How Much of The Prayers Have Gone Through You

(This post is excerpted from my Rosh Hashanah 5772 morning sermon)

Prayers can be comforting, prayers can be uplifting, and prayers can be challenging; the words of our liturgy can be disturbing.  Some of the liturgy we may know well and some not so well. Some prayers some have become so interconnected within our tradition that it is virtually impossible to take them out.

We have prayers that span the vast centuries of Jewish history and tradition, all the way back to when the great Temple stood in Jerusalem.  How awesome and incredible it is to think that we stand today and pray the same prayers as Jews across the world, and that we pray the same words our ancestors have prayed in many different places and in vastly different times, and these words have sustained them. So it is that we are all together now, on the pages of our prayerbooks, praying these words with Jews of the time of the Golden Age of Spain, of the Crusades, of our Reform ancestors in the early 1800s.  And yet, knowing this, we realize that some of our prayers are hard to understand and were composed long before our modern understandings.  Their authors could not have predicted how we would think today - they didn’t know that they were medieval any more than we know how our words will sound to Jews a thousand years in the future.  Many of these words were uplifting and meaningful to them. Maybe some of these words bothered them too. We do not know how literally they prayed these same words and phrases. 

Many of the words were chosen for reasons other than their literal meaning - as poetry, allusions to the words of the Bible and Talmud, or because the sounds and syllables lend themselves more easily to chanting and meditation.

Rabbi Lawrence Kushner reminds us of this: “If I tell you to read the Amidah silently, you’ll read it like Evelyn Wood speed-reading dynamics at two thousand words a minute with 90 percent comprehension. What you will discover after a page or two is that you’re reading to get information and there’s no new information in the Siddur. So the first thing you have to (remember) is that reading prayers is not reading to get information.” (Lawrence Kushner, in Making Prayer Real, Mike Comins (ed). p. 175).

In other words, it’s not how much of the prayerbook you have gone through, it’s how much the prayers have gone through you. About 300 years ago there was a very famous teacher, Rabbi Dov Ber, the Maggid of Mezrich. Students came from all over to study with him.  Of all the many lessons he taught his students was the insight of how to know and understand Torah.  They thought that if they could repeat everything he taught them, they would truly know Torah. Not so, the Maggid taught, don’t just say words of Torah, BE Torah. 

Prayer is also challenging because it reminds us of our obligations, our moral responsibilities and our fragility.  The words hold us accountable. If you pray the words of the siddur daily, your world view will change and you will be focused more on how you walk in the world through the lens of Jewish history, tradition, and values.  You will see the world through Jewish eyes. That, above all, keeps us connected to the words of the Siddur.  The language of the prayerbook connects us to Jews throughout the ages who had similar concerns to ours - the amazement at the gift of being alive, the fragility and preciousness of life, the connections between the generations,  how to find joy, and comfort and connection despite the challenges of living, our desire to become better than we are, to return to God.

Rabbi Yehuda Halevi, the 11th Century poet and author of the Kuzari, wrote that prayer is to the soul as food is to the body. If we do not feed our bodies, or eat nourishing food, our bodies suffer; if we don’t pray, or take the time to focus on the spiritual aspects of our lives, our inner being, our souls will not be the same; we will be different people. A person can live without music, art, laughter, love...but her life will not be as full.  In Hebrew the word for prayer is l’hitpaleil.  It is a reflexive verb that means to judge oneself, to examine yourself to understand what it is that you believe, what you need, where you are strong and where you need to grow and strive.  In some languages, we might understand the word “pray” as meaning “to ask’, but in Hebrew praying is really about how the tefillah, the prayer and the praying, changes you, and your relationship with God and with the world around you. 

At the beginning of this New Year, may the words of our prayers help us grow upwards and inward to find God. May they lead us to a place of transformation,  that will make us better people and Jews who will go out into the world and act on our values and make the world a better place.