Six years ago, at the urging of our then Membership and Publicity Chair, I was asked to write a weekly piece for our Facebook page and the Temple B’nai Israel website. For a year, I wrote weekly articles on the designated Torah portion for that week. When we returned the following summer to the portion on which I had started, even though there is always much more to write about each portion, I suggested instead that I might write a weekly piece on one of the prayers from our services. My thought initially was that I might teach my congregation and anyone else interested in reading these essays about the structure of the prayerbook, the order and choice of the prayers, and the meaning of our liturgy and thereby help people feel more at home with our services.. Like many teachers and writers, however, I discovered that the more I got into this subject, the more I began learning myself. What I thought I already knew in great depth turned out to be only the tip of the iceberg. There was so much more that I did not previously know. As I explored this detailed tradition, I found it rather humbling, for I found myself learning as much or more than my readers through my research on the prayerbook and its contents.
With only a few days to prepare each essay each week, I have felt that my research even so was somewhat superficial. Even as the articles grew in length, I frequently discovered that there was so much more written about our prayers than I could fully encompass even in the several pages I was producing each week. In the course of my studies, I came across prayers I had not even realized existed such as the special “modeh ani” prayers prescribed to be recited prior to each service during the day based on a teaching in the Talmud Yerushalmi. I had not realized that not only were there special Psalms to be said instead of or in addition to the Psalm of the Day for Rosh Chodesh, Chanukah, and Purim, but also for each Major Holiday as well. I came across special prayers to say on the way out the door of the synagogue each day as well as a detailed ritual prescribed for getting there in the first place.
As I continued reading and writing, I realized that while the main prayers of the service, the Sh’ma and its blessings and the Amidah were very familiar to me and their Hebrew was, for the most part, clear and understandable, the Psalms and collections of verses that we say prior to the main portion of the service, written in ancient poetic form, were not as easily comprehended. Stopping to take a closer look at each of the elements of the preliminary service, I learned more about their content and how they ended up in our service. For example, in the Birchot HaShachar, the first part of the preliminary service, there is a section that extends over a couple of pages that I had thought were separate meditations on the day ahead that had been lumped together. I was surprised to learn though that the whole passage was taken in its entirety, almost verbatim, from a late Midrash known as Tanna d’vei Eliyahu, which in turn was citing a prayer that was already found in the works of the Geonim, the post-Talmudic sages.
I hadn’t known much about the opening portions of the lengthy passage of Hodu ladonay kir’u bishmo, which follows the blessing of Baruch SheAmar in the P’sukei d’Zimrah in Ashkenazic tradition. Though labeled in the siddur as taken from the book of Chronicles, I hadn’t know that it comprises two Psalms that appear also in the Book of Psalms with only minor variations. This entire section of the service, P’sukei d’zimrah, which often is recited very quickly with minimal understanding by many of us, can be very moving when one takes the time to look it over prayer by prayer and reflect on its meaning and why certain Psalms have been linked together within it.
This kind of study of prayer is a process we mention every day toward the beginning of our service in a list of mitzvot of which the Talmud tells us, “the profits are enjoyed in this world while the principal remains for us in the world to come.” It is called “iyun tefillah,” which is taken to mean devotion or intention in our prayer. “Iyun,” however, comes from the root “ayin” which is an eye. Thus, I would suggest that that is exactly what we have tried to accomplish in these prayer studies, opening our eyes and looking more closely at the words we pray and what they may mean and, one hopes, how they might impact on our lives.
In the course of these studies, I also discovered prayers and rituals that were not part of my own prayer routine, but I had vaguely known about. Probing a bit deeper, I looked at the section early in the traditional prayerbook, but which is omitted in the Conservative siddur, known as korbanot. This section includes readings from the Torah about various sacrificial offerings that are no longer brought in the absence of the Temple. For some, reading about them is seen as a replacement for actually offering these sacrifices and performing the rituals associated with them. We also saw how some modern rabbis have taken parts of this section as metaphors and given them new applications for today. Rather than praying for a restoration of a more primitive mode of worship, we seek to incorporate the intensity of that ancient service into our prayers, to offer ourselves in place of animal sacrifices and other Temple rituals.
