May 2009 • Sivan, 5769 www.kolotchayeinu.org

congregation kolot chayeinu • • voices of our lives

I’ve got my siddur. check. I’ve turned to the announced page. check.

If I read the page, I’m reciting. When I examine the text, I’m studying. If I listen to the cantor lead, I am audience. When I join in with the congre-gation, I am singing. But praying? What to do?….What to do?

I am an arch-er and my bow floats before me. This prayerbook is a quiver but its pages are dull arrows. They are not yet mine.

I must taste a word touch a note borrowed from my neighbor and rip that page with my teeth to own them and their succulent marrow

And when with them, I lick, stir, pinch, twist, stroke, suck, or hum, snort, drag flick, chew, gnash, nudge swallow, shove, sway, spew, breathe, heave, hiss, hug

lift, blow, choke, or sigh

they do sharpen they can move they might rise and maybe maybe even fly from my mouth, my bowstring, my heart. and I will have become pray-er.

I am an arch-er who with will and with spirit loads an arrow and aims for myself, for pray-er.

BARUCH blah blah blah la la la UNIVERSE oy la la blah oy blah SHALOM la blah blah AMEN

Leaving the PageEDDY Ehrlich

Leaving the Page ............................. 1From the Rabbi ................................ 2Tachlit ............................................... 3Sincerity ........................................... 4‘We Shall Do and We Shall Hear’ Movement and Prayer ...................... 5Good Vibrations ................................ 6Siddur 2.0 ......................................... 7Prayer in Margins and and the Pathways to Prayer ..........8-9

Why I Stopped Praying and Started Again ................................. 10Blackbirds ...................................... 11Traveling Man ................................. 12Why I Don’t Pray ............................. 13Lost and Found .............................. 14Fruit Flies – A Prayer for Birkat HaChamah ..................................... 14The Predicament of Prayer ............ 15On Being Called for an Aliyah ........ 15

Elijah the Prophet being fed by ravens from "Descriptive catalogue of a collection of objects of Jewish ceremonial Objects"

in this issue

2 V O I C E S

FROM THE RABBIDear Friends,

How can any siddur – any written prayerbook – encompass all that we want prayer to do? Any prayer or song or ritual moment or word of Torah or outstretched hand may be deeply moving to any person sitting in the sanctuary at any time during any Shabbat service. I smile to look out at the congregation and see the faces – many kinds of people, some deep in thought, some worn with care, some alive in love or friendship, some seeking comfort or wisdom or connection or a new thought, some bored, some sleepy, some knowing what our next word will be and some awash in confusion.

When Kolot began, we did not have any formal prayer. We had monthly meet-ings that included Torah study and planning for what we would eventually do. When we began to meet as a fledgling community, we started with Shabbat dinner, which included the Shabbat blessings, songs and music and stories. In September of that year (1993), we opened a tiny Children’s Learning Program. I was frankly more enamored of Torah study than of prayer, believing with Dr. Louis Finkelstein that “when you pray, you speak to God. When you study, God speaks to you.” I was also hoping to develop a com-munity of non-formal Jewish learning and strong community connections, based in a Kolot-owned and operated café. We spoke of prayer services happening informally in that dreamed-of café, but did not place much emphasis on them.

But soon we began holding Shabbat morn-ing Torah study, and it felt wrong to do that without some prayers surrounding our learn-ing. The prayer grew as people wanted bless-ings that addressed their lives, joys and fears and then as the mourners’ kaddish seemed necessary. Then it began to seem odd not to begin with some morning prayers after our customary blessing for food. (We always began with food and still do, and I remain convinced that there are few better ways to make a tran-sition from the workaday world to the world of intentional community, prayer and study.)

So it was that the first of several Kolot cut-and-paste siddurim were born, along with holiday celebration booklets and song sheets. Some long-time members are still nostalgic for those booklets, remembering, I think, the joy of a small circle of prayer in which there were no strangers for long and prayers and blessings really were directed at each individual.

Those booklets seem overly sparse to me now – in need of great-er choice, more tradition, prayers for many occasions, and songs.

And though the smaller gathering is still a joy at Kabbalat Shabbat, Shabbat morning services have grown too large to fit in a circle. This larger and more diverse congregation expresses many needs: different God language, clear introductions for newcomers to Jew-ish prayer, enough tradition and Hebrew for those with background and skill and notes for everyone to enrich our understanding.

A few years ago, Kolot graduated from cut-and-paste siddurim when we were invited to be one of many draft-using sites for the Reform movement’s Siddur-in-development, Mishkan Tefila. A group of us met to give feedback to those who created what is now

the finished siddur. It was a good step up for our congregation, but two things made it clear that we needed to evolve yet again: The books began to fall apart! And they too began to seem a bit skimpy: Why didn’t it have songs? Some ver-sions included the full Sh’ma and others did not; ditto for the full haftarah blessings. It was time to explore our next step.

And so we find ourselves in the spring of 2009 (5769). After analyzing five siddurim that had potential to meet Kolot’s many needs, the

Siddur Selection Committee chose three siddurim to explore in more depth. Each

Shabbatot, for two months each, whenever there is not a B’nai Mitzvah, we are using each “candidate” Siddur. We have recruited a large feedback team that has volunteered to pay special attention and fill out feedback forms. After their feedback and more mulling by the congregation as a whole, we hope to arrive at consensus about which book to select.

This is a major step for Kolot Chayeinu. For the first time we will be purchasing a new, hardcover siddur for our community. We hope it will enhance and enrich our prayer and last for many years. But none of us have any illusion that a prayerbook creates prayer on its own, especially not the deeply felt prayer and song we strive to create.

Communal prayer is a complex dance or play or opera, involving many participants, many words, a lot of music, strong and subtle symbols, and in the background the unfolding story of the congregation. The siddur – any siddur – can only be what its name implies: an order, the structure that holds us all in the dance that is our prayer. It helps to know what prayer may come next, but no book can say

how I will feel saying that prayer on that Shabbat, or how it will be sung or whether we will stand or sit or dance or stamp our feet or hold a hand as we do it. The siddur is not a script, it is an outline and “aleinu” – it is up to us – each of us - to fill that outline in every

continued on page 12

CCommunal prayer

is a complex dance

...involving many

participants...and in

the background the

unfolding story of

the congregation.

