This sermon is based on the sermon I delivered at HUC-JIR in my 4th year.
Across Jerusalem , a city built
for spiritual seeking, calls to prayer are sounded to the faithful. All preparation must be completed as the city
glows golden in the setting sun. All
projects postponed as the stars are arranged in their places. All work put aside before the siren calls,
low and dull, across valleys and high places…and into souls. Hearing the call to prayer, communities make
their way. Compelled. Some, called to have a personal conversation
with God. Some, called to communal
obligations. Some, called to continue ancient traditions. Others do not hear the call to prayer or do
not heed it.
Do we hear a call to prayer? One evening not that long ago, as I walked
through a mostly empty parking lot, I was caught off guard by a brightness
gleaming above me. I looked up and found
myself staring at a full moon, partially covered by clouds, its shine hardly a
“lesser light” as it lent its silvery radiance to the night sky. I stood amazed, struck by the majesty and the
beauty. Awed by the kedushah, the
holiness, of that moment, I said aloud: “How can you not believe in God when
you look up at something like that?”
At that moment, I recognized
God. I felt holiness and needed to say
so. Looking back, I see how this
spontaneous prayer imbued simple words with deep personal meaning.
Meditating on the kedushah of the moment and
embracing the presence of Adonai, I experienced a call to prayer: a moment of
solitary kedushah. I believe many
of us have experienced moments like this, whether out in nature, helping feed
those in need, watching as our child or our grandchild plays or smiles when she
sees your face.
Individual prayer has always been a
hallmark of the Jewish experience. And
our texts tell us as much. In our
morning blessings, we recite words about our individual souls: “The soul that
you have given me, O God, is a pure one…you breathed it into me
and within me you sustain it.”
This blessing we recite each morning, thanking God for our soul’s return
is a personal prayer. The morning
blessings we recite, thanking God for giving us sight, and giving us freedom
among other attributes, are all personal prayers to God. Every morning, we are called to thank God and
praise God for our individual lives, souls, bodies and minds.
But it is not only when we arise in
the mornings or when we are taken aback by a sight in nature or our lives that
we are accustomed to praying to God as individuals. Sometimes, we need something and the only one
to turn to is God. In the Haftarah for
Rosh HaShanah, we read the story of Hannah, the mother of the prophet
Samuel. Her story is not an uncommon
one, either for the Bible or for people today.
Hannah struggles with infertility.
She, like Sarah before her, turns to God for help.
Hannah and her family would go
every year to the Temple at Shiloh
to offer sacrifice to God. Remember that
this all takes place before David conquers Jerusalem
and before Solomon builds the Temple . One year, after her suffering had become too
much for her to bear any longer, Hannah goes to the Temple and prays. And she does so with fervor
and with passion. She is so passionate
and so caught up in her prayer that the priest, Eli sees her and mistakes her
silent devotion for drunkenness. He
demands that she leave. Her response is
subtle and tinged with emotion. “You
mistake me, my Lord,” she replies. “I am
a sober woman. I have had neither wine
nor liquor, but have been pouring out my heart before the Lord…All this time I
have been speaking out of my great sorrow and grief.”
Hannah’s response to Eli the priest
shows the power of personal prayer, the importance of time spent talking to
God. At that time, talking to God was
either done through prophesy or through sacrifice, the notion of prayer, the
idea of it was not common. Yet, in her
grief at her family situation, she felt that her only recourse was to talk to
God. To try and tell God how she was
feeling. To try and let God know that
God needs to act, that the time has come.
How many of us have been there, at a time when we are at our wits end,
when we feel we can go on no more? How
many of us understand the heartache Hannah is going through either because we
or a loved one have gone through a difficult time and the only action we could
take was to cry out to God? Whether we
are in awe of nature or exasperated at it, sometimes all that is left is our
one-sided conversation with God.
Hannah’s prayers are answered, and in return she dedicates her son to God. Ultimately, he will become a prophet,
choosing and crowning the first two kings of Israel , Saul and David.
Judaism places importance and
significance on personal prayer.
