The Prayer Book -- Week 11

Before reciting the Amidah, it is customary to recite silently a short verse from Psalms 51: "My Lord, open my lips and my mouth, that it should recite Your praises." I have often thought that this verse sums up the paradox of Jewish Prayer. On the one hand, the psalmist speaks of HIS OWN lips and mouth, but on the other hand, he speaks of the praises as belonging to God. We are the pray-ers -- but the prayers belong to God! We who stand to affirm our dependence on God and ask for our needs, are confronted with a text and a task!! WHOSE PRAYER IS IT ANYWAY?

This is actually one of the questions with which we opened this course in our discussion of types of prayers and how one feels about praying. It is instructive to return to it at this point, from the enriched perspective of those who have studied some of the fixed prayers in some depth. By way of describing the "paradox of prayer," I want to think back to an illustration I brought in the opening lecture of this course (particularly apt on this Memorial Day for the Fallen Soldiers of Israel):

As the expression goes: "there are no atheists in fox-holes." Whoever coined this insightful phrase touched on a fact of human existence: even a person who has never walked into a synagogue or church can spontaneously create liturgical masterpieces under the right conditions!

In the Viet Nam years there used to be a t-shirt you could buy with the legend: "Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil, for I am the meanest ------ in the entire Mecong Delta." It was apparently motivated by a shirt worn by an American soldier in Viet Nam. It suggests the mindset of a battle-hardened Rambo, typical of all frontline warriors from time immemorial. But like the turtle in a cartoon who sees a ghost and outruns the rabbit, the unction of fear transforms the mighty marine into an "alter-boy!"

What I like most about the "fox-hole" illustration is that the motivation to pray precedes the activity of prayer. No one has to tell a soldier under fire that he should turn his eyes toward heaven. There is an intuitive sincerity -- a "reverent frame of mind" (koved rosh) -- which makes it natural for him to pray. Not so with the prayers we have been studying in the siddur. In ritual prayer the motivation to pray is preceded by a text which tells us what to ask for. It also presumes a religious obligation to place that request. The paradox of prayer is that the laws of Jewish prayer instruct the pray-er to do so with the same sincerity and motivation as the soldier under fire, yet without his motivation!

To appreciate the difficulty of the task before us, think of a typical suburban Jewish community. In the morning service (assuming there is one) on a typical weekday, one person stands to recite the Amidah. S/He may be thinking about: his/her sick mother, his/her bank overdraft, the fact that his/her car is getting old, how to pay for bringing the entire family to Jerusalem for their daughter's Bat Mitzva, etc. S/He is actually in a radical state of need. S/He is primed to utter prayer. With intuitive reverence s/he reaches the Amida's mandated blessing (#12):

And for the slanderers let there be no hope; and may all the heretics perish in an instant; and may all the enemies of Your people be cut down speedily. May you speedily uproot, smash and cast down the wanton sinners -- destroy them, lower them, humble them, speedily in our days. Blessed...Who breaks enemies and humbles wanton sinners.

** Time-out: How do/would YOU feel when faced with the siddur's challenge to say this prayer with kavanah (i.e. intention, sincerity)? Please e-mail your feelings to me, and I will in turn share them with the group. **

Let us return to our suburbanite. What if, in addition to not knowing any slanderers, this person stands to pray on a day in which his/her family is healthy, his/her bank account is solid and his/her car is new? Need and perceptions of dependency (on God, as discussed in Lessons 7 and 8 in connection to the Amidah) are the touchstones of sincere prayer. What happens to us when we are called on to pray when we feel no pressing need? Yet again, we are required to pray and to do so from a "reverent frame of mind!" Is this still really OUR prayer?