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Photo courtesy of Ellen Lippmann

3 V O I C E S

“

sincerityBY MiriaM attia

During the reception after I became a Bat Mitzvah, I received several versions of the following compliment:

“You’re so sincere when you pray!” I didn’t know how to respond.

The first thing that almost flew out of my mouth was, “Aren’t you?” If I had inad-vertently shown myself to be more sincere than other people who’d presumably been developing their praying skills far longer than I, did that mean I’d hit the ceiling early? That whatever prayer-sincerity I’d developed was as much as I could ever hope to have? Was all the challenge gone from Judaism, just when it was supposed to be beginning?

The next thing I wanted to say was, “That’s what you think.” I had devoted a good deal of time learning to chant the prayers and the parsha fluently and clearly with no mistakes. I loved doing it, but there was a big difference between polished pre-sentation and actually meaning what I said. I had studied the meanings of the prayers, sure, but they weren’t mine; I wasn’t exactly pouring out the deepest yearnings of my heart as I progressed through the Shabbat morning liturgy. I didn’t want to deceive people into thinking I was more sincere than I really was, but how should I have prayed so as not to deceive them?

The third thing I didn’t say was, “What difference does it make to you whether I’m sincere or not?” In Hebrew School we’d been taught to read and chant and under-stand the prayers, and had been encouraged in (and praised for) nothing but mastery of the text. No one ever told me I had to mean what I said. Before I led the prayers that morning, it had never occurred to me before that the service leader is not only a bouncing ball on a Karaoke screen, but also the one who, like it or not, sets the tone for everyone else. Gosh, had all those people been influenced in their prayer-experience by an unintentionally faux-sincere 13-year-old kid? What was wrong with this world?

Eventually, I realized that my elders probably had meant something more like, “It’s unusual for someone of your age to care enough about the liturgy to bother enunciating.” Still, the unsettling realization

stayed with me. My praying was polished, but insincere. I was a Bad Jew.

Ten years later I moved to New York to attend Drisha’s Beit Midrash program, in-tending to land myself in rabbinical school the following year. Good rabbinical school candidates pray regularly, I figured, so once there I did my best to learn to pray with the Jews of Manhattan’s Upper West Side. I followed my classmates to Ramath Orah, B’nai Jeshurun, and Hadar. But “Gates of Prayer”, the only siddur I had ever used, was nowhere to be found. Everyone here

either davvened from Sim Shalom, which had paragraphs and paragraphs of liturgy I’d never seen before (but which everyone else seemed to know), or they used the Art Scroll siddur, which left me utterly lost. And the worst part was all that silence! I didn’t understand the point of so much silent prayer. I wanted to sing the tunes I knew with the people around me. Why throw out all those pretty melodies and replace them with hurried whispering? At least when we sang or chanted together, I could put my voice behind the prayer and feel sincere; I didn’t have to examine whether the words were actually coming from me rather than merely sliding through me. When the melodies went away, only my thoughts were left, and usually those were, “What page are we on?” or “Am I doing it quickly enough?” The silent prayers exposed me to myself, calling me out for the fake that I was-- a creampuff who liked to pray for the pretty music.

But I got more comfortable with the new liturgy and learned how to pace myself, though I still didn’t feel as if all the prayers

were mine. Some, I could totally get be-hind, like Yotzer, Ma’ariv Aravim, and the Nisim b’Chol Yom, because I already gener-ally felt grateful for many aspects of my life, and I was comfortable thinking of God as the power that keeps the laws of physics working the way they do. There were other prayers, however, that remained inaccessible to me. The Kaddishes left me cold, as did the Kedusha and several other parts of the Amida. I just didn’t know what to do with all that remote talk about God’s greatness when it wasn’t illustrated with some specific experience that I had had or could at least imagine having.

When we prayed aloud, I could say to myself that I was doing it for the sake of bonding with the community. When we prayed silently, though, it was just me and the words and if I didn’t have a good sense of what the words themselves meant (the English translations always seemed to opt for poetry and inoffensiveness at the cost of accuracy), or if I understood them and disagreed, then I was just lying to myself. And what was the point of that?

I was dating a Christian. He told me about his approach to prayer and it made my head spin. “You mean you just kneel down and talk directly to God?” I asked him. “You make up your own words? And God talks back? Seriously?” If God exists at all, then surely God is the power behind the workings of the universe! How conceited to think that God is going to pay attention directly to me every time I decide to pray! But then the fellow suggested that I ask God whether or not I should go to rabbini-cal school, and to listen for an answer. I was incapable of turning down that challenge. So one afternoon I went out to find a secluded area where I would try to speak directly with God.

I found a likely spot among some trees but it was too out in the open. I went to where the trees were clustered more thickly, but there I couldn’t see enough of the sky. I moved to another spot where I could see more sky, but there the buildings were vis-ible, and I didn’t want any visual reminders of civilization. So, I stood in an imperfect spot, closed my eyes and tried to speak.

It was terrifying. Where could I begin? Anything I thought to say seemed, in light of the nature of my Interlocutor, not good enough. The question I had set out to ask suddenly appeared insignificant, and what’s

Cno one ever

told me i had to

mean what

i said

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continued on page 11

4 V O I C E S

The first time I actually prayed I was in a play, the Yiddish clas-sic, THE DYBBUK, which takes place in a 19th Century

Polish shtetl. The production empha-sized the intense community of the play’s world, so the large stage at the Public Theatre was always populated, two or three things going on at once, with even the most private moments taking place in public space.

Early in the play several of us gathered upstage right to daven while the main ac-tion went on downstage left nearer to the audience. The actors were all Jewish, but none of us could daven like a Hasid so we took field trips to 770 Eastern Parkway to participate-observe with the Lubavitch-ers. They welcomed us with missionary zeal: I’ve never had so many invitations to dinner. I got the shukling down pat – feet together, bend knees, bob slightly, bow from the waist, straighten, repeat and repeat and repeat; focus on the book held close in, twist occasionally, vary speed, always high intensity, compete to be the most fervent Hasid. But to me these were just moves, no more meaningful (and less fun) than the swordplay I learned for Shakespeare productions. Having been raised in the certainty that belief in God was a sure sign of a weak will and a fuzzy mind, I was im-mune to prayer. But as an acting problem it was interesting.

