Did Anyone Ever Teach You How to Pray? (Also, Blessings and Babies)
Tonight I want to talk about the thing that has been happening all around us this evening: prayer. Prayer is paradoxically extremely central to Jewish life—it is in some ways the central activity that happens at any Jewish event: a Shabbat service, holidays, a lifecycle moment like a wedding or a funeral— and fundamentally foreign to the Jewish experience, to many of our day-in, day-out experiences. How many of us regularly pray outside the context of a service? I’m pretty sure the answer is not none of us, but I’m also pretty sure it’s not 100% of us either.
And I say that without judgment:. How many of us were taught how to pray? And I don’t mean ‘taught how to recite prayers.’ I mean taught how to pray. What does to pray even mean? The Hebrew word for prayer is tefillah, which comes from the root palal. Palal ironically means something like ‘to divide’ or ‘to intervene.’ But in context, I think palal means ‘to break down the barrier between what is within and what is beyond.’ That barrier that is illusory at best. Tefilah means to draw down, to facilitate a connection between, what is within and what is beyond.
And so I ask again, who taught you how to do that? Again, I don’t think that none of us here were lucky enough to have someone who taught us that; my guess is a few of us were so fortunate. But for most of us, it’s the blind leading the blind.
Now this conversation assumes you grant my implicit premise that prayer is valuable. I imagine we’re not all on the same page there. I remember my beloved grandfather, zichrono livrachah, may his memory be a blessing, incredibly proud of his Jewishness, while being an avowed atheist, once found out that the pope—I think it was John Paul II—prayed for something like five hours a day. “What an incredible waste of time” he remarked to his aspiring rabbinical student grandson. I know not all of us see direct value in prayer.
And I confess that I don’t necessarily see the value proposition of prayer to be a linear one. It does not seem to be: we want something to happen, then we pray for it, and then it happens. That can’t be the value of prayer because we know of too many times where that trajectory does not appear to bear fruit. In a teaching I often cite from Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, he writes, ‘Will prayer help? We know some parents pray with all their hearts for a child to be cured of a life-threatening disease and yet the little one dies. We pray daily for peace, yet we are still at war. Prayer is not a switch with which we can control the universe.’
But he says, ‘Prayer waters thirsty souls like rain on flowers,’ continuing, ‘Prayer may not bring world peace, but it gives my heart peace. Prayer may not cure the sick, but it helps us find healing. Prayer may not guarantee me a job, but it helps me rise up with renewed energy and purpose to address the obstacles before me. So yes, prayer helps.’
What he seems to be suggesting is that in prayer we are opening up passageways to our soul that we don’t otherwise give attention to. Our psyche, if soul makes you nervous. Being. Spirit. Space for those unexamined parts of our being to breathe, time for them to bask in light, and then, hopefully, to have those parts extend throughout all of us. From there, through us as vessels of holiness, to extend to the world around us through our acts of love and kindness. Prayer can serve to settle ourselves down, purify our hearts, our intentions, which we then carry out in our interactions with the people and the world around us.
That’s prayer. (I think. I said it was the blind leading the blind didn’t I?) So we return to the question of how do pray? What does prayer look like, how do we get to this place of breaking down the barrier between what is beyond and what is within?
My teacher Bobbi Breitman teaches of the the man who goes to the Zen master and asks, ‘how long will it take me to be enlightened?’ The Zen master pauses and says ‘ten years.’ The man is disappointed by this and so responds, ‘and what if I try really hard?’ The Zen master pauses and says, ‘Twenty.’
I’m still figuring out how to pray. Is it through music, the gorgeous vibrations penetrating to our soul, the melodies lifting us up? Is it through silence, the stillness giving us space to breathe and to be. Is it through the words of the prayer book, running our hands over the Hebrew whose meaning we’re still trying to grasp? Is it through the words of our heart, spontaneously speaking whatever is on our mind, whatever is weighing on our chest pouring out whatever it is we’re struggling with or yearning for?
