Post by Rabbi Neil on Nov 29, 2019 19:03:57 GMT
A story is told of the Baal Shem Tov that once he refused to enter a synagogue because it was too full of insincere prayer. The moral of the story is clearly that kavannah, the intention of the prayer, is just as important as keva, which is set form of the prayer. In last night’s sermon, I clearly expressed that kavannah was an essential part of prayer in its effort to change the world, but I also referred to the fact that this was not always the case in Jewish prayer. Where Biblical prayer was fluid, Rabbinic prayer became more and more fixed as Jews started to spread across the world. The first siddurim from the ninth century and on clearly show differing prayer customs, showing that even many hundreds of years after Rabban Gamaliel fixed the prayer themes, varieties existed of which words best fitted those themes.
In an essay called Communal Prayer and Liturgical Poetry, Raymond Scheindlin explains that for most of the Middle Ages, prayer services consisted of two kinds of prayer – fixed prose prayers and what were called piyyutim, which were fluid prayers in verse form. These piyyutim, these liturgical poems, were an essential part of Jewish worship for centuries. Sometimes they even formed the majority of the prayer service. Scheindlin says that “the result was a very intellectualized type of liturgy, a liturgy resembling midrash,” that is, a creative reimagining of prayer. The problem with piyyutim was that, after a while, the Rabbinic urge to unify meant that they were absorbed into the canon of Jewish liturgy and became as sacrosanct as the prayers they were expounding upon. As a result, over time, the length of the prayer service doubled. When it started, Reform Judaism expunged most of these piyyutim because they wanted the service to be a sensible length. But in so doing, they removed much of the creativity within the prayer service. That creativity has partially returned in the form of alternate readings, which you find in your machzor on most of the alternate pages. But in the Reform movement, we find ourselves walking a delicate balance between keva and kavannah, between the fixed prayers and the spontaneous, midrashic, creative prayers. It’s a difficult balance because the keva, the set prayers, the beautiful choir pieces, the prayers from our childhood, often feed into feelings of inauthenticity if we don’t address them. But year after year, in this community we are slowly changing the service to have more kavannah and less keva.
Personally, I love the idea of having set prayers and then occasionally turning to a poet in the community to ask them to expound on that prayer, either spontaneously or, probably better, in a pre-written form. I could definitely see that happening in some of our services in the future. It’s a particularly appealing idea for me because it opens up access to prayer to those who are not completely versant in the traditional keva, the fixed prayers. Of course, the more they are aware of them, the more nuanced and grounded in traditional metaphors their piyyut could be. But that said, often piyyutim would contain themes that were the total opposite of the prayer upon which they were based, which is why some Rabbis of yore hated the addition of piyyutim! Piyyutim, which were basically prayer jazz, certainly need to come back into contemporary Jewish practice, not as dogmatic texts that must be included as keva, but as genuine expressions of our contemporary and ever-changing response to the traditional liturgy. If nothing else, I believe that piyyutim are one of many possible responses to last year’s sermon inviting our community to actively seek out the authentic Jewish voice of women. To include feminist kavannah responses with our still often patriarchal keva tradition (especially theologically) would be a very important spiritual step forward for our community. Perhaps after the High Holy Days, Rabbi Jenny and I should run a workshop on traditional piyyutim and suggestions on how to write contemporary ones. To be clear, I am not saying that these piyyutim should only be written by women but I do think that one obvious way for our creative community to explore new creative spiritual and theological paths is for people to write their own prayer jazz, often through a deliberate lens of challenging the patriarchal assumptions and language of our liturgy.
I would honestly love to see a plethora of piyyutim written by our members that we collated together, not in order to concretize and canonize them, but so that others might use them for inspiration in prayer. Such a collection would strongly mirror the custom of techines, which were Yiddish prayers outside the traditional liturgy that women in the Middle Ages would collect and recite at differing times. Techines were women’s prayer jazz, their own enormously expansive collection of liturgy relevant to their own lives.
This celebration of kavannah – not just acknowledgement but celebration of spontaneity in prayer – connects immediately back to last night’s sermon. Our tradition can guide our prayers in terms of theme. It can even suggest traditional words based on those themes. But it must not enforce them. Every time it has tried, it has merely shown itself to be the enforcement of patriarchal control. For example, in the thirteenth century, Judah the Pietist and his disciple Eleazar of Worms wrote of the Jews of France and England that they, and I quote here, “err utterly and completely for [they] invent lies and add several words in [their] prayers of which the early sages… never dreamed.” They urged those naughty French and English Jews to “give heed and repent and do not go on doing this evil thing [of] adding and omitting letters and words from the prayers.” Think about that for a moment. Think about what it means for a Rabbi to have described the sincere, heartfelt prayer of other Jews as “lies” and as “evil.” While I acknowledge that such sentiments can only come from a mindset that kavannah is the need for intention on reciting the correct words, the problem is who enforces what is right? Who can speak on behalf of God to say what is an appropriate prayer to God? The hubris that underlies that statement is staggering and while I understand that that kind of authority structure was essential for Judaism of the past, it cannot be for Judaism of today.
