People who love the study of Torah are those who are never content to stay in one place, for it is for this purpose that they were created. They know that Torah demands that we keep moving, that we keep turning it over and over, and that we do not stop even for a moment to notice, say, a beautiful tree by the roadside. Prayer, in contrast, is about standing still and looking inward. The central prayer—the one that the rabbis refer to as HaTefilla (the prayer)—is commonly called the Amidah (the “standing prayer”) because it must be recited while standing in place, our feet pressed together in imitation of Ezekiel’s vision of the angels (10b). If I want to daven, I have to wholly inhabit myself and my space. I have to be comfortable enough in my body to sit and stand and bow freely, all without ever stepping out of a very small imaginary circle drawn around my feet. I have to be focused and present and at peace. It reminds me of the way friends describe how they feel when they do yoga, and so a few years ago I signed up for a yoga class in the hope that it might furnish me with the skills to become a better davener.
In my two-month stint as a yogi—alas, that was all it lasted—I came to appreciate the similarities between prayer and yoga, even if I remained hopeless at both. First, prayer, like yoga, is an embodied practice. The prayer service is choreographed: there are times to stand and times to sit, and like the synchronized movements of a yoga class, everyone gets up and down at more or less the same times. While davening is not quite as physically taxing as yoga, it too is a spiritual discipline achieved through physical movement. As such, it requires specific poses and positions—bowing, taking three steps back, lifting our bodies up on our tiptoes three times, resting our head in our hands. The Talmud relates that Rav Sheshet would bend to bow like a reed and then raise himself up like a serpent (Berachot 12b). I don’t think my prayer posture is as dramatic, but I am certainly very aware of my body when I pray. If I feel uncomfortable in my own skin, I find it difficult to sit through services. For many years, I davened in a minyan with hard plastic chairs lined up in rows. Occasionally I would visit a more established synagogue—one that had cushioned seats and a place to rest my siddur in front of me, so I could sit comfortably with my hands at my sides and my siddur at eye level before me. This, I thought, is the right position for prayer.
But even the most comfortable chairs are worthless unless there is a commitment to sit in them regularly, because prayer, like yoga, is a discipline. It wasn’t easy to attend a yoga class several times a week; nor is it easy for anyone to wake up for minyan every morning. The rabbis teach (Berachot 32b) that prayer is one of four activities that require vigorous strength (the others are Torah study, good deeds, and the pursuit of a trade). But regardless of what it takes, there is no substitute for regular practice. I don’t think it is possible to come to synagogue once a year and have an all-time spiritual high. Rather, it is the accumulation of many early mornings, afternoons, and evenings spent in prayer that ultimately results in a moment of transcendence. The eleventh-century poet and philosopher Yehuda HaLevi wrote that “prayer is to the soul what food is to the body.” Just as we are supposed to eat three times a day, so too must we pray three times a day. While I’ve been tempted at times in my life to pray just when the spirit moves me, the effect was something akin to all-day snacking, with nothing filling or fulfilling.
Praying regularly is difficult, in large part because it requires a significant sacrifice of time. If I wanted to pray before writing this chapter today, I would have had to give up twenty minutes of writing. This relationship between prayer and sacrifice as acts of “giving up” dates back at least to the destruction of the Second Temple, when prayer became a substitute for sacrifice, as the Talmud teaches in Berachot (26b). The rabbis insist that regardless of the competing demands on our time, prayer comes first: we learn in Berachot that we should daven before we eat breakfast (10b) and that anyone who takes care of his own needs before praying is regarded as if he has built an idolatrous shrine (14a). Nonetheless, it’s reassuring to me to know that it was not easy for the rabbis either, as reflected by the license they grant to study Torah before praying (Berachot 11b).