We had to sound like we were praying but in a way that didn’t interfere with the action going on downstage. As you may know, when actors have to make a group sound, they mutter, `rutabaga, rutabaga, rutabaga,’ or `umbrella, umbrella, umbrella,’ which makes a hubbub that sounds like talking...or praying. But after a couple of weeks of this we got bored, so we did what actors do to cope with endless repetition -- crack each other up without the audience knowing. It’s a fine art. Instead of ‘ruta-baga,’ someone would stage-whisper-sing `If the red red Robin should dav, dav, daven along, along.’ Or ‘Shukkle off to Buffalo.’ We hid our snickers and snorts behind our

prayer books and increased the intensity of our shukling.

The games wore out quickly because, even though I had more prominent and challenging things to do in the show, these nightly interludes had become my favorite

moments. It felt something like a medita-tion but not quite, because meditation is inward and this had this added intention of trying to make the audience see prayer. I thought, ‘the audience is sort of a stand-in for God, because if I was really praying I would be trying to make God believe I’m sincere.’ That’s the thing about acting: if you do something over and over, it gets to you even if you don’t want it to. At some point the thought just entered my head: `I wonder what it would be like if I actually tried...praying?’

I didn’t know any Jewish prayers, in He-brew or even in English. But I was doing a lot of meditating, so I tried chanting the heart sutra: `Om, gate gate paragate paras-amgate Bodi svaha.’ Over and over, while I shukled. And it worked! For the first time in my life, I felt I was actually praying.

My acting training was the opposite of

the Method, in which the form is supposed to flow from feeling. We started with the words, the relationships, the sense of time and place, the style, even gestures or pieces of costume, and in the process of exploring the knowable tangible elements, discovered the deeper subjective lives of characters. I worked with directors who would cho-reograph movement – ‘lift your arm; do it again; again, now faster.’ and that was the total direction. Nothing about motivation or feeling, just do it. It was then my job to ‘fill’ the movement with intention, feeling, character and all the rest. I also studied martial arts and Yoga, which start from direct physical actions – ‘stand this way; move this way; ‘don’t ask why, just do it, you’ll understand later.’ And it works. You practice and practice a move, learn finer and finer details – plant your feet this way, move from your center, be aware of your center -- and gradually or suddenly it becomes part of a greater whole – your breath becomes part of it, you feel the expansion or contrac-tion of power and spirit, then some emo-tional connection and perhaps ultimately a connection to Chi or the universe or the divine … or God.

Years ago I visited an Alzheimer’s respite group on the Lower East Side for immi-grant Jews far gone in dementia. Few could tell you their name; most spoke in word sal-ad. It was Friday noon, and the lunch was preceded by a brief Shabbat service. The so-cial worker gathered the women around the table and lit the candles. Instantly, as if on cue, they began the ancient gestures, sweep-ing their arms over and around the light, each in her own unique individual form evolved over decades. They appeared trans-formed, uplifted, joined to their own long pasts and ours. Before they had been shuf-fling, mumbling, lost; for those moments they became fully human, proud, linked in time, space and spirit to something great and profound in our history and humanity. And I thought about the Dybbuk and how I had been lifted by those absurd moments of movement and sound and realized that

‘We shall Do and We shall hear’Movement and PrayerBY arthur StriMling

CPrayer is at

least as much in

the muscles and

the breath and

the sound

as in the words.

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continued on page 12

I praise the lily pads on the cool dark pondI praise the weedsI praise the ants, and the dragonfliesand the butterfliesYes, most importantly the butterfliesI praise my cats wide eyesmy unopened math textbookI praise the bubbles and the soapI praise the blank hood of night

I praise the stars of my destinationI praise the moon, that globe of solaceI praise the robin’s egg bluecolor of the sky in JulyI praise white puff sheep and the storm cloudsThe promise ofgreener leaves and the scent of dawn’s sweatI praise the sun. and the golden shafts of

light that dance through the window paneand I praise you and meI praise our similaritiesand differencesandone day I pray forus to all hold handsfor you and I are temporary pronounsBut all is an adjective

5 V O I C E S

There was no prayer or spiritual-ity in my household when I was growing up. My parents made the decision to raise

my siblings and me as secular Jews. On the few occasions when I was exposed to Jewish prayer (basically at the b’nai mitzvot of relatives and friends) I was not impressed. No one ever seemed moved by the prayer, everyone was bored, and I wondered if anyone even knew what the Hebrew they were praying in meant. I thought it was pretty unsophisticated that people would pray in a language that they didn’t understand – who knew what they might be uttering? Maybe they were promising to do things that they had no intention of really doing, or promising allegiance to a god that they didn’t believe in. I was determined that if I was ever to pray, I would at least know what the heck I was saying, and at least have some feel-ing behind the words.

When I was in high school, one of my older brothers dropped out of college and became what I would describe as a hippie-type, which included having a guru and moving to an ashram. My mom then took an interest too and started doing yoga at the same ashram. Then, another of my broth-ers, the one closest to me in age, also took on a guru and moved to an ashram. I found it all really silly and did not take any inter-

est in my family’s spiritual pursuits.That is, until, when I was in my mid-

twenties. I was in my first job after graduate school and a coworker suggested I take a yoga class with him. That was my first ever yoga class, and boy, did it send me!! I felt the exhilaration of my first relaxation pose and suddenly I understood the appeal. It was trippy!

So, like the rest of my family, I started doing yoga and meditation and visiting ashrams to learn from real gurus. Often the meditations involved chanting in the ancient Indian language, Sanskrit. It was explained that the sounds were developed thousands of years ago by the spiritual masters and the vibrations of the sounds have a salutary, meditative effects. I found that to be true as I chanted, feverishly at times, feeling the good vibrations wash all over me.

Then it hit me -- I was doing what I had told myself I would never do – praying in a language that I didn’t know, promis-ing to do who knows what to who knows whom! And I didn’t mind! In fact, I loved it! I loved the calming effect that the chant-ing had on my mind and body. But after a while, I felt a little silly. I mean I was pretty much practicing the Hindu religion (in a dumbed down way), but I was Jewish. So, I decided the next logical step would be to try to pray in the language of my own people,

since I had established that I could, in fact, be comfortable praying in a language that I didn’t understand.