We know from Rabbinic sources that if you only have set prayers, saying them again and again ensures that focusing on the prayers becomes impossible. In the Jerusalem Talmud , we read Rabbi Hiyya’s admission that he never once concentrated on his prayer. He even admits to thinking about politics during his prayer. Another Rabbi, Shmuel, admits to counting clouds during prayer, another to counting the layers of stones in a wall! That’s not prayer! That’s magical incantation! That’s saying words, reading words aloud regardless of what they mean. That couldn’t be further removed from original Jewish prayer, which was spontaneous, personal, and heart-felt. Worse than that, saying the right words to convince God to change the world for us would be theological slavery. That would, once again, be staggering hubris.
Kavannah, intention, has therefore expressed itself in two differing ways in our tradition. One way is intention to say the prayers correctly, the other is intention to say what’s genuinely in our heart. The two cannot mutually coexist because they are based on entirely differing theologies and lead to two totally differing ritual practices – one which requires that words of prayer must not change and one which requires that they must. It would be nonsensical for Reform Judaism to hold the first position. Reform Jewish prayer therefore should openly celebrate liturgical creativity and, moreover, should encourage it. Our community, therefore, should… and will in the coming year… be far more creative with our prayer services. We should strive to create a healthier, more authentic balance between praying traditional words and praying our responses to those words. We should give space, as we will, starting on Yom Kippur, to our own individual kavannah responses. We should empower our members, as we will after the chagim, to create piyyutim and to share them in prayer services. Reform Jewish prayer shouldn’t be about merely taking out that which is redundant or tweaking that which is offensive, but should be about creating exciting, new, relevant prayers that fit nicely in a traditionally-themed service. Reform Jewish prayer shouldn’t be tradition-lite, it should be real and filled with kavannah. Our prayer, then, must be the outpouring of the spirit, in prose or poetic form, around traditional themes. It must hold kavannah not as important, but as essential. So, let us today truly start the wonderful journey of opening up kavannah, and thereby opening up prayer for everyone gathered here today, as well as those not here with us today. And let us say, Amen.
In an essay called Communal Prayer and Liturgical Poetry, Raymond Scheindlin explains that for most of the Middle Ages, prayer services consisted of two kinds of prayer – fixed prose prayers and what were called piyyutim, which were fluid prayers in verse form. These piyyutim, these liturgical poems, were an essential part of Jewish worship for centuries. Sometimes they even formed the majority of the prayer service. Scheindlin says that “the result was a very intellectualized type of liturgy, a liturgy resembling midrash,” that is, a creative reimagining of prayer. The problem with piyyutim was that, after a while, the Rabbinic urge to unify meant that they were absorbed into the canon of Jewish liturgy and became as sacrosanct as the prayers they were expounding upon. As a result, over time, the length of the prayer service doubled. When it started, Reform Judaism expunged most of these piyyutim because they wanted the service to be a sensible length. But in so doing, they removed much of the creativity within the prayer service. That creativity has partially returned in the form of alternate readings, which you find in your machzor on most of the alternate pages. But in the Reform movement, we find ourselves walking a delicate balance between keva and kavannah, between the fixed prayers and the spontaneous, midrashic, creative prayers. It’s a difficult balance because the keva, the set prayers, the beautiful choir pieces, the prayers from our childhood, often feed into feelings of inauthenticity if we don’t address them. But year after year, in this community we are slowly changing the service to have more kavannah and less keva.
