Focusing on prayer: a curious irony

I have generally enjoyed the formal prayer routine prescribed by Jewish law, finding it both a useful way to clarify my thoughts and feelings and to utilise my three regular daily personal audiences with God. Usually I can focus on my prayers, on their meaning for me, for Jewish communities worldwide and for the world at large. There are however exceptions.

Earlier this week I found myself distracted and sailed through several of the 19 blessings in the weekday Amidah before realising that my mind was quite elsewhere. Where had it gone? By a strange irony the subject of my wandering mind was a search for the answer to an age-old question: how much thought and intention—if any—is needed if the words of a prayer are to be properly regarded as prayer?

The sages of the Mishnaic period were aware of this problem. At Avot 2:13 Rabbi Shimon ben Netanel urges us not to make our prayers keva(literally “fixed”), adding that they should instead be heartfelt supplications that are designed to trigger God’s mercy. This theme is echoed at Berachot 4:4 where Rabbi Shimon ben Netanel’s contemporary and fellow-student Rabbi Eliezer teaches that a prayer that is keva is not a heartfelt supplication.

Does this mean that there is no value in a prayer that is uttered from the lips only, rather than from the heart?

We are probably all familiar in our own experience of words that are spoken without feeling but which are essential to life in civilised society. Think of a situation in which a parent intervenes between two squabbling siblings or a teacher separates two pupils who are slugging away at each other. The prescribed solution to the dispute often requires one, or even two, of the combatants, to say the magic word “sorry” before they are absolved from their part in the spat and allowed to resume their daily lives. We all know in our hearts that children who are forced to say “sorry” rarely if ever do so because they are actually sorry, and we know this because we used to be children ourselves. The important thing is that the word “sorry” is spoken, regardless of the intention with which it is uttered. And now that we are grown-ups, we ask God for forgiveness three times a day in our prayers with possibly only as much sincerely-meant feeling as we did when we were children.

The gap between external conduct and inward appearance is reflected elsewhere in Avot. Shammai (Avot 1:15) tells us to greet other people with a cheerful countenance. This teaching presumably applies more to greeting those folk whom we don’t like, or at least to whom our feelings are neutral, rather than to our friends whom we would likely greet with a warm smile. And at Avot 3:16 Rabbi Yishmael tells us to greet other people with happiness. This is something internal, a feeling that we must learn to cultivate when we meet other humans who are created in God’s image. Ideally, we should feel happiness when meeting anyone and everyone but, when we can’t muster that feeling, we should at least put on a brave face and give them a smile.

Returning to prayer, we see that the same bifurcated approach exists in our own tradition. As Rabbi Chaim Volozhiner points out in his Nefesh HaChaim, one approach is to hold that the most important thing is to cultivate the right level of understanding of the words and the appropriate degree of sincerity of thought. If not, the prayer is empty and valueless. The other approach is to accept that the words of the template of the Amidah prayer, so carefully chosen and loaded with meaning by the Men of the Great Assembly, have a power and a cosmic significance of their own, a power that transcends man’s thoughts. All that need be done is to say the words.

Happily, it is possible both to vest one’s words with personal meaning and feeling and to acknowledge their inherent power, but we should not resign ourselves to a feeling of despair and believe that, if we do not manage to articulate each word from the bottom of our hearts and with full understanding, we have wasted our time.