HOW WE PRAY

Each day of Hebrew School, I spend the last half hour with two of the grades in the Temple Beth El Sanctuary for t’fillah — our weekday evening prayers. The third and fourth graders come one week and the fifth and sixth graders come the next. The goal is both to teach them about prayer and to challenge them to think about prayer in new ways.

Near the end of the school year, I tried an experiment with the fifth and sixth graders. When they arrived in the Sanctuary, I asked them to sit in every other row and with two empty seats between them. You see, the principle of Jewish worship is that we come together as a community to say our individual prayers. While some of our prayers are meant to be said as a collective, we are each supposed to establish our own personal connection with God. The fifth and sixth graders are excellent at coming together as a community; it is the individual prayer thing that tends to be the challenge.

It was wonderfully uncomfortable. Why would I view their discomfort as wonderful? Because it told me immediately that I had hit on an important new challenge. While a few of the students can pray with confidence, most go with the flow of the group. By spreading out the seating, the sense of group was present only in the background. Each student now had to come to terms with his or her own prayers.

We began with two exercises. First, I asked them to take a look around the room in order to get a sense of the entire community. Next, I asked them to think of one hope they had — either for themselves or someone close to them. With that hope, we would begin switching the focus to our own individual prayers. We began to pray. At first, students kept looking up from their prayer books to see how everyone else was doing with this new exercise. Gently, I repeatedly encouraged them to return to their prayer books, and make this an experience between themselves and God. With each turn of the page, more and more students became absorbed in their prayers.

There were a few, however, who could not keep from looking around the room, no matter how many times I tried to return them to their own worship. They could not be alone with themselves. They could not stand the silence, the stillness and the isolation. The contrast between this experiment in prayer and the noisy reality of our everyday world became stark. I began to think about the fact that some of us are never alone with ourselves; some of us are never without external stimulation.

Radios play all day at work. Televisions are on all the time at home. Joggers are not at one with the natural beauty around them; they are at one with their iPods. Go to any modern gym — the exercise bikes, treadmills, Stairmasters, rowing machines and the like are all lined up facing a bank of TVs. I even see water-walkers in the swimming pool with radio headphones on. Car radios play. Children watch videos in the back of the van. Gameboys and cell phones are in constant use in gate areas at the airport. How dare they tell us to cease using electronic equipment during take-off and landing!

When I talk to the students about prayer, they are comfortable with prayers that praise God, or express our own hopes, desires or fears. They struggle, however, with the dialogue aspect of prayer. They can express more easily than they can listen.

How do we know if our prayers are answered if we don’t listen? How can we hear God’s voice amidst all the noise?

In the Book of First Kings we read that when God passed by the prophet Elijah, there was a mighty wind, an earthquake and a fire. But God’s presence was in none of these. After the fire, there was heard a still small voice — and that is where God’s presence dwells. Can you hear it?  

L’shalom,
Andrew Bernard
Cantor