Pray As If It Means (Some/Every)thing - Summer 2019 - Liturgy #8

And may the worship of Your people, Israel, be always be acceptable - God who is near to all who call.
Avodah (R’tzei) - T’fillah section of the liturgy

Prayer is a tricky thing.  We spend a great deal of time at the Temple teaching children the correct forms of Jewish communal prayer - the right pronunciation, tune or chant, and choreography.  Recently, we have begun to go deeper, and help them find meaning not only in individual prayers, but in worship as a whole.  We are getting better at explaining why Jews come together to pray, and what we hope to get out of those moments.  We spend virtually no time at all on individual prayer - on the communication with the Divine that happens outside of prescribed worship; personal prayer which does not require the participation of others.

One of the common questions that I hear from students is, “Why do I have to learn Hebrew?”  Beyond the question of difficulty and effort, there is an earnest inquiry - “Doesn’t God understand every language?”  The answer that we give is about community - Jews throughout history and all over the world today, pray (at least in part) in Hebrew.  Our Confirmation students, when we worship together with our sister congregation in Budapest, feel at home because, while the Hungarian parts are different, as are some of the tunes, the words of the Sh’ma, the v’ahavta, the aleinu, and so much else is familiar.  At that moment a bond is formed: we have something in common.

Yet the question remains valid. Further, how can we create spontaneous, heartfelt, personal prayer, in a language which we do not speak or even fully understand?  The prayer known as the avodah comes to answer this question.  When the rabbinic sages of two thousand years ago were moving Jewish worship from sacrifices offered in the (then newly destroyed) Temple in Jerusalem to this new concept of offering up words of prayer, they were nervous about whether it would work - whether the act of verbal prayer would carry the power and transformation of sacrifice.  In the service, at the end of the amidah, they placed this prayer, which was both a hope and an apology for the whole effort.  We ask God, in words, that our prayers will be acceptable, in place of those sacrifices.  The original version contained a promise to return to sacrifice once the Temple was rebuilt; that this was only a temporary solution, for use in exile.  Reform Judaism, which threw out the idea of a Messianic return to a rebuilt Temple, removed that reference, but kept the idea of praying that our prayer would be sufficient, would be formed correctly, would be pleasing, would be acceptable.

However, this prayer has more meaning than just an apologia for prayer in place of sacrifice.  The words imagine a greater truth - whatever we offer in worship to God, we trust it will be acceptable, as we believe that God is near to those who call.  The very act of reaching out to God is what draws God near.  For those who believe in a Theistic God - a God who hears prayers and responds, the idea is easily comprehensible.  For those with different Divine concepts, this metaphor may tend to alienate rather than bring close.  Let us then imagine the motion in the opposite direction.  When we open ourselves up to the Divine, then we let God, who is already near, in.  God, not as an external object or separate being, but, perhaps, the concept that ties us to other creatures, the spark we all have in common.  For those who understand God as the voice within themselves that calls them to do better, prayer is the moment of silencing the other voices, and focussing on the Divine, on our better nature.  For those who are called to transcendence by the world around them, prayer is the moment to step away from the centrality of ourselves, and be overwhelmed by the world of nature.
May the worship of Your people Israel, be acceptable to You, God who is near to all who call.  No matter what the nature of that worship, if it is a moment of opening ourselves up, of allowing the concept of something beyond ourselves - our ties to humanity, to each other, to the world, to a higher power - then let us learn to accept that moment as true worship and prayer.  Only then can we find the usefulness of prayer, once we open ourselves up to the possibility that we actually have the power to do it correctly.




Let us end this year’s study of liturgy with the words that bring us out of our silent prayer, our prayer of the heart, in our worship service - May the words of our mouths, the meditations of our hearts, be right and proper prayers before You, our sure and secure Anchor, the Idea through which we save the world.