Sample Reading

Loving Prayer

 

Tamar Frankiel

Preface

If you struggle with our Jewish prayer tradition, this book is for you. It’s intended as a study guide, to offer new perspectives to refresh your approach and guidance in some of the difficult aspects of prayer. Prayer is, after all, a key part of our ancient spiritual practice, but it’s hard for modern Jews to find their way into it. The siddur or prayer book may seem too dense. You may lose interest easily and need a framework that sustains your involvement. You might be already familiar with the prayers, but they have become rote for you – you need some new insights.
I’ve had some of the same experiences. I began learning the prayers with an excitement about learning something new, including learning to read Hebrew at the same time. I struggled to follow the service while enjoying its songs and rhythms. Over time I became more comfortable, and began to experience a period of deep engagement with the prayers. I prayed on my own much of the time. When we had the opportunity to pray with a community, on a holiday or special Shabbat, it was glorious.
But that was followed by years of much less attention to prayers, for I was now a working mother with five children. We lived in an active Jewish community but I had so little time, and often just rushed through a few formal prayers. I became interested in Jewish meditation, which helped for a while. Still, over the years my own practice waxed and waned: sometimes I was actively davening every morning, while at other times I was speaking to God less, studying and contemplating more.
My opportunities to teach enriched my own prayers, but I was well aware that for many, many Jews, the prayer book was still opaque. They felt stymied by the language, the length of the prayers, and their own theological questions. I wanted to share my love for the prayers, but I was not sure how to move beyond the existing books and viewpoints. After years of teaching, the weekday morning prayers opened up to me at another level. This book is the result. I’m grateful to my students in tefillah at the Academy for Jewish Religion, California, without whom I might not have persisted in finding new ways of understanding our prayers.

We begin with the consciousness that Jewish prayer is a liturgy, best thought of as a cousin to drama, dance, or symphony. It is not someone’s spontaneous prayer written down for others to imitate. Liturgy is composed, crafted, arranged for a purpose. I like the analogy of drama because I can think of the segments of liturgy as scenes. The comparison also invites me to identify with characters or actions as well as to contemplate ideas and themes.
As a practitioner, you are a performer in the drama. Just as you might learn a part for a Shakespeare play, you will appreciate the liturgical drama more when you have prepared, when you know the whole play from start to finish even though your part seems small. Though some performances will seem just ordinary, there will be moments when you are swept up in the grand movement of it all. Best of all, there’s no audition required; you can join the cast at any time; and it’s the longest running play in the world.
A certain kind of consciousness will develop as you take on this approach to practice: an imaginative interaction with the words of the siddur. Unlike a play that you watch from the audience, much of the liturgical drama goes on in your imagination. Actually, we are using our imaginations with a stage play as well – we “identify” with the characters and our bodies respond with pleasure or sadness or thrill to the action, in empathic imagination. With Jewish prayer, we need to extract the drama from the words before us and carry it along in our minds, as well as attend to our feelings and inner senses.
While that may seem odd at first, think of High Holy Day prayers. There, the drama is fleshed out more fully in the machzor (holiday prayer book), with the conceptual framework of crowning a king on Rosh Hashanah, and the readings about ancient atonement sacrifices on Yom Kippur. A musical score accompanies the congregation, and the cantor sings with great emotion. We are absolutely expected to identify imaginatively with the prospect of being recorded in the Book of Life, and with the sheep that pass before the shepherd in the Unetaneh tokef prayer:

As a shepherd herds his flock, causing his sheep to pass beneath his staff, so do You cause to pass, count, and record, visiting the souls of all living, decreeing the length of their days, . . .

