What is Prayer?

May 5, 2008

by Daniel E. Levenson

For me, the idea of prayer has always seemed a little strange. I mean, after all, if god really is omniscient, then he/she/it must already have a pretty good idea of what’s going on here in the world, including what people are thinking and feeling. I would say that up until the last few years if someone mentioned praying I would think either of last ditch efforts to produce divine intervention on behalf of my performance on a final exam in college, or of what I had heard on the high holidays in shul. I have given the subject a lot more thought, however, over the last few years, both from what I might term a “spiritual” as well as a “critical” perspective.

I decided that if prayer is meant as a way to relate to “god,” whether that is the very present and sometimes unpleasant god of the Tanakh, or the sadly absent god of the Shoah or some unnamed, unknowable spirit that moves in and throughout the world, I first had to figure out how to relate to the process of relating, which has essentially led me to wonder what prayer is in the first place. I suppose I have tried to embrace multiple meanings at various times, ranging from seeing it as an opportunity for quiet self-reflection and meditation to discharging an obligation to a perhaps aquixotic attempt to recreate what preceding generations experienced in eastern Europe when they recited these same words on Friday nights two hundred years ago. Not surprisingly, I have come up with few answers, except, perhaps, the feeling that at different times, it can serve different functions.

From what I might term a “critical” perspective I have also given the subject a lot of thought. After all, these prayers, even if they are actually rooted in some kind of divine truth, were written by people, and I would not be doing my  degrees in English literature and anthropology, much justice, if I did not inquire about the history and evolution of Jewish prayer. And of course when I took a close look at it from this angle, there is no shortage of twists and turns, with certain ritual customs and liturgy designed specifically to differentiate Jews from other religious groups in the early post-Temple period and other customs evolving later on as Jews began to leave the land of Israel and spread out across the world.

Tne of the questions this might raise is whether the act of prayer in Judaism is meant to continue the practice of the temple sacrifices in some way, essentially “sacrificing” time or our thoughts, or if it is meant to be an act of remembrance. If we are emulating what the patriarchs and matriarchs did in the Tanakh, then we are finding a connection to the divine by not only doing what they did, in the times before the temple, but also, in a way, honoring their memory. When I had a chance to study the Talmudic debate about the origin of prayer at the Pardes Institute in Jerusalem, one of the things that struck me was the various ways in which different rabbis argued for competing ideas about the connection between history, god, the Jewish people and prayer. As the early rabbis struggled to define what Judaism was and would become in the post-temple period, they clearly embraced not only collective cultural memories of life when the temple still stood, but looked to their own personal traditions and history as well.

One of the ideas that I find attractive when it comes not only to prayer but to other forms of ritual observance as well is the idea of “kavanah,” or “intention.” This is something that the late Abraham Joshua Heschel seems to have devoted much thought to, The idea that it is not simply about fulfilling or discharging obligations, but being aware of what we are doing and directing our thoughts in a certain way, so as to make the experience something more meaningful than just reciting words from a book or memory. I think this is a particularly beautiful idea because it is one that is somewhat malleable, while at the same time it demands the kind of mindfulness that we so often neglect throughout our day-to-day lives. If you think of prayer as an obligation, you can still embrace the idea of being consciously present. Perhaps, in fact, one could argue that the more present one is, the more assiduously one is discharging their duty. And on the opposite end of the spectrum, the same might be said of someone who is engaging in prayer as an act of meditation, as a way of perhaps not necessarily connecting with a “god” that resides outside the self, but as a reminder to connect with positive intentions and create or maintain balance within.

Of course I have not come to any concrete answers, and I suspect the possibility exists that I will never come to a real conclusion on the topic, but I continue to think about it and explore the varied meanings and possibilities that the idea of prayer seems to offer. I don’t know if I am any closer to understanding it, but I do know that whether Jewish prayer is rooted in the Talmud, the Temple or the Tanakh itself, that the notion of Kavanah is one that I will carry with me as I try to find meaning and remain consciously present in a world that often defies understanding.