When it comes to prioritizing prayer, Daniel is my model. Each morning when he wakes up, he wraps himself in a prayer shawl, puts on tefillin, and stands in prayer—no matter what else he has to do. To some extent this is emblematic of who he is: in all aspects of his life, he puts others first. When he calls his mother, he first wants to hear all about how she is doing, and only then does he tell her anything about our lives. When he walks in the house at the end of the day, he runs over to give each child a hug, and only then takes off his heavy backpack. But I suspect that this is not just about Daniel, and that anyone who follows the Talmud’s injunction to pray before attending to his own needs is more likely to internalize the value of prioritizing the needs of others.
Unlike Daniel, for whom prayer is a regular discipline, I tend to daven most when my days have the least shape because I look to prayer as an organizing principle. When I was in the hospital after giving birth to my children, the days seemed to drag on in an endless cycle of baby feedings and vital sign measurements, so I davened three times a day as a way of remaining cognizant of the passage of time. It was helpful that each service has to be recited at a set time of day, as we know from the first chapter of Berachot, which begins with a discussion about how early one can recite the evening Shema (2a). By davening regularly I remained attuned to the passage of the sun across the sky, even in my windowless hospital room.
I once met a religious family who homeschooled their children. I found the idea fascinating and bombarded them with questions: “How do you decide when the school day begins, given that the kids don’t have to show up at any specific time?” The father looked at me as if the answer were obvious. “We wake up when it is time to say shacharit, and then eat breakfast and start studying.” His response reminded me that prayer can provide the rhythm to our days, punctuating the hours we rise and the hours we lie down and preventing the days from flowing meaninglessly into one another—which is perhaps what the Hebrew poet Leah Goldberg meant when she wrote, “Teach me, my God, to bless and to pray … Lest my day be today like yesterday before / Lest my day be like one unthinking haze.”1
Prayer is an escape from this unthinking haze. If today’s prayer is to be different from yesterday’s, it must be suffused by an intentional awareness of what it is that I am praying for at this particular moment. To pray meaningfully I must be able to identify what is most urgent and important to me and articulate those wishes in the context of the liturgy. For years I prayed that I would marry the right man. I included this prayer in the fourth blessing of the Amidah: “Grace us with knowledge, understanding, and discernment.” I was praying not for this man to land in my life miraculously but for the wisdom to recognize who he was, and who he was not.
I know people who swear by prayer’s efficacy, confident that their prayers have been heard and answered. My friend Rimona resolved on her thirty-fourth birthday that she was going to get married before she turned thirty-five. Each morning she walked to the Kotel and prayed to God that she would meet the man of her dreams. Sure enough, by her thirty-fifth birthday, she was wed. For Rimona, this was proof that prayer “works.” But I suspect it’s more complicated than that. After identifying her deepest aspiration, Rimona was motivated to concentrate all her energies on making that dream come true. Prayer, then, is the language for articulating our dreams—which may explain why the Talmud’s long and fascinating excursus on dream interpretation appears in tractate Berachot. Here the rabbis anticipate Freud in their assertion that “a person is shown in a dream only that which troubles his own heart” (55b), and they go on to give various examples: a person who dreams of a camel has been spared the fate of an early death; one who dreams that his front and back teeth fell out is at risk of losing his sons and daughters; and one who dreams of reciting the Shema will be guaranteed a place in the world to come.
Prayer challenges me to t
hink about what I dream for the world and what I dream for myself. It is a regular reminder of the kind of person I want to be, which in turn inspires me to grow and change. The transformative power of prayer is reflected in the Hebrew word l’hitpalel—to pray—which is in the reflexive form. And yet all too often, transformative prayer seems remote and inaccessible. On trapdoor days, when I wake up sad and despondent and ill-equipped to face the day, I am overcome by how much I need to pray for, yet I’m unable to pull myself together to speak to God. And when life seems rich and full and there is little that feels wanting and even less time to ask for it, I rarely feel inspired to pray, even if I am stable and centered enough to do it. I tell myself that prayer is an insurance policy because you need to pray on the good days, when prayer feels least urgent, so that the channels of communication remain open on the bad days, when prayer is most vital.
