מודה אני

Was I five years old when they first taught us to sing "Modeh Ani"? It is the first prayer an observant Jew recites in the morning, even before one washes ones hands. It is a simple prayer that can be taught to young children and I see posters and plaques of it for sale, to be hung in a child's bedroom before they can speak.

I translate the words as: "I am thankful before You, living and eternal King! You reanimate my soul within me in the great mercy of Your faith!"

These words - in the melody I first learned for them - come to me often while my dog Prophet and I walk together in the woods along the Hudson, looking at the Palisades across the way. Everything about those walks is a gift. Once or twice a winter we hear a piercing screech and see a bald eagle winging up the river or sitting and watching us from a tree. Occasionally the air and the water are still enough that we can see the cliffs on the Jersey side reflected on the river's' surface. Frequently the rising sun moves down those cliffs, so that their upper reaches are illuminated bright red, while the lower part is still black and gray in the shadow of the Bronx side. The light in the woods we walk in is different each day. So is the color of the leaves. And - not to be forgotten - there is the everyday blessing of a companion who enjoys the walk as much as I do, although his sensory universe is totally different and his list of the blessings would have much more to do with sounds and scents: his friends, their human companions, coyotes, opossums, rabbits, and feral cats.

So those are all extraordinary gifts for which I have to remind myself to be thankful. But the words of the prayer which take my breath are "b'chemla rabbah emunatecha": in the great mercy of Your faith. Your faith. Your mercy. Because I failed to live up to my promise yesterday. I may fail again today. But I am still here, still breathing. There is mercy for my failures. There is faith that I will eventually do right.

After the Shoah the rabbis devoted a great deal of attention to theodicy, the question of how a good God can permit the presence of evil or of unmerited suffering. What interests me every morning is the problem of unmerited grace. What have I done to deserve all my blessings? What have I done to deserve a good friend like Prophet? A wife like Judith? All my human friends and family? Living indoors? My health? What have I done even to deserve a breath: the reanimation of my soul within me?

Every single one of these things is an unearned blessing. I receive them due to great mercy for my failings and faith that I may eventually merit some of them.

A note. While writing the above yesterday I was thinking about the world-class view that is the Hudson and the Palisades from the Bronx. We once took an excursion boat on the Danube from Kelheim to Weltenburg Abbey. It was spectacular, with 80 meter cliffs rising above the river. I am really glad to have seen it. But the Palisades are twice that height, and I get to look at them every single day. You see what I mean about making time to appreciate a gift?

So I was thinking about the Danube and all the literary and musical works it has inspired. I looked it up on Wikipedia and there was a mention of Chabad niggunim from the 18th century that Lubavitcher Hassidim used to sing. To clarify, a niggun is a repetitive melody, often sung with nonsense syllables, to aid in meditative prayer. And the claim - unsubstantiated in the Wikipedia article - was that these Hassidim used these melodies to heighten their appreciation at seeing the Danube! In other words, they were doing the exact same thing that I do with letting Modeh Ani run through my mind as a walk along the Hudson.

I texted my college friend Pinchas in California to ask if this were so. In addition to being a professor of Talmud and a scholar of Zohar, he is familiar with Yiddish literature and has done translation for YIVO, the Institute for Jewish Research. He responded almost immediately that yes, it is so, and that the best known of these niggunim is the refrain to the song "Dona Dona."

I know this song from the Folkways records of Mark Olf, who was a friend of my grandfather. But it achieved great popularity in the Sixties in English versions. It was the B-side of a Joan Baez single in 1960 and was also recorded by Chad & Jeremy, Donovan, and the Chad Mitchell Trio. I always wondered about the refrain to that song, which is just "dona, dona, dona, dona, dona, dona, dona, do; dona, dona, dona, dona, dona, dona, dona, do." If it is a reference to the Danube, ("Donau" in German, "Duna" in Yiddish) it suddenly all makes sense.

Today as Prophet and I walked by the Hudson in the steady rain, I sang "Dona Dona."