This is a D’var Torah I shared in Shabbat services a few weeks before Rosh Hashanah on September 10, 2022. This is a reflection on the metaphor of malchut (kingship or royalty) for the Divine, which features so centrally in the prayers of the High Holy Days. The week I wrote this was also the week that Queen Elizabeth of Great Britain died. “Davvening”, a term I use in this, is a Yiddish word for praying.
When I was a kid in grade school, my family used to listen all the time to Free to Be You and Me, the album of songs and stories and bits by Marlo Thomas and all kinds of famous performers. My favorite piece after all these years is a story called Atalanta. “Once upon a time, not long ago, there lived a princess named Atalanta, who could run as fast as the wind.” She was bright and could build things, and all the young men in the kingdom wanted to marry her. Atalanta’s father, the king, wondered how he would decide who should get to, but she said to him, “I will choose”, and perhaps even choose not to be married. In any case, Atalanta said she wanted to go off and see the world before deciding anything for sure.
The king was very distressed, and eventually told Atalanta that he would hold a race and the swiftest man would win the right to marry her. Atalanta said, “But you must let me run in it too. If I am the winner, I will choose for myself what I will do.” The king agreed, and Atalanta began to practice for her race.
Well you should listen to Marlo Thomas and Alan Alda tell the whole story, with just a suggestion of regal heralds and trumpets for effect. On the day of the race, many young men briefly ran ahead of Atalanta, but each time she pulled ahead. Toward the end of the race, a young man named John caught up to her. He was a seeker, interested in the faraway stars and seas just as Atalanta wanted to see the world, and as the finish line approached they ran neck and neck, until they broke through the golden ribbon together.
The king awarded young John his daughter’s hand, but John said: “I could not possibly marry your daughter unless she wished to marry me. I have run this race for the chance to talk with Atalanta.” So they spent the day together before going off in their searchers, perhaps reuniting and perhaps not. The story doesn’t loop back to the princess title at all, or even say whether Atalanta returned to that role. At the end, the two narrators, female and male, say simply: “In any case, it is certain that they are both living happily ever after.”
I am recounting the story because I was going to be the one rabbi who didn’t talk about Queen Elizabeth, but her death this week messed with my davvening. Our prayers are full of royal words and metaphors, and how much the more so on Rosh Hashanah coming up, and having a very real specific image everywhere I turn threw me for a loop because, and pardon me if you’re more of a British royal swooner than I, but the whole thing about the royals is at best a ridiculous anachronism and at worst an abomination. And neither of those is good for the davvening.
“Atalanta” is a story that uses the standard metaphors of royalty and obviously subverts them. But it’s a satisfying story because there is a king in it, and because it’s the princess who drives the story and the commoner at the end who is the hero along with her. If we lost stories about kings forever, we couldn’t tell stories like Atalanta and we couldn’t make the points or learn the lessons of such stories.
When it comes to the Jewish idea of malchut (kingship), the Talmud is very much in the spirit of Atalanta, and the Kabbalah is like 200% Atalanta. The traditional king in Jewish prayer is nothing like a stereotypical king and not like Queen Elizabeth II, may her memory be for a blessing. In the Talmud, the rabbis sometimes run rings around the Divine throne, making fun of the heavenly entourage, twisting God’s words around and taking words in the Torah supposedly written by God and removing words like “not” and then saying okay this is really the law — and all the King can do is laugh and say, “My children have defeated me.” If your real-life king was the Roman emperor, you’d have just as much trouble with malchut as we do in democratic times.
I said the Talmud is Atalanta-ish, and this is what I mean. The Talmud says when you say Adonai Melech (“God is king”), what you’re saying is: A flesh and blood king goes to war. Maybe he provides his troops enough to eat, and maybe he doesn’t. Maybe he cares when one of them is killed in battle, and maybe he doesn’t. But the Melech Mal’chay Ham’lachim, the king who is the most kingly of kings, is different. The Divine is connected to each person on earth, provides for all, cares and hurts when anyone is wounded or God forbid dies. The Divine king knows that there is no such thing as Divine power without each and every person arrayed on the field. Indeed, until each person is aligned in that way God is not actually king. Malchut is power and law, but divine Malchut is the possibility of a power that is more just in more sustained fashion than any we’ve ever known.
The point of Adonai Melech is not to imagine God as a king on earth, but to strain toward a Divinity beyond that, and you need those king images and king stories to give you a jumping-off point and then direct you at the next thing.
My favorite way of using the image of Melech is from Rebbe Nachman of Bratslav, who says the Amidah is not like standing in some high-ceiling throne room where you praise the king and hope for an audience and a good decree. No, the Amidah is said in a whisper. It’s the conversation in the portico off to the side, between the king and you, the king’s most trusted advisor. Yes, you and I are not the most powerful person and we do not make the laws or set decrees for all, but we have the ear of the One who does, and the destiny of all is somehow in your whispered conversation. That’s what it means to walk in the presence of malchut.
And to me there is truth in that picture, or something useful. We are for sure each not up to carrying the burden of a whole realm. And yet goodness requires that kind of power somehow, and only we can approach that power, perceive it, live in its light because we know it, because we are at times able to be in that whispered conversation where what I have to say is what the king needs and what everyone out there needs from the king, who has it only because of me.
How would Rebbe Nachman say that without the king metaphor? How would he say who we are, what is our relationship to wise and sustained power, without that picture?
When I said the Kabbalah is 200% Atalanta – in the tree of the sefirot, the image of pure Divine spirit entering our world and then spreading through it, the idea of king is divided in two. At the top is Keter, the divine crown, and Kabbalah isn’t really all that interested there. At the bottom of the tree is Malchut, regalness, royal power. It is identified with us, the Jewish people. King-ness is not up there; it is down here. It is Shechinah, the feminine metaphor for presence through all of us and the world we perceive.
And in Kabbalah, one way of understanding malchut is not as king, but as princess. Malchut is Atalanta — inheriting the crown, taking the power and taking it to go out and explore the world. Knowing that there is a Source that is older than we, not confusing ourselves with the source, but identifying ourselves as the main focus of power. Once upon a time in Judaism there was a traditional king story, where we first thought about our mitzvot and our Torah. Now malchut is down here. Judaism is only interested in up there, the crown and the throne, to remind us not to get too haughty about ourselves. Where malchut really is now, it’s not in the judge up there or in some throne room decreeing our fate. It’s in the words of the story of our lives that we tell in our own handwriting, that the king must read.
There is a saying about the month of Elul: “The King is in the field.” Hamelech basadeh. This is the time of year when there is no throne, there is only the field, where the race track is, where each of us is Atalanta, malchut, the princess, eager to run our race and find someone to run it next to us, and then go out into the new year and see the world. It’s all Atalanta.
So use these ideas of malchut when you pray, today and every Shabbat and on Rosh Hashanah. Or don’t if what I’ve said doesn’t work for you. But know that Judaism does not worship the old king, the one like Atalanta’s father, and hasn’t for two thousand years if not more.
Soon we cross the finish line of the year that is concluding, together side by side, as did Atalanta and young John. There we will talk, for a day or two, and head out to the world again. That’s where malchut is. And while we aren’t sure what comes after, because of our regal power, the world stands a chance to live happily ever after.
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