The Amidah for Shabbos and Yom Tov end the day-specific berachah with a paragraph that includes:

קַדְּ֒שֵֽׁנוּ בְּמִצְוֹתֶֽיךָ   וְתֵן חֶלְקֵֽנוּ בְּתוֹרָתֶֽךָ …
שַׂבְּ֒עֵֽנוּ מִטּוּבֶֽךָ     וְשַׂמְּחֵנוּ בִּישׁוּעָתֶֽךָ
 … וְטַהֵר לִבֵּֽנוּ   לְעָבְדְּ֒ךָ בֶּאֱמֶת

… sanctify us with Your mitzvos   and give us our share in Your Torah;
satisfy us from Your goodness      and gladden us with Your deliverance,
and purify our hearts      to serve You in truth.

The first thing I noticed about this snippet is the change of prepositional prefix: בְּמִצְוֹתֶֽיךָ, בְּתוֹרָתֶֽךָ, מִטּוּבֶֽךָ, בִּישׁוּעָתֶֽךָ. All the other nouns are introduced with -בְּ, but good get a -מִ.

Perhaps this is because we are asking for something fundamentally different. “Sanctify us with Your mitzvos – give me more opportunities for mitzvos by which (-בְּ) we can be sanctified.” “Give us our share in Your Torah – expose us to more Torah that our portion in life to be more centered in it.” Similarly, the third -בְּ: “Gladden us with Your deliverance — deliver us from our troubles, so that we can achieve simchah.” In all these cases, we are asking for a gift as a means of reaching some higher inner qualify.

But not Divine Good. Everything He does is Good — sometimes visibly so, and sometimes good isn’t how we experience it in the here-and-now. So we aren’t asking for more Good, there isn’t more Good to be had. Here the preposition has to be -מִ, allow us to experience simchah from Your Good, good we are already getting. Make it easier for us to be makir tov, to recognize and notice the Good that we get.

Decades later, I had another thought, one that ties these phrases into pairs. But in this part 1, I will limit myself to the middle one.*

There is a profound difference between “Tuvekha — Your Good”, and “Yehu’asekha — Your deliverance”. One refers to things we can recognize as good times. The other acknowledges the experience of bad times, times we need to be delivered from.

I mentioned the same contrast before, on the beginning of Shemone Esrei. Hashem is both “Gomeil chassidim tovim — the One Who supports as with good forms of Lovingkindness”, but also “Qonei haKol“, which the Vilna Gaon takes to mean “the Repairer of everying”. Good vs. Redemption. And from there, we understood what the Gra took to be parallel phrases: “HaGdol” — the Great One, Whose presence is felt everywhere, and “HaGibbor” — the one Who shows restraint, backing off to give us room to be ourselves, free-willed actors in the universe.

We call the Creator “Hashem”, which denotes His being Everywhere and Everywhen — or really as Having no one “where” or “when”, as well as the Middah of Divine Compassion. But also “Elokim”, Lawmaker and Source of Justice on the other. According to the Gra, this pair from the opening of the berakhah speaks to the same contrast as those other iterations of the four-fold theme of that berakhah.

Everything is Good. Some can be recognized now, and some is tragic that we won’t realize is good until the time of yehu’ah, Divine Rescue from a painful experience.

Next time בע”ה I will share yet another thought that developed from that one, years later, which will tie more of the quote together.

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* An hour and a half to Shabbos!