So, I made to make my first attempt at praying in Hebrew at Kolot Chayeinu. I trusted Rabbi Lippmann, whom I had known for many years, to keep me safe in this weird world of Jewish prayer. I felt that if she was comfortable praying in Hebrew, then I could be comfortable, even if I didn’t know what it was that I was saying.

Much to my surprise, I found that praying and singing in Hebrew had the same effect on me that chanting and sing-ing in Sanskrit had had. I could feel the calm and good vibrations of the ancient Hebrew sounds wash over me. In addition, it gave me something that I was missing in the Hindu rituals – I felt connected to my ancestors. I was saying the prayers that my Chasidic grandfather and all those who came before had said. I felt the joy in Jewish prayer that my Chasidic grandfather felt. Though my father might not feel the same way, this was good fro me. It still is good. It has made me a better and wiser person. And, as I learn more and more Hebrew, I am kind of glad that I don’t understand most of the prayers and songs since the literal meaning is often something I would not be too happy saying out loud in English.

So I bow to the wisdom of our ancestors who developed this system of prayer and worship, and I am proud to be a Jew who prays in Hebrew. ■

Good VibrationsBY JEanY hEllEr

in PraiseBY hannah hEnDErSon-charnow

& alicE MarkhaM-cantor

siddur 2.0BY roBErt MorDEcai BErkMan

6 V O I C E S

For the past year, a Kolot com-mittee has tirelessly traveled the world in search of siddurim. In my opinion, their valuable time

was wasted.The last thing Kolot, or any congrega-

tion that is concerned with the nature of worship and spirituality, should be doing right now is purchasing a prayer book. It is not that I have anything against prayer books: I am the proud owner of several of them. But, as the Rabbi has pointed out, any siddur that is chosen for use by Kolot will involve compromise: some will have more explanations, others will have different fonts and formats, while all will have varying ratios of Hebrew to English, and Hebrew to transliteration. Indeed, any siddur we select will involve “settling” on content chosen by a team of experts who decided for us what our worship should look like. It is, at best, an artifact of an earlier age.

Like anybody who believes that perfec-tion still exists, I believe that we should not “settle,” especially because there is no reason to do so. Remember, we’re really going to be “stuck” with whatever siddur we decide upon for a good 30 or 40 years. These books are made to last. And last. And last. It’s quite hard to imagine: if one of these books is adopted, I’ll have to read this darned thing week in and week out until I’m in my eighties. That’s a very frighten-ing prospect! Do I really want to look at the same prayers, the same translations, the same commentary, the same poetry, the same graphics, the same cover for the next four decades? Does anybody? I can’t imagine so.

Settling upon a siddur implies that our worship is “fixed,” that we are ready to com-mit to the same way of doing things year after year. Okay, we all know that Ellen and Lisa know how to keep things fresh and our participatory services ensure that there will always be new voices, new ideas, new thoughts. My fear is that we will become quickly become dissatisfied with our prayer books and that the goal of services will be to escape what is weighing us down.

Our current siddur has its charm in that

it is entirely provisional and lacks any kind of pretense that it is indeed a “final prod-uct.” The fact that the books are thin, soft covered and riddled with stains are a sign that we are not “fixed” in our worship, that we have not committed to any specific type of liturgy, and if they somehow disappeared tomorrow, they would not be missed: we are not defined by them.

However, it is not a bad thing to start thinking about defining our liturgy a little more tightly, because we are, after all, Jews! But like many congregations, we are entirely unique and forward-looking, and a forward-looking congregation deserves a forward-looking prayer book. What we need is Siddur 2.0.

Siddur 2.0 transcends the idea of what a prayer book was for the previous 1,000 years. Siddur 2.0 makes use of current technology to collect the prayers, commen-tary, graphics, translations and poetry we love best. Siddur 2.0 never shows its age, because materials can be added, deleted, edited and refined. Siddur 2.0 exists in a variety of media, from PDF files on our website, to Podcasts of niggunim, songs and dvar Torah. Siddur 2.0 is a living, dynamic prayer book that allows us to worship with-out compromise. It is the final stage of a process of codifying what began more than two millennia before.

How would Kolot institute Siddur 2.0? We could begin by discarding the notion that we need to purchase a Siddur, and define what we want in our prayer book. Which version (or versions) of the Aleinu do we want? Which prayers require translit-eration? How should it be formatted to make our service accessible to those who haven’t learned how to read Hebrew yet? What poetry should we include? Which songs are essential? Do we really need four different translations of Psalm 149? Should we have an extended version of the Yotzer?

In Siddur 2.0, these are not monumental decisions we will have to live with for the next 40 years, because in Siddur 2.0, we can change when we wish with whatever we wish. Additions can be published on the web, downloaded on our comput-ers, loaded onto our iPods, printed in our homes, and placed in our Kolot binders. Siddur 2.0 doesn’t live in a set of milk crates in the basement; it is accessible on the web, loaded onto our laptops and readable on our Kindles. Whatever new media comes along, Siddur 2.0 is ready for it.

Siddur 2.0 is an investment in wrestling with the idea of spirituality and prayer as an ever-changing expression of that spiritual-ity. Let’s start working with the tools of the future, not confining us to those of the past. ■

Books in the Pardes Beit Midrash. Photo courtesy of Trisha Arlin

7 V O I C E S

Standing at trailhead always makes me nervous. I know where I am, I know where I am going, and I even have some sort of map and markers to fol-

low. But what will happen between now and when I return to this place at the end of my journey remains a mysterious unknown preg-nant with possibilities. Will the view be good at the top or will there just be clouds and mist? Will I get lost on the way or will I find some thing beautiful, some piece of the natural world or some piece of myself?

Prayer is an act of ascending a mountain. The top of the mountain is, as Rabbi Lawrence Hoff-man and the Prophet Isaiah eloquently explain, is knowing God. That is what we all are after when we pray. The Siddur or prayer book is our map, and as much as we might walk with others in prayer, everyone hikes their own trail. And just like a path in the woods we make take once, twice or even each day, every experience on that journey is unique. The environment we are in changes and so do we.

