tagged: why prayer • the Open Siddur Project ✍ פְּרוֺיֶקְט הַסִּדּוּר הַפָּתוּחַ

“Prayer,” by Abraham Joshua Heschel (1945)

Abraham Joshua Heschel — Wed, 22 Aug 2018 03:18:00 +0000

Contribute a translation	Source (English)
	About a hundred years ago, Rabbi Isaac Meir Alter of Ger pondered over the question of what a certain shoemaker of his acquaintance should do about his morning prayer. His customers were poor men who owned only one pair of shoes. The shoemaker used to pick up their shoes at a late evening hour, work on them the whole night and part of the morning, in order to deliver them before their owners had to go to work. When should the shoemaker say his morning prayer? Should he pray quickly the first thing in the morning, and then go back to work? Or should he continue his work, let the appointed hour of prayer go by and, every once in a while, raising his hammer from the shoes, utter a sigh: “Woe unto me, I haven’t prayed yet!”? Perhaps that sigh is worth more than prayer itself.
	We, too, face this dilemma of wholehearted regret or perfunctory fulfillment. Many of us regretfully refrain from habitual prayer, waiting for an urge that is complete, sudden, and unexampled. But the unexampled is scarce, and perpetual refraining can easily grow into a habit—idle, sullen, and stolid. We may even come to forget what to regret, what to miss.
	I. PRAYER AS AN ANSWER
	We do not refuse to pray. We merely feel that our tongue is tied, our mind inert, our inner vision dim, when we are about to enter the door that leads to prayer. We do not refuse to pray; we abstain from it. We ring the hollow bell of selfishness, rather than absorb the stillness that surrounds the world, that hovers over all the restlessness and fear of life—the secret stillness that precedes our birth and follows our death. Futile self-indulgence brings us out of tune with the gentle song of nature’s waiting, of mankind’s striving for salvation. Is not listening to the pulse of wonder worth silence and abstinence from self-assertion? Why do we not set apart an hour of living for devotion to God by surrendering to stillness? We dwell on the edge of mystery and ignore it, wasting our souls, risking our stake in God. We constantly pour our inner light away from Him, setting up the thick screen of self between Him and us, adding more shadows to the darkness that already hovers between Him and our wayward reason. Accepting surmises as dogmas, and prejudices as solutions, we ridicule the evidence of life for what is more than life. Our mind has ceased to be sensitive to the wonder. Deprived of the power of devotion to what is more important than our individual fate, steeped in passionate anxiety to survive, we lose sight of what fate is, of what living is. Rushing through the ecstasies of ambition, we only awake when plunged into dread or grief. In darkness, then, we grope for solace, for meaning, for prayer.
	But there is a wider, voluntary entrance to prayer than sorrow and despair—the opening of our thoughts to God. We cannot make Him visible to us, but we can make ourselves visible to Him. So we open our thoughts to Him—feeble our tongue, but sensitive our heart. We see more than we can say. The trees stand like guards of the Everlasting; the flowers like signposts of His goodness—only we have failed to be testimonies to His presence, tokens of His trust. How could we have lived in the shadow of greatness and defied it?
	Mindfulness of God rises slowly, a thought at a time. Suddenly we are there. Or is He here, at the margin of our soul? When we begin to feel a qualm of diffidence lest we hurt what is holy, lest we break what is whole, then we discover that He is not austere. He answers with love our trembling awe. Repentant of forgetting Him even for a while, we become sharers of gentle joy; we would like to dedicate ourselves forever to the unfoldment of His final order.
	To pray is to take notice of the wonder, to regain the sense of the mystery that animates all beings, the divine margin in all attainments. Prayer is our humble answer to the inconceivable surprise of living.^[1] emphasis ours –ANV It is all we can offer in return for the mystery by which we live. Who is worthy to be present at the constant unfolding of time? Amidst the meditation of mountains, the humility of flowers—wiser than all alphabets—clouds that die constantly for the sake of beauty, we are hating, hunting, hurting. Suddenly we feel ashamed of our clashes and complaints in the face of the tacit greatness in nature. It is so embarrassing to live! How strange we are in the world, and how presumptuous our doings! Only one response can maintain us: gratefulness for witnessing the wonder, for the gift of our unearned right to serve, to adore, and to fulfill. It is gratefulness which makes the soul great.
	However, we often lack the strength to be grateful, the courage to answer, the ability to pray. To escape from the mean and penurious, from calculating and scheming, is at times the parching desire of man. Tired of discord, he longs to escape from his own mind—and for the peace of prayer. How good it is to wrap oneself in prayer, spinning a deep softness of gratitude to God around all thoughts, enveloping oneself in the silk of a song! But how can man draw songs out of his heart if his consciousness is a woeful turmoil of fear and ambition? He has nothing to offer but disgust, and the weariness of wasting the soul. Accustomed to winding strands of thoughts, to twisting phrases in order to reap praise, he is incapable of finding simple, straight words. His language abounds in traps and decoys, in shams and tricks, in gibes and sneers. In the teeth of such powerful distractions he has to focus all the powers of his mind on one concern. In the midst of universal agitation how can there be tranquillity?
	Trembling in the realization that we are a blend of modesty and insolence, of self-denial and bias, we beseech God for rescue, for help in the control of our thoughts, words, and deeds. We lay all our forces before Him. Prayer is arrival at the border. “The dominion is Thine. Take away from me all that may not enter Thy realm.”
	II. PRAYER AND THE SPIRITUAL LIFE
	As a tree torn from the soil, as a river separated from its source, the human soul wanes when detached from what is greater than itself. Without the ideal, the real turns chaotic; without the universal, the individual becomes accidental. It is the pattern of the impeccable which makes the average possible. It is the attachment to what is spiritually superior: loyalty to a sacred person or idea, devotion to a noble friend or teacher, love for a people or for mankind, which holds our inner life together. But any ideal, human, social, or artistic, if it forms a roof over all of life, shuts us off from the light. Even the palm of one hand may bar the light of the entire sun. Indeed, we must be open to the remote in order to perceive the near. Unless we aspire to the utmost, we shrink to inferiority.
	Prayer is our attachment to the utmost. Without God in sight, we are like the scattered rungs of a broken ladder. To pray is to become a ladder on which thoughts mount to God to join the movement toward Him which surges unnoticed throughout the entire universe. We do not step out of the world when we pray; we merely see the world in a different setting. The self is not the hub, but the spoke of the revolving wheel. In prayer we shift the center of living from self-consciousness to self-surrender. God is the center toward which all forces tend. He is the source, and we are the flowing of His force, the ebb and flow of His tides.
	Prayer takes the mind out of the narrowness of self-interest, and enables us to see the world in the mirror of the holy. For when we betake ourselves to the extreme opposite of the ego, we can behold a situation from the aspect of God. Prayer is a way to master what is inferior in us, to discern between the signal and the trivial, between the vital and the futile, by taking counsel with what we know about the will of God, by seeing our fate in proportion to God. Prayer clarifies our hopes and intentions. It helps us discover our true aspirations, the pangs we ignore, the longings we forget. It is an act of self-purification, a quarantine for the soul. It gives us the opportunity to be honest, to say what we believe, and to stand for what we say. For the accord of assertion and conviction, of thought and conscience, is the basis of all prayer.
	Prayer teaches us what to aspire for. So often we do not know what to cling to. Prayer implants in us the ideals we ought to cherish. Salvation, purity of mind and tongue, or willingness to help, may hover as ideas before our mind, but the idea becomes a concern, something to long for, a goal to be reached, when we pray: “Guard my tongue from evil and my lips from speaking guile; and in the face of those who curse me, let my soul be silent.”^[2] Psalms 34:13
	Prayer is the essence of spiritual living. Its spell is present in every spiritual experience. Its drive enables us to delve into what is beneath our beliefs and desires, and to emerge with a renewed taste for the endless simplicity of the good. On the globe of the microcosm the flow of prayer is like the Gulf Stream, imparting warmth to all that is cold, melting all that is hard in our life. For even loyalties may freeze to indifference if detached from the stream which carries the strength to be loyal. How often does justice lapse into cruelty, and righteousness into hypocrisy. Prayer revives and keeps alive the rare greatness of some past experience in which things glowed with meaning and blessing. It remains important, even when we ignore it for a while, like a candlestick set aside for the day. Night will come, and we shall again gather round its tiny flame. Our affection for the trifles of living will be mixed with longing for the comfort of all men.
	However, prayer is no panacea, no substitute for action. It is, rather, like a beam thrown from a flashlight before us into the darkness. It is in this light that we who grope, stumble, and climb discover where we stand, what surrounds us, and the course which we should choose. Prayer makes visible the right, and reveals the hampering and the false. In its radiance we behold the worth of our efforts, the range of our hopes, and the meaning of our deeds. Envy and fear, despair and resentment, anguish and grief, which lie heavily upon the heart, are dispelled like shadows by its light.
	Sometimes prayer is more than a light before us; it is a light within us. Those who have once been resplendent with this light find little meaning in speculations about the efficacy of prayer. A story is told about a Rabbi who once entered heaven in a dream. He was permitted to approach the temple in Paradise where the great sages of the Talmud, the Tannaim, were spending their eternal lives. He saw that they were just sitting around tables studying the Talmud. The disappointed Rabbi wondered, “Is this all there is to Paradise?” But suddenly he heard a voice, “You are mistaken. The Tannaim are not in Paradise. Paradise is in the Tannaim.”
	III. SUFFERING—THE SOURCE OF PRAYER?
	In those souls in which prayer is a rare flower, enchanting, surprising, and scarce, it seems to come to pass by the lucky chance of misfortune, as an inevitable or adventitious by-product of affliction. But suffering is not the source of prayer. A motive does not bring about an act as a cause produces an effect; it merely stimulates the potential into becoming the actual. Peril or want may clear the ground for its growth, stubbing up the weeds of self-assurance, ridding the heart of the hard and obdurate, but it can never raise prayer.
	To a farmer about to prepare a seedbed, the prerequisite for his undertaking is not the accidental need of a crop. His need of food does not endow him with skill in cultivating the earth; it merely affords the stimulus and purpose for his undertaking. It is his knowledge, his possession of the idea of tillage, which enables him to raise crops. The same principle applies to prayer. The natural loyalty of living, fertilized by faith saved through a lifetime, is the soil on which prayer can grow. Laden with secret fertility, and patient discreetness concerning things to be and things forever unknown, the soil of the soul nourishes and holds the roots of prayer. But the soil by itself does not produce crops. There must also be the idea of prayer to make the soul yield its amazing fruit.
	The idea of prayer may seem to be the assumption of man’s ability to accost God, to lay our hopes, sorrows, and wishes before Him. But this assumption is a paraphrase, rather than a precise expression of what we believe. We do not feel that we possess a magic power of speaking to the Infinite; we merely witness the wonder of prayer, the wonder of man addressing himself to the Eternal. Contact with Him is not our achievement. It is a gift, coming down to us from on high like a meteor, rather than rising up like a rocket. Before the words of prayer come to the lips, the mind must believe in God’s willingness to draw near to us, and in our ability to clear the path for His approach. Such belief is the idea that leads us toward prayer.
	Prayer is not a soliloquy. But is it a dialogue with God? Does man address Him as person to person? It is incorrect to describe prayer on the analogy of human conversation; we do not communicate with God. We only make ourselves communicable to Him. Prayer is an emanation of what is most precious in us toward Him, the outpouring of the heart before Him. It is not a relationship between person and person, between subject and subject, but an endeavor to become the object of His thought.
	Prayer is like the light from a burning glass in which all the rays that emanate from the soul are gathered to a focus. There are hours when we are resplendent with the glowing awareness of our share in His secret interests on earth. We pray. We are carried forward to Him who is coming close to us. We endeavor to divine His will, not merely His command. Prayer is an answer to God: “Here am I. And this is the record of my days. Look into my heart, into my hopes and my regrets.” We depart in shame and joy. Yet prayer never ends, for faith endows us with a bold craving that He draw near to us and approach us as a father—not only as a ruler, not only through our walking in His ways, but through His entering into our ways. The purpose of prayer is to be brought to His attention, to be listened to, to be understood by Him; not to know Him, but to be known to Him. To pray is to behold life not only as a result of His power, but as a concern of His will, or to strive to make it a divine concern. For the ultimate aspiration of man is not to be a master, but an object of His knowledge. To live “in the light of His countenance,”^[3] Cf. Proverbs 16:15 to become a thought of God—this is the true career of man.
	But are we worthy of being known, of entering into His mercy, of being a matter of concern to Him? It seems as if the meaning of prayer lies in man’s aspiration to be thought of by God as one who is thinking of Him. Man waxes in God when serving the sacred, and wanes when he betrays his task. Man lives in His mind when He abides in human life.
	There is no human misery more strongly felt than the state of being forsaken by God. Nothing is so terrible as rejection by Him. It is a horror to live deserted by God, and effaced from His mind. The fear of being forgotten even for an instant is a powerful spur to a pious man to bring himself to the attention of God, to keep his life worth being known to Him. He prefers to be smitten by His punishment rather than to be left alone. In all his prayers he begs, explicitly or implicitly, “Do not forsake me, O Lord.”^[4] Psalms 38:21
	The man who betrays Him day after day, drunk with vanity, resentment, or reckless ambition, lives in a ghostly mist of misgivings. Having ruined love with greed, he is still wondering about the lack of tenderness. His soul contains a hiding-place for an escaping conscience. He has torn his ties to God into shreds of shrieking dread, and his ear is dull and callous. Spoiler of his own lot, he walks the earth a skeleton of a soul, raving about missed delight.
	God is not alone when discarded by man. But man is alone. To avoid prayer constantly is to dig a gap between man and God which can widen into an abyss. But sometimes, awakening on the edge of despair to weep, and arising from forgetfulness, we feel how yearning moves in softly to become the lord of a restless breast, and we pass over the gap with the lightness of a dream.
	IV. THE NATURE OF KAVVANAH
	A Rabbi once remarked on the passage in the Amidah, “For Thou hearkenest in mercy to the prayer of every mouth,” that we would expect the phrase to be “the prayer of every heart.” But the passage wishes to remind us that it is the mercy of God to accept even prayers that come only from the mouth as lip-service, without inner devotion. However, this remark in no way denies the principle that Kavvanah, or inner participation, is indispensable to prayer, the principle which found a precise expression in the medieval saying: “Prayer without Kavvanah is like a body without a soul.”
	Yet, what is the nature of Kavvanah? Is it paying attention to the context of the fixed texts? Thinking? Prayer is not thinking. To the thinker, God is an object; to the man who prays, He is the subject. Awaking in the presence of God, our aim is not to acquire objective knowledge, but to deepen the mutual allegiance of man and God. What we want is not to know Him, but to be known to Him; not to form judgments about Him, but to be judged by Him; not to make the world an object of our mind, but to let it come to His attention, to augment His, rather than our knowledge. We endeavor to disclose ourselves to the Sustainer of all, rather than to enclose the world in ourselves.
	To most people, thinking is a thing that grows in the hothouse of logic, separated from the atmosphere of character and of everyday living. They consider it possible for a man to be unscrupulous, and yet to write well about righteousness. Others may disagree with this view. However, all of us, mindful of the ancient distinction between lip-service and the service of the heart, agree that prayer is not a hothouse plant of temples, but a shoot that grows in the soil of life, springing from widespread roots hidden in all our needs and deeds. Vicious needs, wicked deeds, felt or committed today, are like rot cankering the roots of tomorrow’s prayer. A hand used in crime is an axe laid to the roots of worship. It is as Isaiah said: “And when ye spread forth your hands, I will hide mine eyes from you; Yea, when ye make many prayers, I will not hear; Your hands are full of blood.”^[5] Isaiah 1:15 Life is fashioned by prayer, and prayer is the quintessence of life.
