Rabbi's Writings

Yom Kippur Shacharit
Chavurat Lamdeinu, Madison, NJ
September 28, 2009
Rabbi Ruth Gais

Confessions of a Frequent Pray-er

When I wake up in the morning, I try to remember to say one of my favorite prayers right away,
the one that goes “Modah ani lefanecha, melech chai v’kayam, sh’hechazarti bi nishmati b’
chemlah, rabbah emunatecha – I give thanks to you, My ruler who lives and lives forever, who
has given me back my soul through your grace- what a lot of trust you have in me!” But I don’t
always remember. I stagger to the bathroom and pour cold water, symbol of life and purity,
from our toothbrush cup slowly over my fingers, first the right hand, then the left, and I recite
the blessing for “Netilat yadayim, waving of the hands.” A blessing written before the age of
towels, I imagine.
After I’m dressed, I take out our dog, Maggie, on a walk of about ½ hour. This is one of my
favorite times of the day. It’s usually quiet out, the day is just awakening; it’s really not clear
what the day will bring. It’s on this walk that I almost always say the “Modah” I just quoted. It
just feels much more right for me to thank God for letting me be alive for another day as I step
into the day and hope that I won’t make too much of a mess of it but will be worthy of God’s trust
in giving me another day of life. As is traditional I follow this simple prayer with another simple
one – “The beginning of wisdom is being in awe of God,” which I follow up with Adon Olam,
always taking comfort in the last words – “Adonai li v’lo ira, God is with me so I am not afraid.”
I say these prayers with Maggie trotting at my side, sniffing sometimes, doing other things at
other times, and sometimes I can concentrate on what I’m saying and sometimes it’s an almost
unconscious litany that plays in my head as I mouth the words, half of my mind focusing on
finding the poop bag, half of it churning out Adon Olam. Sometimes I think this is not exactly
kosher praying, sometimes it feels just right.
It’s when I get home that things get more complicated. Time is marching on. There’s the dog to
feed, lunch to make, breakfast to eat, coffee to drink, newspaper to read, Paul to talk to, work to
go to… And this is without having children at home to feed, dress, find homework, find coats,
get off to school… It’s clear why women, according to Jewish law, are not bound by most time-
bound commandments – the duties of child care and child rearing make this incredibly difficult.
But! I am neither the mother of little children any more nor am I, an ordained Reform rabbi,
bound by Jewish law, and yet, even so, I am compelled by who knows what, to pray almost
every morning. Some days I just can’t – I have to leave too early, I oversleep, I’m caught up in a
story in the paper. On those days, I try to pray mincha, the afternoon service, a much shorter
one, wherever I am. I sneak outside and face the east, I find an empty room, sometimes I find a
chapel. But this prayer time is snatched time, taken from my work time, and it just doesn’t feel
the same.
Once I complained to my chaplaincy supervisor, an Episcopal priest, that I couldn’t find time in
the morning to pray and she couldn’t believe it. “You mean you can’t find a few quiet minutes to
pray?” she asked. I snickered and answered, “ You don’t understand. To pray the morning
prayers even by yourself takes about half an hour, if you rush them, and some days I can’t find
that half hour.”
So I am often in conflict. Do I pray, do I go to the gym for a quick work out, do I drink a
luxuriously slow cup of coffee? What do I need to do most to let my soul be ready for the day?
Praying, it turns out, is an art and a discipline. I’m not talking about spontaneous praying, which
comes from a heart filled with joy or sorrow – a halleluia, or Hannah’s silent prayer for a child,
but praying the same prayers, on a regular basis, day in and day out, whether you want to or
not, alone or with a minyan. This kind of prayer requires discipline, dedication, time, and
practice but the reward is great.
Most of us, when we come together to worship, don’t find it easy to pray. Lots of reasons – we
don’t understand the shape of the service, we don’t understand the Hebrew, and that makes us
uncomfortable, we’re distracted by the presence of others, the room is too hot, too cold, the
seats too hard, the music maybe not to our liking, and, and this is a big AND, we don’t have a
good enough relationship with God to take our worship seriously.
Like all relationships, a relationship with God takes work; prayer is that work. The more we let
ourselves work on that relationship, via prayer, and I would say via praying in a traditional
Jewish way, the closer the relationship becomes. This is the point of that story that my teacher,
Rabbi Jerome Malino, z”l, told so often and I tell a lot too, the one about the farmer and the son
who are cultivating a field when a huge storm comes up fast. The farmer takes one look at the
huge black cloud, drops his hoe, and starts running to the barn. The son takes one look, drops
to his knees in the dirt and starts praying. The rain starts to come and lightning too. The farmer
looks back and yells to his son, “Come into the barn, son!!” But the son just stays on his knees,
raising his hands to the heavens. It’s now really raining and thundering. The farmer shouts to
his son another time to run to the barn but the son doesn’t move. Finally the farmer,
exasperated, races back to the field, grabs his son by his overall straps, and drags him into the
safety of the barn. Once inside, the farmer turns to his son and says, “What did you think you
were doing out there, praying on your knees in the mud? Don’t you know scared prayin’ ain’t
worth a damn?”
So what’s this story saying? You know how we often call God “our rock’? In this little story,
God isn’t our rock, he’s our barn. The farmer knows that all he has to do is get to the barn and
he’ll be safe. He knows where the barn is and he knows he will be protected there. He and God
have a longstanding relationship built on trust. The son, poor lad, apparently doesn’t and so