The destination on this journey is both known and unknown. The zenith of this adventure is the Amidah, the standing personal prayer where it is just you and God standing together in face-to-face dialogue. Prayer is a two-sided, interactive discussion. This adventure is exploratory. Who are you? Who is God? The more each of these entities is known, the more intimate the relation-ship. The more you talk and communicate, the closer the bond. In this conversation, we all have an agenda, a set of topics we want to discuss. We have specific items to ask for ourselves and for the community, we have much to apologize for, a host of ideas we hope for and so much...so much to express our gratitude about to God. But exactly what is on these lists and exactly what topics precisely will come up in the moment of meeting remain unclear until we are there.

But like a good expedition, we do not begin at the apex; we make our way there. Morning tefillah (the Hebrew word for prayer) begins with getting up, washing, gathering the day’s accoutre-ments and traveling to the trailhead. This is called the birchot hashacher, the morning blessings. Once upon a time, these were the prayers one said en route to the synagogue. This list of blessings, central to this section of the prayer service, pro-vides us with a checklist of what we need to pack with us for the day.

After we have warmed up our journey continues upward. We enter into the zone of Psukei D’Zimra-Psalms or Songs of Praise for God. Think of any conversation you have with someone. You often talk with one another with an agenda in mind but you usually don’t start

there. Instead, you begin with, “Hello! How are you?” Then you open up and begin a real discus-sion. Thus, we get and give the opportunity to praise (and appraise) our lives with one another. So too in Psukei D’Zimra do we praise God. We reflect on God’s wonders and glory and we also are drawn to reflect on our own as well.

As we climb higher, the travel diary contin-ues to the Barchu and the Shema--the Call to worship and our central prayer of identity. In the Barchu we look to our travel companions and ask one another-are you ready to do this? And they respond, yes, I am ready. And we are off. We are climbing, we are praying...and like any worthy

journey, this one is challenging. We come to the Shema, Hear oh Israel, Adonai is your God, Adonai is one. As we push through, we pause on a plateau and remind ourselves together what we are doing here! Why are we doing this? To unite, to be one. For some, the oneness is with others through time and space that have said and will say these words, seemingly through all time. For others, the connection is with the people, fellow travelers, there in the room. Perhaps it is to the music, the traditions, the familiar comfort of hav-ing walked this way before which unites us back with our selves. And for others still the oneness is with God. We unite and connect to the holy, the sacred and the awesome. And on this journey,

well-worn path that it may or may not be, differ-ent days/ and travels bring different connections and unifications, sometimes to God, sometimes, to others, sometimes to self and sometimes to all things all at once.

Spurred on and renewed by this reminder of the wonderfulness of the task at hand, we continue to our destination: alone time with God. Like many hikes, we often start off together but arrive at the top staggered, on our own. Only you, knowing others are nearby who support you, can climb this final ascent to God on high. A final set of softly spoken words to strengthen our resolve-Adonai, open my lips that my mouth may declare

your praise...shoosh, I have come this far, I hope I can make this last final push!!!! And then, we are there, at the top, standing before God. Meekly, with three small steps forward, we approach. We bow in reverence as we introduce ourselves. You know me, I am the child of these ancestors and you listened to them. Please, hear me too. We continue: God, you are really pretty amazing. You give life to everything (including me!) and, fur-thermore, you are holy, holy, holy. And then, you launch into the meat of the discussion. I have had some things on my mind I have been wondering about lately...can we talk?

We converse. We humbly step away. We sit silently for a moment absorbing the awesome-

A Pathway through Prayer PrAyer in the MArGins AnD

read our classic texts, we tread the paths of prior readers, in search of spiritual nourishment...You are invited to share our path, and even to break new ground yourself, passing on to others your own marginal notes, should you wish...

My People’s Prayer Book...will be deemed a success if it provides the spiritual insight required to fulfill ...a prophecy (Isaiah 52:6), that through our prayers,My people may know my name That they may know, therefore, in that day, That I, the One who speaks, Behold! Here I am.”

Introduction to the Commentaries from My People’s Prayer Book, Volume I

BY larrY hoffMan (Used by permission)

“...I reflected on the sheer joy of studying a traditional Jewish text...what a wonderful habit we Jews developed once upon a time: writing a text in the middle of the page and then filling up the margins with commentaries. Every page becomes a crosscut through Jewish history. Jewish Bibles come that way; so does the Talmud; and the Mishnah; and the codes. We never read just the text. We always read it with the way other people have read it...

To be a Jewish reader, then, is to join the ranks of the millions of readers who came before us, and who left their comments in the margins...When we

8 V O I C E S

“In this mode of davekut [becoming one with God], your will, your deed, becomes God’s...his or her action is God’s [action]. By repairing things here, we repair them above...this personality is a doer, an achiever, a fixer, someone who wants to repair the world...we cannot make God do what we want, but by thinking, doing or praying what God wants, we become one with God and ourselves.1”

I am studying to be a rabbi and I do not like to pray.

Well, that is not exactly true. If prayer, as Kushner describes it, is union with God, then I LOVE to pray. I want to pray all the time. This is what I think prayer (with a lower-case “p”) is and what Prayer (in a Temple of some sort) aspires to be. The times in my life when I have noted God’s presence or even have felt united with God are some of the most meaningful, wonderful and beautiful moments. But they do not seem to happen for me inside of a Sanctuary for prayer, but rather within sanctuaries for people.

The Hebrew word,” davekut” (unity with God), shares the same root as the words in modern Hebrew for glue and tape. Uniting with God is a powerful act that binds and adheres me to the pursuit. Somewhere within the struggle for union is where I cleave to God the most. Please, God, when I struggle and wrestle with you, please do not leave me. As I yell at God and turn away in anger and frustration, like a child with a parent, I pray in my heart, please just stick with me, just hang on to me while I try so hard to pull away and separate.

So what happens in the Sanctuary that I do not like? I have learned, from my Rabbi and teacher, Larry Hoffman, about the his-tory and development of our prayer service.

Much of this information I have taught to several of you! The ideas behind prayer are ones that I believe in. I know we pray to communicate with God as a replacement modality for sacrifice. (So I believe praying should involve some sort of sacrifice.) I know which prayers were added when, why and by whom. Sometimes I think I know too much as I read words...someone else’s words reflecting someone else’s idea of what prayer should be and the belief within our history that if we all say these right words in the right way at the right time we can save the world (whatever that means). But God told someone else to say these prayers, using these words at these times, God did not tell me. God told someone to dance around the Sanctuary with the Torah, kissing it, bowing towards; a message I never personally received.

