From the Rabbi

Since the destruction of the second Temple and the move from sacrifice to prayer, Jews have struggled with the concept of prayer. Is the purpose of prayer merely to ask for something we do not possess and then, if the answer we anticipate does not immediately materialize, we deem prayer worthless? Is the purpose of prayer simply to acknowledge our human weakness? Or is prayer just an act of obligation whose words are secondary to the proper form?

Jewish prayer has always combined the elements of obligation, praise, petition, certainties and doubts. Jewish prayer is both fluid in the possibilities we have for personal and musical expression, while it is fixed in terms of what has evolved as structure.

But Jewish prayer has obstacles in 21st century America. Jewish prayer is essentially communal, an endeavor often diametrically opposed to contemporary ideas of individualism. Jewish prayer places individual and community at equal positions, while our society minimizes the communal. Jewish prayer requires effort – effort to learn the fixed form while still allowing us the individual room for our own spontaneous outbursts of need.

Perhaps the greatest obstacle to prayer might be the expectations that we bring to worship and the fact that within community there exist wide diversities of individual expectations. Some might literally wish for something as significant as health or as insignificant as an X-Box. Others feel comfort at intoning words knowing that their immutability provides stability in an otherwise changing environment. Yet others feel the need to be entertained while the other polarity from that need is the desire to be elevated spiritually.

The common response to the very real obstacles to prayer is avoidance of the obstacle rather than seeking the way to overcome it. It is perhaps the only way in which I can explain a statistic cited recently in a religious column in the Dallas Morning News, reiterating the well-known statistic that on a given Shabbat, less than 15% of the Jews of America will be in any synagogue at all. And that 15% factors into consideration Orthodox Jews, the majority of whom will be engaging in communal worship on Shabbat.

People are people, and, if confronted with market research about prayer, would always respond, "I would come to pray if…." But real experience with human behavior indicates that such responses are rarely, if ever, translated into action should the "if…" become reality. It very well might be that Judaism is doing nothing "wrong"; the other possibility might be a basic incompatibility between Judaism in all of its expressions and what we believe to be modern. Hillel had an answer for the skeptic. He simply said: "Go study." While for too many of our kids today, the definition of study is doing a Google search or asking a question on a web forum, traditional Jewish values saw only one path. Pirke Avot says (translated loosely, but this is the true connotation of the Hebrew) "Find a teacher and get a study partner." Jewish learning leads to Jewish deeds. Jewish learning occurs through the interaction and dialectic of teacher, student, and fellow student.

I invite you to join me in creating an interactive environment for the study of Jewish prayer – its forms, its structures, its opportunities for creativity, in seven Sunday morning sessions: February 4, 18, 25; March 11, 25; and April 15, 29 – as we together struggle with both the mechanics and the meaning of Jewish prayer. I also invite you to the added inspiration of public congregational worship as cantorial intern Sherri Allen adds new musical components to our congregational worship on a monthly basis. Her first service will be Saturday, February 10, at 10:00 a.m., followed by Friday, March 23, at 8:00 p.m.

– Rabbi Ned J. Soltz