	The laws of science we comprehend as a rational concept in critical understanding, while the mercy and greatness of the Infinite we absorb as a mystery. Prayer is a spiritual source in itself. Though not born of an urge to learn, it often endows us with insights not attainable by speculation. It is in prayer that we obtain the subsidy of God for the failing efforts of our wisdom.
	But prayer goes beyond the scope of emotion; it is the approach of the human to the transcendent. Prayer makes man a relative to the sublime, initiating him into the mystery. The will, at times, is an outsider to the sanctuary of the soul. It ushers in great things, but does not always control them. The will to pray opens the gates, but what enters is not its product. The will is not a creative, but an auxiliary power, the servant of the soul. Creative forces may be discharged, but not engendered, by the will. Thus, inclination to pray is not prayer. Deeper forces and qualities of the soul must be mobilized before prayer can be accomplished. To pray is to pull oneself together, to pour our perception, volition, memory, thought, hope, feeling, dreams, all that is moving in us, into one tone. Not the words we utter, the service of the lips, but the way in which it is performed, the devotion of the heart to what the words contain, the consciousness of speaking under His eyes, is the pith of prayer.
	For neither the lips nor the brain are the limits of the scene on which prayer takes place. Speech and devotion are functions auxiliary to a metaphysical process. Common to all men who pray is the certainty that prayer is an act which makes the heart audible to God. Who would pour his most precious hopes into a deaf abyss? Essential is the metaphysical rather than the psychical dimension of prayer. Prayer is not a thought that rambles alone in the world, but an event that starts in man and ends in God. What goes on in our heart is a humble preliminary to an event in God.
	The passage of hours, almost unnoticeable, but leaving behind the feeling of loss or omission, is either an invitation to despair or a ladder to eternity. This little time in our hands melts away ere it can be formed. Before our eyes man and maid, spring and splendor, slide into oblivion. However, there are hours that perish and hours that join the everlasting. Prayer is a crucible in which time is cast in the likeness of the eternal. Man hands over his time to God in the secrecy of single words. When anointed by prayer, his thoughts and deeds do not sink into nothingness, but merge into the endless knowledge of an all-embracing God. We yield our thoughts to Him who endowed us with a chain of days for the duration of life.
	V. THE ESSENCE OF PRAYER
	To many psychologists, prayer is but a function, a shadow cast by the circumstances of our lives, growing and diminishing along with our needs and wants. Consequently, to understand the nature of prayer, it is enough to become familiar with the various occasions on which it is offered. But is it possible to determine the value of a work of art by discovering the occasion of its creation? Assuming that we can ascertain whether Cervantes wrote his Don Quixote in order to pay his debts, or to attain fame and impress his friends, would that have any bearing upon either the intrinsic value, or our appreciation of his art? Nor is the factor which induces a person to pray the substance of prayer. The essence of prayer is inherent in the act of prayer itself. It can be detected only inside the consciousness of man during the act of worship.
	The drive toward practical consequences is not the force that inspires a person at the moment of his chanting praise to God. Even in supplication the thought of aid or protection does not constitute the inner act of prayer. The hope of results may be the motive that leads the mind into prayer, but not the content which fills the worshiper’s consciousness in the essential moment of prayer. The artist may give a concert for the sake of the promised remuneration, but, in the moment when he is passionately seeking with his fingertips the vast swarm of swift and secret sounds, the consideration of subsequent reward is far from his mind. His whole being is immersed in the music. The slightest shift of attention, the emergence of any ulterior motive, would break his intense concentration, and his singleminded devotion would collapse, his control of the instrument would fail. Even an artisan can never be true to his task, unless he is motivated by love of the work for its own sake. Only by wholehearted devotion to his trade, can he produce a consummate piece of craftsmanship. Prayer, too, is primarily Kavvanah, the yielding of the entire being to one goal, the gathering of the soul into focus.
	The focus of prayer is not the self. A man may spend hours meditating about himself, or be stirred by the deepest sympathy for his fellow man, and no prayer will come to pass. Prayer comes to pass in a complete turning of the heart toward God, toward His goodness and power. It is the momentary disregard of our personal concerns, the absence of self-centered thoughts, which constitute the act of prayer. Feeling becomes prayer in the moment in which we forget ourselves and become aware of God. When we analyze the consciousness of a supplicant, we discover that it is not concentrated upon his own interests, but on something beyond the self. The thought of personal need is absent, and the thought of divine grace alone is present in his mind. Thus, in beseeching Him for bread, there is one instant, at least, in which our mind is directed neither to our hunger nor to food, but to His mercy. This instant is prayer.
	We start with a personal concern and live to feel the utmost, for the fate of the individual is a counterpoint in a larger theme. In prayer we come close to hearing the eternal theme and discerning our place in it. It is as if our life were a seamless garment, continuous with the Infinite. Our poverty is His. His property is ours. Overwhelmed with awe of His share in our lives, we extend ourselves to Him, expose our goals to His goodness, exchange our will for His wisdom. For this reason, the analogy between prayer and petitioning another human being is like the analogy between the ocean and a cup of water. For the essence of prayer lies in man’s self-transcending, in his surpassing the limits of what is human, in his relating the natural to the Divine.
	Prayer is an invitation to God to intervene in our lives, to let His will prevail in our affairs; it is the opening of a window to Him in our will, an effort to make Him the Lord of our sold. We submit our interests to His concern, and seek to be allied with what is ultimately right. Our approach to the Holy is not an intrusion, but an answer. Between the dawn of childhood and the door of death, man encounters things and events out of which comes a whisper of truth, not much louder than stillness, but exhorting and persistent. Yet man listens to his fears and his whims, rather than to the soft petitions of God. The Lord of the universe is suing for the favor of man, but man fails to realize his own importance. It is the disentanglement of our heart from cant, bias, and ambition, the staving in of the bulk of stupid conceit, the cracking of hollow self-reliance, that enables us to respond to this request for our service.
	VI. THE TWO MAIN TYPES OF PRAYER
	At first sight prayer appears to be a communication of ideas or feelings through spoken words. Every one of us bears a vast accumulation of unuttered sorrows, scruples, hopes, and yearnings, frozen in the muteness of his nature. In prayer the ice breaks, our feelings begin to move our mind, striving for an outlet. It is not an expression of things accidentally stored up in our minds, but an emanation of what is most personal in us, an act of self-expression.
	Yet, in a sense, prayer starts where expression fails. The words that reach our lips are often but waves of an overflowing stream touching the shore. We often seek and miss, struggle and fail to adjust our unique feelings to the patterns of texts. The soul, then, intimates its persistent striving, the riddle of its unhappiness, the strain of living twixt hope and fear. Where is the tree that can utter fully the silent passion of the soil? Words can only open the door, and we can only weep on the threshold of our incommunicable thirst after the incomprehensible. A certain passage in the morning prayer was interpreted by the Kotzker Rabbi to mean that God loves what is left over at the bottom of the heart and cannot be expressed in words. It is the ineffable feeling which reaches God rather than the expressed feeling.
	Various attempts have been made to classify prayer. The division into supplication and praise pays attention to the theme, but not to the inner dynamics of prayer. This inner dynamics takes its course between the soul of man and the words. From this point of view, we have to distinguish between two main types of prayer: prayer as an act of expression, and prayer as an act of empathy. The first type takes place when there is a strong feeling within that leads to prayer, when we are stirred by something and seek words to express our state of mind. But the more common type of prayer is an act of empathy. There need be no prayerful mood in us when we begin to pray. It is through our reading and feeling the words of the prayers, through imaginative projection of our consciousness into the meaning of the words, and through empathy into the ideas with which the words are pregnant, that this type of prayer comes to pass.
	The ability to express what is hidden in the heart is a rare gift, and cannot be counted upon by all men. What, then, makes it possible for us to pray is our ability to affiliate our own minds with the pattern of fixed texts, to unlock our hearts to the words, and to surrender to their meanings. For words are not dead tools, but living entities full of spiritual power. The power of words often surpasses the power of our minds. The word is often the giver, and man the recipient. Thus man submits to the words. They inspire his mind and awaken his heart. We do not turn the light of prayer on and off at will, as we control sober speculation; we are seized by the overwhelming spell of His name. It is amazement, not understanding; awe, not reasoning; a challenge, a sweep of emotion, the tide of a mood, an identification of our wills with the living will of God.
	What do most of us know about the substance of words? Estranged from the soil of the soul, our words do not grow as fruits of joy, but are found as sapless clichés, refuse in the backyard of the intelligence. There can be no prayer without a sense of the dignity of words. Everyone feels the binding force of the uttered word, the reality of an oath, vow, or promise, but rarely do we ponder on the nature of the secret power stored up in words. When the heart, co-operating with the forces of faith against tumult and anxiety, succeeds in keeping alive the inner stillness, we feel how great and gentle words can be. Strength and pride come from their sounds. They soften the harshness of fear and unfold the wings of hope. Our thoughts, tiny and feeble, become powerful in their wake.
	There is always the opportunity of realizing the holy, but when we fail to use it, there are words to remind the mind what to draw from the depth of every hour. Words are like mountain peaks pointing to the unfathomable. Ascending their trails we arrive at prayer. They are like notes of music. It is the strength of our inner life which makes the symbols live; it is the fulness of our heart which lends force to words. By our feeling we make manifest and real what is indicated in the texts. In prayer, we discover what moves us unawares, what is urgent in our lives, what in us is related to the ultimate.
	Is it the outburst of eloquence which makes the Infinite listen to our feeble voice? Prayer is not a sermon delivered to God. Essential in prayer is the intention, not the technical skill. In oratory, as in any other work of art, we endeavor to lend an adequate form to an idea; we apply all our care to adjusting the form to the content. But prayer is almost pure content; the form is unimportant. It makes no difference whether we stammer or are eloquent. We can concentrate entirely on our inner devotion.
	Two brief stories may be told relative to the two main types of prayer, the expressive and the empathic. One of these, told in Sefer Hassidim, concerns a young shepherd who was unable to read the Hebrew prayers. The only way in which he worshiped God was to say: “O Lord, I should like to pray, but I cannot read Hebrew. There is only one thing I can do for you—if you would give me your sheep, I would take care of them for nothing.” One day a learned man passing by heard the shepherd pronounce his offer, and shouted at him: “You are blasphemous!” He told the boy that he should read the daily Hebrew prayers instead of uttering irreverent words. When the shepherd told him that he could not read Hebrew, he took him to his house and began to teach him to read the prayer-book. One night the learned man had a dream, in which he was told that there was great sadness in heaven because the young shepherd had ceased to say his usual prayer. He was commanded to advise the boy to return to his old way of praying.
	Now many of us are so much on the side of the shepherd-boy as to be opposed to the institution of regular prayer, claiming that we should pray only when and as we feel inspired to do so. For such there is a story, told by Rabbi Israel Friedman, the Rizhiner, about a small Jewish town, far off from the main roads of the land. But it had all the necessary municipal institutions: a bathhouse, a cemetery, a hospital, and a law-court; as well as all sorts of craftsmen—tailors, shoemakers, carpenters, and masons. One trade, however, was lacking; there was no watchmaker. In the course of years many of the clocks became so annoyingly inaccurate that their owners just decided to let them run down, and ignore them altogether. There were others, however, who maintained that as long as the clocks ran they should not be abandoned. So they wound their clocks day after day, though they knew that they were not accurate. One day the news spread through the town that a watchmaker had arrived, and everyone rushed to him with their clocks. But the only ones he could repair were those that had been kept running—the abandoned clocks had grown too rusty!
	VII. THE VISION OF PRAYER
	The thirst for companionship, which drives us so often into error and adventure, indicates the intense loneliness from which we suffer. We are alone even with our friends. The smattering of understanding which a human being has to offer is not enough to satisfy our need of sympathy. Human eyes can see the foam, but not the seething at the bottom. In the hour of greatest agony we are alone. It is such a sense of solitude which prompts the heart to seek the companionship of God. He alone can know the motives of our actions; He alone can be truly trusted. Prayer is confidence, unbosoming oneself to God. For man is incapable of being alone. His incurable, inconsolable loneliness forces him to look for things yet unattained, for people yet unknown. He often runs after a sop, but soon retires discontented from all false or feeble companionship. Prayer may follow such retirement.
	What is pride worth if it does not add to the glory of God? We forfeit our dignity when we abandon loyalty to what is sacred; our existence dwindles to trifles. We barter life for oblivion, and pay the price of toil and pain in the pursuit of aimlessness. Only concern for our inalienable share in the unknown holds our inner life together. It enables us to grasp the utopia of faith, to divine what is desirable to God, aspiring to be, not only a part of nature, but a partner of God. The sacred is a necessity in our lives, and prayer is born of this necessity. Through prayer we sanctify ourselves, our feelings, our ideas. Everyday things become sacred when prayed for to God.
	The privilege of praying is man’s greatest distinction. For what is there in man to induce reverence, to make his life sacred and his rights inalienable? The possession of knowledge, wealth, or skill does not compose the dignity of man. A person possessing none of these gifts may still lay claim to dignity. Our reverence for man is aroused by something in him beyond his own and our reach, something that no one can deprive him of. It is his right to pray, his ability to worship, to utter the cry that can reach God: “If they cry at all unto Me, I will surely hear their cry.”^[6] Exodus 22:23
	The main ends of prayer are to move God, to let Him participate in our lives, and to interest ourselves in Him. What is the meaning of praise if not to make His concern our own? Worship is an act of inner agreement with God. We can only petition Him for things we need when we are sure of His sympathy for us. To praise is to feel God’s concern; to petition is to let Him feel our concern. In prayer we establish a living contact with God, between our concern and His will, between despair and promise, want and abundance. We affirm our adherence by invoking His love.
	Prayer is spiritual ecstasy. It is as if all our vital thoughts in fierce ardor should burst the mind to stream toward God. A keen single force draws our yearning for the utmost out of the seclusion of the soul. We try to see our visions in His light, to feel our life as His affair. We begin by letting the thought of Him engage our minds, by realizing His name and entering into a reverie which leads through beauty and stillness, from feeling to thought, and from understanding to devotion. For the coins of prayer bear the image of God’s dreams and wishes for fear-haunted man.
	At the beginning of all action is an inner vision in which things to be are experienced as real. Prayer, too, is frequently an inner vision, an intense dreaming for God—the reflection of the Divine intentions in the soul of man. We dream of a time “when the world will be perfected under the Kingdom of God, and all the children of flesh will call upon Thy name, when Thou wilt turn unto Thyself all the wicked of the earth.”^[7] Cf. Aleinu, second part We anticipate the fulfillment of the hope shared by both God and man. To pray is to dream in league with God, to envision His holy visions.