God, tell ME what to say!! Tell ME where to stand, tell ME when to say it!!

Yet I know the presence of God and feel connected to it. Is this not what prayer is, union with God? And so I wrestle, torn between a compulsion to be a part of the prayer around me (I want so badly to be part of this group that is IN with God) and a revulsion to the service (but I was not invited to join this club.). Some days my reaction is so strong I actually need to walk out and take my prayer journey elsewhere, often to the streets.

Below New York City in the subway station, I see a man, Wendell (the second syllable ac-cented, not the first.) He is dark, tall, broad and solid. I have seen him before in photographs of the homeless with his bulging eyes, the result of his hyperthyroidism. I turn away, repulsed, turn back and smile my biggest smile...Hey, I know you! I proclaim. I look him in the eye. I can only

bear to stare into one eye. You know me? He smiles a huge smile, blushing, grinning, shy. We chitchat blithely about life as people walk by, avert their eyes, trains rolling in and out. For a moment I see us standing there, talking like old friends, laughing and intimate. I wonder how others around us see this. He is monstrous to look at but for a moment, they see me seeing him as normal. Can they too see the humanity of this beautiful man alone in the subway playing poker to keep sane? My train comes; I squeeze his hand warmly like a hug and wish him well and blessing, then step in the train and pull away into darkness, dissolving in to tears.

As the sobs keep coming and I become the spectacle below the city, I wonder, how did I know to do that? I consider God told ME to say those words, at that time, in that place. God, Wendell and I were one in those moments. Did I see God when I looked into Wendell’s face? No, but I felt God looking at that man beyond and within that face. Seeing God is frightening, awesome and painful. No wonder the Israelites flitted back away from the Mountain when God spoke the ten utterances directly to them. Sinai can really mess you up, yet we cleave, stick and adhere to it. Again and again we come close, fall back and return.

And so, in services at school I sit in my usual seat surrounded by my usual friends, laughing our usual laugh, watching the others of the com-munity, like a tableau in their regular, set places. I hear the familiar tunes and the words, ingrained in me like my own name. I know this way, I know this path, I’ve walked it many times before. I look at my friend to the right nodding off during the sermon and my friend to the left, bristling at the recitation of Kaddish. God is there, too. I am one with them, this place, these words, this music, these people, my people, my God, is one.

For a moment I hang on to this feeling and absorb the dust of their prayers. Then I leave the room to go out and walk with mine.

Rain in Your Soup: Reflections on Selfless-ness in Sukka by Lawrence Square Kushner, de-livered at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, New York City on 12 October 1989/ 13 Tishri 5750 . ■

PAthWAys to PrAyer BY rachaEl BrEgMan

Praying with My Feet – My Own Journey in Prayer

ness of what we have just accomplished. Sweating, muscles shaking, overwhelmed by the power of what we am able to do!! Quiet, inward turning, we listen for an answer, we absorb what has occurred, we prepare to descend.

The others catch up with us now. We come back together, perhaps singing, perhaps laughing and dancing. Together, we come down. Now we

are in the Aleinu. You know, we remind each other, and ourselves it is incumbent upon us to do this-to praise God for all this great stuff that we have, that we are, that we can do. Perhaps the answer to our Amidah prayer is contained within the Aleinu prayer...pray as if it all depends on God, act as if it all depends on you.

We come down the mountain. We mark the

end of this journey with the Mourner’s Kaddish, remembering those who are with us in spirit-whose strength and presence is with us, in us and shapes us, whose being forms our being.

And with a Closing Song, we brush off the dirt from the hike, we smile and rejoice in what we have done, and slowly turn our thoughts to the rest of the day. ■

9 V O I C E S

A few years ago, when I read about a suicide bomber who drove his car into a group of young boys receiving candy

from American troops in Baghdad, I stopped praying.

I didn’t stop attending temple and, drawing my arm around my wife while we said the family blessings, I continued to light Shabbat candles every Friday night. But my mind was drifting, troubled — thinking about a God who I had come to believe was not concerned with me or anyone else at all under the vast elegant sky. This is a terrible place to be, when you’ve always found comfort in prayer, and it’s suddenly gone, broken.

Apparently, the suicide bomber was heading for the US convoy, an easy target because the soldiers had stopped and were out of their trucks. Young boys gathered around, a lot of boys, though that didn’t matter to the bomber. According to my be-lief, God was watching and He watched as 26 children scooping up candy were blown to pieces. So I stopped praying. At some point you just push yourself away from the table and say,” Okay, I’m out.”

Four years have gone by. Four years of reading the commentary at the bottom of the page in the prayer book and thinking, “How does this work?” How can one be so totally committed and filled with joy and awe as the words in this prayer book suggest?

But just the other night, after a long silence, I said, “God, I miss you.” It sounds absurd. I want to pray to God even though I believe He will not respond and will not be moved. My words are as pennies dropped by children down a well. My prayers fly into oblivion and nothingness. Yet, I’ve decided I’m going to pray to Him anyway – or Her. (I’m calling him a him for now. Call him a her if you want. See if She cares.)

I was raised Catholic. Prayer was central to belief -- prayer and guilt all wrapped together. We prayed for penance and we prayed for the dead. Prayer was a weapon

against sin and suffering, though some prayers were more mundane. One could pray to saints for specific needs, like Saint Anthony if you couldn’t find something and amazingly, it would work, you’d find the thing you were looking for! The big prayer of course was for forgiveness and salva-tion – a prayer that could only be answered when you were dead.

When I was sixteen I stopped going to church. I’d tell my mother, “I’m going to church, bye!” and I’d turn left instead of right and drive the car out to the farmland of Northern Virginia were my grandmother was born. I would drive around for an hour listening to the car radio thinking of nothing, watching the white horse fences going by, daydreaming in peace. It was a better place to be than listening again to the same priest and contemplating the same wooden crucifixion hanging over his head. The sculpted figure on the cross was very “School of Sixties Suburban Modern with a Retro-Twist of Existential Pathos” which was pretty good, but I’d looked at it enough.

Later, my closest high school friend introduced me to a Pentecostal group he had taken up with. I joined them for almost a year, but the entire enterprise proved very hard sell, aggressive and judgmental. Ques-tioning anything meant that the devil was sitting on your shoulder. I finally left when

someone declared that drawing from the nude model was a sin (I was an art student.) and another bemoaned that his Jewish mother was, “still living without Jesus in her life.”

