Prayer

Prayer is not easy. Sure, some times it is more natural, or environment is more conducive to the kind of focus that makes prayer efficacious and affecting, but it is never easy. I know this and I don't expect ease of others because it is is easy for me. It isn't. So I don't.

In Judaism, there is a built in tension. Tefillah, prayer, is designed as a communal exercise of individual devotion. Even for those sections that are sung with a group, ultimately, prayer is a private and lonely. It is scary to have to isolate the self and look inward, find your own identity and meaning in the words. It certainly it easier to be subsumed by the group, joining in song and tapping into the shared feeling. But that, then, loses the true power of prayer.

Prayer is about joining in the group but about assuming singular responsibility for your own thoughts and actions and that's frightening. We stand in front of the king of kings on our own, not as one of a choir, hiding behind the power of the masses. We are seen for who we, individually, are and that requires that we come to terms with who we are first. We have to wrestle with the language and the pronunciation. We are responsible to understand meaning and make the connections to our own thoughts. We have to muster our own strength and infuse our ritual with significance, day in and day out. And we run the risk not just of losing that self and only reciting words by rote, but of finding that link and then losing it by repetition.

To say the same thing on most every day and still be able to rally the strength to find difference and relevance is a further obstacle. How can we pray for mercy, peace, intelligence and happiness yet again when we sense no difference between yesterday, today and probably tomorrow?

Now we are adding in prayers asking God to help release the hostages. One hundred and one days and it is becoming the new normal. How can we get ourselves to feel each day as day one and not day 101? How can we tap into the fright, sadness and bleak reality others deal with as new each and every waking moment? How can we stop ourselves from adding prayers for hostages to the pile of things we say while we are waiting for a response to our last text to anyone else? We are so connected externally when it comes to day-to-day things that we let prayer be ONLY internal and we set a low standard for ourselves so the internal can pass without notice because we demand less of our own performance. We save our empathy and comments for a video or a meme avoiding the pressure to look inward and find a bridge between ourselves and those who are truly suffering. Prayer is doubly scary -- we are afraid to put ourselves in a position to be truly introspective and painfully honest with ourselves and we are also afraid to acknowledge that we have become blase about our personal expressions of prayer.

So we talk to others. We stand in awkward silence. We mumble words and avoid thinking about their meaning or consequence. We sing songs lost in the tune and unaware of the words. We think of everything but ourselves and our relationship to others. And we call it prayer, watching the clock annoyed that we will have to do it all again really soon.