Please allow me to respond rather personally to the "Time-out" question for a moment (after all, I feel as if I know some of you after ten weeks of sharing Cyberspace together!): Smashing slanderers and wanton sinners is not exactly high on MY list of priorities. The happy truth is I don't know m/any wanton sinners in need of smashing. This does not lead me, however, to skip over this blessing. I see it rather as the siddur's challenge to me to try to identify with the pain of those of my people who HAVE been thus victimized. This is easier to do on some days than on others. For example, in this season of remembering the victims of the Holocaust and of the wars of the young State of Israel, it is far less difficult to pray for destruction of enemies than at other times. Also, if I am to be brutally honest, how free am I (or any of us) from deep dark desires for revenge against those who have hurt me and mine, even during other seasons of the year? The Jewish prayer service allows for the expression of the full range of human emotions -- even the ones that are not so "politically correct" -- that wash over all human beings at one time or another. In that sense, fixed prayer can be viewed (at least by those who find this connection helpful) as a type of "therapy," of the "spiritual-feedback" (as opposed to bio-feedback) variety. As such, one goes down a well-balanced check-list of emotional and spiritual states, needs and desires and does a daily check on where one is holding, how connected one feels to the Jewish people at this time, how connected one feels to God at this time, is this prayer fully MINE at this moment? (All this and a mitzvah too!)

A few other thoughts about this question: 1) Jewish Prayer is specifically designed to REMIND us of our needs, even if we do not experience them spontaneously. Indeed if faced with the task of spontaneously composing a full (i.e. one that addresses all our needs) prayer service every day, how many of us would be left stammering for our next words? How many of us would compose prayers that are banal and trite, about which we might end up even feeling embarrassed or short-changed after several days of hearing ourselves say them? 2) We pray in the plural, on behalf of the entire community of Jews, some of whom do, in fact, currently experience the need the prayer describes; and 3) praying on behalf of others, in accordance with Talmudic dictum (Bava Kama 92a), has practical/mystical benefits:

Rava said to Rabbi bar Mari: from where do we learn this matter:...He who prays for mercy on behalf of his fellow Jew, and [the pray-er later also] requires [mercy, that person's prayer] is answered first? [We learn this from the biblical story in Genesis 20-21]: "And Abraham prayed to God (on behalf of Avimelech)" and it is written afterwards: "And God remembered Sarah, as He said". "As he said" refers to what Abraham "said" (prayed) about Avimelech.

In other words, since Abraham prayed that Avimelech's wives should be able to conceive, Abraham's own wife Sarah was suddenly able to conceive after so many years of barrenness.

All of the above thoughts are based on a basic principle of Jewish ritual: the idea that an attitude can follow an act. We don't have to want to pray to in order to pray -- sometimes we have to pray in order to want to pray! Prayer accrues strength when we know we are involved in a shared, communal experience. If we consider that Jews everywhere are reciting the same words, each on each other's behalf -- we can just imagine the impact. "When is it a propitious time (to pray)?" the Talmud asks. "When the community prays." (Berachot 8a) All points argue that when we barter away spontaneity for a fixed experience, we come out ahead.

So far we have been speaking mostly about spiritual, psychological and even nationalistic reasons for relating to fixed prayer. Let us put aside the social sciences for the time being and use a legalistic (halakhic) probe to dig deeper into the question. This requires a return to what has been my basic approach throughout this course: YOU CANNOT REMOVE PRAYER FROM THE CONTEXT OF RITUAL. The basic antinomy I have set out between spontaneous prayer in which the need precedes the prayer and fixed prayer, in which the prayer text precedes the need, is in reality a far more complicated antinomy. We must factor into the equation additional comparisons: ritual vs. non-ritual prayer, required vs. permissible (non-required) prayer, community vs. individual prayer, regular occurrence vs. one-time prayer, etc. No matter how complicated we make it, all definitions fall somewhere on a continuum of ritual worship.

Let's look at the following examples to direct us into the discussion. In the Amidah we have the blessing (#8):

Heal us, God -- then we will be healed; save us -- then we will be saved, for You are our praise. Bring complete recovery for our ailments, for you are God, King, the faithful and compassionate Healer. Blessed .... Who heals the sick of His people Israel.