The Talmud teaches that “a person is obligated to bless God for the bad just as he blesses God for the good” (54a). And yet it seems clear that we need to invoke God when times are bad; often we cry out instinctively to God in such moments. It is when the going is good, too, that we must remember to cultivate gratitude lest we come to think of our blessings as our rightful due, or as the work of our hands alone. In the poem “Sunday Morning,” Wallace Stevens writes about the “complacencies” of a woman who chooses to stay home in her nightgown rather than go to church and pray. She views the world as “unsponsored,” disconnected from the divine source of blessing.2 But the rabbis maintain that everything in our lives is sponsored by God, as if an infinite number of invisible kite strings connect all that we hold most dear to the One who is on high.
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I felt most aware of divine sponsorship in the early years of my marriage to Daniel, when I could hardly get over my joyous surprise that such a man had landed in my life, and had stayed. I identified with Isabel Dalhousie in Alexander McCall Smith’s novel The Careful Use of Compliments, who also got married against all odds. Isabel would look at her beloved Jamie and wonder if he were really truly hers. So too I would look at Daniel as he got out of the shower at night, a towel wrapped around his waist and drops of water glistening on his shoulders, and wonder: Are you really mine? Is it really my good fortune to be with you? Can there really be someone who loves me, with all my foibles and with all my flights of fancy? It did not seem possible that such supreme joy could be my rightful lot. I found myself becoming nostalgic for the present, which seemed already fleeting at the very moment it alighted on my shoulder. I worried that Daniel—the present of his presence—could not possibly be real, and that I would wake up one day and discover it had all fled like a fanciful dream, flapping its dazzling wings and taking off, never to return again.
Isabel Dalhousie ultimately tells herself that no, Jamie is not hers: “She realized that Jamie was on loan to her, as we are all to one another, perhaps.”3 Her conclusion reminds me of a story about the Talmudic sage Rabbi Meir and his wife Beruriah. The Midrash on Proverbs (31) tells of how Beruriah discovered that their beloved sons died suddenly on the Sabbath, but she hid them from her husband so as not to cause him distress on Shabbat. She laid their bodies on the bed, spread a sheet over them, and told her husband that they had gone to the study house. After he made the Havdalah prayer, she posed this question to him: if someone were to lend her a pledge and later come back to claim it, should she return it? Rabbi Meir responded that of course she should return it. Beruriah then took her husband by the hand and led him to their bedroom, where she removed the sheet covering the bodies of their sons. When Rabbi Meir began to wail, Beruriah reminded him of his own assertion that one must return a pledge to its rightful owner. Her husband replied, “God has given, and God has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.”
Rabbi Meir and Beruriah realize that everything in the world belongs to God, and we can at best merit to be custodians. This is a mentality that underlies all of tractate Berachot, since it is only when we realize that everything comes from God that we feel the impulse to bless. In the sixth chapter of the tractate, which deals with the blessings over various foods, Rabbi Hanina bar Papa asserts, “All who benefit from this world without first saying a blessing are as if they are stealing from the Holy One Blessed Be He” (35b). Just a few lines earlier, the Talmud tries to reconcile two conflicting biblical verses: How can it be that “the heavens are the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, the earth and its inhabitants” (Psalms 24:1) and yet “the heavens belong to God and the earth was given to men” (Psalms 115:16)? Does the earth belong to man or God? Rabbi Levi explains that everything in the world belongs to God until we make a blessing, but that once we bless something, it is on loan to us.
Paradoxically, it was only when I adopted the notion of love on loan that I could allow myself to trust enough to be able to love Daniel without being tortured by the fear of losing him. Only when I realized that he was not mine forever could I revel in the fact that he was mine for now. During our first year of marriage I woke up before him each morning and watched the sun stream in through the windows and dance across his still-shut eyelids, pinching myself to make sure he was real. I thanked God not just for restoring my soul to my body, as the Talmud mandates (Berachot 60b), but for restoring Daniel to me. For there he was, here with me on yet another blessed day!
