The Torah says, "You shall place inside the breastplate of judgment the Urim and Tumim and they shall be over Aaron’s heart whenever he comes before Adonai. Thus, Aaron shall carry the judgment of the Israelites over his heart before Adonai always" (Exodus 28:30). 

A passage in the book of Samuel shows the Urim and Tumim in action. When King Saul believed that a member of the Israelite army had committed a sin that removed God's favor, he used the Tumim to discover who was at fault. The text says that Saul separated himself and his son Jonathan from the troops and used the Tumim to determine whether the fault was with Jonathan or the rest of the army. The Tumim showed that it was Jonathan who had sinned. He then confessed his actions (I Samuel 14:41). 

The idea of using special objects as oracles to divine secret knowledge existed in many cultures of the ancient world. Think of the Urim and Tumim as a special pair of dice that a king or high priest could throw to determine a propitious date for attacking an enemy or discovering a source of divine disfavor. The Urim and Tumim were instruments of selection that helped their user discover meaning and sense in a world of seeming chaos and uncertainty.

In that respect, the Urim and Tumim are rather like the Torah itself. They were a guide to finding a right path in a world that seems to be all wilderness.

The lovely irony is that, during the very time of year when we read about the Urim and Tumim in the Torah, their exact counterpart appears in an upcoming holiday. Purim, of course, is the holiday named for pur, the selection tool used by the evil Haman to discover the date for the destruction of the Jews. The book of Esther tells how, "In the first month, the month of Nisan, in the twelfth year of King Achashveirosh, pur (which means 'the lot') was cast before Haman concerning every day and every month, until it fell on the twelfth month, the month of Adar" (Esther 3:7). 

In the Purim story, Haman's use of the pur is a kind of inside joke. Haman is depicted as an evil and superstitious man who denies God. He believes in a universe without rules that is governed only by strength and power, not by ethics or righteous divinity. His reliance on the pur is a statement about his allegiance to a random universe. 

The joke is that, when Haman casts the pur, the date revealed—seemingly by chance—is nearly the last possible day on the calendar. Nisan is the first month of the year; Adar is the last. Poor Haman cast his dice on New Years Day to find out when he would realize his dream. The dice landed on the equivalent of December 15th. Haman would have to wait eleven and a half months—plenty of time for his intended victims to discover his plan and prepare their defense. 

The book of Esther, famously, is the only book of the Hebrew Bible that does not contain the name of God. Yet, God's presence is felt everywhere in it. God appears as the unnamed source of strange coincidences that show a higher power at work against the forces that worship only human might.

The relationship between the Urim and Tumim, on one side, and the pur, on the other, is paradoxical. Both appear to be instruments of random selection, but their meaning is opposite. Haman selected his date with a pur because he believed in chaos. A random selection device, according to this view, would reflect the nature of a random universe. The high priests and kings of Israel, on the other hand, used the Urim and Tumim because they believed in an underlying order hidden beneath the seeming disorder of reality. This device that freely chooses among options, to them, would have been like a compass that points to the true north of God's will, revealing the hidden pulse of God's magnetic field of meaning.

What do you believe? Do you, at a fundamental level, believe that there are reasons and purposes within the universe that usually are hidden beyond the reach of our senses? Or, do you believe that your presence in the world is just the product of a long series of meaningless coincidences? Either position can be defended, yet it is difficult to see how both can be true. 

Shall you choose one or leave it to chance?


Other Posts on This Topic:
Tetzaveh: Keeping the Fire Burning
Ekev: Deuteronomy vs. Job

It's time to talk tachlis ("brass tacks") about creating joyful Judaism. What are the specific things that Jewish communities can do to create services that inspire meaning, joy and fulfillment?

My experience as a leader of Jewish worship is that prayer is most meaningful—and joyful—when it is connected to people's lives outside of the synagogue. If worship is just a ritual people go through, without any reflection or relevance to their daily lives, then it will wash away from their awareness the moment it is done and it will never really have the power to engage or move them. The challenge for the worship leader always is to connect the worshippers—to each other, to God, and to their own lives.

