Even on those days when the Torah is not read, the basic prayer service contains many quotes from the Torah. Particularly in Shacharit we find large excerpts, even whole paragraphs, from Torah and Talmud. Learning is a form of prayer; moreover, one is commanded to study Torah every day. For those who could not find another time, the Rabbis inserted these texts into the prayer service so as to enable people to fulfill the requirement of Talmud Torah, the daily study of Torah.
The Minchah service is much briefer than Shacharit. It includes the Shmoneh Esreh, but not the Shema. The Maariv, again, has both foci, with the accompanying prayers varied somewhat. Just as in Shacharit we take note of the day, so in Maariv we make special requests and offer words of gratitude that are related to the night. Unlike the Shmoneh Esreh of Shacharit and Minchah, the Shmoneh Esreh of Maariv is not repeated by the shaliach tzibbur, the prayer leader. It is dark out and people must hurry home.
Each of these three prayers must be said in its appropriate time slot. If one misses a prayer, it cannot be recited later. I find this fixed-time concept to be useful in ways the Rabbis never would have imagined. Moshe, also known around these parts as “the day sleeper,” has over the years frustrated the efforts of nagging parents, first-period schoolteachers, waiting friends, not to mention numerous alarm clocks, flashing lights, blaring radios—until we finally discovered the key. A gentle whisper of, “Moshe, it’s almost ‘oh’ver z’man kriat Shema’” (the end time for saying the morning prayers), and miraculously, the body would stir.
A word about position and posture. Some prayers are recited sitting, some standing. The parts of the service that can be recited only in a minyan—such as Borchu, Kedusha (recited during the reader’s repetition of the Shmoneh Esreh), Kaddish, and Torah ceremonies—are recited standing. So are other prayers that have an added measure of holiness to them. We also alternately stand and sit at set times to keep the momentum going.
The Shmoneh Esreh, the eighteen benedictions, is recited silently, standing, facing Jerusalem, toward the spot where the Holy Temple once stood. Before we begin the Shmoneh Esreh, we take three small steps backward, bow left, right, and center, and then take three steps forward again—to accentuate our standing in the presence of the Lord of the universe. When we conclude the Shmoneh Esreh, we similarly “bow out.”
Jews never kneel, except at special moments of the Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur liturgies, as ancient Jews did in the Holy Temple on Yom Kippur. However, there are certain points in the liturgy where we do bend the knee and bow gently (or deeply for those less inhibited) from the waist.
Knowing where to stand or sit or bow comes from experience. Most prayer books do not instruct the petitioner at what points to stand or sit. The beginner would do well to take his/her siddur to someone knowledgeable to mark off the changes in posture.
A most remarkable thing about the prayer of Orthodox Jews is that every member of the congregation prays. There is no watching or waiting for someone else to do it. What the rabbi is required to pray so is the least of his congregants.
We begin the day with the Modeh Ani, giving thanks for the soul restored:
Modeh ani lefanecha, melech chai v’kayam, sheh’heh’ch’ehzarta be nishmati b’chemla. Rabbah emunatecha.
I give thanks to you, Ruler of life and everlasting, Who, in mercy, has returned my soul to me. Our trust in You is great.
We close our day with the Shema, affirming our belief in one God, our commitment to love God, fulfill the commandments, study the Torah, and pass on the chain of tradition:
Shema yisrael, Adonai Elohainu Adonai ehad. Baruch shem k’vod malchuto l’olam va-ed. V’a-havta et Adonai Elohecha b’chol I’vavcha uv-chol naf-sh’cha uv-chol m’odecha. V’hayu hadvarim ha-aileh asher anochi m’tzav-cha ha-yom al I’vavecha, v’sheenan-tam I’vanecha v’dee-barta bam, b’sheev-t’cha b’vaitecha uv-lech-t’cha va-derech, uv-shach-b’cha uv’kumecha. Uk-shartam l’ot al yadecha, v’hayu I’totafot bayn aynecha uch-tavtam al mezuzot baytecha u-vish-arecha.
Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One. And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your might. And these words which I command you this day shall be on your heart. You shall teach them to your children, and you shall speak of them when you sit at home and when you go out on the road, when you lie down and when you rise up. And you shall bind them as a sign upon your arm and they shall be as frontlets [tefillin] between your eyes and you shall write them on the doorposts [mezuzot] of your house and on your gates.
Even those who have recited the Shema as part of the Maariv service will recite it again at bedtime; and certainly those who have not said the Maariv, such as most women and children, will recite the Shema before retiring.
One of the most precious moments of Jewish parents and children is the nighttime recitation of the Shema. Each night, as we put our young children to bed, the last thing we do is to sing this prayer with them, or to listen as they sing it aloud in our presence. Surely, it changes their lives; surely, it deepens the bond between parents and children.
WOMEN AND LITURGY
As I’ve said elsewhere in this book, no system is perfect. That is certainly true as regards women and liturgy. Indeed, this has been the most difficult chapter for me to write. On the one hand, I have described the specialness of Jewish prayer and the strength it brings to the individual; on the other, at many steps along the way, I have been tempted to add, “but not for women” or “women don’t do this.”
In Orthodox Judaism, prayer has tended to be a man’s thing. What’s more, although some have begun to probe the implications of different roles for men and women in liturgy, most feel rather comfortable with the status quo. Some of my best and deepest prayer experiences have come from watching the men in my family pray their daily prayers. When I walk into a darkened room, and find Moshe reciting the Maariv by heart, and with intense concentration, it moves me greatly. And I’m not sure why, but one of my morning thrills is to watch my husband put on tallit and tefillin. And in the album of my mind I hold scenes of Yitz and our boys daavening at the edge of a beach in Dahab, Sinai, with a group of Israeli soldiers he had just rounded up; or awakening in a hotel in Puerto Rico to find Yitz on the terrace daavening into the sunrise. For some reason these are all romantic memories for me; a mixture of faith and sexuality, and at times a sense of nearness to God.
By and large, Orthodox women do not seem to be much exercised about this relative lack of participation and performance. Most women take in stride the fact that this significant area of a Jew’s life—daily prayer—is experienced only vicariously, if at all. Interestingly, the majority of women do recite the Sabbath and holiday prayers (which we are not formally obligated to do), but not weekday prayer (to which technically we are obligated). And for various reasons throughout our history, we have generally tended to consider ourselves devout, observant Jews, members in good standing, even without all that daily prayer.
Nor are women to be blamed for this lapse, for it is in great measure a function of conditioning and low communal expectations. Women are halachically exempt from certain time-bound positive commandments, and this exemption has had a domino effect on all aspects of women’s prayer. Women are not counted in a prayer quorum; ten men make a minyan—not women. These are among the factors that have suppressed an instinct that does not develop or flower, as I said earlier, all by itself.
Prayer is a mystery to human beings. A thousand questions spring to mind. Is there a connection between ethics and prayer? Between fortune and prayer? On the High Holidays, we often repeat the phrase, “Repentance, prayer, and righteousness remove the evil decree.” Yet, who can know? Who can measure the efficacy of prayer, or the rewards of prayer?
In 1980, a study on longevity was done by medical researchers in Israel. They discovered that prayer in a daily minyan was significantly correlated to longer life and fewer heart attacks. Was it God’s reward for this expression of faithfulness and lov
e or was it, as the medical researchers speculated, not the content of prayer, but rather that in these few moments of community prayer each day, the supplicants could disengage and relax from wordly concerns and immediate pressures?
These are questions whose answers are not given to human documentation. There can be no definitive proofs of the efficacy of prayer.
However, one thing I do know: that prayer orients a person to life in a special way. Let me illustrate with a story about my father:
In 1973, my brother-in-law, age forty-three, recuperating from hepatitis, suffered a massive heart attack. Fortunately, it happened in New Orleans, twenty minutes from one of the best-equipped heart hospitals in the world, for by the time he reached that hospital his heart had stopped altogether. Several months later, he had recuperated sufficiently to undergo open-heart surgery—successful, but not without its painful aftereffects. During the next few years, my sister’s family sustained other serious illnesses, and a robbery, and a fire which completely gutted their home and destroyed all of their belongings.