Grateful for each day, I came to appreciate that nothing beautiful lasts forever. An inherent characteristic of beauty is that it unfolds in time: a real flower is more beautiful than a plastic one in part because the real flower will ultimately wither. This is the meaning behind a story about Rabbi Elazar and Rabbi Yohanan in tractate Berachot (5b). The Talmud relates that when Rabbi Yohanan came to visit Rabbi Elazar on his deathbed, the former pulled up his sleeve and a brilliant light fell from his arm. Rabbi Elazar was moved to tears by his visitor’s beauty, which is elsewhere compared to a glass of pomegranate seeds in the sunlight; this is one of several occasions in which the Talmud describes and remarks upon male beauty. Rabbi Yohanan then asked: Why are you crying? Rabbi Elazar answered: I am crying for this beauty that will be ravaged by dust.
As this story teaches, evanescence is beauty’s hallmark. Or, in the words of Wallace Stevens in “Sunday Morning,” “Death is the mother of beauty.”4 A thing of beauty is not, in fact, a joy forever. It is the knowledge that the object of our love, in all its beauty, is not guaranteed to be ours forever that renders our love so precious and so prized. We are on loan to one another, which means that sometimes we must acknowledge that “God has given, and God has taken away.” We live in spite of those moments. But there are also the moments we live for, when the impulse for blessing comes from another acknowledgment, uttered in wonder and incredulity: God has taken away, but God has also given.
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It is this wondrous acknowledgment of blessing that inspires the prayer of the biblical figure of Hannah, whom the rabbis frequently invoke in the fifth chapter of Berachot. In the book of Judges, Hannah offers two very different kinds of prayer. First, she prays tearfully for a child of her own each year when she comes to bring sacrifices at the altar in Shiloh with her husband, her husband’s other wife, Peninah, and Peninah’s children. Her distress is so great that the high priest Eli mistakes her for a drunkard, and she must rally to her own defense: “I am not drunk, but I have been pouring out my heart to God. Do not mistake me for someone worthless. I am praying out of my great anguish and distress” (I Samuel 1:15–16). Later, when her son Samuel is born, Hannah finds herself at the opposite end of the emotional spectrum, praying out of joy and gratitude.
For the rabbis, Hannah is invoked as a model of how to pray. Yet this invocation is surprising because it follows on the heels of the Mishnah’s injunction that a person must pray in a “reverent frame of mind” and must countenance no interruption. Hannah meets neither of these criteria. She does not seem particularly reverent. On the contrary, the Talmud relates that she speaks to God with the utmost chutzpah: “Master of the Universe, nothing tha
t you have created in a woman is for naught: Eyes to see, ears to hear, a nose to smell, a mouth to speak, hands to work, legs to walk, breasts to nurse. But these breasts that you placed on my heart—what use are they? Give me a son that I may nurse him!” (31b). Nor does she pray without interruption. When Eli asks if she is drunk, she stops praying to defend herself, once again contravening the rabbinic injunction.
Perhaps the rabbis nonetheless invoke Hannah as a role model because of her ability to pray through both her pain and her joy. When she speaks to Eli, Hannah describes herself as a “woman of hardened spirit” (I Samuel 1:15). She has been hardened by the agony of her years of childlessness as year after year she has endured both the taunts of her rival Peninah and her husband’s inability to comfort her. Yet the very same biblical verse that describes her bitterness also tells of how she cried to God: “Hannah was bitter of heart, and she prayed to God, weeping all the while” (I Samuel 1:10). In spite of her bitterness, Hannah does not become hardened past the point of tears, nor does she renounce all relationship with a God who created a world with so much suffering. Though all she can do is rage at God, she continues to engage Him. Perhaps she knew, as the rabbis go on to say later in this same chapter in Berachot (32b), that even when the gates of prayer are locked, the gates of tears remain open, as if tears oil the hinges. And while the gates may open just a very tiny bit, miraculously that proves to be enough: God opens Hannah’s womb and she conceives and bears a son, who inspires her prayers of thanksgiving.
If All the Seas Were Ink Page 22