Here are some specific techniques I've tried that seem to work:

1) Make each aliyah in the Torah service an invitation to self‐reflection. I first saw this technique in the Renewal Movement and it seems to be spreading. Each aliyah is a group aliyah in which the gabbai (the person leading the Torah service) announces a theme connected to the reading. For example, on this coming Shabbat, there will be an aliyah in which we will hear a description of the Urim and Thummim, the ritual objects used by the ancient High Priests to discover the hidden will of God. This aliyah might become an opportunity to invite to the bimah "those who are struggling to find out what God wants from them right now." In this way, the experience of the aliyah becomes more personally meaningful and it becomes an opportunity for the worshipper to connect his or her worship experience to the events happening in his or her life.

2) Use the blessing for the month as an opportunity to reflect on the last month and on the coming month. There is a traditional prayer recited during Shabbat morning service when the new moon will occur during the following week. The words of the blessing wish the community a month of happiness, prosperity, reverence and well‐being. I take a moment before the blessing to ask people to silently reflect on their experiences during the past month before we bless the new month. Those thirty seconds of silence give people the chance to think about what is happening in their lives in the context of holiness. It also makes the blessing that follows more meaningful, because it lifts it out of the realm of abstraction and drives home the idea that the blessing actually refers to the real‐life experiences they anticipate in the coming four weeks.

3) Take a moment after group study to use Kaddish DeRabbanan as a meditation on the coming week. I conduct a text study immediately following services every Shabbat morning. I always end the study with the recitation of Kaddish DeRabbanan—the traditional prayer for the conclusion of study. Before we recite the prayer, however, I ask the congregation to think about our learning together as if it were an offering that we have placed upon the altar to send upwards. In return, I say, we are blessed to receive from above a touch of divine energy (shefa) that will sustain us through the coming week. Our challenge is to take that energy away from the study table and to use it in our daily lives. I ask the members of the congregation, each in his or her own heart, to decide on one thing they will do in the coming week—something that they had not already planned on doing—that will make the meaning of the words we have studied come to life. We stand in silence for a moment before reciting the prayer together.

I should add that, while many Jews are familiar with most of the Aramaic words Kaddish DeRabbanan--its beginning and ending are nearly the same as the Mourner's Kaddish (Kaddish Yatom)—there is one paragraph in the middle of Kaddish DeRabbanan that is unfamiliar to many. For this paragraph of difficult Aramaic, I substitute an English translation that allows people to focus on the prayer's message of sanctifying the act of study. You can download the version of Kaddish DeRabbanan that I use from the "Resources" page. (Props to my teacher, Rabbi Kerry Olitzky for this idea.) 

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These are just a few of the things that I've done to keep prayer connected to the realities of people's everyday lives. I am very interested to learn about the experiments in meaningful worship that other people have tried (and, I presume, so are you). Please think about your best worship experiences and the specific techniques or intentions that have helped you connect your prayers with your life. Please, share them in the public comments below. (You can also leave me a private comment on the "Contact Reb Jeff" page, but then I'm the only person who gets to see it!)


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The idea of keeping worship connected to life is reflected in this week's Torah reading. Parashat T'tzaveh begins with a commandment about the ner tamid (eternal light) that was lit in the Mishkan (the portable tabernacle that the Israelites carried through the desert). Moses instructs the priests to keep the light burning continually. To the masters of the hasidic tradition, the eternal light of the Mishkan was connected to the light of our own souls. We are commanded to keep the fire burning within ourselves, not just when we are praying, but throughout all of our busy days. 

This is how it is expressed by the earliest hasidic masters (Likutim Yekarim 15b, translation by Rabbi Arthur Green in Your Word is Fire):

     A person at prayer is like a bed of coals,
     As long as a single spark remains,
          a great fire can again be kindled.
     But without that spark there can be no fire.

     Always remain attached to God,
          even in those times
          when you feel unable to ascend to God.
     You must preserve that single spark--
          lest the fire of your soul be extinguished.

As prayer leaders, we have an obligation to tend to the fire of people's souls, just as the priests tended to the ner tamid. Our obligation extends beyond the time that they are sitting in the synagogue, and, to do this, we must make sure that the worship experience is something they will carry into the stretches of time between their visits to the synagogue.