That night, I slept fitfully for a couple of hours. I woke up around midnight and started Googling. By 3 AM, I was a total wreck; scared, exhausted and completely unable to sleep. That’s when I decided to pray. In the dark I stumbled for my glasses, a bathrobe and, finally, a siddur. I prayed slowly and deliberately, lingering over the words. And they brought me comfort. My mind began to settle. In a little while, I put the prayer book down, went back to bed, and fell asleep. A few days later, my doctor called with news that my tests had turned out okay, and mildly upbraiding me for not trusting him more.
I don’t pray ever day, but I do pray most days. My own daily rubric of prayers takes me between 20 and 30 minutes, depending on how fast I go and whether I add prayers here and there along the way, as I often do. I usually, but don’t always, put on my tallit to pray. I rarely use tefillin. But you might be surprised to know that I do use an Orthodox siddur - the Koren Siddur which is relatively new and has a clean, modern style which appeals to me. What I like most about it is that it lays out the Hebrew, not as large blocks of text, but as the poetry it truly is.
As someone who was raised an atheist, prayer has been a struggle for me. It has taken me years to develop a minimal competence as a שליח צבור - a prayer leader - and even that faint praise might be too generous. And it has taken me just as long to develop a true need to pray - a need that transcends temporary wants or anxieties and touches my very being. When I don’t pray, I feel like something is missing in my day. But that said, my prayer is often - perhaps too often - mechanical. I often find myself at the end of a prayer having been barely aware that I had even started it. This, of course, is a far cry from the Talmudic standard which demands a concentration so intense that if a snake curled itself around our feet while we prayed, we wouldn’t take notice. I won’t need many hands-worth of fingers to count how many times I reached that standard of intentionality.
So let’s begin with that - with the recognition that prayer in general, and Jewish prayer in particular - is very hard to do right.
How hard? Recently I spent a Saturday afternoon attending a Catholic Mass at which a friend’s daughter was being married. The entire service, including the wedding, ran to about an hour and a half. There were some hymns and a couple of scriptural readings of little more than a half dozen verses. And, of course, there was communion. The only thing in the service that struck me as anything close to the Jewish concept of prayer was the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer.
Just out of curiosity, I did a word count on that prayer. It came, in its traditional form and including the “amen” at the end, to seventy words. In the course of those seventy words, a Catholic manages to confess submission to God’s will, and asks for sustenance, forgiveness and deliverance. That prayer is shorter than the first of nineteen blessings that constitute the weekday עמידה. The עמידה includes requests for knowledge, repentance, forgiveness, redemption, healing, prosperity, justice, the ingathering of the exiles, the preservation of the righteous, the destruction of the wicked, the rebuilding of Jerusalem and the restoration of the Davidic kingdom. And that doesn’t include the three opening blessings of praise or three closing blessings of acceptance, thanks and peace. In all, the עמידה runs close to 800 Hebrew words, which corresponds to more than 1200 in English. And that is but a single section of the liturgy. I haven’t even touched the שמע or the lengthy blessings that surround it.
For some reason, I have had much less experience with Protestant prayer than I have Catholic. I have had no experience with Muslim prayer. But from what I have learned about both these faith’s practices, neither has anything near the length nor the complexity of Jewish prayer.
The point I am trying to make is that Jewish prayer isn’t merely long and hard. The demands it places on its practitioners are far beyond what is expected in any other faith system with which I am familiar. This might have worked in a shtetl or in a ghetto where a Jew was regularly forced into prayer environments and could absorb its language and habits through osmosis. But once regular synagogue attendance became the exception rather than the rule, and once we raised up a generation of Jews who got their knowledge of Hebrew and prayer in a classroom rather than in a sanctuary, and then expected that generation of Jews to raise up another generation of Jews who would also get their knowledge from a classroom rather than a sanctuary, the hope that we could convey to a majority of our people the great depths of thought and subtle emotional power that our prayers command became became a distant one at best. When we lost the ability to pray comfortably, with knowledge and ease, we also lost the understanding of why prayer is so important to us. So let me take a few moments to tell you why prayer is so important to me.