Years passed. I belonged to no group, until I found myself watching someone chanting and gliding a silver pointer gently over the words of a Torah unrolled on a table. And this is the good part — every-one had a different opinion on what God meant. I smiled inside. I had found a place. I was with my wife. We had a child. In time I began with my family to observe Shabbat.

Yet no matter whether I was ponder-ing a crucifix, watching farmland from my car or listening to a Jewish friend chanting Torah, prayer was never in doubt. God was Truth. God was compassion. God poured down his grace upon us. Then, there was candy in Baghdad.

I’m sure there is a simple explanation for why God did not stop the suicide bomber, why a seed of doubt was not planted in the bombers brain, why no impediment was thrown up: Free Will. We have choices – the greatest gift bestowed upon humankind and the greatest curse. I know all this, but where does that leave prayer? Prayers for peace? health? for a just and fair world? What of prayer, the orphan of belief?

I need to pray and I want it back. So I will continue to light Shabbat candles and say Kiddush on Friday nights. I will draw my arm around my wife and repeat our family blessing. A young person said to me recently, “Why bother lighting Shabbat candles and saying the blessings? It doesn’t do any good. It doesn’t bring peace to the world.” I said, “It brings peace to me,” even if only for a moment.

This is a good place to start – with a measure of peace and choices. There is a choice to be silent, a choice to speak out, a choice to hope and dream or a choice to submit to the will of others. Choices bring responsibilities and awareness that decisions have consequences. I suppose rather than asking for God to fix something we are supposed to make the choice to fix it our-selves. We were given the power to create and the power to destroy – and a Law upon which to base and measure our actions.

Freedom is an awesome responsibil-ity. In prayer I can turn to God and talk about it. ■

Why i stopped Praying and started AgainBY MikE cockrill

CPrayer was central to

belief – prayer

and guilt all wrapped

together.

c

1 0 V O I C E S

“Blackbirds singing in the…” bright morning sun provided a high point on my trip to Israel last

summer, a surprising source of spiritual nourishment, and a lesson about prayer and connection.

This was my first trip to Israel, traveling with friends and colleagues from my semi-nary. Some had visited many times; I and a few others were excited “first” timers. We are all seminary students, so, not surpris-ingly, we did a lot of praying: in our hotel rooms every morning, at Robinson’s Arch, on the other side of the Western Wall, where men and women can pray freely together. It was touching and centering to be with this community, traveling all over, meeting a wide range of Israeli’s, arguing and learning and experiencing pieces of this complex, dense, beautiful place.

After about a week we took a trip to Masada. The night before our pre-dawn hike up the mountain we drove through the desert to Arad, a funky pioneer town. After dinner, three of us took a long, fast walk from our even funkier hotel down to town in search of a late-night ice cream. It felt great to be out of the bus, talking and rais-ing our heart rates on such a beautiful, cool clear night in the desert. It was so quiet, and I really felt present – and while I was also very far from home, I felt connected – to the stars, to my friends, to Arthur (who I’d been able to talk to every day, thanks to Skype), and to this country that had been so remote all my life.

We woke at 4 a.m. and piled into our bus, driving silently through the desert, watching the colors shifting on the sands and rocky peaks. We got to the base of Masada as the sky turned a little red and pink, scrambled past the Birthright buses, and walked up the mountain.

At the top we wandered about a bit, caught our breath, and found a great spot overlooking the Dead Sea, facing the quickly rising sun, where we set up for our Shaharit service. As we started praying and singing, a flock of little black birds alighted nearby on the stone walls of Masada. They sang and chirped…and prayed? on the wall above us from the moment we started to

the moment we stopped. As soon as we were done, they flew off.

And it wasn’t just birds sharing our intimate service. We were actually a bit of a tourist attraction to the increasing hoards at the top of Masada. As we prayed, a group of gorgeous Russian Birthright kids parked themselves a few feet away, flirting and giggling and vaguely noticing us. One young woman sat a little separate from them, dressed in a long skirt and hat, head to toe in black. She was watching us, taking photos, shyly, respectfully attentive; moving her lips with our prayers.

As we toured the site, we kept turning a corner and seeing this lithe, magical young

woman. She was just like one of those the little black birds, and even more mysterious.

Later we drove to Ein Gedi, the oasis where it is said King David hid from Saul, (and maybe even brought Bathsheba to swim and relax). It was packed with tourists, but after hiking in the oppressive heat, we leapt into the cool, glorious water splashing under the waterfall. Once we’d cooled off, I noticed the young Russian bird in black, sitting alone on a rock, hat off, skirt hiked up a little with her feet in the water, taking photos of the flowers and rocks. I approached gently, asked if she’d like me to take her photo. She said yes, and then we talked. Dina is a Russian Jew who recently spent six months in NY at

JTS, studying towards the Rabbinate! We talked of her passion for Judaism and Israel and New York, and her hopes to become a Rabbi, which was an impossibility for her in Russia. We took pictures together, she met our group, and we exchanged emails, hugged each other and wished each other great luck in our pursuits.

The black birds are called Tristrams, and someone in Israel told me a midrash that these birds, like Eliyahu Ha Navi – sometimes called “the bird of heaven” - fly through the world and appear at key spiritual moments. These birds and Dina awoke something in me of the mystery of Israel, the pull of it, the pull of history and the pull of prayer, of connecting with God and connecting with each other. There was something in Dina’s quiet witnessing and the birds’ accompaniment of my prayer that helped connect me to that mystery. ■

BlackbirdsBY liSa B. SEgal

Blackbirds at Masada. Photo courtesy of Lisa B. Segal.

Cshe was

watching us...

moving her lips

with our prayers.

c

1 1 V O I C E S

According to Wikipedia, prayer is the act of communicating with a deity or spirit in worship. It is difficult to write about prayer without first contemplating belief. Can one pray without believing in a higher power? Can you extol Adonai without believing in our unique God’s existence?

Prayer in Hebrew is, for me, protective behavior. I mostly know what I am saying if I concentrate, but prefer the shelter of rote and rhythm of Hebrew prayer. It comforts me. Walking into a temple or synagogue in any city, almost anywhere, I know the order, words and music of prayer. I can wrap my-self in a tallit, bend and sway at appropriate times and be encircled by the calm and protection of connection—connection with community, with my history, my people and all those around me at that moment in time.

