For the last two years of Parshat Emor, I wrote a rather startling sentence: I can't pray because I'm afraid of praying. At the time I wrote:
More accurately, I don't think of myself as praying, or having acceptable prayer towards God. My prayer ascends to heaven the very same way a brick does: not at all. In this weeks portion we are to learn that the offering to God must be perfect, without defects. And here I am unable to read the Hebrew prayer without flubbing every third word. I'll admit it's an improvement. Ten years ago I wouldn't have been able to do that since I couldn't read Hebrew. These words of our liturgy I cannot say perfectly, nor can I always have perfect intention, as my anxiety over my poor Hebrew reading skills overwhelms me. And somehow English doesn't work here; it's too much for me like giving a turtledove instead of an ox for sacrifice. That said I'm really good at faking it, I've been faking praying most of my life, though I feel like a fraud when I do.
In doing a lot of thinking about theology lately, I’ve been using the Song of Songs as a springboard. Thinking about Prayer, I am reminded of the following verse
Oh, my dove in concealment of the cliff in steep hiding places.
Show me your appearance let me listen to your voice
For your voice is sweet, and your appearance is beautiful. [Song of Songs 2:14]
While I have often looked at the Song in its literal sense, I also believe that it is underneath a theology, and since studying Heschel, I have come to put Heschel’s ideas of God in search of man to be the story within the Song of Songs. The song is an unrequited relationship between two very committed partners. The male protagonist, representing God, calls out to the hiding female, Israel, to listen to her voice, to talk to God, to pray.
But what is this thing called prayer? At its simplest it is talking to God. There is no one way to pray but a spectrum from personal prayer to liturgy said as Minyan. Yet in order to understand prayer I look to how I pray. I pray three ways: the liturgy in synagogue, the liturgy in private prayer, and my personal prayer to God. Each of these contains different elements of the idea of prayer.
Within prayer there is keva, the form of the prayer and kavvanah, the intention and passion of prayer. There is keva in a set liturgy, one solid enough I can pick up a prayer book and recite it out of the book. I don’t have to do anything other than recite it.
Yet intention is also important. Hasidism in particular elevated the idea of praying with intention, yet they were far from the first. Even the Talmudic rabbis saw the power of having deep intention while praying. The rabbis note:
One should not stand up to say tefillah [i.e. the amidah] save in a reverent frame of mind. The pious men of old used to wait an hour before praying in order that they might concentrate their thoughts upon their father in heaven. Even if a king greets him [while praying] he should not answer him: even if a snake is wound round his heel he should not break off [Brachot 30b].
In the Talmud, they explain this statement by claiming that one should pray like Hanna. Hanna was one of two wives of a man named Elkanah who was barren while her rival wife, Pennina was very fertile. After a stream of verbal abuse from Pennina, Hanna went to the Mishkan where Eli the high priest happened to be sitting and prayed:
10. And she was in bitterness of soul, and prayed to the Lord, and wept bitterly…13. And Hanna spoke in her heart; only her lips moved, but her voice was not heard; therefore Eli thought that she was drunk. [I Sam 1]
Hanna’s apparent drunkenness was the ideal state of prayer, so intense the outside world does not exist. Her lips move, but no sound comes out of them so concentrating on the words and the connection with God. Hanna models Kavvanah. She has an intention. She also has attentiveness to God. She has a deep, intimate, connection with God. Yet this is an ideal state. In reality, it is rather difficult to do or sustain. This is where Keva, the form and structure, helps. It is like a man on a journey with a map. He must rely on landmarks found on his map to orient himself and find his path. Liturgy is our map. The prayers we recite daily, every Shabbat or on holidays act as markers to the higher state of kavvanah. Such markers exist because we can get lost easily.
When I am not in a synagogue, but there is a set time to pray such as Friday evening, I pray alone, yet follow the liturgy. Besides acting as a map, liturgy has other purposes in prayer. For some prayers, such as the Shema I am commanded to say them. Others, like L’cha Dodi or V’shamru on Friday Night, are integral for creating the sanctity of Shabbat. In their absence, my prayer would neither be special nor commemorate the time. But liturgy is also the comfort of having a common Jewish prayer. It can be compared to a single traveler making his way on the road. He may use the unknown rarely traveled back roads, or he may use the well-traveled Interstate. If the traveler gets stuck or is low on gas, he is more likely to find help on the Interstate than on those back roads, hopelessly lost. By praying the liturgy, I have the ability to learn the way to pray, and in times of crisis I have prayer readily available in the nearest Siddur.
