Ya’aleh v’yavo is to prayer what a journeyman player is to baseball: reflecting a great deal of experience, appearing only occasionally but having a great deal to offer. Ya’aleh v’yavo appears on holidays, chol hamoed (the intermediate days of long holidays, like Passover and Sukkot, and rosh chodesh, the beginning of a new month.
The text begins: “Our G-d and G-d of our ancestors, may there rise, come, reach, be noted, be favored, be heard, be considered , be remembered—the remembrance and consideration of ourselves, the remembrance of our ancestors; the remembrance of Jerusalem, the City of Your Holiness, the remembrance of Your entire people of the House of Israel—before You for deliverance, for goodness, for grace, for kindness, and for compassion, for life, and for peace on this day of…” and here, fill in the blank with the appropriate day.
Like the aleynu prayer, which was composed for Rosh Hashanah but then applied to literally every prayer service we have all year round, so too there is good reason to believe this prayer was originally composed for Rosh Hashanah. Why? Because another name for Rosh Hashanah is Yom Hazikaron, the Day of Remembrance, and this prayer virtually pounds home the concept of remembrance: “Our G-d and G-d of our ancestors, may there rise, come, reach, be noted, be favored, be heard, be considered , be remembered—the remembrance and consideration of ourselves, the remembrance of our ancestors; the remembrance of Jerusalem, the City of Your Holiness, the remembrance of Your entire people of the House of Israel—before You for deliverance, for goodness, for grace, for kindness, and for compassion, for life, and for peace on this day of…” on Rosh Hashanah: zikaron, Remembrance.
And why would this prayer, so obviously linked to remembrance, the theological theme of Rosh Hashanah, come to be applied to all sorts of other occasions? The answer is hidden in plain sight. There are fifteen “ stages” mentioned in this prayer: “rise, come, reach…etc.” These are associated with the fifteen steps which took a pilgrim to the Temple in Jerusalem from the Women’s Court to the Court of the Israelites. Simply put, the specific experience of Rosh Hashanah gave way to the more general experience of ascent to the Temple. More remarkable is that Rosh Hashanah could, throughout Jewish history, be experienced in the here and now as it is for us. Ascent to the Temple, by way of contrast, was merely a memory, indeed an increasingly distant memory.
But in Judaism, memory is never “mere.” It is the source of redemption.
Rabbi Robert L. Wolkoff