The essay, “Prayer,” by Rabbi Dr. Abraham Joshua Heschel, then Associate Professor of Jewish Philosophy at Hebrew Union College, published in Review of Religion vol. 9 no. 2, January 1945. I have replaced his transliteration of “kawwana” with “kavvanah.” –Aharon N. Varady

In Spiritual Radical: Abraham Joshua Heschel in America, 1940-1972 (Yale University Press 2007, p. 339-340), Edward K. Kaplan writes:

…in January 1945 Heschel’s essay “Prayer” appeared in the Review of Religion, again bringing his analysis of the inner life to an English-speaking readership. This time Heschel’s presentation was explicitly Jewish, though his goals remained universal. He introduced the “essence” of worship with a story about the Gerer rebbe, Rabbi Isaac Meir Alter, who cherished the sigh of a shoemaker who had bewailed his lack of time to make his morning prayers. Heschel suggested, “Perhaps that sigh is worth more than prayer itself.” Then, without mentioning the Hebrew terms, he examined the classic problem of law (halakhah), or outward acts, versus intention (kavanah), emotion, and inner awareness. Foremost in the latter was the desire to pray. Authentic prayer, according to Heschel, was the proper vehicle of religious insight and theocentrism its hallmark. Implicitly, but without naming Buber, he rejected the popular notion of dialogue: “It is incorrect to describe prayer on the analogy of human conversation; we do not communicate with God. We only make ourselves communicable to Him.”^[8] Heschel 1945, “Prayer,” 158.

Heschel addressed readers without faith, agnostics, or those who rejected religion, as he elucidated the ethical consequences of recentering the self: “Prayer takes the mind out of the narrowness of self-interest, and enables us to see the world in the mirror of the holy. For when we betake ourselves to the extreme opposite of the ego, we can behold a situation from the aspect of God.”^[9] Ibid., 156.