According to Jewish law, a person MUST say this blessing at each weekday service, whether or not everyone in the family is healthy. Now, in the event that someone in the family is sick, one MAY insert into this prayer the name of the sick person when reciting the Amidah silently. When the Torah is taken out for public reading, one MAY make a special prayer for the sick person known as a MiSheBerach ("May [God] Who blesses...). One MAY also recite psalms on behalf of the sick person, and MAY even gather a group of people together to recite psalms. In the event that a person is seriously ill and recovers, s/he MUST recite Birkat HaGomel (blessing said by those saved from disaster) publicly in synagogue when the Torah is taken out, so that the community can answer this blessing. And, if we rely on the Rambam (Laws of Prayer 1:3), a person MAY recite prayers of supplication and request all day long, if s/he is capable. Clearly this would include prayers on behalf of the sick.

We have before us an example of a continuum in prayer halakhah (Jewish law). There are prayers which MAY be said and prayers which MUST be said. There are PRIVATE prayers and PUBLIC prayers, which directs us back into our overriding concern of ritual. There are prayers which have NO FIXED TIME and prayers which have SPECIFIC TIMES, which again directs us back to questions of ritual. And, there are COMMUNAL prayers and INDIVIDUAL prayers, some of which MUST be said and some which MAY be said. All, interestingly, were prayers for the sick. All, save "blessed...who heals the sick" which appears in the Amidah, share the characteristic that the need precedes the prayer! Only in the case of the Amidah blessing does the prayer precede the need.

If all of the above are prayers for the sick, what is it then that makes me so sure that some are ritual and some are lesser in the hierarchy of Jewish worship? It all comes down to (1) what MUST be said (2) at SPECIFIC TIMES (3) in narrowly DEFINED TEXTS and (4) in specific COMMUNAL CONFIGURATIONS. All these elements can lend even to spontaneous prayer some measure of ritual.

The heading to this lecture asks the question: can scripted prayer answer individual needs? In a real sense, this is only half a question. We should also be asking can spontaneous, individual prayer answer the needs addressed by scripted prayer? Let me answer with my second favorite illustration of all times:

There was once an elderly shoemaker from the Lower East Side of New York who had spent his entire life hunched over his bench repairing the shoes his customers brought him. At an advanced age, he one day closed the door to his shop, retired without fanfare, and told his wife that they were going to "Eretz Yisroool" to visit before it was too late. They made arrangements on the first available flight. If the truth be told, shoemakers don't see a lot of the world. So you can imagine this man's surprise when he found himself in the middle of the bustle of Ben Gurion Airport, modern and busy, and so different from the quaint pictures of Israel he had kept on the walls of his tiny shop. As he looked around, he was particularly bothered by one detail. He had in his shop a clock, whose hands were mounted on a stylized picture of Jerusalem. But when he looked around Ben Gurion Airport, he saw that one wall had on it five clocks! When he looked closer, he saw that each of them said a different time!! Puzzled, he found a porter, to whom he asked: "Excuse me, mister, why do the clocks on the wall all say a different time?" The porter, in typical Israeli fashion answered: "Why would we need five if they all said the same time?"

The continuum of Jewish Prayer resembles the many clocks which all tell the time in a slightly different way. And why are they all different? Because if they were all the same, why would we need so many? Can scripted prayer answer individual needs? Yes. It answers the individual's needs for scripted, ritual worship which is not addressed by any other type of prayer. Can spontaneous, individual prayer answer the needs addressed by scripted, ritual prayer? Of course not. But then again, why should it? That's why we have both.

From the beginning of this course I have attempted to examine the most specifically-defined, obligatory type of prayers in all of Jewish ritual. These are the prayers of community worship and of the fixed calendar of worship services. These are the most well-known prayers -- the ones we find set out most prominently in the siddur. However they are only the most prominent elements in an entire range of devotion. It is this full range of devotion that addresses our need to pray alone and our need to pray together. And at its best, it is our comfort with the full range of devotion in its variety of times, texts and communal configurations, that convinces God to answer the needs of our prayers!

QUESTIONS FOR FURTHER THOUGHT

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Lesson 11 WHOSE PRAYER IS IT? -- CAN SCRIPTED PRAYER ANSWER INDIVIDUAL NEEDS?

QUESTIONS FOR FURTHER THOUGHT

Lesson 11
WHOSE PRAYER IS IT? -- CAN SCRIPTED PRAYER
ANSWER INDIVIDUAL NEEDS?