Jerusalem’s Western Wall, one of Judaism’s holiest sites (AFP/file photo)
Shelly Schreter – Israel: My Issues with Prayer
For someone who doesn’t really davven, I have spent a lot of time in shul. I have nothing in principle against davvening, and am familiar with the liturgy and the moves after many years of exposure to them. It’s just that I can’t bring much to a substantive discussion of prayer as my channel of communication with God.
I don’t claim to be an agnostic, rather theologically challenged, or just ambivalent. I am not a full believer, and never have been. If I were, I would be Levi Yitzchak of Berdichev-type angry with the God who allowed the Shoah, not to speak of pandemics, famine, and the vast array of human suffering. The argument that if God had intervened to prevent the Shoah, man’s free will would thereby have been compromised, does not work for me. An omnipotent or even just a very powerful God could have figured out how to accomplish the former without sacrificing the latter. I’m not an atheist – I don’t have enough faith for that. So, what am I doing in shul on most shabbatot and chagim? Full disclosure: with the “help” of COVID-19, that has become less true during the last 19 months.
On one level, it’s about my wife, an observant Jew whom I love and respect, and with whom I have an understanding about religious observance. I perform quite a few religious actions, including Friday night Kiddush and eshet chayil and holidays and no driving or telephones …. up to a point. She knows that I do this mainly out of solidarity and respect for her and commitment to our partnership rather than actual belief, and that is fine for both of us.
But it’s not only that. My most powerful drive is my sense of being part of כלל ישראל , and trying to be a good citizen of the Jewish people. I was never שומר שבת ומצוות as a kid growing up, but neither was I completely irreligious. Judaism was never a distant planet, much the opposite, nor did observance particularly offend the freedoms most important to me.
I had a pretty fair day-school Jewish education, including learning how to speak Hebrew, in Montreal. I attended morning minyan through the end of high school, because that’s what all the guys did, including those not particularly religious. It didn’t bother me, but neither did it uplift or inspire me. As a teenager, whatever my deviation from my shul devotions, I always articulated every word of the prayer for the State of Israel. Wherever all the other prayers went or didn’t go to, I wanted to be on the record with that one, just in case. I went along as if God was there, somewhere, giving Him the benefit of the doubt and hoping – if He really was – that He would return the favour.
Later on, I fluctuated in my observance, including to minimal levels. Somehow, I always kept pretty close to kashrut. When each of my parents passed away, over 20 years apart, I scrupulously said kaddish 3 times a day, according them the respect they deserved. Even today, when the gabbai of our neighbourhood (orthodox) shul in Ra’anana occasionally calls for some morning minyan reinforcement (ours starts at 5:45 am, and 5:30 on Mondays and Thursdays, so it’s not trivial!), I try to respond, because I see it as payback. I feel an obligation to our minyan community who were there for me when I needed them. At the same time, I never agree to lead the prayers as the שליח ציבור, even though I could, because I truly do not represent this particular ציבור , and they deserve a prayer-leader who does.
So what, to return to the question, am I doing there? Well, I’m identifying with a community in which there are individuals I care about, good people. The community aspect is an integral component of my Jewish self-conception, and it has to take the form of doing something active. It can’t just be theoretical or virtual. I don’t have to agree with its dominant religious or political assumptions – and I don’t – in order to participate in it. That extent of pluralism is ingrained in my Jewish DNA.
I’m singing along with the liturgy, which evokes a lifetime of associations and memories. The music is embracing, soothing, nourishing. Very occasionally, very.… I encounter a moment of serenity when some piece of the liturgy transports me to another place, where I actually feel linked to the chain going through my parents and ancestors, all the way back to a force that has powerfully influenced my basic life choices. That happens especially on Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, when I spend long hours in shul, though never without supplementary reading material. And somehow, it happens in the quintessentially Jewish format of a shul service. If standing on your head, like Ben-Gurion famously used to do, were defined down the generations as a classic Jewish behaviour, I might well be performing that, too.