According to Judaism, the answer is: yes. Each of these are modalities that our ancestors have leaned on and been transformed through.Whether it was David playing the harp to soothe Saul’s spirit, Isaac’s going out into the field to meditate, generations of Jews shuckling and swaying, plaintively murmuring the words of the Siddur, and everyone from Hannah to Rebbe Nachman simply pouring out their heart in prayer, each of these modes has served our people as we’ve sought to get closer to God, to ourselves, and to the world around us, lifting it up, as we lift up ourselves.
Why am I talking about this tonight? Well, one, because I think it’s good for us. As Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote, ‘Is not listening to the pulse of wonder worth silence and abstinence from self-assertion?’ Continuing, ‘Why do we not set apart an hour of living for devotion to Hashem by surrendering to stillness?’
He says an hour a day. How about even 15 minutes?
And two because in a post-Tree of Life, post-Coleyville world, when not only is it incumbent upon us and those around us to call out antisemtism, it’s also incumbent, as Michael Balaban, the new President and CEO Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia suggested to us rabbis and executive directors on a security call this week, to, essentially, explore what Judaism has to offer and teach it to our children. It’s not only about defining ourselves in relationship to those who can’t see our humanity, it’s also about finding, discovering, being in touch with our own humanity—being in touch what it means to be Jewish and to pass this onto the children in our communities.
One of the features of being Jewish is prayer. Teifllah. Breaking down the barrier between what is within and what is beyond. Making space, day in and day out, to tend to the soul’s connection to the divine. Even if it takes 20 years.
On Saturday morning (services every week from 9:45 a.m.-noon, with a Torah discussion during the service from 10:30-11) we discussed a different component of Jewish prayer, sourced from the weekly parashah (Torah portion), Mishpatim. Mishpatim means “rules” and it refers to the series of rules and regulations that flow from the Ten Commandments which had been revealed to the Israelites in the previous week’s portion as the foundation of the covenant between God and Israel. To conclude these rules and regulations, God says, “You shall serve Adonai your God, and He will bless your bread and your water.”
The ancient rabbis, looking for biblical source for the sacred practice of offering blessings before eating food that we follow to this day, cited this verse, commenting in the Talmud, “do not read: And He will bless [uveirakh], rather: And you will bless [uvareikh]” (Berakhot 48b). You will offer blessings before you partake of food.
Why? Though it may seem intuitive to us after so many years of practice, the rabbis had a very specific, and perhaps counterintuitive, rationale: “One who derives benefit from this world without a blessing, it is as if he enjoyed objects consecrated to the heavens” (Berakhot 35a). Blessing food, according to the rabbis, doesn’t sanctify food, as we might assume; it, in effect, desanctifies it, permitting it for our use.
This invites a massive and important paradigm shift. Offering blessings isn’t our action to make things holy, fit for our consumption. The world, its fruits, are inherently holy and, perhaps more importantly, inherently not ours. Yes they become permitted for our use through our act of reflection and our articulation of thanks for their source, but we are partaking in something that is of the heavens. For our discussion participants this helped underscore all the more so how offering blessings are an important reminder that there but by the grace of Hashem go we; that the property of which we are consuming is not just ours; that others are in profound need of the world’s abundance and we need to help ensure it is shared.
Finally, I wanted to share, for those who don’t already know, that my wife Caroline and I are expecting our second child on March 4. (Our daughter Lila was a week early. At another time I’ll share the story of how much the timing caught me off guard!)
I write this here to share that I’ll be taking approximately four weeks of parental leave at that point. Between Rabbi Avi Winokur, Hazzan Jessi Roemer, Executive Director Sahar Oz, and the multitude of talented and capable staff members and volunteer leaders, the congregation is in good hands, but I wanted to share this news now in case it affects anything you were hoping to connect about with me personally. Please do reach out if you want to connect in advance of my leave.