when things are bad, he doesn’t know where to turn to escape the danger and can only do
“scared praying.”
But praying is hard work, fraught with peril. The ancient rabbis knew this. They knew that the
greatest danger was the sneaky way in the discipline required to pray the same prayers every
day, can easily devolve into rote recital. They acknowledged this and worried about it, just as I
do.
“Rabbi Hiyya said, “I never concentrated during my prayer in all my days. Once I wanted to
concentrate, but I thought about who will meet the king first, or the governor. Shmuel said, “I
count clouds during prayers. Rabbi Bun bar Hiyya said, “I count the layers of stones in the wall
while I pray. Rabbi Matnaya said, “I am grateful to my head, because it bows by itself when I
reach “Modim.” (Y.Ber. 2:4 or 16a)
But the rabbis didn’t give up nor do I. Sometimes the words of our liturgy are just words, they
may stick in the throat, they may seem boring, but sometimes they are more than words, they
are like candles that illuminate something inside of me and that’s what I long for. Sometimes I
understand something about the nature of God, of the world, of myself, or those I love just from
a word or a phrase. Sometimes it’s the melody, this is why we need a sweet singer or our own
voice, sweet or not, that moves me to tears because it exposes some tender, vulnerable part of
myself. This is what Wordsworth describes as “surprised by joy.” This moment can come
anytime, any place, not just in the discipline of prescribed prayer, but why wait for the Grand
Canyon, that sweet summer night, or that special moment? Get used to it on a daily basis, get
addicted to the spiritual joy that regular prayer can bring.
Many synagogues have written over their ark: Da lifnei mi atah omed – know before whom you
are standing. I endorse that- Meet God regularly and get to know God. Find out what God’s
concerned about. You never know, you might find you have similar ones. In fact, the rabbis tell
us that God prays, just as we do. And they tell us that God prays just what we pray for, in exactly
the same words: that God will not let God’s anger get in the way of God’s mercy and that mercy
will trump strict justice. What an amazing symmetry of human and divine desire!
Let’s go back for a minute to my morning prayers. I’ve decided to pray first, then eat breakfast.
First I dress like God. I say the blessing, put on my tallit and add this verse from Psalm 104:
Bless Adonai my soul. Adonai, my God, You are very treat, clothed in majesty and splendor,
wrapped in a robe of light, spreading out the heavens like a tent.” God wraps God’s self in a tallit
of light. I get as close to that as I can when I wrap myself in my own tallit. Then I say the blessing
and slowly lay my grandfather’s tefillin, winding the strap slowly 7 times around my left arm,
placing the head tefillin on my hair, and finally returning to wrap the strap around my middle
finger while reciting this meditation from Hosea:
I will betroth you to Me forever;
I will betroth you to me in righteousness and justice,
Loving kindness and compassion;
I will betroth you to Me in faithfulness;
And you shall know Adonai.
This is a mutual pledge, God has betrothed God’s self to me, little old me, as a member of the
people Israel. I begin my prayers dressed like God and reminded of our mutual love and
covenant. I’m getting ready for my daily meeting. If we had some hours, I’d go through my
favorite parts of my conversation with God, pointing out the parts that fill me with joy and awe,
and maybe finding some new ones. The art of prayer comes after the work. The pray-er, just
like a painter, needs to prepare the canvas, understand its size, the use of paints and brushes,
and have a sense of what she wants to do and can do. The more the painter paints, the more at
ease she is with her craft, the more the act of painting, the painting itself, and the painter
become one.
I’ll close with the words of Sr. Jonathan Sacks, Chief Rabbi of Great Britain, who answers the
question “why pray” in this way:
“Without a vessel to contain a blessing, there can be no blessing. If we have no receptacle to
catch the rain, the rain may fall, but we will have none to drink. If we have no radio receiver, the
sound waves will flow, but we will be unable to convert them into sound. God’s blessings flow
continuously, but unless we make ourselves into a vessel for them, they will flow elsewhere.
Prayer is the act of turning ourselves into a vehicle for the Divine.
Prayer changes the world because it changes us. At its height, it is a profoundly transformative
experience. If we have truly prayed, we come in the course of time to know that the world was
made, and we were made, for a purpose; that God, though immeasurably vast, is also intensely
close.
It makes a difference to be brushed by the wings of eternity. Regular thrice daily prayer works
on us in ways not immediately apparent. As the sea smoothes the stone, as the repeated
hammer-blows of the sculptor shape the marble, so prayer, cyclical, tracking the rhythms of
time itself – gradually wears away the jagged edge of character, turning it into a work of
devotional art. We begin to see the beauty of the created world. We locate ourselves as part of
the story of our people. Slowly, we come to think less of the I, more of the We; less of what we
lack than of what we have; less of what we need from the world, more of what the world needs
from us. Prayer is less about getting what we want than about learning what to want. Our
priorities change; we become less angular; we learn the deep happiness that comes from
learning to give praise and thanks. The world we build tomorrow is born in the prayers we say
today.
God exists where we pray. As Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Kotzk said, God lives where we let
Him in.: And in that dialogue between the human soul and the Soul of the universe a momentous
yet gentle strength is born.”

k.y.r.

Chavurat Lamdeinu

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Confessions of a Pray-er