I’m not an expert on Jewish prayer, or on Hebrew language or grammar. Far from it. But sometimes a single word captures my attention, and I spend a lot of time puzzling over what it means to me.

Sometimes it’s just a comma—or the absence of one.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about part of the prayer known as Ahavah Rabah, which translates as “abundant love.”

The prayer begins:

With abundant love you have loved us, Lord our God. With great mercy you have been merciful to us.

Okay, we’re expressing gratitude and, as you might guess, working up to a request. The prayer continues:

For the sake of our ancestors who trusted you, and to whom you taught the laws of life, so grace us and teach us.

The word that grabbed me here is “ancestors.” The Hebrew is avoteynu, which literally means fathers or patriarchs. Modern translators often consider it to be gender-inclusive. But some egalitarian prayerbooks add the parallel feminine word, imoteynu, yielding “our patriarchs and our matriarchs,” or “our fathers and our mothers.”

Avoteynu was good enough for me until a few years ago. That’s when I identified my very own Jewish ancestor—my great-grandfather Bernard Akerman—and learned the names of his parents.

Before I knew those names, imoteynu—our collective Jewish matriarchs—were an abstraction to me. They were the wives of the biblical patriarchs: Sarah, Rebecca, Leah, and Rachel, archetypes whose stories are little told.

Now I knew that Bernard’s mother was Debora Spiro Akerman. I had her name, handwritten on Bernard’s birth record in Hungary in 1874. This was my great-great-grandmother: my very own Jewish female ancestor.

On Rosh Hashanah in 2020, praying by myself in that first pandemic year, I used a different prayerbook from usual—one that included the word imoteynu. Suddenly, the word took on personal meaning. In that time of radical disconnection from community and even family, I suddenly felt connected back in time to Debora Spiro and her mother and grandmother. I started adding imoteynu to my prayers.

So, back to the Ahavah Rabah prayer:

For the sake of our ancestors who trusted in you, and to whom you taught the laws of life, so grace us and teach us.

Now I know who a few of those ancestors were. But what about that phrase “who trusted in you”?

My great-grandfather Bernard most certainly did not trust in the God of the Hebrews. Not only did he leave Judaism behind, joining and raising his children in the Catholic church. He also took pains to disguise his Jewish origins. They remained a secret until I found that 1874 birth record in 2020.

I don’t know when or where Bernard made that decision. Perhaps his parents made it for him at some point after his birth and bris, which were recorded in a Jewish registry. More likely, Bernard decided as a young man that being Jewish was not for him—whether to escape persecution, or to marry my Catholic great-grandmother, or to liberate himself from the “laws of life” to which the prayer refers. It’s not talking about universalist moral laws, or Judeo-Christian precepts like monotheism and the Ten Commandments. The prayer is talking very specifically about Jewish laws—including those that specify what you eat and when you do and don’t work—and requesting divine guidance and grace for living a Jewish life.

What about the ancestors who did not trust?

That brings me to a grammar question: Should the prayer be read with a comma after “ancestors”?

Is it “for the sake of our ancestors, who trusted you”—in other words, are we asking God to help us to remain committed Jews because our ancestors were?

Or should it read “our ancestors who trusted you,” without a comma—in other words, for the sake of those who lived their faith, and never mind the others?

These questions beget more questions: What did my ancestors trust? What beliefs and practices guided them in living their daily lives? What sustained them through poverty, persecution, and tragedy—the hardships I know about, and those I will never learn of? Some lived through the Irish famine before coming to the United States. Others were peasant farmers in central Europe. All four of my great-grandfathers worked as Pennsylvania coal miners for a time. There were murders and suicides, illnesses fatal to infants and young adults, wife beatings and criminal records and at least one mind lost to PTSD.

Hardship turns some people toward religion, seeking solace from belief in a merciful God. For others, it destroys that belief.

My parents grew up in the Catholic church and raised their own children the same way. We didn’t attend Catholic school, as they had, but we went to Mass every Sunday and to weekly catechism class.

Late in life, my parents lost their religion. There was no dramatic rupture. The Catholic sex-abuse scandals certainly influenced their feelings toward the church, as did the overwhelming focus on abortion, birth control, and gay rights—as my dad once put it, a bunch of old men obsessed with other people’s sexuality—rather than on compassion and caring for those who are poor and sick. But my parents’ loss of faith went beyond the Vatican. Their search for another denomination seemed half-hearted. Eventually, they no longer necessarily identified as Christian.

Meanwhile, I became Jewish, adopting those “laws of life” without knowing of my ancestral connection—and disconnection. Now that I do know, I feel that I’m reclaiming a family heritage that was lost for 100 years.

All of which leaves me wondering: What did my ancestors trust?

Before getting out of bed in the morning, Jews say a prayer thanking God for restoring their souls after sleep. It ends with the phrase rabah emunatecha: “abundant is your faithfulness.”

In other words, God believes in us, even when we don’t believe in ourselves—or in God.

I’m not sure if I believe that.

But as Rabbi Larry Kushner once said to a kid who didn’t want to go through with his bar mitzvah because he didn’t believe in God: “What makes you think that matters to God?”

What is the Mary Oliver Challenge? Glad you asked. You can read about it here.