Indeed, many rabbis and teachers insist that koach ha-dimyon, the power of the imagination, is essential to a dynamic spirituality. Guided meditations or visualizations have been used in prayer and in private Jewish spiritual practice for centuries. The words of our prayers often invite the imaginative effort – we almost involuntarily try to imagine unity when we concentrate on the Shema and pronounce the word “echad.” In the spiritual approach proposed in this book, we are applying imagination more consciously, engaging more fully with what is before us in the text.
Using this book fully, then, will require not just reading it beginning to end, but sitting down with the siddur at the same time. I will point to a prayer but not necessarily quote it in its entirety. Rather, I will be calling your attention to things you may not otherwise notice – a word, a phrase, a poetic structure, the interweaving of a whole section of prayers. So it’s best if you have a copy of a traditional siddur at hand and be ready to open it as you read. (I will remind you from time to time.)
When I say “traditional” siddur, I mean an orthodox or conservative siddur that has a full version of the prayers. I will give page numbers for the Koren-Sacks siddur (Ashkenaz) – a very recent version of a traditional prayer book translated by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, former chief rabbi of England, who has a superb command of contemporary English idiom. You can use another siddur; you just will not have the same page numbers. Reform and Reconstructionist siddurim may not give a complete version of the weekday prayer service, or may use a translation that varies so much that it would confuse you as the reader of this book. Nevertheless, you will eventually be able to adapt what you learn to those and many other formats and presentations.
Transmitted in Hebrew, the liturgy carries its own inherent barrier that is sometimes formidable to cross. Fortunately, translations into other languages are available and, in English, they are increasingly accessible and helpful. You do not need to know Hebrew to use this book; when I refer to Hebrew words or phrases, they are transliterated in a manner common to popular Jewish literature rather than scholarly customs. The English translations of the prayers in this book may differ somewhat from the Koren version, as I have sometimes used other sources to capture a certain flavor in the Hebrew. A simple example is that the phrase “You are great” is the most familiar English idiom, but I might choose the Hebrew word order and translate “Great are You.” In some cases a particular choice of a word is intended to bring out the root meaning of a Hebrew word that might not otherwise be obvious. I encourage my students to compare many translations of prayers and I hope you will do the same.
Another issue that arises for Jewish prayers in English is how to translate the Tetragrammaton or four-letter Name of God. Since the King James Version of the (Christian) Bible, a practice has prevailed of substituting the word “Lord.” This actually reflects Jewish practice of substituting “Adonai,” which literally translates as “my Lord.” However, Jews tend not to use “Lord” in actual prayer because to us it sounds Christian. Still, “Adonai” has had, for centuries, the status of a holy name, such that we don’t want to use it too casually. What to do?
I have chosen to write Adonai as the substitute for the four-letter Name when it occurs in prayers, because that is what we would say if we were praying. Most teachers accept that we may say it in practicing reading or studying the siddur as a holy text. In discussing a prayer, you may want to use another term such as “Hashem” (literally, “the name”) in order to preserve the unique status of the name Adonai.
When providing biblical citations, or quoting from another source besides the actual prayers, I have preserved the custom of translating the four-letter Name as “Lord,” since that is how you will usually see it if you go to an English Tanakh or secondary source. With the name Elohim and its variants, (Elohai, Elohenu), even though it is also a holy name, it has long been accepted to translate it simply as “God,” both in prayers and elsewhere.
Prayer is a Jewish spiritual practice – but one may well ask, what is it practice for? There is an answer: it is practice for living a life imbued with depth, awareness, sensitivity, ethical consciousness and compassion – a combination we appropriately label “spirituality.” Growing in depth and breadth of consciousness requires gaining understanding and knowledge. To increase sensitivity, our practice must continually promote humility and openness to the mystery of being. To engage compassion and ethical consciousness, it must increase awareness of the larger wholes of which we are a part. And, as a specifically Jewish spiritual practice, the prayers we say must be grounded in awareness of the interrelationships of our individual selves, our community, God, Torah, and the Jewish people.
Like any form of practice (think of a musical instrument or physical exercise), spiritual practice works best when it is frequent; thus most forms of spiritual practice have a daily component as well as seasons of the year when practice is intensified. It also works best when disciplined in content, yet variable enough – including variations introduced by the practitioner – to avoid boredom. Jewish prayer has all these qualities.
The positive effects of this spiritual practice are innumerable. I invite you to trust, experiment, and enjoy.

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Tamar Frankiel, Ph.D. is a Professor of Comparative Religion at the Academy for Jewish Religion, California. Dr. Frankiel is a leading teacher and writer about Jewish spiritual practice and is best known for her books The Gift of Kabbalah, an introduction to Jewish mysticism and The Voice of Sarah: Feminine Spirituality and Traditional Judaism.

Loving Prayer is a guide written in love – love of prayer and of God and of life in all its manifestations, intimating the emotional and spiritual pathways that thread through the arcs of Jewish prayer practice. A splendid guide!
— Dr. Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, Ph.D. Author of Moses: A Human Life (Yale University Press)

Dr. Tamar Frankiel takes the readers on a journey through many levels of parallel universes, from the four mystical worlds to the inner world of the person who is at prayer. She draws skillfully from the fields of sociology, psychology, drama, and music, while providing an analysis of the prayer text that is crystal-clear and engaging.
— Rabbi Haim Ovadia, Magen David Sephardic Congregation, Rockville, MD

Loving Prayer is a gift for both the beginner and the experienced “pray-er.” It is accessible and illuminating, opening hearts and minds to the treasures that unfold in Jewish liturgy.
— Rabbi Laura Geller, Rabbi Emerita, Temple Emanuel of Beverly Hills, CA

An essential volume for the Jewish spiritual seeker who wishes to participate in Jewish prayer and draw a sense of inner purpose from personal and communal practice.— Cantor Sam Radwine, Cantor Emeritus, Congregation Ner Tamid, Rancho Palos Verdes, CA

Frankiel teaches us to ‘love prayer’, to see and be drawn to its inner beauty, its hidden mystical themes and concealed gems, and to devote ourselves to lifelong knowledge of its depths. I have read many books on prayer; this one I treasure.
— Rabbi Mordecai Finley, Ph.D., Ohr HaTorah Synagogue / Academy for Jewish Religion, Los Angeles

ISBN 9781935604815. Paper. 174 pages. $18.95