First of all, I pray because people rely on me to do so. My job puts me in contact with many people who are hurting physically, emotionally or both. I pray for these people, by name, every time I pray. And when I tell them that I do so, they are touched and grateful. Perhaps they believe, I think mistakenly, that my prayers are more efficacious than their own. But I think that for many of these people, that gratitude comes from the knowledge that someone - perhaps on the periphery of their own lives - is taking a moment to recall their suffering and sincerely asking that they be made whole again. Knowing that someone else cares about your pain is, at times, medicine in itself. I often pray just because of this - the sense that I owe these people who are suffering that moment of devotion.
Second, I pray because I feel it my due. I do not believe that I am owed any of the thousands upon myriads of blessings that I enjoy in my life. And heaven forbid that I feel that in praying, I am earning for myself either the continuation of those blessings or the merit of future blessings. I pray, rather, in appreciation of feeling the need to do so. There is, for instance, a prayer one says upon going to the bathroom. It says, in essence, thank you God for all the parts of my body that open when they should and close when they should. Its a prayer like that that has the power to raise at least a few of our many blessings from something we take for granted to something of which we are conscious.
Third - and this is especially true when I pray here - I pray because its fun. I love it when I begin a service with a niggun and people actually join in. I love that I have no idea which tune for לך דודי is going to come out of my mouth until it does. I love that I know four different ways to sing Psalm 150, one more joyous then the next. I love gathering up my ציצית and kissing them during the שמע. I love singing the קדושה and ישמחו and אין כאלהינו and אדון עולם. And when there are, in this place, enough voices to, at least in part, drown out my own, I feel like we must be making a noise that pleases God. And that, to me, is joyous.
As someone who has struggled with prayer, I am working hard to make prayer more meaningful and more accessible to you, my fellow strugglers. Six years ago I streamlined these high holiday services, omitting many of their repetitions on the theory that it is better to say a prayer once with feeling than four times by rote. More recently, I have introduced a once-a-month Shabbat morning service that seeks to bring the full beauty of our most important and extensive liturgy into a brief, three-quarters of an hour. In both of these innovations, I have tried to preserve and present the essence of Jewish prayer in a form that will make people wish to master it and think of it as their own. Mindful of how hard it is to become someone who prays, I am doing my best to ease and broaden our paths into prayer. In this way, I hope to make prayer a part of our lives that we rely on, that we feel is our due, and that brings us joy.
But there is yet another reason why I pray; a reason that surpasses all the others. Indeed, it is to me the very essence of prayer. To try and explain it, I have to take you back to that night last spring when, in exhaustion and fear, I picked up my siddur at three in the morning. What prayers does one say at such times? Its too late for the evening service and too early for the morning. For some reason, I decided to pray the הלל - that collection of Psalms 113 through 118 with which we praise God on our festive days. Our tradition attributes them to King David which would make them around 3000 years old. But on that difficult night, it was as if they had been written just for me. I read מִן־הַמֵּצַר קָרָאתִי יָּהּ עָנָנִי בַמֶּרְחָב יָהּ: - From the narrow place, I called to God. He answered me from God’s wide expanse.
Each of us inhabits a very narrow place. It is a place bounded tightly by a short span of years, but whose walls we veil over so as not to succumb to despair. Then something happens: the veil is lifted, the walls seem to close in on us and we are find ourselves frightened and alone. From that very narrow space we cry out to something beyond ourselves. We cry out to God. We cry out with the same words that David cried out; with the same words that he gave to the scores of generations that cried out between us and him. Those words connect us to those untold generations that came before us, and to the untold generations that will follow us, thus transcending our narrowness. And thus does God answer us from His unlimited expanse. And while it does not change our situation, we in our very narrowness are comforted knowing we have an answer in that which is infinite. We have touched, and have been touched by something transcendent and eternal.
This is why I pray. This is why our prayers are such a precious inheritance. And this is why we must work so hard to reclaim that inheritance. Rebuilding this shul as a modern, vibrant and prayerful community will not be easy. Indeed, doing so will go against some of the most entrenched trends in our society. But doing so will reclaim for us – and more importantly for our children – what is perhaps the most important tool one can possess for building a good and flourishing life: the conviction that that life is not a narrow thing, but has the ability – nay the need - to touch the broadest plains. With God’s help and with your willing patience, we can do this together.
May the Holy One who revealed Himself to our ancestors, grant us the patience and the strength to recover their words of praise and thanks and petition, and make them our own. May He make our prayers a source of comfort to those who need them, a source of reflection in our own lives, and source of joy that binds us all together as one community. And may He, from His infinite expanses, hear our small voices, whispered from our narrow places, and answer us.
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