Cross-posted from Jewschool: A season of firsts
30 Sep 2009This high holiday season was new for me in many ways. It was my first away from my family, it was the first time I fasted without drinking water, and it was also the first time I didn’t go to services during the day on Yom Kippur. This last one, and a related concept I’ve been thinking about a lot recently, are what I want to talk about here. As anyone who’s done it knows, praying is not a simple concept. It’s a big category within the religion (as in it encompasses a lot of practices and ideas), and there are a myriad of opinions about every single aspect of it. When, how, where, and why you should do it, and so on. Like many Jews, I’ve always had a complicated relationship to prayer. I was raised religious, but without much connection to a synagogue. Although very nice, the shul in our town never excited us that much (I think I’ve talked about my struggles with this a bit in a previous post), and I’ve looked for other options for a long time. This was bound to complicate my relationship with prayer. Even since starting to wear tzitzit three years ago, I’ve never prayed regularly, and I’ve never in my life wrapped tefilin. A lot of this has to do with my historical connection to praying it’s never been associated with an excitement to be Jewish for me, so I’ve never felt too enthusiastic about it. Say what you will about willpower, but it’s hard to shake those things.
That being said, do I want to try? If something doesn’t have a lot of meaning to me, how do I make the decision as to whether or not to pursue it with the intention of giving it more meaning? In my life thus far, I’ve never felt the need to pursue regular prayer as a component of my spiritual life, and I’ve never felt a weaker spirituality for it. So it’s clearly not a uniformly bad thing.
Anyway, on the High Holidays, this issue is especially pressing, because the liturgy is so intense. To be honest, I’m really not that into a lot of the language from Yom Kippur. This is not at all to insult those who do appreciate it, but it’s just never really fully synced up with my religious philosophy. I don’t think I’m clay in a potter’s hands. I don’t think I need to give myself up to become a better person. I think that everything I need in order to change for the better is already within me.
So although I went to services on Erev Yom Kippur, I didn’t go back the next day. I slept in a bit, I went to a really excellent class with the rabbi, and I hung around and listened to good music and thought. It was a really good day, and as I mentioned before, the first time I had fasted without drinking. That part was made more difficult by the fact that I hadn’t decided not to drink until late the night before, so I hadn’t drunk a lot beforehand and was pretty thirsty. I made it, though, and was glad I did.
After all this, I’ve definitely figured out more about how I feel about this type of liturgy. Most of my problems with it tend to stem from incompatibilities as a believer in free will, I have a hard time coming to terms with the idea that there are things humans can’t do. I believe in an almost unlimited potential for humans to effect self-change. It’s not easy at all in a lot of cases, and I guess that’s where a lot of people find solace or relief in G()d. So I have a lot of respect for that.
Problems with Yom Kippur-specific prayers aside, in the past few weeks, due I suppose to the High Holidays and their associated increased-shul-time, I’ve had some interesting thoughts about the Amidah. At least one of them was brought on by the use of Xeroxed pages of the Artscroll siddur for a Havurah minyan on Erev Yom Kippur (a weird combination). During the Amidah, there are instructions in Artscroll that say things like “Recite this paragraph while focusing intently on G&d’s sovereignty”. This is, in my opinion, sort of weird. I mean, how can you make a statement like that and expect it to apply to everyone? Before this week I would have said that the answer was that it didn’t have to because the Artscroll is a siddur associated with Orthodox Judaism not everyone’s using it. But now that I’ve used it in a Havurah service, I’m not so sure. This experience makes me think about what role a siddur should have in our prayer. Should it be nothing more than a script in Hebrew, English, and often with transliteration? Should it also contain instructions on how one is to approach the prayers? Most do, certainly. Where’s the balance?
This particular experience is part of a larger shifting of focus I’ve been undergoing about the Amidah. A little background on my experience with this prayer is useful here: I went to Schechter school up until halfway through third grade, at which point I dropped out and went to Hebrew school until seventh grade, whereupon I dropped out of that also, and had my Bar Mitzvah independent of the shul. I learned the Amidah in day school, and then revisited it in a learning sense while preparing for my Bar Mitzvah. The first time, I only learned the parts that are chanted out loud. I never knew anything about the rest of it. We would just be taught something like “You sing this bit, then you wait, and then you sing this bit.” I didn’t have a full concept of the prayer as a whole. This was also the case in my pre-Bar-Mitzvah studies, due only to a shortage of preparation, if nothing else (my tutor was superb).
Given this, davening the Amidah is always an interesting experience for me. I do the first part with a lot of feeling, always adding in the matriarchs as I was taught in Schechter school (I don’t want it to sound like it was a monotonous and completely non-insightful teaching philosophy), but once I pass the Kedusha, I’m in a weird position. I can sound out Hebrew, but I certainly don’t know enough of it to be able to understand what I’m reading, so I often read through the English text of the prayers. This is nice, because I feel connected to the meaning of the prayers. Except for the places where I don’t like the meaning of the prayers. Too often I find myself reciting things I really don’t agree with. In some other parts of services, like a Prayer for our Country, and a Prayer for Israel, I just don’t recite along. I try to be unobtrusive to avoid stepping on other people’s enjoyment of those texts, but I really don’t feel comfortable asking for divine involvement in government. But in the Amidah, I’m doing it silently. There’s no reason for me to say anything I don’t really believe. So after the Kedusha, I’ve started standing silently, usually still shuckling because it feels natural (weird how that happens), but meditating on very different concepts than what’s on the page of the siddur that I now hold closed in my hands, against my chest, on my forehead, or open, obscuring my face. I think about politics, about human rights issues. And usually I end up going back to the three-way bow at the end with “oseh shalom bimromav”. Sometimes I even go back and do the actual motion of bowing many many times, almost subconsciously, between my thoughts. To me, this is the most meaningful part of the prayer. We’ve just spent all of this time glorifying and praising G%d’s name, and now, as a final request, in a final bow, we ask for G@d to use that power for peace. That seems pretty powerful to me, and, based on my complicated experience with the prayer, the most worthy of repeating.
I continue to be challenged by many aspects of the Jewish liturgy. My hope is that I’m able to continue finding ways to make these texts to relevant to me. I also hope that I know when I shouldn’t try. That I don’t feel tied down to those prayers, bound by their sentiments, withheld by their rituals.
Judaism retains relevance to me because of my ability to make it relevant. In this new year, I resolve to continue that quest.
Shana tova.
This post originally appeared on Jewschool.