Texas Jewish Post (Fort Worth, Tex.), Vol. 46, No. 5, Ed. 1 Thursday, January 30, 1992 Page: 2 of 24
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FO OtUtO 2 TEXAS JEWISH POST, THURSO A Y, JANUARY 30, 1992-IN OUR 46TH YEAR!
If Jews Can't Pray, Blame It
(At Least Partly) on English
“I don't understand how people can pray, really pray, from the
depths of their soul, if they don't have some spark of the sense that
God loves them. I have to believe someone is on the other end
of that wire who cares about me. I don't pray for favors;
I pray to be heard."
By Shammai Engelmayer
| f Jews are having a tough
I time praying, or even discuss-
ing prayer, blame it on the
English language. It is the wrong
language for tefilla, say guest
lecturers who participated in a
recent adult education series,
“Prayer and the Life of the
Soul,” at the Jewish Theological
Seminary of America in New
York City.
“Our attitude toward prayer is
determined by our trying to
practice Judaism in an essen-
tially Christian environment,”
says Rabbi Harold Kushner, au-
thor of When Bad Things Happen
to Good People and Who Needs
God?
“We are living Judaism in
translation, and all kinds of dis-
tortions creep in when you live
Judaism in translation. We talk
about ‘the Grace after Meals,’
which is somehow different from
Birlcat Ha’mazon. We say phy-
lacteries, as if that were less
foreign a word than tefillin.”
“Unconsciously, we introduce
Christian categories of thought
into the way we speak about
Judaism because we speak about
it in translation, in a predomi-
nantly Christian setting,” he
says.
“We have been brainwashed
into the Christian modality that
prayer is the pious thing to do,”
he continues. “We take the word
tefilla and stretch it to cover so
many different phenomena that
things get distorted in the pro-
cess.”
Kushner’s words echoed those
of Rabbi David Wolpe, on the
faculty of the seminary’s Los
Angeles affiliate, the University
of Judaism, and author of the
recently published The Healer of
Shattered Hearts: A Jewish View of
God.
“I envy the fact that an evan-
gelical Christian minister can say
‘God loves you’ and nobody
looks at him like he’s crazy,”
comments Wolpe. “Now we can
say that in Hebrew. We can say
‘Ahava raba ahavtanu, ’ or V’a/z-
avta et Adonai Elohecha. ’ But as
soon as you translate it into
Shammai Engelmayer is the di-
rector of communications at the
Jewish Theological Seminary of
America.
English [“Great is Your love for
us”; “A!nd you shall love the
Lord your God”], we get very
uncomfortable. Partly, this is
because English is a Christian
language, so these concepts have
Christian connotations.
“And yet, I don’t understand
how people can pray, really pray,
from the depths of their souls, if
they don’t have some spark of
the sense that God loves them.
Otherwise, why pray? I have to
believe someone is at the other
end of that wire who cares about
me. I don’t pray for favors; I pray
to be heard.”
Says Kushner, “Prayer is not
begging God. We have confused
God with Santa Claus in Am-
erican culture; we have bought
the Christian notion that prayer
means coming to God with your
wish list and persuading Him
you’ve been a good boy or girl all
year. What is prayer? It is com-
ing into the presence of God and
being changed by the experi-
ence.”
Another problem with prayer,
especially in English, is that
people understand only too well
what is being said — and that
makes them intellectually un-
comfortable.
“Prayer is not talking to God,”
says Kushner. “Prayer is daven-
ing. It is emotional, aesthetic. It
uses words, but it is not intellec-
tual, rational, verbal. Asking:
‘What does a prayer mean?’ is
like asking what a symphony
means or what a flower means.
Prayer doesn’t ‘mean’; it has an
impact on you.”
To Dr. Raymond Scheindlin, a
professor of medieval Hebrew
literature at the seminary and
the author of several books,
including The Gazelle: Medieval
Hebrew Poems on God, Israel and
the Soul, prayer should be ap-
proached the way one would
approach poetry, by leaving rea-
son behind.
“The truth that the poet is
getting at requires that we go
along part of the way,” Scheind-
lin says. “We temporarily adopt
a logically false doctrine in order
to come closer to truth. The
poem is a vehicle for our emo-
tional and intellectual lives.”
Adds Wolpe, “The Bible says,
‘The fool says in his heart: There
is no God.’ Notice where he says
it — in his heart. That’s where
the search for God begins — not
in the brain, but in the heart.
“Why can’t we pray? Because
we don’t know how to sing from
the depths of our souls. I mean,
sing the way the first line of the
An’im Z’mirot hymn tells us to
sing: ‘I will weave songs and
embroider hymns because my
soul yearns for You.’ That’s the
kind of song I mean; the kind of
song that isn’t embarrassed. The
kind of song that reaches out to
God.
“I think anyone who is bound
up, whose spirit has no song,
cannot pray. Such a person can
speak the words, he or she can
fulfill the halachic obligation, but
this person can’t pray.”
Being able to “sing” requires
adopting a concept of God,
Wolpe continues. “So what kind
of God do we need? The God of
the Midrash, the God who is
expressed not in concepts but in
poetry, a God who cares and who
hurts.”
He cites two midrashim. In
one, God walks around the ruins
of the Temple and cries. Th
other tells of Moses’ pain
learning that he will not er
the Promised Land. God miti-
gates that pain by telling Moses
that He personally will bury him.
“What you see is not only the
rabbis’ perception of the un-
fairness of Moses’ plight, but the
sense of God’s caring and inti-
macy,” says Wolpe. “That’s a
God you can pray to, a God you
can open your heart to. Moses’
prayer doesn’t depend on the
granting or not granting. It de-
pends on the listening. Moses
was he rd — and while that
wasn’t enough, it was something.
It was a comfort.”
Prayer also takes many forms,
adds the rabbi. Sometimes, one
is not even aware he or she has
prayed.
“How do you pray when you’re
angry?” asks Kushner. “A col-
league, Rabbi Manuel Saltzman
in Boston, tells the story of the
Yom Kippur War in 1973. The
day after Yom Kippur, a con-
gregant of Rabbi Saltzman’s
made an appointment to see him
and says, ‘Rabbi, when I heard
that the Egyptian army had
overrun the positions on the
Suez Canal and that Israeli sol-
diers, by the dozen, had been
killed, I slammed my mahzor
shut and said: I am not going to
sing the praises of a God who lets
Jewish boys be killed defending
Israel on Yom Kippur. And
three hours later, I was terribly
embarrassed by what I did. How
do I make up for that?’
“Rabbi Saltzman says to him,
‘Your slamming the mahzor shut
was as sincere a prayer as was
offered in this whole synagogue
on Yom Kippur.’
“An angry prayer is a prayer.
A prayer of indignation, a prayer
of protest, is a sincere prayer. At
the back of our soul is the
insistence, as Job says, that God
respects our honesty more than
the conventional pieties, the
flatteries of those who are just
mumbling the Hebrew.”
“You don’t pray so God will
do things for you,” continues
Kushner. “This is how you cope
with the world.” Q
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Wisch, J. A. & Wisch, Rene. Texas Jewish Post (Fort Worth, Tex.), Vol. 46, No. 5, Ed. 1 Thursday, January 30, 1992, newspaper, January 30, 1992; Fort Worth, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth754629/m1/2/: accessed April 18, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; .