The Idea of Order at Mount Sinai

During the Yamim Norayim we often repeat and reflect on Exodus 34:6-7:

"And the LORD passed by before him, and proclaimed: 'The LORD, the LORD, God, merciful and gracious, long-suffering, and abundant in goodness and truth; keeping mercy unto the thousandth generation, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin"

This pasuk, also known as the 13 Middot of Mercy (Yud Gimmel Midot Harachamim), is treated at length in the Talmud treatise that deals with the laws of Rosh Hashanah. What interests me here is the Gemara on the setting of the 13 Middot: "And the LORD passed by before him, and proclaimed":

"'And the LORD passed by before him, and proclaimed' - Rabbi Yochanan said: if it hadn't been written we couldn't have said it; it teaches that the Holy One Blessed Be He wrapped himself [in a tallit] like a shaliach tzibbur [prayer leader] and showed to Moshe the order of prayer; he told him: every time that Yisrael sins let them perform this order before me and I will forgive [mochel] them." (Rosh Hashanah 17b; Hebrew English)

Rabbi Yochanan finds license in the anthropomorphic Torah line "passed before him" for his own outlandish anthropomorphic dramatization of God as a prayer leader wrapped in a tallit. But what is interesting here is the insistence that God doesn't merely teach prayer, he teaches the ORDER of prayer, the siddur. Why does prayer have to be ordered? Why does anything have to be ordered?

In his musar book, "Cheshbon hanefesh", Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Satanov lists Order (Seder) as one of the traits we are supposed to internalize and practice in our daily lives:

"This is the trait of order: allocating a set time for each and every thought and analysis [yiunim], freeing time and space for each and every affair in the world of action, and demarcating the bounds of each with set boundaries so that one not intrude upon the other."

Not only our prayers, but also our possessions and our actions have to be ordered. There is an implication here that this is not merely an aesthetic issue, but a moral one and we have to ask again: why is order a musar issue of such high order that God himself is imagined as coming down to teach it to us?

Sins are those behaviors that act to separate us from God. We sin by acting to turn away or by increasing the distance between us and God. And we can also sin by cluttering the space between us and God with objects and actions that promote separation. As Rabbi Ira Stone teaches, our serving God, the ultimate Other, can only be effected thru clearing the space that enables us to serve the signifincant and less significant others around us. Order acts against forgetfulness, forgetfulness of birthdays, appointments, plane departures, deadlines, mynian times. Orderliness clears the clutter of our minds and of the places where we live and opens up a space for teshuvah.

Gmar chatima tova!