Yet there are times that I do pray without liturgy. These are times when I am like the traveler who see the snow capped mountain in the distance – he needs no map because the destination is so awesome and clear that no one can miss it in the terrain. In deep emotional times, both sadness and joy, there is a time for prayer. Hanna prayed directly from the heart, without liturgy. Hanna’s prayer, however, was a prayer of petition, one that wanted God to do something. Heschel in his last interview before his death in 1972 stated:
First of all, let us not misunderstand the nature of prayer, particularly in the Jewish tradition. The primary purpose of prayer is not to make requests. The primary purpose of is to praise to sing to chant. Because the essence of prayer is a song, and Man cannot live without a song. Prayer may not save us, but prayer may make us worthy of being saved.
Although intense and a prayer of pure kavvanah, Hanna’s petitionary prayer takes a second seat to praise. The song of radical amazement with creation is the highest prayer. We see how incredible this world is that God made, and sing out in joy. Yet even here, I sometimes fall back on liturgy or the biblical text. Sometimes it is merely a heartfelt ma’aseh Breshit (blessed is God who makes creation) sometimes a part of a psalm comes to mind, often for me from eternity to eternity you are God (Psalm 90:2). But this type of prayer is the most intense. In some ways it is the easiest, in that it is from the heart. There are no liturgies to memorize. Our prayer can be our own words. Yet it is also the hardest. We all too often in our busy lives miss the radical amazement around us, and never pray. Even when we try, our heart is the least disciplined part of our psyche, as we read in the Shema, that your heart be not deceived, and you turn aside [Deut. 11:16]*. It often leads us astray from our goal, where we head towards that awesome mountain, yet turn off the path to say “how beautiful is this tree.”
Then there is third type of prayer, the one we do in community. This connects us with God in a very different sense than that of individual prayer. It is in the Perkei Avot which describes this best: When there are ten sitting together and occupying themselves with Torah, the Shechinah abides among them. [Avot 3:6] It is the ten people for a minyan. We are all minted from the same coin, yet each unique. But one coin does not make a currency. People in a Minyan create a collaborative effort, and as such some prayers, like the Kaddish can only be done in such a collaborative effort. We each add to the prayer experience of the other. Where Kavvanah might be difficult to achieve for an individual, it is not so difficult when created by community. The spirit of the heart increases in the environment of collaborative kavvanah, the orchestra is more than the violin soloist. You can also compare this to a candle. One candle might burn bright. Ten candles, even when they do not burn individually as bright as that first candle collectively light the room far more than the one candle. Prayer as community provides us with a support, to bring more kavvanah to our prayer.
However, if we prayed our own personal prayer in community it would be chaos. Here too the keva of liturgy provides us with a way of coordinating our kavvanah. When we pray the Shema together, we speak in one voice, coordinated, whole and with intention. The liturgy contains moments of personal prayer, such as the silent Amidah, punctuated with moments of communal prayer in its repetition. Thus we create a fluctuating prayer liturgy that increases both the communal and the personal. Such an experience creates an environment where our attention to prayer can be brought higher than our personal prayer alone.
Yet there are difficulties. Communal prayer can become dogmatic. It can then have the least amount of kavvanah, with route recitation of the words. There are schools of thought that so emphasize rote recitation there is nothing but the keva. Heschel attacks this as “religious behaviorism,” where the supreme article of faith is a respect for tradition. “People are urged to observe the rituals or to attend services out of deference to what has come down to us from our ancestors.” Heschel attacks this as “grotesque and self defeating.” Such dogmas create an intense conformity, and are self limiting. Judaism realizes that what we believe in “surpasses the power and range of human expression” to find the great power of the community. All those different coins of different visages become the same coin of the same visage in fundamentalist belief, and the creative power and communal brightness of kavvanah dims.
Prayer may be a personal connection. It may also be the connection of Israel to God. This determines the when of prayer. We pray at set times of the day and we pray certain prayers to commemorate events of the Jewish people. As Heschel reminds us, Judaism is not anchored in space, but in time. We commemorate not places as much as events. The Sabbath is a commemoration of creation, and every seven days we remember and celebrate that. Part of that remembering is the recitation of prayer. We pray three times a day to commemorate the times of the sacrifices. We change that liturgy to commemorate Shabbat, as we add and subtract things for other holidays.
Abraham Joshua Heschel comments that the best way to learn how to pray is to pray near someone who knows how to pray. Sadly, there are not many who know anymore. Neither my fear of prayer nor ignorance of prayer should then be surprising. Yet, I still pray so God hears that beautiful voice God so strives to hear.
*I know some of you are not familiar with that verse. Some liturgy, such as Reform, removed the second paragraph of the Shema, the Haya im shmoah. It is a statement of direct cause between doing good and evil and divine reward and punishment, and some are uncomfortable with that. I don’t read it that way but rather we are stewards of this world and are responsible for it. I usually include it in my private prayer, since it is rare in the minyans I attend.
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