Personal time talking to God.
In particular, the personal
experience defines what many of us understand to be prayer, even prayer that
takes place in community. Dr. Larry
Hoffman describes this phenomenon. He explains
that from ancient times until probably about 50 years ago, Jews prayed in a
specific direction. When we say the Kedusha,
a reenactment of conversations between angels and God, The three angels in the Kedushah
chorus, Hoffman tells us, were originally understood as our inner conscience,
but directed toward the heavens.
The modern preference of prayer, however, is to look not
necessarily upward, but inward. In
antiquity, the desire was to go up and join the angelic host in the heavens. In contrast, “The goal of worship for many
moderns,” Hoffman writes, “is to go ‘deep down inside ourselves’”[1] In other words, to commune with God in the
deepest most personal way possible. We
aim for this in prayer: striving for the personal God experience.
But, our tradition does not teach
that a Jew can have a complete spiritual life if he or she only prays
alone. We must, at times, pray
together. When the siren sounds in Jerusalem , while it
touches people individually, it calls a community to assemble: men,
women and children. Come and pray. Come and approach God, together. When
the Israelites are wandering through the desert, the entire community is
gathered together at the Tent of meeting, the Mishkan, to witness the
sacrifices made to God and to hear what God has instructed through Moses. The people come together – each with their
own hopes and prayers, yes, but still together ready to be a part of the
conversation with the divine. When
Hannah comes to Shiloh , she is in a place
where her family and other Israelites come together to pray.
Our liturgy even makes a dramatic
shift from the morning blessings, which focus on our individual relationship
with God, to the communal relationship that God has with the people. We move from blessings about the soul of an
individual to blessings about the souls of the community. “Let every living soul bless Your name, O
Lord our God…Through all eternity You are God, we have no King but
You.” This shift from the personal to
the communal carries with it a strong message.
We must recognize that though our prayers be personal, we do not exist
in a world or a community alone. We are
pray-ers, praying alongside other pray-ers
The liturgy of the High Holy Days
makes a point of our communal nature.
When we pray Avinu Malkeinu, we say “our father, our
king.” It is not that God is my father
or your king, but God is for all of us, as a community. When we pray the words of the confessional,
the Vidui, the sins listed are in the communal plural because we know that even
if we did not each personally commit every one of the sins listed, someone in
our community may have and so we confess on their behalf. These High Holy Days represent the most
communal moments of prayer for our people.
We are your people, you are our God!
We come together in large numbers and pray for each other’s well-being.
Meeting God one-on-one in a
communal prayer setting is particularly difficult. Praying in community takes a sincere belief
that we must, if necessary, sacrifice a bit of our own experience to help
others approach God. It takes
persistence: continual practice. When we
pray for forgiveness from our communal sins, we must take some of the focus off
ourselves. We become a part of something
bigger, something communal which has a different kind of power and a different
feeling.
Each time we come together and
pray, we may not be as lucky as the Israelites in the desert. We may not make it to the Mishkan, to the
Tent of Meeting where God’s presence was felt.
Sometimes we may barely see the opening of the Tent, remaining in the
back, behind the crowd. Other days, we
may find ourselves utterly lost amidst the assembled men, women and children. Nonetheless, we have to search every day, for
encounters with the divine. Communal
prayer gives us the opportunities to come to the Mishkan regularly, to
meet God.
Even the angels of the Kedushah, contemplate God’s holiness together: “קָדוֹשׁ
קָדוֹשׁ קָדוֹשׁ יְהוָה צְבָאוֹת; מְלֹא כָל-הָאָרֶץ, כְּבוֹדוֹ
Holy, Holy Holy is Adonai of Hosts, God’s glory fills the earth.”[2] We pray these words every morning, extolling
God’s holiness. Mimicking the angels’
chorus, shouting, each one to the other:
Holy! Holy! Holy!
We pray, each of us standing on our toes, trying to fly, fluttering,[3]
inching ever upward from the earth to the heavens, to get a taste, a moment, a
spark of divine holiness.
