From: heb_roots_chr@mail.geocities.com
To: "Hebraic Heritage Newsgroup"<heb_roots_chr@geocities.com>
Date: Wed, 3 Dec 1997 01:05:52 +0000
Subject: Jewish Prayer - Part II
From: JUICE Administration <juice@virtual.co.il>
To: siddur@virtual.co.il
Subject: JUICE Siddur 11
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World Zionist Organization
Student and Academics Department
Jewish University in CyberspacE
juice@wzo.org.il birnbaum@wzo.org.il
http://www.wzo.org.il
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Course: THE PRAYER BOOK: A WINDOW ON JEWISH THEOLOGY
Lecture: 11/12
Lecturer: Barbara Sutnick and Rabbi Reuven Sutnick
"WHOSE PRAYER IS IT? -- CAN SCRIPTED PRAYER
ANSWER INDIVIDUAL NEEDS?"
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.
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 Amida)
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!
With best wishes to all for a Chag Yom Ha-atzmaut Sameach (Happy
Israel Independence Day)!
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