A year after the fire, one week before they were to move back into their rebuilt home, the fire department called them in the middle of the night to tell them that the house had burned down again.
My sister and I talked for a long while that morning, and in a moment of despair she said to me, “Somebody up there just doesn’t like us.” Feeling equally sour about what Life had served up to them those past five years, I said to her, “I know just what you mean, Judy. I was having the same thoughts myself.”
Later that morning I spoke to my father, anticipating the worst, since my mother had reported to me earlier that he was crying during Shacharit. My father was subdued, but he was far from crushed. He said, “You know, all morning when I was daavening, I couldn’t help thinking over and over again, Chasdei hashem ki lo tamnu*—Once again, they were saved. …”
CHAPTER · 5
PARENTING
AND EDUCATION
Three women are sitting and chatting. The first one sighs a deep sigh. “Oy vey iz mier,” she says. The others nod their heads and one replies in a drained voice, “I have no more strength left.” The third one listens a moment, shakes her head from side to side, and says, “Tze, tze, tze.” Suddenly the first one straightens her shoulders, turns to her companions, and says, “Now, my dears, we really must stop. We promised ourselves not to talk about the children today.”
To be an Orthodox Jewish parent is at once the most difficult and the easiest task in the world.
Difficult, because there are so many additional responsibilities. Beyond feeding, clothing, sheltering, and training, beyond middle-class necessities such as play group, puppet shows, summer camps, braces, museum visits, piano lessons and a college degree—there is a vast normative system to be taught, Jewish identity to be transmitted, communal responsibility (yes, fifteen-year-olds understand that concept well) to be implanted, and the expectations of generations to be passed along.
Easy, because some of these clearly defined “extras” provide the structure and direction that parents need for parenting as much as children need for growing. Easy, because the “over and beyond” responsibilities help everything else fall into place. Easy, because faith and ritual, tradition and community are all very natural components of the process of growing up. Easy, because tradition confirms in a hundred ways what unadorned instinct knows—that children are our greatest blessing, our real wealth, our finest jewels. They are more precious to us than our own lives, and, feeling that way, we understand how to order our priorities. What some might consider sacrifice or burden is what a traditional Jew understands to be the natural way of parents and children.
What are the responsibilities of a parent?
The first obligation of Jewish parents to their children is to have them! To give them life. The very first commandment in the Torah is, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth” (GEN. 1:28). Throughout history, Jews understand these words as blessing and not merely command. Many a Jewish conversation in history went like this: “How many children/grandchildren have you?” “Three/six/fifteen, ken yirbu” (“May the number be increased”).
Even today, when alternate value systems often put “having children” pretty far down the list, or sometimes not on the list at all, most traditional Jewish families still put it at the top. To be sure, things have changed somewhat even among Orthodox Jews. Two decades ago, if a couple didn’t have children by the second or third year of their marriage, friends and relatives would automatically assume the problem was a medical one. Recently, I overheard an Orthodox rebbetzin (rabbi’s wife) say to her granddaughter sometime around the latter’s second anniversary, “Don’t rush things. You still have what to do with your life!” Twenty years ago, such a forthright bubbe would have asked her daughter, “Nu? Any good news from Rachel?” Yes, things have changed. Like other women, traditional Jewish women take advanced degrees, become professionally trained, delay childbearing. Still … an Orthodox family without children? Not if it could be otherwise.
The second obligation is that a child honors his/her parents. Honor, reverence, even fear (see LEV. 19:3): these are the underlying sentiments a child should feel and be guided by. But the obligation really falls on the parents, for who else can teach a child to respect and revere other than the parents themselves! Love comes naturally, but respect must be taught. Orthodox Jews take the mitzvah of honoring one’s parents with great seriousness.