Heschel also clarified his other key notion, the idea of the “ineffable”: the impossibility of finding words adequate to spiritual reality. He drew upon his 1939 German-language essay “Prayer as Expression and Empathy” (Das Gebet als Äusserung und Einfühlung) to delimit “two main types of prayer”: the prayer of self-expression, which comes from the heart; and the prayer of empathy, in which we project ourselves into prescribed words. “A certain passage in the morning prayer was interpreted by the Kotzker Rabbi to mean that God loves what is left over at the bottom of the heart and cannot be expressed in words. It is the ineffable feeling which reaches God rather than the expressed feeling.”^[10] Ibid., 164.

While stressing his confidence in the divine, Heschel admitted to his overwhelming sense of isolation: “The thirst for companionship, which drives us so often into error and adventure, indicates the intense loneliness from which we suffer. We are alone even with our friends. . . . In the hour of greatest agony we are alone. It is such a sense of solitude which prompts the heart to seek the companionship of God.”^[11] Ibid., 167. In one of his 1933 poems, “Lonely,” he confessed to this same isolation: “I would like to scream to myself through all the gates—‘Where are you?’ / but I can’t speak intimately enough with myself for that” (literally, say Du, “thou,” to myself), Heschel 2004, The Ineffable Name of God: Man, 127.

Characteristically, Heschel ended on a practical, even edifying note. He urged readers to imitate the divine, to the point of transforming the world: “We anticipate the fulfillment of the hope shared by both God and man. To pray is to dream in league with God, to envision His holy visions.”^[12] Heschel 1945, “Prayer,” 168. Humankind carries the burden, and the privilege, of a messianic vision. Prayer must be fulfilled in action.

Source(s)

Notes

Notes
1	emphasis ours –ANV
2	Psalms 34:13
3	Cf. Proverbs 16:15
4	Psalms 38:21
5	Isaiah 1:15
6	Exodus 22:23
7	Cf. Aleinu, second part
8	Heschel 1945, “Prayer,” 158.
9	Ibid., 156.
10	Ibid., 164.
11	Ibid., 167. In one of his 1933 poems, “Lonely,” he confessed to this same isolation: “I would like to scream to myself through all the gates—‘Where are you?’ / but I can’t speak intimately enough with myself for that” (literally, say Du, “thou,” to myself), Heschel 2004, The Ineffable Name of God: Man, 127.
12	Heschel 1945, “Prayer,” 168.

“On Prayer,” by Abraham Joshua Heschel (1969)