When we say Kadosh Kadosh
Kadosh together, do we recognize the personal experience comingled with
the communal, or are we merely playing at angels? Do we believe, with all our heart, our soul
and our might that by participating in this chorus we can experience God’s
presence?
We no longer view prayer as an
obligation in our movement. As modern
people, and as Reform Jews, we have made decisions to skip over certain parts
of our Torah readings, particularly those parts dealing with sacrifice. We tend to gloss over the number of bulls or
rams that God demands on a particular day.
We choose to ignore the notion of a freewill sacrifice or a guilt
offering to God. What that leaves us
with is a sense of Torah with a good deal of narrative when God is talking to
us, but very little notion that the people talked to God a lot. Every sacrifice was a conversation with
God. Every time the altar of the Eternal
was lit, the people created a connection to the heavens, and though the
sacrifices were often individual, the people came together to offer them.
Praying together is what Jews have
done for ages, and though we are in a modern period marked by individualism and
a sense that we can, and in fact should, each have our own relationships with
the divine, the communal experience continues to be important. One wonders how much comfort Hannah might
have found if she had been able to pray her silent prayer, but surrounded by
her community: bolstered by the strength in numbers, feeling the silent
presence of a friend or neighbor sitting alongside her. Even if she had not shared her struggle, what
might the presence of another have given her in that moment?
And this is why as Jews we often require a
quorum to pray. Ten adults coming
together is more than a requirement, allowing us to say the words of prayers. A minyan is a symbol of community because it
means we have all taken to heart the needs of others and we expect that others
are considering our needs. We recognize
that there are people in our community hurting, grieving, in pain: we come to
support them. We recognize that there
are people celebrating, living, rejoicing: we come to share our good wishes
with them.
And yet, in too many communities,
even in our own, the sanctuary is all too often empty. Milestones are often only attended by direct
relations. Calls to participate in our
services are all too often unanswered.
In this New Year, let us each strive to be a part of a prayerful
community. Let us make a commitment to
each other that we will be there to support and to celebrate.
If you are not a regular synagogue goer, try
it out. Consider coming once a month for
five months or consider coming five weeks in a row to a Friday Night
service. What might you get out of
it? What might change for you? What might you be able to add to the service
and to the sense of community? If there
is a special celebration happening, a graduation or confirmation, what might it
mean to the graduates or the confirmands to know that their community, more
than just their parents and classmates, supports them? What might it do for our Temple family to see our sanctuary regularly
filled with voices who have come not only for themselves, but because the call
to pray in community was so strong it could not be ignored. What might it do for someone to find that
their home is filled during a shiva minyan?
What it will do is bring us closer
to God and closer to each other. We use
prayer to mark the passage of time. We
pray out of pain and suffering as Hannah did.
We pray when we mourn. We pray to
celebrate. When we join with our
community to pray, we learn about our neighbor’s lives. We begin to understand each other more,
gaining a sense of the seasons of our lives.
We gain a sense of who is in need and who can be of help. Praying together brings us closer, even if only
via a conversation at the oneg.
It is time for us to talk to God on
a regular basis, and it is time for us to do so together as a community! It is also time for us to start to discuss
what prayer means to us and what we hope prayer will look like and sound like. I know that the Cantor and I have some ideas,
but we will need your help, your advice and your counsel. This spring, I will be teaching an adult
education course on prayer, but the specific topic is not yet determined. Let me know what you want to know about
prayer. Let us begin to think about the
words we use and the prayerbook we use.
When we make prayer as meaningful as possible for each of us
individually and for our community, we strengthen our relationships and our
community.
As the sounds of the shofar echo
through this room in just a few minutes, and we rise as a community to hear
them, let them be a call both to each of us and to all of us. Let their sounds remind us of our journeys,
from wholeness to brokenness to wholeness again. Let them call us to prayer.
[1] My People's Prayerbook vol 2.
P 92. Hoffman, L. on Kedusha
[2] Isaiah 6:4
and Shacharit
[3] My People's Prayerbook vol. 2
p.89 Rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev describes the motion as fluttering.
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