We took a look as well at a relatively more recent practice in some observant circles, of Yom Kippur Katan. This is a fast day which some people keep on the day prior to the new moon most months. On investigation, not only did I find that it has a detailed liturgy, but thanks to my friend Cantor Marlena Fuerstman, I learned also that it has cantorial music utilized for a special service that is held in some circles in the afternoon on those days. It is a service that allows people, month by month, to repent of their sins and foolish acts, and begin each new month intent on doing better this time. There is no need to wait for Yom Kippur to reassess our lives according to this tradition. We can begin anew each month, indeed each day.
I have also written of the joyful singing at the Shabbat dinner table that I recall from my college days. There I learned various melodies for the Shabbat table songs, the Zemirot, customarily sung after dinner. We have looked at about a half dozen of these songs over the past few years and learned where they came from and taken a closer look at what they were trying to impart. Among the other essays I’ve written, have been pieces that review the liturgy for various holidyas and for life cycle events, brisses, baby namings for girls, bar and bat mitzvah celebrations, weddings, and funerals. Each has its own customs and the prayers that go along with them.
One other outcome of these studies has been the opportunity to consult a variety of prayerbooks and volumes about prayer. Often, we have compared the siddurim published by the Reform Movement to our Conservative prayerbooks. We have also utilized several different Orthodox siddurim including the ArtScroll siddur that we have used for our traditional services at TBI in the past and the Koren Siddur with a translation by the late chief rabbi of Great Britain, Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks. A colleague online introduced me to the prayerbook I now use regularly for my daily worship, Siddur Aliyot Eliyahu. Its attraction for me is twofold, first is its attempt at completeness. Very few prayers for weekdays, Sabbaths, and festivals are missing from this volume. It is quite comprehensive. Its other attraction to me are the tiny footnotes below each page pointing to the sources for each prayer in the service. Some of these footnotes admittedly have led me down “rabbit-holes” in search of the origins of a particular practice. I confess that that search is always a great joy to me.
Issachar Yakovson’s five-volume set on the prayers, “Netiv Binah,” has been an indispensable guide to the history of prayers, often comparing earlier versions of a prayer to what developed over the centuries. Yakovson’s work, intended for teachers who are instructing their students, devotes much effort to the interpretation of each prayer he considers. I purchased these volumes back in Seminary days. Though the set is in Hebrew, a portion of this work has been translated into English as well. For the English reader, however, more recently we have the ten-volume series edited by Rabbi Lawrence Hoffman, “My People’s Prayerbook” set up like a rabbinic text with the traditional prayers in Hebrew and in English in the center, surrounded by a variety of commentaries reflecting various interests and insights into each prayer by rabbis from different traditions. That series was followed by eight volumes of essays on different parts of the liturgy for High Holidays as well and two volumes on the Haggadah. I consulted other volumes as well, but those two series were the mainstay for much of this research.
One may ask, however, what is the purpose of all of these prayers and our delving into their meaning. Who is listening? And who is answering? Who sorts out all those prayers that are at cross-purposes? I don’t generally think of our prayers as requests for divine intervention in the world. God is not a cosmic Santa Claus. To my way of thinking, we pray to acknowledge all that exists in this world, all that has come forth from the Creator of the world. We pray to remind ourselves of what is good and holy and true, what is beautiful and meaningful and to try to live lives encompassing those values. However we imagine God, it should not be as some being sitting by His mailbox, awaiting an avalanche of prayer requests hour after hour, day by day. Rather the goal of prayer, it seems, is not to move God, but to transform us into better, more caring, more loving beings or, at least, to remind us that that is our goal, to embody the image of God within ourselves. Prayer to me is a song which we sing, the music of our lives, and we hope as we seek the meaning of its words, that we may embody them within us every day. So if there is one petition we need to make to the Almighty it might be that God help us to “live the words we pray.”
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