Abraham Joshua Heschel — Fri, 10 Aug 2018 19:20:54 +0000

Contribute a translation	Source (English)
	Primarily my theme is not liturgy, public worship, public ritual, but rather private worship, prayer as an enterprise of the individual self, as a personal engagement, as an intimate, confidential act.
	Public worship is an act of the highest importance. However, it tends in our days to become a spectacle, in which the congregation remains passive, inert spectators. But prayer is action; it requires complete mobilization of heart, mind, and soul. What is the worth of attending public worship when mind and soul are not involved? Renewal of liturgy involves renewal of prayer.
	There is, in addition, a malady indigenous or congenital to liturgy. Liturgy as an act of prayer is an outcome and distillation of the inner life. Although its purpose is to exalt the life which engenders it, it harbors a tendency to follow a direction and rhythm of its own, independent of and divorced from the energies of life which brought prayer into being. At the beginning, liturgy is intimately related to the life which calls it into being. But as liturgy unfolds, it enters a state of stubborn disconnection, even into a state of opposition. Liturgy is bound to become rigid, to stand by itself, and to take on a measure of imperviousness. It tends to become timeless, transpersonal; liturgy for the sake of liturgy. Personal presence is replaced by mere attendance; instead of erecting a sanctuary of time in the realm of the soul, liturgy attracts masses of people to a sanctuary in the realm of space.
	I do not wish to set up a dichotomy of prayer and liturgy. This would contradict the spirit of devotion. I merely wish to concentrate my thoughts on prayer as a personal affair, as an act of supreme importance. I plead for the primacy of prayer in our inner existence. The test of authentic theology is the degree to which it reflects and enhances the power of prayer, the way of worship.
	In antiquity as well as in the Middle Ages, due to the scarcity of parchment, people would often write new texts on top of earlier written parchments. The term denoting such writings is palimpsest. Metaphorically, I suggest that authentic theology is a palimpsest: scholarly, disciplined thinking grafted upon prayer.
	Prayer is either exceedingly urgent, exceedingly relevant, or inane and useless. Our first task is to learn to comprehend why prayer is an ontological necessity. God is hiding, and man is defying. Every moment God is creating and self-concealing. Prayer is disclosing or at least preventing irreversible concealing. God is ensconced in mystery, hidden in the depths. Prayer is pleading with God to come out of the depths. “Out of the depths have I called Thee, O Lord” (Psalms 130:1).
	We have lost sensitivity to truth and purity of heart in the wasteland of opportunism. It is, however, a loss that rebounds to afflict us with anguish. Such anguish, when converted into prayer, into a prayer for truth, may evoke the dawn of God. Our agony over God’s concealment is sharing in redeeming God’s agony over man’s concealment.
	Prayer as an episode, as a cursory incident, will not establish a home in the land of oblivion. Prayer must pervade as a climate of living, and all our acts must be carried out as variations on the theme of prayer. A deed of charity, an act of kindness, a ritual moment—each is prayer in the form of a deed. Such prayer involves a minimum or even absence of outwardness, and an abundance of inwardness.
	a sanctuary for the soul
	Prayer is not a stratagem for occasional use, a refuge to resort to now and then. It is rather like an established residence for the innermost self. All things have a home, the bird has a nest, the fox has a hole, the bee has a hive. A soul without prayer is a soul without a home. Weary, sobbing, the soul, after roaming through a world festered with aimlessness, falsehoods and absurdities, seeks a moment in which to gather up its scattered life, in which to divest itself of enforced pretensions and camouflage, in which to simplify complexities, in which to call for help without being a coward. Such a home is prayer. Continuity, permanence, intimacy, authenticity, earnestness are its attributes. For the soul, home is where prayer is.
	In his cottage, even the poorest man may bid defiance to misery and malice. That cottage may be frail, its roof may shake, the wind may blow through it, the storms may enter it, but there is where the soul expects to be understood. Just as the body, so is the soul in need of a home.
	Everybody must build his own home; everybody must guard the independence and the privacy of his prayers. It is the source of security for the integrity of conscience, for whatever inkling we attain of eternity. At home I have a Father who judges and cares, who has regard for me, and when I fail and go astray, misses me. I will never give up my home.
	What is a soul without prayer? A soul runaway or a soul evicted from its own home. To those who have abandoned their home: the road may be hard and dark and far, yet do not be afraid to steer back. If you prize grace and eternal meaning, you will discover them upon arrival.
	How marvellous is my home. I enter as a suppliant and emerge as a witness; I enter as a stranger and emerge as next of kin. I may enter spiritually shapeless, inwardly disfigured, and emerge wholly changed. It is in moments of prayer that my image is forged, that my striving is fashioned. To understand the world I must love my home. It is difficult to perceive luminosity anywhere if there is no fight in my own home. It is in the fight of prayers radiance that I find my way even in the dark. It is prayer that illumines my way. As my prayers, so is my understanding.
	the many purposes of prayer
	Prayer serves many aims. It serves to save the inward life from oblivion. It serves to alleviate anguish. It serves to partake of God’s mysterious grace and guidance. Yet, ultimately, prayer must not be experienced as an act for the sake of something else. We pray in order to pray.
	Prayer is a perspective from which to behold, from which to respond to, the challenges we face. Man in prayer does not seek to impose his will upon God; he seeks to impose God’s will and mercy upon himself. Prayer is necessary to make us aware of our failures, backsliding, transgressions, sins.
	Prayer is more than paying attention to the holy. Prayer comes about as an event. It consists of two inner acts: an act of turning and an act of direction. I leave the world behind as well as all interests of the self. Divested of all concerns, I am overwhelmed by only one desire: to place my heart upon the altar of God.
	God is beyond the reach of finite notions, diametrically opposed to our power of comprehension. In theory He seems to be neither here nor now. He is so far away, an outcast, a refugee in His own world. It is as if all doors were closed to Him. To pray is to open a door, where both God and soul may enter. Prayer is arrival, for Him and for us. To pray is to overcome distance, to shatter screens, to render obliquities straight, to heal the break between God and the world. A dreadful oblivion prevails in the world. The world has forgotten what it means to be human. The gap is widening, the abyss is within the self.
	Though often I do not know how to pray, I can still say: Redeem me from the agony of not knowing what to strive for, from the agony of not knowing how my inner life is falling apart.
	A candle of the Lord is the soul of man, but the soul can become a holocaust, a fury, a rage. The only cure is to discover that over and above the anonymous stillness in the world there is a Name and a waiting.
	Many young people suffer from a fear of the self. They do not feel at home in their own selves. The inner life is a place of dereliction, a no man’s land, inconsolate, weird. The self has become a place from which to flee. The use of narcotic drugs is a search for a home.
	Human distress, wretchedness, agony, is a signal of a universal distress. It is a sign of human misery; it also proclaims a divine predicament. God’s mercy is too great to permit the innocent to suffer. But there are forces that interfere with God’s mercy, with God’s power. This is a dreadful mystery as well as a challenge: God is held in captivity.
	I pray because God, the Shekhinah, is an outcast. I pray because God is in exile, because we all conspire to blur all signs of His presence in the present or in the past. I pray because I refuse to despair, because extreme denials and defiance are refuted in the confrontation of my own presumption and the mystery all around me. I pray because I am unable to pray.
	And suddenly I am forced to do what I seem unable to do. Even callousness to the mystery is not immortal. There are moments when the clamor of all sirens dies, presumption is depleted, and even the bricks in the walls are waiting for a song. The door is closed, the key is lost. Yet the new sadness of my soul is about to open the door.
	Some souls are bom with a scar, others are endowed with anesthesia. Satisfaction with the world is base and the ultimate callousness. The remedy for absurdity is still to be revealed. The irreconcilable opposites which agonize human existence are the outcry, the prayer. Every one of us is a cantor; everyone of us is called to intone a song, to put into prayer the anguish of all.
	God is in captivity in this world, in the oblivion of our lives. God is in search of man, in search of a home in the soul and deeds of man. God is not at home in our world. Our task is to hallow time, to enable Him to enter our moments, to be at home in our time, in what we do with time.
	Ultimately, prayer in Judaism is an act in the messianic drama. We utter the words of the Kaddish: Magnified and sanctified be His great name in the world which He has created according to His will. Our hope is to enact, to make real the magnification and sanctification of this name here and now.
	A great mystery has become a reality in our own days, as God’s response to a people’s prayer. After nearly two thousand years the city of David, the city of Jerusalem, is now restored to the people of Israel. This marvellous event proclaims a call for the renewal of worship, for the revival of prayer. We did not enter the city of Jerusalem on our own in 1967. Streams of endless craving, endless praying, clinging, dreaming, day and night, midnights, years, decades, centuries, millenia, streams of tears, pledging, waiting—from all over the world, from all comers of the earth, carried us of this generation to the Wall, to the city of Jerusalem.
	prayer is living
	Prayer must not be dissonant with the rest of living. The mercifulness, gentleness, which pervades us in moments of prayer is but a ruse or a bluff, if it is inconsistent with the way we live at other moments. The divorce of liturgy and living, of prayer and practice, is more than a scandal; it is a disaster. A word uttered in prayer is a promise, an earnest, a commitment. If the promise is not kept, we are guilty of violating a promise. A liturgical revival cannot come about in isolation. Worship is the quintessence of living. Perversion or suppression of the sensibilities that constitute being human will convert worship into a farce. What is handicapping prayer is not the antiquity of the Psalms but our own crudity and spiritual immaturity.
	The hour calls for a revision of fundamental religious concerns. The wall of separation between the sacred and the secular has become a wall of separation between the conscience and God. In the Pentateuch, the relation of man to things of space, to money, to property is a fundamental religious problem. In the affluent society sins committed with money may be as grievous as sins committed with our tongue. We will give account for what we have done, for what we have failed to do.
	Religion as an establishment must remain separated from the government. Yet prayer as a voice of mercy, as a cry for justice, as a plea for gentleness, must not be kept apart. Let the spirit of prayer dominate the world. Let the spirit of prayer interfere in the affairs of man. Prayer is private, a service of the heart; but let concern and compassion, bom out of prayer, dominate public life.
	Prayer is a confrontation with Him who demands justice and compassion, with Him who despises flattery and abhors iniquity. Prayer calls for self-reflection, for contrition and repentance, examining and readjusting deeds and motivations, for recanting the ugly compulsions we follow, the tyranny of acquisitiveness, hatred, envy, resentment. We face not only things—continents, oceans, planets. We also face a claim, an expectation.
	God reaches us as a claim. Religious responsibility is responsiveness to the claim. He brought us into being; He brought us out of slavery. And He demands.
	Heaven and earth were known to all men. Israel was given a third reality, the reality of the claim of the word of God. The task of the Jew is a life in which the word becomes deed. A sacred deed is where heaven and earth meet.
	We have no triumphs to report except the slow, painstaking effort to redeem single moments in the lives of single men, in the lives of small communities. We do not come on the clouds of heaven but grope through the mists of history.
	There is a pressing urgency to the work of justice and compassion. As long as there is a shred of hatred in a human heart, as long as there is a vacuum without compassion anywhere in the world, there is an emergency.
	Why do people rage? People rage and hurt and do not know how to regret, how to repent. The problem is not that people have doubts, but rather that people may not even care to doubt. The charity we may do is terribly diminutive compared with what is required. You and I have prayed, have craved to be able to make gentleness a certainty, and have so often failed. But there are in the world so many eyes streaming with tears, hearts dumb with fears, that to be discouraged would be treason.
	pray to be shocked
	The predicament of prayer is twofold: Not only do we not know how to pray; we do not know what to pray for.
	We have lost the ability to be shocked.
	The malignity of our situation is increasing rapidly, the magnitude of evil is spreading furiously, surpassing our ability to be shocked. The human soul is too limited to experience dismay in proportion to what has happened in Auschwitz, in Hiroshima.
	We do not know what to pray for. Should we not pray for the ability to be shocked at atrocities committed by man, for the capacity to be dismayed at our inability to be dismayed?
	Prayer should be an act of catharsis, of purgation of emotions, as well as a process of self-clarification, of examining priorities, of elucidating responsibility. Prayer not verified by conduct is an act of desecration and blasphemy. Do not take a word of prayer in vain. Our deeds must not be a refutation of our prayers.
	It is with shame and anguish that I recall that it was possible for a Roman Catholic church adjoining the extermination camp in Auschwitz to offer communion to the officers of the camp, to people who day after day drove thousands of people to be killed in the gas-chambers.
	Let there be an end to the separation of church and God, of sacrament and callousness, of religion and justice, of prayer and compassion.
	A home is more than an exclusive habitat, mine and never yours. A residence devoid of hospitality is a den or a hole, not a home. Prayer must never be a citadel for selfish concerns, but rather a place for deepening concern over other people’s plight. Prayer is a privilege. Unless we learn how to be worthy, we forfeit the right and ability to pray.
	Prayer is meaningless unless it is subversive, unless it seeks to overthrow and to ruin the pyramids of callousness, hatred, opportunism, falsehoods. The liturgical movement must become a revolutionary movement, seeking to overthrow the forces that continue to destroy the promise, the hope, the vision.^[1] emphasis our own. -ANV
	The world is aflame with evil and atrocity; the scandal of perpetual desecration of the world cries to high heaven. And we, coming face to face with it, are either involved as callous participants or, at best, remain indifferent onlookers. The relentless pursuit of our interests makes us oblivious of reality itself. Nothing we experience has value in itself; nothing counts unless it can be turned to our advantage, into a means for serving our self-interests.
	We pray because the disproportion of human misery and human compassion is so enormous. We pray because our grasp of the depth of suffering is comparable to the scope of perception of a butterfly flying over the Grand Canyon. We pray because of the experience of the dreadful incompatibility of how we live and what we sense.
	Dark is the world to me, for all its cities and stars. If not for my faith that God in His silence still listens to a cry, who could stand such agony?
	Prayer will not come about by default. It requires education, training, reflection, contemplation. It is not enough to join others; it is necessary to build a sanctuary within, brick by brick, instants of meditation, moments of devotion. This is particularly true in an age when overwhelming forces seem to conspire at destroying our ability to pray.
	prayer is praise
	The beginning of prayer is praise. The power of worship is song. First we sing, then we understand. First we praise, then we believe. Praise and song open eyes to the grandeur of reality that transcends the self. Song restores the soul; praise repairs spiritual deficiency.
	To praise is to make Him present to our minds, to our hearts, to vivify the understanding that beyond all questions, protests, and pain at God’s dreadful silence, is His mercy and humility. We are stunned when we try to think of His essence; we are exalted when intuiting His presence. While it is true that being human is verified in relations between man and man, depth and authenticity of existence are disclosed in moments of worship.
	Worship is more than paying homage. To worship is to join the cosmos in praising God. The whole cosmos, every living being sings, the Psalmists insist. Neither joy nor sorrow but song is the ground-plan of being. It is the quintessence of life. To praise is to call forth the promise and presence of the divine. We live for the sake of a song. We praise for the privilege of being. Worship is the climax of living. There is no knowledge without love, no truth without praise. At the beginning was the song, and praise is man’s response to the never-ending beginning.
	The alternative to praise is disenchantment, dismay.
	Society today is no longer in revolt against particular laws which it finds alien, unjust, and imposed, but against law as such, against the principle of law. And yet, we must not regard this revolt as entirely negative. The energy that rejects many obsolete laws is an entirely positive impulse for renewal of life and law.
	“Choose life!” is the great legacy of the Hebrew Bible, and the cult of life is affirmed in contemporary theology. However, life is not a tiling, static and final. Life means living, and in living you have to choose a road, direction, goals. Pragmatists who believe that life itself can provide us with the criteria for truth overlook the fact that forces of suicide and destruction are also inherent in life.
	The essence of living as a human being is being challenged, being tempted, being called. We pray for wisdom, for laws of knowing how to respond to our being challenged. Living is not enough by itself. Just to be is a blessing. Just to live is holy. And yet, being alive is no answer to the problems of living. To be or not to be is not the question. The vital question is: how to be and how not to be?
	The tendency to forget this vital question is the tragic disease of contemporary man, a disease that may prove fatal, that may end in disaster. To pray is to recollect passionately the perpetual urgency of this vital question.
	the uphill struggle
	One of the results of the rapid depersonalization of our age is a crisis of speech, profanation of language. We have trifled with the name of God, we have taken the name and the word of the Holy in vain. Language has been reduced to labels, talk has become double-talk. We are in the process of losing faith in the reality of words.
	Yet prayer can only happen when words reverberate with power and inner life, when uttered as an earnest, as a promise. On the other hand, there is a high degree of obsolescence in the traditional language of the theology of prayer. Renewal of prayer calls for renewal of language, of cleansing the words, of revival of meanings.
	The strength of faith is in silence, and in words that hibernate and wait. Uttered faith must come out as surplus of silence, as the fruit of lived faith, of enduring intimacy.
	Theological education must deepen privacy, strive for daily renewal of innerness, cultivate ingredients of religious existence, reverence and responsibility.
	We live in an age of self-dissipation, of depersonalization. Should we adjust our vision of existence to our paucity, make a virtue of obtuseness, glorify evasion?
	My own sense of the reality of food depends upon my being hungry, upon my own craving for food. Had I grown up on intravenous food injections, apples and beans would be as relevant to me as pebbles and garbage.
	Do we know how to thirst for God? Do we know what it means to starve?
	O God, thou art my God, I seek Thee, my soul thirsts for Thee; my flesh faints for Thee, as in a dry and weary land where no water is. So I have looked upon Thee in the sanctuary, beholding Thy power and glory. Because Thy steadfast love is better than life, my lips will praise Thee. So I will bless Thee as long as I live; I will lift up my hands and call on Thy name. Psalms 63:2-4
	As a hart longs for flowing streams, so longs my soul for Thee, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When shall I come and behold the face of God? My tears have been my food day and night, while men say to me continually, “Where is your God?” Psalms 42:2-4
	Religion is critique of all satisfaction. Its end is joy, but its beginning is discontent, detesting boasts, smashing idols. It began in Ur Kasdim, in the seat of a magnificent civilization. Yet Abraham said, “No,” breaking the idols, breaking away. And so everyone of us must begin saying “No” to all visible, definable entities pretending to be triumphant, ultimate. The ultimate is a challenge, not an assertion. Dogmas are allusions, not descriptions.
	Standing before Mt. Sinai, Israel was told: “Take heed that you do not go up to the mountain and touch the border of it.” Take heed that you do not go up to the mountain and only touch the border. Go to the peak! Once you start going, proceed to the very end. Don’t stop in the middle of the road.
	This is the predicament of man. All souls descend a ladder from Heaven to this world. Then the ladders are taken away. Once they are in this world, they are called upon from Heaven to rise, to come back. It is a call that goes out again and again. Each soul seeks the ladder in order to ascend above; but the ladder cannot be found. Most people make no effort to ascend, claiming, how can one rise to heaven without a ladder? However, there are souls which resolve to leap upwards, without a ladder. So they jump and fall down. They jump and fall down, until they stop.
	Wise people think that since no ladder exists, there must be another way. We must face the challenge and act. Be what it may, one must leap until God, in His mercy, makes exultation come about.
	What do we claim? That religious commitment is not just an ingredient of the social order, an adjunct or reinforcement of existence, but rather the heart and core of being human; its exaltation, its verification being manifest in the social order, in daily deeds.
	We begin with a sense of wonder and arrive at radical amazement. The first response is reverence and awe, openness to the mystery that surrounds us. We are led to be overwhelmed by the awareness of eternity in daily living.
	Religious existence is living in solidarity with God. Yet to maintain such solidarity involves knowing how to rise, how to cross an abyss. Vested interests are more numerous than locusts, and of solidarity of character there is only a smattering. Too much devotion is really too little. It is grave self-deception to assume that our destiny is just to be human. In order to be human, one must be more than human. A person must never stand still. He must always rise, he must always climb. Be stronger than you are.
	Well-trodden ways lead into swamps. There are no easy ways, there are no simple solutions. What comes easy is not worth a straw. It is a tragic error to assume that the world is flat, that our direction is horizontal.
	The way is always vertical. It is either up or down; we either climb or fall. Religious existence means struggle uphill.
	shattering the silence
	Life is a drama, and religion has become routine. The soul calls for exaltation, and religion offers repetition. Honesty, veracity does not come about by itself. Freshness, depth has to be acquired. One must work on it constantly.
	To be moderate in the face of God would be a profanation. The goal is not an accommodation but a transformation. A mediocre response to immensity, to eternity, is offensive.
	The tragedy of our time is that we have moved out of the dimension of the holy, that we have abandoned the intimacy in which relationship to God can be patiently, honestly, persistently nourished. Intimate inner life is forsaken. Yet the soul can never remain a vacuum. It is either a vessel for grace or it is occupied by demons.
	At first men sought mutual understanding by taking comisel with one another, but now we understand one another less and less. There is a gap between the generations. It will soon widen to be an abyss. The only bridge is to pray together, to consult God before seeking counsel with one another. Prayer brings down the walls which we have erected between man and man, between man and God.
	For centuries Jerusalem lay in ruins; of the ancient glory of King David and Solomon only a Wall remained, a stone Wall left standing after the Temple was destroyed by the Romans. For centuries Jews would go on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem in order to pour out their hearts at the Wailing Wall.
	A wall stands between man and God, and at the wall we must pray, searching for a cleft, for a crevice, through which our words can enter and reach God behind the wall. In prayer we must often knock our heads against the stone wall. But Gods silence does not go on forever. While man is busy setting up screens, thickening the wall, prayer may also succeed in penetrating the wall.
	The tragedy is that many of us do not even know how to find the way leading to the wall. We of this generation are afflicted with a severe case of dulling or loss of vision. Is it the result of our own intoxication, or is it the result of God’s deliberate concealment of visible lights?
	The spiritual memory of many people is empty, words are diluted, incentives are drained, inspiration is exhausted. Is God to be blamed for all this? Is it not man who has driven Him out of our hearts and minds? Has not our system of religious education been an abysmal failure?
	The spiritual blackout is increasing daily. Opportunism prevails, callousness expands, the sense of the holy is melting away. We no longer know how to resist the vulgar, how to say no in the name of a higher yes. Our roots are in a state of decay. We have lost the sense of the holy.
	This is an age of spiritual blackout, a blackout of God. We have entered not only the dark night of the soul, but also the dark night of society. We must seek out ways of preserving the strong and deep truth of a living God theology in the midst of the blackout.
	For the darkness is neither final nor complete. Our power is first in waiting for the end of darkness, for the defeat of evil; and our power is also in coming upon single sparks and occasional rays, upon moments full of God’s grace and radiance.
	We are called to bring together the sparks to preserve single moments of radiance and keep them alive in our lives, to defy absurdity and despair, and to wait for God to say again: Let there be light.
	And there will be light.

