all blessings: these blessings are reflected in all of existence, which, through this reflection, bless their source. We bow before and bless the Blessed One to acknowledge that we are a part of that existence as well as dependent upon it, and to praise the source that makes it so.

The function of the Bar’chu, then, is to direct our attention away from our more mundane concerns, in which we are the center, toward a simultaneously broader and humbler view. Rabbi Reuven Hammer claims this is the function of every blessing, but especially that of a blessing like the Bar’chu:

The uniqueness of a blessing is that it is pure praise, asking nothing of God but rather giving us an opportunity to remind ourselves of God’s presence and of the ways we experience [God] in the world. Every moment when we are aware of God, we speak [God’s] praise by proclaiming that God is blessed, that [God] is the supreme being of the universe. (Entering Jewish Prayer, p. 24)

In this way of thinking, the Bar’chu is among the purest acts of praise because, unlike blessings which mention particular phenomena, actions, or experiences, the Bar’chu “is rather a general proclamation that God is blessed, i.e. [God] is the highest of all beings” (p. 78). When we consider the Bar’chu's generality together with its public, call-and-response nature, we can see that this prayer, in word and deed, is meant to open us up, to draw us away from focusing on our individual desires and actions.

In our day, when so much in our culture encourages us to look no further than ourselves, the message of the Bar’chu becomes especially urgent. We should remember, too, that the purpose of the Bar’chu is not simply to instill humility, but to foster connection. Most contemporary Americans do not bow unless they are acknowledging applause, which is hardly the humble acknowledgement of sovereignty Dorff associates with the Bar’chu. It’s worth mentioning, though, that for the rabbis of the Talmudic era, bowing was a gesture performed in place of the full prostration common in Temple era worship, in part to recognize that the Temple was no more, and in part to reflect cultural changes wrought by Hellenstic and Roman influences, in which bowing was the common way to show respect and deference. When to bow, in what way, and for how long come in for much discussion, especially in the Palestinian Talmud, which I won’t detail here. One point we should consider when we recite the Bar’chu however, is that bowing at “baruch” and rising up at "adonai” prevailed over remaining bowed while saying “adonai” because God “lifts up those who are bowed down” (Uri Ehrlich, The Nonverbal Language of Prayer, p. 52). In other words, we bow to acknowledge God’s sovereignty and then rise to meet God in the space our acknowledgement has created, “trust[ing],” as Uri Ehrlich puts it, “in divine providence” and “in God’s fondness for [God’s] people” (p. 63). The Talmudic discussions about bowing concerned the Amidah, which is, at its heart, a private prayer; this practice came to be applied to the Bar’chu as well, which is more public in nature. We could say, then, that bowing together helps to create a communal as well as a personal connection in prayer, a link to God as well as to each other. May we continue to foster such connections, both in prayer and in study. Shabbat Shalom.

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