There is a song that has been stuck in my head all week, and I’m not the only one. A few of us in the office have been singing it on and off since Rosh Hashanah. The song is “I Will Hope in God.” The prayer is sung to many different melodies in synagogues around the world, but the one I cannot stop humming is by Ishay Ribo, one of Israel’s most popular singer-songwriters. It is beautiful and stirring, the kind of tune that lifts you and stays with you long after the prayers have ended.
The words are simple:
I will hope in God, I will plead before Him, I will ask Him for the gift of speech. Among the congregation of the people I will sing of His strength; I will pour out songs about His deeds. To a person belong the plans of the heart, but the answer of the tongue comes from the Lord. Lord, open my lips, and my mouth will declare Your praise.
It is a short prayer, and it is not really a prayer for anything most of us would put on a High Holiday wish list. It does not ask for health, livelihood, or forgiveness. It asks for words. Why would a people standing before the King of the universe, on the days when the Sages say the whole world is judged, spend precious moments asking for the ability to speak?
To understand this prayer, it helps to know who says it and when. The prayer is a “request for permission.” It is a personal, heartfelt petition in which the prayer leader asks God for eloquence, strength, and the right words to represent the congregation before the Heavenly Throne on the Day of Judgment. He recites it during his repetition of the Musaf prayer, the additional prayer service of the High Holidays. On Rosh Hashanah it comes just before the section of the prayer known as Malchuyot, “Kingship,” where we declare God as King over all creation. On Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement) it comes just before the retelling of the High Priest’s service in the Holy Temple, the dramatic center of the day.
Picture the moment. The prayer leader stands before the congregation, which is waiting for him to carry its prayers upward. He is about to speak the most important words of the most important days of the year. Every person in the room is placing their hopes on his voice. And he knows, better than anyone, that he is just a person. He may be tired. He may be distracted. He may have his own sins weighing on him.
So before he begins, he stops and asks God for help. Not help with his livelihood, but help with the very words he is about to say. “I will ask Him for the gift of speech.”
The heart of the prayer is a verse from the book of Proverbs, which King Solomon wrote:
Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz offers two readings of this verse. In the first, “the plans of the heart” are a person’s thoughts, hopes, and feelings. We are free to dream and to plan. We can picture how we want our lives and our world to look. But “the answer of the tongue,” the final word, belongs to God. As Rabbi Steinsaltz puts it, “It is God’s word that determines the outcome.”
In his second reading, the verse is about speech itself. A person thinks about how to put his thoughts into words, but in the end, as Rabbi Steinsaltz writes, “it is God who places His words into the person’s mouth.”
Both readings fit the prayer leader beautifully. He has prepared. He has practiced the melodies and studied the text. Those are the plans of his heart. But whether his words will actually move the congregation, and whether they will be accepted on High, is not something he can control. That part belongs to God.
The prayer then closes with a verse from Psalms that we say at the start of every Amidah, the central standing prayer, all year long:
King David wrote those words in his psalm of repentance after his sin with Bathsheba. Even the sweet singer of Israel, the man who gave us the book of Psalms, did not trust his own mouth to open by itself when he stood before God.
The prayer was written for the prayer leader, but somewhere along the way the whole congregation began singing it with him. And that makes sense, because the prayer leader’s situation is really everyone’s situation during this season.
On Rosh Hashanah, the Sages teach, all human beings pass before God like sheep before a shepherd. We arrive with our plans for the coming year. We have ideas about our careers, our families, our health, our communities. We have lists of what we hope will happen and what we pray will not. Those are the plans of our hearts, and they are real and important. The Bible does not ask us to stop planning or stop hoping.
But the High Holidays confront us with a truth we spend most of the year avoiding. We are not the ones who write the final word. On Yom Kippur we sing another beloved poem that is built on the words of the prophet Jeremiah:
For some people, that image is frightening. Clay has no say in what it becomes. If our future is not in our hands, how can we feel secure?
The prayer “I will hope in God” answers that fear, and that may be why it is so inspiring to sing.
The prayer leader does not say, “I cannot find the words, so I will stay silent.” He says, “I will hope in God.” The recognition that the outcome is not in his hands does not paralyze him. It frees him. He has done his part. He has prepared his heart. Now he can step forward and sing, because he is not carrying the whole weight alone.
That is the gift of this season. When we recognize that we are in God’s hands, we are not being told that we are powerless. We are being told that we are held. The plans of our hearts matter, and God wants to hear them. But the result, the final answer, rests with a loving Father who sees far more than we do, who knows what we need better than we know it ourselves, and who has carried His people through every exile and every return.
There is a deep rest in that. The worried parent, the person waiting for test results, the one who does not know how the coming year will unfold: each of us can do what the prayer leader does. Prepare your heart. Speak your hopes honestly. And then let go of the illusion that everything depends on you.
So when you hear the congregation rise into those familiar notes this year, or when you catch yourself humming them at your desk, remember what you are really singing. You are telling God that you trust Him with the words you cannot find and the outcomes you cannot control. And there is no greater comfort than that.