This is the text of “On Prayer” as published in Conservative Judaism, v.25 n.1 Fall 1970, p.1-12. Rabbi Dr. Abraham Joshua Heschel delivered this speech at an inter-religious convocation held under the auspices of the U.S. Liturgical Conference in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on August 28, 1969. In Spiritual Radical: Abraham Joshua Heschel in America, 1940-1972 (Yale University Press 2007, p. 339-340), Edward K. Kaplan writes:

Late in August 1969, Heschel was the sole Jew among leading Protestants and Catholics to address a mass meeting of the National Liturgical Conference (an unofficial Catholic organization) in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The audience was composed of progressive Catholics, most of them young. The agenda called for a fusion of inwardness and action: political change, social justice, and the virtues of prayer. The theme, as described by Robert McAfee Brown in Ins opening address, was that hope must emerge from dissent. Former senator Wayne Morse urged participants to launch a “religious crusade” against the Vietnam War. Andrew Young of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference spoke of “hope in the quest for economic justice” and the revolutionary power of the Gospels.^[2] The conference took place on 25–28 August 1969. Some 2,500 people attended the opening session at the Milwaukee Arena, which ended with a multimedia extravaganza, a liturgical dance, and a mass set to rock music. See L. I. Steli, “The Road Show of Hope,” Tempo, (15 October 1969), 3; Catholic Herald Citizen (29 March 1969), and articles by Ethel Gintoft, “Speaker [Robert McAfee Brown] Defines Meaning of Liturgy as ‘Work People Do,’ ” Catholic Herald Citizen (30 August 1969), and “Rabbi Reminds Conference of Need for Prayer Along with Activity,” Catholic Herald Citizen (6 September 1969). Robert McAfee Brown, “Backdrop for Hope,” Tempo (15 October 1969), 7.

The press paid special attention to Heschel. Before the event, he was reported to have criticized repressive tendencies within the Catholic Church, defending activists such as Archbishop James Shannon, “who recently resigned because of conservative pressure against his questioning of the War, Papal authority and the pill ban.” At the same time, Heschel pleaded “that reformers not throw out positive religious traditions, such as reserving time for daily prayer.” In his address, Heschel offered “hope in the midst of alienation, chaos, and destruction.” How could this be found? Through prayer.^[3] Steli, “Road Show of Hope,” 3; Gintoft, “Rabbi Reminds Conference of Need for Prayer.” Heschel’s speech was excerpted in Tempo (15 October 1969), 8, 11. The most complete version, “On Prayer,” appeared in Conservative Judaism 25, 1 (fall 1970), 1–12, from which I quote.

In rhythmical cadences, Hesehel demonstrated that prayer was a sanctuary for the “weary, sobbing soul,” as he continued: “How marvelous is my home. I enter as a suppliant and emerge as a witness; I enter as a stranger and emerge as next of kin.” Prayer was a cosmic drama, with human beings responsible for redeeming the divine: “I pray because God, the Shekhinah, is an outcast. I pray because God is in exile, because we all conspire to blur all signs of His presence in the present or in the past. I pray because I refuse to despair. . . . I pray because I am unable to pray.”^[4] Heschel 1970, “On Prayer,” 2–3, 4.

The focus on prayer even explained his political dissent: “Religion as an establishment must remain separated from the government. Yet prayer as a voice of mercy, as a cry for justice, as a plea for gentleness, must not be kept apart.” Religious observance braces us to reject the status quo, even if it means toppling the authorities: “Prayer is meaningless unless it is subversive, unless it seeks to overthrow and to ruin the pyramids of callousness, hatred, opportunism, falsehoods. The liturgical movement must become a revolutionary movement, seeking to overthrow the forces that continue to destroy the promise, the hope, the vision.” Thrilled at Heschel’s “terse, proverbial insights,” the audience gave him a standing ovation.

Source(s)

“Prayer is MEANINGLESS unless it is subversive, unless it seeks to overthrow and to ruin the pyramids of callousness, hatred, opportunism, falsehoods. The liturgical movement must become A REVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENT seeking to overthrow the forces that continue to destroy the promise, the hope, the vision.” — Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel (August 1969, National Liturgical Conference, Milwaukee Wisconsin) as quoted on a banner by the Teva Learning Center program at Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center, Falls Village, Connecticut. Photo by Aharon Varady (license: CC BY-SA).

Notes

Notes
1	emphasis our own. -ANV
2	The conference took place on 25–28 August 1969. Some 2,500 people attended the opening session at the Milwaukee Arena, which ended with a multimedia extravaganza, a liturgical dance, and a mass set to rock music. See L. I. Steli, “The Road Show of Hope,” Tempo, (15 October 1969), 3; Catholic Herald Citizen (29 March 1969), and articles by Ethel Gintoft, “Speaker [Robert McAfee Brown] Defines Meaning of Liturgy as ‘Work People Do,’ ” Catholic Herald Citizen (30 August 1969), and “Rabbi Reminds Conference of Need for Prayer Along with Activity,” Catholic Herald Citizen (6 September 1969). Robert McAfee Brown, “Backdrop for Hope,” Tempo (15 October 1969), 7.
3	Steli, “Road Show of Hope,” 3; Gintoft, “Rabbi Reminds Conference of Need for Prayer.” Heschel’s speech was excerpted in Tempo (15 October 1969), 8, 11. The most complete version, “On Prayer,” appeared in Conservative Judaism 25, 1 (fall 1970), 1–12, from which I quote.
4	Heschel 1970, “On Prayer,” 2–3, 4.

Meaning What We Pray, Praying What We Mean: The Otherness of the Liturgy, by Rabbi Dr. Joshua Gutoff (1989)

Joshua Gutoff — Thu, 23 Feb 2023 21:30:17 +0000

A discussion of the nature of truth and belief in Jewish liturgical prayer, suggesting that fixed liturgy is less a vehicle for conveying theological or philosophical outcomes than a practice for developing an emotionally religious personality. Shabbat musaf is used as an example.

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The traditional Jewish liturgy seems particularly distant from us: in culture, in language, in theology. Indeed, our alienation from the meaning of the tefillot has been seen as the root of a larger Jewish religious crisis:

This is our affliction—we do not know how to look across a word to its meaning. We forgot how to find the way to a word, how to be on intimate terms with a few passages in the prayerbook. Familiar with all words, we are intimate with none.^[1] Abraham Joshua Heschel, “The Spirit of Jewish Prayer” in Proceedings of the Rabbinical Assembly, Vol. 15 (1953), p. 172.

Yet for all our interest in what the prayers may mean, there has not been much concern with how they mean. That is, what exactly is supposed to be going on in the encounter between the “pray-er” and the prayer. This is not just an abstract theoretical question, but a vital point for anyone who has any contact with the liturgy, and it needs to precede attempts to interpret, evaluate, or debate specific passages.