When we get to the essential texts, say the Shema or the Amida of Shacharit, I find myself going through them deliberately, and not just skimming the pages. Parts of the liturgy, like anything to do with the ancient animal sacrifices, turn me off. That is weird, since these prayers were introduced as substitutes for animal sacrifice, rendered impossible by the destruction of the Temple. Still, even though the text is fixed, and often irrelevant to my reality, I still feel some ownership of it, some measure of involvement. I can imagine my grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins crying them out from inside the cattle cars hauling them to Auschwitz in May, 1944. I cannot now pretend that I feel God (or whatever name you prefer) listening or reacting in any perceivable way to the words I and those around me are saying and singing. Does this make it all a fraud, or more kindly, a delusion or self-deception?
That doesn’t worry me. I’m not out to impress or convince anyone of anything. My idiosyncratic Judaism is based on questions and finds comfort in seeking answers, knowing that there will never be final ones. I can handle that. The process itself sustains and connects me. I feel in tune with many Jews before me who were in a similar place, whether they acknowledged it or not, especially in the post-Emancipation era. By definition, my Judaism leaves room for contradictions and ambiguities, which do not threaten me. I distrust any system which purports to answer ALL doubts, because it is precisely in those doubts and our wrestling with them that our humanity resides. The banishers of doubts are scary people, even when they are sincere, decent and welcoming. They are at the same time tragically capable of evil in the service of their certainties.
With this attitude, what is it possible to pass on to the next generation? Fair question. My sons were not raised religiously (my wife, referred to above, is not their mother) and none of them is observant. They all have some connection to kashrut: two of them are vegetarians, but even the carnivores pay attention. They don’t come to shul with me, not even on the High Holydays (sometimes one or another puts in a cameo appearance), but neither are they completely out of it. They can all find the place in a siddur or machzor and know Kiddush and Birkat Hamazon perfectly well. They will all willingly step up to help nine other Jews make a minyan. The two who are married say Kiddush every Friday night. One of them is married to an observant woman, and they are working out their blended lifestyle. The musician/music historian has chosen Yiddish culture and music as the subject of his doctoral dissertation. And the lawyer, is now studying psychology! I think they all have a Jewish consciousness and spiritual reflexes. How that plays out in their lives is obviously for them to determine.
Some people look to prayer as an attempt to assert a measure of control in their lives, by giving shape and structure to their ongoing dialogue with God, and thereby affirming the existence of a source of truth and morality beyond our everyday existence. This could possibly allay some of the anxieties of living in a fragile world vulnerable to war, disease and poverty. But there is another, slightly mystical approach. Maybe acknowledging the impossibility of control is a liberation from that kind of insecurity. Prayer, then, could become a channel for an alternate, free consciousness, independent of the need for control, released from the terror of lacking control, and leading to the discovery of meaning for our existence.
Unusual beings, we humans. We need not only food, clothing, shelter and companionship, but also meaning in our lives. There has to be some point to all the pain and struggle, some larger purpose. Why? Because we have to live – our instincts point us toward survival – and you cannot live on meaninglessness, which is despair, any more than you can do without oxygen or water or, for that matter, humour. So is that meaning-hunger the manifestation within us of being created in the image of God? And would that imply that God “needed” humans in the created world to provide meaning in His/Her existence? Are we – God and humankind – in this quest for meaning, of which tikkun olam is an important aspect, together?
I will not pursue theological speculations any further. Following Viktor Frankl in Man’s Search for Meaning [1962], I would rather seek meaning in man’s inner spiritual freedom to choose how to react to the challenges posed by our life circumstances, no matter how extreme, and by taking responsibility for those choices. For some of us, prayer can help in achieving that worthy goal. Frankl ended his classic book with the observation that we live today without illusions about man, “who has invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord’s Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.” (p.134)
I will close with one final thought about prayer, borrowed from Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi’s book, “Jewish with Feeling: a guide to Meaningful Jewish Practise” [2005]:
“The prayers in our siddur were collected over centuries, but the siddur is not a museum vault of liturgical music and information. It is a living document. Like a coloring book, though, the siddur gives us only the outlines. Coloring those outlines in with life, context, feeling, is up to us. The siddur belongs not to the mind, but to the heart. [The siddur] … is trying to transmit a feeling. … We’re not trying to lay the same old praises at the feet of some old man in the sky; we’re trying to connect with a being, a will, a love radiating out from the center of the universe – not the astrophysical center but the spiritual center – that can nourish something deep in our souls, something that has gotten very hungry among us.” (p.82)
