It is always a privilege to share a service together with
members of our community and with guests, to pray, schmooze, read and reflect,
to study, question and sing.
And in this holy space, when we gather for services, there’s
a critique I have heard time and again, a critique that I would like to put to
rest today, or at least try to put to rest today.
The critique is that our Jewish tradition provides a rigid
and consistent set of prayers for us to say.
Week in and week out, we recite the same words as a community. Except for some seasonal and holiday
variations, the Amidah is the same, the Shema is always the same, Alenu, the
Kaddishes – all the same.
And all these are the same when we are not the same from day
to day, from month to month. Can we
recite the prayer Mechayey ha’metim,
the 2nd blessing in the Amidah, the prayer praising God as the one
who gives life to the dead, when we’ve just lost a loved one or friend? The Shema, the prayer of heavenly unity, may
feel strange to say if we feel scattered or lost in life…
We are looking for opportunities to infuse our prayers and
Jewish experiences with what is unique to who we are, with what we may feel in
the moment – joy, sadness, anger, uncertainty…And it may feel as though the
mat’be’ah, the traditional sequence of prayers, does not permit us the mental
and soul-space to commune with where we are right now, in this moment, with
what we want to say, or shout, or say through our tears as they fall.
The beauty that we find in the Siddur, in our services, is
the chance to achieve both goals – to be a part of a community in prayer, to
sing in unison, and find comfort and familiarity in the prayers of our
tradition. And we also have the chance
to pray from the inside out, to reach out with our own words, our own
perspective, our own emotional response even as others may continue on with the
prescribed order of psalms, poems, and blessings.
Our parsha today, parshat Emor, offers a holiday
schedule: Pesach, Shavuot, Sukkot, a
celebration the first day of the 7th month, Yom Kippur, Sukkot, and
this begins with God’s instruction, “Eleh mo’adey Ado-nai…asher tik’re’uh otam
be’mo’a’dam.”(23:4) These are God’s
festivals…that you will call at their appropriate times.
If God has set the timing for the festivals, than what need
is there for us to call them, to proclaim them?
Ramban explains God is specifying these specific holy days,
as if to say, “It’s these holy days that I want you to observe. And if you don’t treat them as holy days,
then they won’t be My holy days.”
What’s important here is not just that we observe holy days
at the appropriate time, but that we infuse these days with a spirit of
joyfulness, thoughtfulness, meaning and relevancy to our soul and spirit during
the course of the seasons – as the weather shifts, as our moods and lives shift
in response to blessings, losses, searching, boredom, excitement, the whole
range of human experience.
The same is true with our prayers. We do have a set of prayers we recite, laid
out in an intentional sequence just like our holy days, but, like the holy
days, our traditional prayers can only help us bring out our true voices, can
only help us feel connected and like we’re speaking sincerely and personally if
we infuse our prayer moments with all that we’re thinking and carrying with us,
through the lens of who each of us is today.
I’d like to share 2 short stories about how different
communities encourage self-expression within the framework of a traditional
prayer service.
The first is Kehillat Mayanot, a Masorti-Conservative minyan
that meets in the Bakaa neighborhood of Jerusalem. At Mayanot, I experienced for the first time
the way members of the community would raise a hand and ask a question or offer
a comment during a dvar Torah. I was so used to sitting in rapt silence, but
found this a refreshing way of staying involved and, well, awake to what the
speaker was teaching.
The second is Mt. Bethel Baptist Church in Ridgewood, New
Jersey. I had the privilege on several
occasions of joining Reverend Johnson and his congregation for a service, and
during their songs people cry out, call out, and harmonize. When the Pastor speaks people call out like
it’s a pep rally, calling out their support, their encouragement, their
feelings of pure praise and glory.
Whether in silent reflection, in conversation, or in
clapping, singing, and joyful noise, our traditional prayers and our
self-expression are not mutually exclusive here in this holy space. Prayer is avodat ha’lev, the work of the heart,
and we can allow our ancient prayers to well up inside us and seek their wisdom
to relate and react to where we are today, and we can allow our souls to soar
on the energy of our emotions and the thoughts that mysteriously open up in our
minds as we explore them to find their source.
And so may the words of our mouths and the meditations of
our hearts be acceptable to You, Ado-nai, shome’ah
tefilah, the One who Hears Prayers, prayers from the book and from the
heart, and also the prayers that leap forth from the spaces in between us when
we talk to each other and pray together.
No comments:
Post a Comment