Institute for Jewish Spirituality

Yom Iyyun, November 20, 2013

“Framing the Issue: Prayer as Practice”

Rabbi Nancy Flam

Good morning! It’s wonderful to see new and familiar faces gathered together.

I am going to try to frame the overall issue we’ll be exploring in various ways today: engaging in prayer as spiritual practice.

To begin: Our rabbinic ancestors clearly understood themselves to be doing something in prayer: whether bringing rain or healing illness, making unifications to enable God’s shefa to flow into our world, or waking up their awareness to know themselves to be standing in God’s presence. They aimed through their prayer toward some kind of transformation.

They didn’t control the transformation; but theyaimed toward it. In the rabbis’ worldviews, no matter how different across time and personality, their ideal prayer was directed toward making a change that would have a positive effect in manifest reality, sometimes “simply” in the manifestation of consciousness.

According to our sources, some people were particularly adept at different prayer practices: like Honi HaM’agal (whose prayers brought rain),Hanina ben Dosa (whose prayers brought healing), Isaac Luria and Chabad contemplatives, whose unifications of names and letters and contemplations on yesh v’ayin, respectively, enabled the Divine shefa to flow into our world.

I’m not suggesting that the rabbis’ underlying theologies supported facile, mechanistic processes of prayer’s efficacy. But they did utilize strategies toward particular ends– strategies of concentration, contemplation, intention, body movement, emotional arousal, etc. –with the intention that the dedicated application of these strategies might stimulate desired results.

So the fundamental questions I believe we would do well to explore are these: What are our intentions in prayer?What kind of transformation are we aiming at with our practice?How do we refine our skills and gauge how we’re doing?

Prayer is difficult, and committing to personal prayer is complicated. We are children of the Enlightenment and its values of scientific reasoning, humanism and the individual; we are children of the Academy and its disciplines of psychology, anthropology, and sociology, not to speak of neurobiology;and we are children of Post-Modernism and its methods of deconstructing and reconstructing language and meaning. As we participate in these compelling streams of Western intellectual thought and swim in our fathoms-deep, beloved sea of Torah, we are challenged to evolve new understandings of what we may actually be doing in our prayer.

Not that the rabbis didn’t have sophisticated ways of thinking about their tefillah.

Our Hasidic and Kabbalistic masters, in particular, were extremely refined in their prayer understanding and practice, contemplating with exquisite nuance the interconnection between us humans and the Source of All Being. But how many of us truly understand their teachings about prayer and can turn their teaching into a system of satisfying and comprehensive practice instructions for our time?

We have work to do. We risk losing a core of Jewish religious life if we do not discover better ways to help our people pray, along with the motivation to do so. We need to develop interlinking anthropologies and theologies that will help us understand what change in ourselves and in God or the greater reality our prayers are meant to effect. This intellectual work needs to be done, shared, studied, and argued broadly within and across our congregations and communities in order to fashion various answers to these fundamental questions.

What are our intentions in prayer?What kind of transformation are we aiming at with our practice?How do we refine our skills and gauge how we’re doing?

Now, you might ask, why it is so important to explore these questions! Why do we need to know and articulate what we’re trying to do in prayer and to have an intellectual framework to underlie our aims? I’d like to suggest three broad reasons:

First: We are lost. Despite the extraordinary and successful efforts you and our beloved colleagues throughout America have made over the past decades to bring life and relevancy, accessibility and spirit to our communal prayer services, we still have the sense that something fundamental is broken or missing, or perhaps ill-understood and therefore ill-remedied. That something may be that we don’t really know what we’re aiming to effect in prayer.

We prayer leaders and congregants certainly don’t share an explicit agreement of what and how we’re trying to transform ourselves, God and the world when we engage in prayer, or even that we’re seeking transformation at all. It’s hard for us to help each other get somewhere when we don’t quite know where we’re trying to go.

We are, in this sense, lost. Furthermore, because so many of us have lost a life of personal prayer, we are lost when we join together to pray.