When I was growing up, I remember my parents pulling out, at appropriate times, the catch phrase: kibbud av v’em (the honor of a father and mother). Those three words were more powerful than fifty speeches on the subject. If I stepped too far out of line in back talk, it was kibbud av v’em; when my father wanted us to do something special that was beyond the range of a child’s obligations, he would say, “Who would like a mitzvah (of kibbud av v’em)?” The Talmud teaches us that honor is manifested in all sorts of little acts: Do not sit in a parent’s seat; do not stand in his/her spot; do not speak in his/her place.
Kibbud av v’em extended to grandparents, of course, but somehow it rippled to include all adults. When my mother taught us, as young children, to give up a bus seat to an adult, it was not only for one who was elderly or frail; we were taught to stand for anyone who looked like an adult. Somehow, it fit into the context of showing deference to one’s elders. I finally reached my own maturity when I became pregnant with our first child—and stopped giving up my seat to anyone who had one more wrinkle in his/her skin than I.
And, if kibbud av v’em included adults in general, it certainly applied to one’s teachers. I remember a mock wedding our junior-high-school class staged. We showered confetti on the teacher as he walked into the classroom, for which he thundered at us, “You girls will lose your place in the world to come!” He knew whereof he spoke: that is the punishment reserved for those who fail to honor their parents, and by extension, their teachers. In our children’s yeshiva high schools, this very day, all the students stand in respect as the rabbi-dean enters the room.
Kibbud av v’em sets the tone for the entire relationship between parents and children. Implicit in this is a concept of inequity, that is, a healthy distinction between parents and children. The Torah—and the tradition—never intended it to be a relationship of equals. While there were checks on parental exploitation of this imbalance, there was never any doubt as to who played what roles. The underlying principle of unequals has large and, I think, positive consequences for family relationships today where sometimes parents abdicate their responsibility too soon or too much. By saying “Honor your father and mother,” and not “Love your parents,” as it said “Love your God,” the Torah in effect was saying to the Jewish parent: your primary responsibility is to be a parent and your secondary responsibility is to be a pal. This might not be true for every last parent and child, but it does hold true for most.
It’s not always as easy as it sounds. Especially since we teach our chil
dren to think independently—beginning with the diaper crowd. Especially with bright children who know—almost instinctively—how to argue, cajole, and sometimes manipulate parents whom they love dearly and who love them even more. Orthodox Jewish parents are no different from other contemporary parents who are swept up in the constantly changing theories of child psychology. Despite the fact that we have come to understand a thing or two about structure and limits, we also feel torn between doing that which makes our beloved children feel happy, contented, and our pals—and doing the other which is often best for them. So the commandment that children “honor” is a helpful reminder all around that a bit of distance between parents and children can be quite sound.
I try not to use it as a crutch or a guilt trip, but I do find myself at times saying kibbud av v’em in one form or another. “Is that the way you show respect for your mother? father?” serves two functions: it corrects the immediate behavior and, without even bringing it up for debate, it reminds the children that there is a hierarchy here. Deep down, that sense of unequals makes them feel good about themselves; oddly enough, it gives them a sense of self. Even though our children—and most children—are very free-spirited by nature, nevertheless they like to know that there is a certain order to their lives, a structure within which they must function, a backdrop against which to test and define themselves.
Honor, fear, and reverence, then, are not only important structural components of a relationship whose natural base is love, they are also the optimal mode of discipline. For tradition cautions moderation in using physical force: “If you must hit, then hit only with a shoelace,” sums it up quite well indeed (BAVA BATRA 21A). There was the recognition that sometimes a child needs physical force, but a parent should use it sparingly. Inequity does not mean indignity, honor does not mean a lack of mutual respect, and hierarchy does not mean a trampling of the spirit. Hardly ever does one hear of child abuse in a religious Jewish home. From the tradition we learn that even with the worst kind of child, the errant and wayward son who technically was subject to capital punishment (Jewish tradition informs us that there never actually was such a case), parents could not take punitive measures in their own hands. It became a matter of communal discipline.
How to Run a Traditional Jewish Household Page 16