Take, for example, the apparently never-ending debate about Musaf. The claim against the traditional formula has been as follows: “We do not want the restoration of sacrifices, we do not believe in the restoration of sacrifices, and therefore we should not pray for the restoration of sacrifices.” The ensuing debate has been the halakhic one: whether or not it is permissible to change the received text. Once the answer to this is established, one either does or does not want to see the renewal of the Temple cult, and so prays accordingly.

Without for a moment belittling the importance of the halakhic question, I would like to suggest that an affirmative answer to that question should mark the beginning, not the end of the discussion, for there are two assumptions which underly the complaint. The complaint assumes that we should agree with what our prayers say, taking for granted that the prayers themselves mean what they say. Common sense? Indeed. Not even worthy of discussion? Hardly. I hope to show that not only are we not required (or even expected) to believe in the content of the liturgy, but that the very word “content” is ill-chosen. For although the siddur may be read as a kind of theological curriculum, prayer is anything but a vehicle for the elaboration of beliefs and ideas.

The Problem of Belief

It would be an interesting experiment if we were to subject every statement in our prayer-book (whichever one we use) to a vote of approval based on whether or not we believed it. I am not referring to the “obvious metaphors,” such as the anthropomorphic representations of God (obviously metaphorical to us, that is), but to other more “serious” claims. Would we all subscribe to “Because of our sins we were exiled from our land?” “Blessed are You… who revives the dead” (Harlow’s translation notwithstanding)? Would the second paragraph of the Sh’ma be retained? And surely if we really longed to be returned to our land, we would be there.

There is much we say which we do not believe. Since the Conservative movement has, through a process of self-selection, excluded those Jews who respond to this fact with a call for radical revision of the siddur, most of us have learned to live with the disjunction between prayer and pray-er. For many, the breach is a painful but inevitable fact of modernity. We are not our ancestors and cannot believe as they did, but we maintain their words as homage to their piety. In fact, the breach is nothing new.

Past generations have intoned many prayers which defied literal acceptance…. Even today, for example, we would be painfully mistaken to assure that the nominal Orthodox Jew—that is, the Jew who says he is Orthodox because he attends an Orthodox synagogue, even though he may not subscribe to the totality of Orthodox Jewish law—really subscribes to the literal meaning of the entire Siddur…. He believes in angels, bodily resurrection, and the like no more than does the average Reform Jew.^[4] Lawrence Hoffman, “The Liturgical Message,” Sha’are Binah: Gates of Understanding, L. Hoffman, ed. (New York: UAHG, 197), pp. 139-140.

This is a phenomenon of neither reform nor modernity. It is not even a phenomenon of belatedness, the response of those who are born to a siddur they did not write. Rather, the possibility of a disjunction between pray-er and prayer was not only accepted, but even at times courted by Ḥazal. The most famous example of this is almost a cliché, but I think we need to take it seriously:

A person must say a blessing (ḥayyav ‘adam l’varekh) upon the evil just as one says a blessing upon the good.^[5] Mishnah Berakhot 9:5 (= Berakhot 60b).

The force of this injunction is in the word evil, ra’ah. Evil is frequently a subjective term, but even those things which are subjectively bad must first be recognized as such if a person is to say the appropriate blessing. By referring to something as evil, the mishnah specifically points to an event which is not recognized as being a product of God’s justice; else it would not he called “evil,” but rather “just,” or “hard,” or “painful.” This mishnah could be rephrased as, “Precisely when you feel least like saying a blessing, you must say a blessing.” An even more interesting, and less well-known, example found in the Tosefta. Keep in mind the rabbinic attitude towards ’avodah zarah:

A person who sees idolatry says, “Blessed [are You. . .], the Long Suffering.”^[6] Tosefta Berakhot 7:2 (cf. Yerushalmi Berakhot 9:2).

Myself, I doubt that when one of the Tannaim saw idolatry being practiced he experienced it as an expression of God’s great good nature, or expected his fellows to do likewise. Yet there was a tradition that would have required him to say words to just that effect.

If our sages, of blessed memory, had no difficulty in legislating blessings which may have run contrary to an individual’s experience, how much less of a problem there would have been with tefillah, the regular ordained prayer. Prayer, after all, is ’avodah, service.

. . . it is not a mere vessel for expressing a person’s emotions . . . the tefillah is . . . “service” like the service of the Temple itself, formalized and obligatory, through which the people Israel fulfills its obligation towards its God.^[7] Joseph Heinemann, “Yaḥid v’Zibur b’Tfllah” in Heinemann, Studies in Jewish Liturgy (Hebrew) ed. Shinan, 2nd edition (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1983), p. 171.

Indeed, the issue of belief does not even seem to arise, Kavvanah is of crucial importance, not ‘emunah; that is, it seems to matter less what one thinks than how one thinks. We might even think of translating ’avodah not as service, but as discipline—and we shall come back to that term presently. Nevertheless, discipline or service or what-have-you, it was still no little thing for Ḥazal to require one to say something which he (or she; women were obligated as well) might not believe, and indeed to invoke God’s name in doing so. Are they not forcing the individual into a condition of bad faith, or cynicism, or even transgression? After all, if it is not a brakhah l’vatalah to say a blessing you believe to be false, what is?

The Siddur as Textbook

Would it be a false blessing if the “reality” expressed by the blessing were, in fact, true? In the eyes of a True Believer it is no more an act of bad faith to insist that a doubter bless the God who revives the dead than it is to insist that a child learn to recite the “times table” correctly. In many ways, the divergence between the individual and the text can be seen as the divergence between the real and ideal worshipper.

Petitionary prayer, sanctioned by Tradition, enlarges the range of our concerns. People can become very egotistical and self-centered in prayer. They can confine their prayers to their own very immediate concerns, paying litle attention, if any, to the needs and the concerns of their fellowmen. But a petitionary prayer, uttered by a whole community, can save us from such pitfalls.^[9] Jakob Petuchowski, Understanding Jewish Prayer (New York: Ktav, 1977), p. 37.

We can imagine the liturgy as a corrective device, a way of refocusing our attention and redirecting our energies. Yet while this approach acknowledges the problem, its “solution” (“Liturgy isn’t what you believe, it’s what you’re supposed to believe”) merely begs the question. For one thing, it still leaves the validity of the prayer open to criticism: just because this doctrine was appropriate for our ancestors does not mean it is appropriate for us. It is not justification enough to say that liturgical prayer is an educational experience and that the siddur is a theological textbook if what is being taught is wrong.

Oddly enough, even if we were to agree with the content of the siddur we would still have to question the idea of prayer as doctrinal education. Is the siddur really a textbook of theology? If so, it is a poorly designed one. It contains neither narrative nor developed argument, and resembles less a curriculum, a vehicle for learning, than it does, say, television:

. . . its imagery is fast moving, concrete, discontinuous, alogical. . . . Not being propositional in form, its imagery does not provide grounds for argument and contains little ambiquity. There is nothing to debate about. Nothing to refute. Nothing to negate.^[10] Neil Postman, Teaching as a Conserving Activity (New York: Dell, 1979), p. 75).

Nor is that all. Even were the prayerbook written in a way to instruct, the liturgical experience is so designed as to undermine any serious learning encounter. Study is characterized by reviewing, repeating, making connections. Liturgy is just the opposite. You may not say things out of order, you may not repeat. You may even pray in a language you don’t understand (Hebrew). To put the most extreme face on it, it is better to not understand the experience than it is to interrupt it. The only exception is when there is a possibility that something has been left out. Imagine trying to learn philosophy, or law, or science, through this kind of process.

Toward Experience and Empathy

All of this is not to belittle the siddur, or deny the possibility of a rich and powerful spiritual experience through its use! Quite the contrary. The emphasis, though, is on the word “experience.” For while a directed, repeated, recital of a series of texts structured neither by propositional nor narrative logic may be of no help to the intellect and understanding, it is very good for the emotions and empathy. Consider this parallel from classical Athens:

[The emphasis on memorization and recital] meant that the young were involved emotionally and subjectively with the content of their discourses to a degree we would find difficult to grasp. . . . Athenian youth were concerned to reproduce their literature, not reflect upon it. They did not so much evaluate characters and their situations as they identified with them and relived their experience. A sense of critical detachment as not only unnecessary, it was undesirable. As [Eric] Havelock says [in Preface to Plato]: “You threw yourself into the situation of Achilles, you identified with his grief or his anger. You yourself became Achilles…”^[12] Postman, p. 34.

Now we are getting somewhere. An approach which is better suited to empathizing with a person than to understanding (let alone believing) an idea is an apt one for prayer, because prayer implies personality. We might say, for example, that Torah remains Torah even if no one studies it, or that halakhah is still halakhah even if it is not followed, but liturgy does not become prayer until it is prayed. Prayer must be spoken, and that means there must be a speaker. Prayer is called a cry by the Talmud—and a cry must at least be someone’s, if not our own.

Which leads us to some alternate possibilities. The liturgy as prayed is not an argument but a series of cries, that is, personal exclamations which are more indicative of a state of soul than of external reality. Moreover, the point is not to understand the cry, but to empathize with the crier. This means that we must approach each cry from the inside out, as it were: we must find, or imagine, what the cries meant to the person who uttered them, and what gave rise to their utterance. Liturgy seen this way resembles play-acting, where the characters we are playing are the true ba’alei tefillah, the masters of prayer.

As in play-acting, we need to leam the truth that stands behind the lines by gaining insight into the person we portray. We must envision the kind of person who might say these things, and the kind of circumstances which would prompt them. Liturgical prayer then becomes not just a portrayal of, but an encounter with, the ones who uttered the prayers. No brief encounter either: in order to be able to speak the cries truly (that is, believing not the cry but the crier), we must come to know the characters deeply, intimately, learning the way they saw the world.

Religious traditions are filled with examples of discipleship, a learning relationship in which the student adopts a pattern of behavior observed of or directed by the master in order to develop the otherwise unteachable insight or wisdom desired. Liturgical prayer is like a discipleship. We say words we did not write, and the very otherness of those words causes us to look for the person who could say them and the experiences which could prompt them. And so through the service we encounter, experience, and at length—if we choose— appropriate a variety of religious personalities.

Whose Prayer?

If our experience of a liturgical text is really an experience of a personality, then our evaluation should also be of the personality. The question about a prayer is not if we believe it, but if we want to learn from the person who said it. Does it represent a valid model of a religious person?

Consider the blessing, she-lo ‘asani ‘ishah, the traditional formula by which the male worshipper thanks God for not having made him a woman, as well as its companion blessing for women, she-‘asani kirtsono (“who made me according to His [sic] will”). They do not appear in Siddur Sim Shalom. Instead, there is a single blessing in which the (male or female) worshipper thanks God for having created him or her in God’s own image. Now, it would seem to be a desideratum for people to delight in being who and what they are, and in not being otherwise. I should, in theory, be able to recite the original formula in good faith, just as I am able to thank my Creator that I am not taller or better looking or more talented than I am. Similarly, I would have no hesitation about rejoicing for being made according to the designs of God’s very will. Yet while the blessings are in no way dishonest, they are both inappropriate. Certainly in an egalitarian community it makes no sense to have a different kind of blessing for men and women. The issue is not equality, though. Even a non-egalitarian can hear the arrogance in she-lo ‘asani ‘ishah, and the resignation in she-‘asani kirtsono, when the two are paired together. We reject the blessings because we reject the religious personalities who say them.