Secondly: Prayer is here to stay. Prayer is clearly a central element of Jewish religious life. The spiritually awakened heart needs to know how to express its longing, gratitude, humility, awe, love and devotion in the presence of the One, Alufo shel Olam/the Cosmic Aleph, HaShem, The Power that Makes for our Salvation, Ribbono shel Olam, Mekor Hayyim - however one wants to name or define the Ultimate. As human beings, we need prayer forms, strategies, and underlying theologies that will support the expression of our heart’s fullness (or emptiness), ourdeepest yearnings, and our existential orientation in the presence of the All, that which is greater than we are and is the ground of our lives. Human hearts will turn in prayer in any case, just as a flower turns toward the sun. We serve our people best by supporting those with a native desire to pray with forms andunderstandings that fit, and by inspiring others with possibilities that resonate with promise.

I know that prayer is not everyone’s primary portal to significant Jewish living. But even if we don’t place prayer at the very top of the pyramid of religious practice, a valuation our Hasidic forbearers clearly championed, it does need to find a meaningful place for“Jews with religion” (as the Pew study put it) or seekingreligion, alongside the practices of Talmud Torah and Ma’asim Tovim.

And the third reason why this investigation is so important that we have entered the Age of Practice. Some of you know the work of Princeton sociologist Robert Wuthnow, who explains that American religious life evolved from a “dwelling spirituality” of the relatively stable (if socially problematic) 1950s where the physical church or synagogue building provided an extended home and was the focus of family religious life; to a “seeking spirituality” of the turbulent 1960s where the individual and her quest for personal meaning and discrete moments of transcendence stood at the center, moments in a journey that could be found throughout the wide smorgasbord of the spiritual marketplace; to our age, when what we most need are communities of shared practicewhich combine the best of the previous home- and journey-based spiritualities, by providing intentional, committed, disciplined, self-reflective communities of practice that focus on particular methods of deepening each person’s relationship with the Divine and subsequent positive impacts for living and acting in the world. This is our age: the age of meditation practice communities, yoga practice communities and sometimes even Torah-study communities and Shabbat communities. We believe that more of our people would engage in prayer practice communities, and those that do engage would be more fulfilled, if they understood more clearly just what they were aiming to do and how to do it.

So in sum, why are these questions and answers about what we are trying to do in our prayer so important to explore and articulate? Because we are lost. Because prayer is a fundamental, even defining human need, and here to stay. And because we have entered the age of practice which requires us to know what we’re practicing toward, and how to get there.

I’d like to make one final comment. When we at the Institute for Jewish Spiritualityspeak about prayer, we are not only speaking about liturgical prayer of the siddur, and not only speaking about communal prayer. I focus my comments this morning on communal, liturgical prayer because this is where most of you find yourselves in your work, experimentation and struggle.

But when speaking of investigating prayer forms and practices, I mean to emphasize, too, those of the individual alone, and those that are un-worded, or minimally-worded with chant, or spontaneously worded in private seclusion.

I mean to include prayer forms and practices that are entirely silent - contemplative and quieting - as well as emotive and expressive.

Because of differences in temperament and inclination, collectively we need help finding our way with all these forms of prayer.

It’s important to say that our goal today is not to provide answers. Rather, we will engage in study, experimentation and discussion of the questions, with the hope that our shared sense of urgency, along with our shared wisdom and inspiration,

will lead to unfolding work together that will better nurture our people’s lives of prayer.

As we prepare to move into our next session, please know that along with plenary presentations, Talmud Torah in small groups, and a variety of workshops, we will engage in three Adovah B’Tzibburpractices today. They are experiments inform and intention, and only one of them matbe’a-based. Before each practice, our prayer leader will say a word about how he or she understands the main aims of the practice, the strategies he or she invites you to engage toward those aims, and a few tips or instructions for practice. At the end, you’ll have three quiet minutes to take note, in private, of what you observed in your own mind, heart, body and spirit.

I am so grateful to each one of you for making the effort to be here today and to join in this day of study and investigation. Thank you!