Personally, I love the idea of having set prayers and then occasionally turning to a poet in the community to ask them to expound on that prayer, either spontaneously or, probably better, in a pre-written form. I could definitely see that happening in some of our services in the future. It’s a particularly appealing idea for me because it opens up access to prayer to those who are not completely versant in the traditional keva, the fixed prayers. Of course, the more they are aware of them, the more nuanced and grounded in traditional metaphors their piyyut could be. But that said, often piyyutim would contain themes that were the total opposite of the prayer upon which they were based, which is why some Rabbis of yore hated the addition of piyyutim! Piyyutim, which were basically prayer jazz, certainly need to come back into contemporary Jewish practice, not as dogmatic texts that must be included as keva, but as genuine expressions of our contemporary and ever-changing response to the traditional liturgy. If nothing else, I believe that piyyutim are one of many possible responses to last year’s sermon inviting our community to actively seek out the authentic Jewish voice of women. To include feminist kavannah responses with our still often patriarchal keva tradition (especially theologically) would be a very important spiritual step forward for our community. Perhaps after the High Holy Days, Rabbi Jenny and I should run a workshop on traditional piyyutim and suggestions on how to write contemporary ones. To be clear, I am not saying that these piyyutim should only be written by women but I do think that one obvious way for our creative community to explore new creative spiritual and theological paths is for people to write their own prayer jazz, often through a deliberate lens of challenging the patriarchal assumptions and language of our liturgy.
I would honestly love to see a plethora of piyyutim written by our members that we collated together, not in order to concretize and canonize them, but so that others might use them for inspiration in prayer. Such a collection would strongly mirror the custom of techines, which were Yiddish prayers outside the traditional liturgy that women in the Middle Ages would collect and recite at differing times. Techines were women’s prayer jazz, their own enormously expansive collection of liturgy relevant to their own lives.
This celebration of kavannah – not just acknowledgement but celebration of spontaneity in prayer – connects immediately back to last night’s sermon. Our tradition can guide our prayers in terms of theme. It can even suggest traditional words based on those themes. But it must not enforce them. Every time it has tried, it has merely shown itself to be the enforcement of patriarchal control. For example, in the thirteenth century, Judah the Pietist and his disciple Eleazar of Worms wrote of the Jews of France and England that they, and I quote here, “err utterly and completely for [they] invent lies and add several words in [their] prayers of which the early sages… never dreamed.” They urged those naughty French and English Jews to “give heed and repent and do not go on doing this evil thing [of] adding and omitting letters and words from the prayers.” Think about that for a moment. Think about what it means for a Rabbi to have described the sincere, heartfelt prayer of other Jews as “lies” and as “evil.” While I acknowledge that such sentiments can only come from a mindset that kavannah is the need for intention on reciting the correct words, the problem is who enforces what is right? Who can speak on behalf of God to say what is an appropriate prayer to God? The hubris that underlies that statement is staggering and while I understand that that kind of authority structure was essential for Judaism of the past, it cannot be for Judaism of today.
We know from Rabbinic sources that if you only have set prayers, saying them again and again ensures that focusing on the prayers becomes impossible. In the Jerusalem Talmud , we read Rabbi Hiyya’s admission that he never once concentrated on his prayer. He even admits to thinking about politics during his prayer. Another Rabbi, Shmuel, admits to counting clouds during prayer, another to counting the layers of stones in a wall! That’s not prayer! That’s magical incantation! That’s saying words, reading words aloud regardless of what they mean. That couldn’t be further removed from original Jewish prayer, which was spontaneous, personal, and heart-felt. Worse than that, saying the right words to convince God to change the world for us would be theological slavery. That would, once again, be staggering hubris.
Kavannah, intention, has therefore expressed itself in two differing ways in our tradition. One way is intention to say the prayers correctly, the other is intention to say what’s genuinely in our heart. The two cannot mutually coexist because they are based on entirely differing theologies and lead to two totally differing ritual practices – one which requires that words of prayer must not change and one which requires that they must. It would be nonsensical for Reform Judaism to hold the first position. Reform Jewish prayer therefore should openly celebrate liturgical creativity and, moreover, should encourage it. Our community, therefore, should… and will in the coming year… be far more creative with our prayer services. We should strive to create a healthier, more authentic balance between praying traditional words and praying our responses to those words. We should give space, as we will, starting on Yom Kippur, to our own individual kavannah responses. We should empower our members, as we will after the chagim, to create piyyutim and to share them in prayer services. Reform Jewish prayer shouldn’t be about merely taking out that which is redundant or tweaking that which is offensive, but should be about creating exciting, new, relevant prayers that fit nicely in a traditionally-themed service. Reform Jewish prayer shouldn’t be tradition-lite, it should be real and filled with kavannah. Our prayer, then, must be the outpouring of the spirit, in prose or poetic form, around traditional themes. It must hold kavannah not as important, but as essential. So, let us today truly start the wonderful journey of opening up kavannah, and thereby opening up prayer for everyone gathered here today, as well as those not here with us today. And let us say, Amen.