In this light, we can return to our discussion of Musaf. For the sake of clarification, we compare the Harlow version of the middle berakhah with a traditional (pre-1927) one.

SIM SHALOM	TRADITIONAL
At Sinai did our ancestors receive the mitsvah of Shabbat, and You commanded	At Sinai did our ancestors receive the mitsvah of Shabbat, and You commanded
them	us
that on Shabbat an additional sacrifice be offered.	that on Shabbat an additional sacrifice be offered.
May it be Your will, Lord our God and God or our ancestors	May it be Your will, Lord our God and God of our ancestors
who restores His children to their land
to lead us in joy to our land and to settle our people within its borders. There	to lead us in joy to our land and to settle our people within its borders. There
our ancestors	we will
sacrificed to You with	sacrifice to You with
their	our
daily offerings and with	daily offerings and with
their	our
special offerings,	special offerings.
and there may we worship You with love and reverence as in days of old and ancient times.
And the special offering for Shabbat	And the special offering for Shabbat
they	we
offered lovingly, according to Your will, as written in Your Torah through Moses, Your servant. . . .^[15] Jules Harlow, editor, Siddur Sim Shalom (New York: The Rabbinical Assembly of America and the United Synagogue of America, 1985) p. 435.	will offer lovingly, according to Your will, as written in Your Torah through Moses, Your servant.

Who are the people behind these two prayers? What drives them? As I hear the voice on the left [in Sim Shalom], as I take it on, the stance is one of nostalgia. The strongest connection seems to be with the ancestors—it is their prior presence which seems to sanctify the land—yet their world, and their tasks, and their way belongs to an un-reachable past. There is no crisis; “I” have my own tasks, my own way, and it is primarily this nostalgia which informs and encourages me in them. To my ear, this prayer authentically captures the voice of many modern Jews.

In contrast to this nostalgia, I am struck by the “connectedness” of the vision behind the traditional version. As I hear it, there is a sense of the eternality of the divine voice (God spoke once, and all of us are commanded), an experience of continuity with our ancestors, and at the same time a feeling of loss and frustration, all of which are missing from the newer prayer. Is this a vision I share? No. Is this the vision of someone I’d like to learn from? Ahh.

Nor am I entirely put off by the “S”-word (or, rather, the Quf-word). For one thing, the Hebrew suggests the possibility of reciprocity with God: “I prayed before that you bring us near (v’ḳeiravtanu). Now I pray that you let us bring near (v’sham na‘aseh v’naḳriv).

More than that: just what did the sacrifices mean to those who brought them, or to those who felt their loss? A controlled barbarity? Or a closeness, a physical intimacy with the Divine Presence? And if only the former, and not the latter, why do we even bother with the Avodah service? Or Tisha b’Av? Again: to pray the traditional liturgy, yes, to pray it honestly, does not require me to actually desire the restoration of the blood cult. It requires that I authenticate, and attempt to share, the religious experience of someone who used that language.

Redeeming the Liturgy

Is it really worth all this work, all this convoluted reinterpretation just to redeem particular text? Yes, for two reasons:

1) First, a “political” reason, and here a sweeping generalization is in order. Real Jewish religious authority lies not in the power to write the text, but in the power to interpret the text. To abandon a text—any text—as unredeemable is to say, “Yes, you are right, the text means what you say it means, and so we opt out.” As we have seen, there may be times when it is unredeemable, when a prayer does not present a desirable model of spirituality, but to realize and act on that awareness always involves loss.

2) We have no choice. Every use of liturgy—even liturgy we write ourselves—is an encounter with an Other by the very fact that it is not spontaneous. We need an approach that does not pretend that we mean what the book says.

In closing, I would like to mention a few programmatic implications of this kind of approach to the siddur.

We must acknowledge the foreignness of the liturgy, the “otherness” of it. We must teach an approach to prayer that is not afraid of that othemess, but appreciates it as an opportunity to learn a new way of seeing. It follows that addition to the literary skills taught as the key to understanding the text of the prayer, we must actively pursue kavvanah as a stance of listening to the prayer even as we speak it, to listen to what is behind it.

A friend of mine at a liberal Protestant church was telling me about her efforts to help her students learn to pray. My first impulse was to think, “There’s no Hebrew, there’s no nusaḥ. What’s to lean?” I had forgotten, as perhaps many of us have forgotten, that learning to pray may have nothing to do with learning the prayerbook. We must—even in the most time-constrained settings—teach and nurture a prayer life independent of the liturgy. The liturgy was never intended to be the entirety of a person’s conversation with God; only when we stop talking to God on our own do we feel a need for the liturgy to be in congruence with our own thoughts.

If we do our job well, there does not have to be a conflict between spontaneous and established prayer. Indeed, the result of our apprenticeship to the voices in the liturgy should help us find our own voice that much better. We are like the writing student, who, an educator prescribed,

. . . should be encouraged to impersonate other people, not “be himself.” He should imitate the historical styles until he can live them with ease. He will then feel, and ‘embody, the historical “selves” they express. Every prose style allegorizes a life style. These lifestyles will become available to an eclectic effort to build a self of one’s own.^[16] Richard A. Lanham, Style: An Anti-Textbook (New Haven and London: Yale, 1974), p. 116.

Service

When we ponder ’avodah, service, we ponder God and God’s needs (kviakhol) because that is what service means. To ask what is ’avodah she ba-lev, is to ask what God needs of our hearts. Maimonides wrote:

Know that all the practices of the worship, such as reading the Torah, prayer, and the performance of the other commandments, have only the end of training you to occupy yourself with His commandments, may he be exalted. . . .^[17] Maimonides, Guide of the Perplered, trans. S. Pines (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1963), III:51 (= p. 622).

That is, the purpose of religious deeds is to train the religious soul. I would humbly suggest that God needs our hearts to be more aware of the Divine presence, more open to wonder, more eager to respond. God needs our hearts to be more religious, in the best sense of the word. We serve God with our hearts when we remake our hearts along those lines. In order to do that we need examples of hearts already remade. We need models of souls who know in Whose presence they stand. It is this we find in the liturgy when it is functioning as ’avodah she ba-lev: not doctrines, not theology, but soul.

“Meaning What We Pray, Praying What We Mean: The Otherness of the Liturgy” by Rabbi Dr. Joshua Gutoff was first published in Conservative Judaism, Vol. 42(2), Winter 1989-90, pp. 12-20. At the time, Joshua Gutoff was serving as rabbi of Congregation Agudat Achim in Leominster, Massachusetts.

Notes

Notes
1	Abraham Joshua Heschel, “The Spirit of Jewish Prayer” in Proceedings of the Rabbinical Assembly, Vol. 15 (1953), p. 172.
2	See most recently David Golinkin, “Siddur Sim Shalom: A Halakhic Analysis,” Conservative Judaism, XLI:1 (Fall 1988), pp. 38-55.
3	Which is assumed for the sake of argument. See ibid, pp. 45-46.
4	Lawrence Hoffman, “The Liturgical Message,” Sha’are Binah: Gates of Understanding, L. Hoffman, ed. (New York: UAHG, 197), pp. 139-140.
5	Mishnah Berakhot 9:5 (= Berakhot 60b).
6	Tosefta Berakhot 7:2 (cf. Yerushalmi Berakhot 9:2).
7	Joseph Heinemann, “Yaḥid v’Zibur b’Tfllah” in Heinemann, Studies in Jewish Liturgy (Hebrew) ed. Shinan, 2nd edition (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1983), p. 171.
8	Berakhot 20b.
9	Jakob Petuchowski, Understanding Jewish Prayer (New York: Ktav, 1977), p. 37.
10	Neil Postman, Teaching as a Conserving Activity (New York: Dell, 1979), p. 75).
11	Mishnah Berakhot 5:3. The traditional assumption that the one who said “modim modim” was silenced because it might appear that he was acknowledging two divinities is perhaps deserving of reconsideration. It appears as an explanation neither here nor in the parallel in Megillah 4:9 (in which some other prohibited formulations are explained, however), It is not raised as an issue in any of the attributed discussion in the Bavli (Berakhot 33b-34a and Megillah 25a); R. Zeira compares it to saying “Sh’ma sh’ma,” and Rav Papa suggests that it was the result of a momentary lapse of kavvanah. It is not mentioned at all in the Yerushalmi (Berakhot 5:3: Megillah 4:10); while R. Shmuel bar R. Yitzhak does apply the verse “the mouth of the liars is stopped” (Psalms 63:12) to the three cases in M. Berakhot, the Yerushalmi adds that the prohibition only applies (to the leader?) in public prayer, and in Megillah it continues by comparing the repetition to saying “amen amen” and “sh’ma sh’ma.” Indeed, the only appearance of the issue is in an apparently late layer of the sugya, where it is mentioned by the stam by way of introducing an argument concerning an earlier part of the mishnah. That even that part of the mishnah may not have been concerned with heresy is suggested by Halivni in his commentary on the Megillah parallel (Mekorot Umesorot: Mo‘ed: M’yoma ‘ad Ḥagigah (Jerusalem: JTSA with the Gustav Wurzweiler Foundation, 1975) pp. 508ff).
12	Postman, p. 34.
13	This is not just a philosophic observation, but a halakhic requirement: it is not sufficient for person to think or read a prayer silently, it must actually be voiced.
14	Berakhot 31a.
15	Jules Harlow, editor, Siddur Sim Shalom (New York: The Rabbinical Assembly of America and the United Synagogue of America, 1985) p. 435.
16	Richard A. Lanham, Style: An Anti-Textbook (New Haven and London: Yale, 1974), p. 116.
17	Maimonides, Guide of the Perplered, trans. S. Pines (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1963), III:51 (= p. 622).

tagged: why prayer • the Open Siddur Project ✍ פְּרוֺיֶקְט הַסִּדּוּר הַפָּתוּחַ

“Prayer,” by Abraham Joshua Heschel (1945)

Source(s)

“On Prayer,” by Abraham Joshua Heschel (1969)

a sanctuary for the soul

the many purposes of prayer

prayer is living

pray to be shocked

prayer is praise

the uphill struggle

shattering the silence

Source(s)

Meaning What We Pray, Praying What We Mean: The Otherness of the Liturgy, by Rabbi Dr. Joshua Gutoff (1989)

The Problem of Belief

The Siddur as Textbook

Toward Experience and Empathy

Whose Prayer?

Redeeming the Liturgy

Service