I entered the covenant in prayer, before consciousness, and learned the rules of prayer, which I continue to personalize. I was Bar Mitzvah’ed and married in prayer and I continue, even in my most secular and rebellious moods, to revert to prayer when least predicted or expected.

For my whole life before I go to sleep each night, just as I turn out the reading light, I recite the Shema—in English and Hebrew. Sometimes I invoke a blessing on those I love or express thankfulness for a particular person in my life or happening during my day.

When flying in an airplane, I find myself chanting the Shema on takeoff and reciting the Shechayanu at landing. It’s my own form of automatic pilot, but I do it, whether I think about it or not.

Every Friday evening, Shabbat begins for us (and the weekend, I might add, with all that implies about putting the work week and its worries aside), when we light the candles, bless the wine with prayer and bless the challah. Those moments, earlier or later, depending on where we find ourselves

and how long it takes us to get there, are marked, not by a clock, but by being to-gether and by those special Shabbat prayers and blessings.

On the anniversaries of our parent’s deaths, we light Yiskor candles. We do not invoke God’s name nor do we recite bless-ing, but it always seems to me to be an act of prayer—this time a prayer of memory and connection. When invited, we rise and recite Kaddish; a prayer of memory, but largely a praise of God. Who can remain unaffected by its rhythm, its alliterative and onomatopoetic qualities?

When relatives recently were very ill, I tried to say the psalms in English. It took a lot of searching to find one I was comfort-able saying. It reminded me that awareness of specific prayers could rob them of their efficacy.

As for belief, I have a continuing struggle with it and with the notion of God. What is clear to me is that when I pray, I pray as if I believe in God. Prayer then is not only an outward expression, b ut also an inner journey. I guess I’m a traveling man. ■

traveling Man

BY PhilliP SaPEria

sinCerity continued from page 3

more, the very idea that I should try to engage God in conversation was, I felt sure, so unacceptable to God that God would refuse to answer just on principle, if there even was a God at all. What was I think-ing, trying to do this without the help of other Jews around me, the Torah in its ark in front of me, and the book of approved words in my hands? I waited a moment more, hoping something miraculous would happen to take the pressure off. In the still-ness, feeling simultaneously shocked at my own audacity and foolish for halfway be-lieving, I haltingly articulated a question. It wasn’t polished, but it was certainly sincere.

After saying all I could think of to say I held still and concentrated hard, waiting to see if any non-Miriam-like ideas were going to enter my head. There was noth-ing, only the overwhelming sense that the universe really had no interest whatsoever in whether I go to rabbinical school or not, and that it was really just up to me. If I wanted to do it, I should just go ahead and do it. God didn’t mind. In fact, God didn’t care. I was a little disappointed, but

it was good to have done something scary and to still be in one piece. Better yet, God, if there is one, had the chance to stop me and didn’t, so at least I wasn’t acting against some sort of Eminent Cosmic Disapproval.

Since this experience, I’ve tried the direct-prayer method only a few times more. I’ve never received anything more answer-like than the same old silence. It’s cathartic and I have enjoyed the post-prayer relief as I would enjoy a post-exercise glow, but I don’t think it’s a good way for me to make the important decisions in my life. My boyfriend says I must be doing it wrong. But every time I work up the nerve to try again, it’s just as terrifying and silence producing as it was the first time. Still, the experience has given me a glimpse of how I can transform my regular prayers into something more powerful and sincere. That sense of confronting God-if-there-is-one was never part of my prayer before but when I work up the nerve to invoke it, it in-stantly puts everything else into sharp relief. I’m so gripped by the idea of God listening that God barely needs to listen at all; I can imagine how God would react if God were

listening and so I myself can do the work that God would have done.

And even though I haven’t received any recent comments about how sin-cerely I pray, if someone did remark on it now I think I could smile and accept the compliment. ■

prayer, real prayer, is at least as much in the muscles and the breath and the sound as in the words.

And that’s how I pray – the physi-cal and vocal forms lead me into the meanings and feelings. Repeated enough, the action transforms me. Repetition is the river that flows toward truth, spirit, sometimes even God.

And as often happens I discover the knowledge rooted right there in our story: at Sinai the Hebrew people say ‘We shall do and we shall hear.’ In other words do the actions, follow the forms and the ‘hearing,’ the meaning will follow. ■

We shALL Do continued from page 4

V O I C E S 1 2

When I was a kid I prayed all the time. I prayed for world peace and univer-sal understanding; more

specifically, I prayed that my grandparents and my parents would live forever, that my dying cat would stop coughing, and that my classmates would forget to torment me. When I got a little older, I prayed to propitiate the Almighty. I thought that if I made myself sufficiently craven, I could shame Him into pulling His punches. I apologized so often and for so many things that I had to devise a special shorthand to get them all in. I was obsessive, to put it mildly—in fact I was perseverative (the clinical term for the uncontrollable repeti-tions of words or gestures). Nowadays they medicate kids who act that way and that’s not a bad thing.

In time, I learned to still the chatter in my head. I stopped worrying so much about being punished and stopped asking for spe-cial dispensations. Once in a while I expe-rienced moments of real exaltation—in the beauty of James Joyce’s prose, the timbre of

Pharaoh Sanders’ tenor saxophone, in the shattering wisdom of the Book of Job—intimations of what Christians called the Mysterium tremendum and what the Hasids that I encountered in Yiddish stories called Ein sof (without end). When I was a sopho-more in college I read W.T. Stace’s Time and Eternity (1952) and the phrase “that than which there is no other” really stayed with me. By then I had stopped praying altogether because I no longer believed in a God who was a projection of my fears and desires, but provisionally at least in one who was truly other and genuinely incommensu-rate with me.

I know that many people approach their spirituality in a completely different way and I have no argument with them. I have a dear friend, a Lutheran minister, who rolls up his sleeves and wrestles with demons from time to time and actually carries on two-way conversations with the living Christ. I know Jews—believers and non-believers alike, many of them members of Kolot—who derive tremendous satisfac-tion from davening. I don’t disdain prayer;

it’s just not something I do. Maybe if I had been raised observantly, or if I had praised more and pleaded less when I did pray, if I had loved rather than merely feared God, it would be that way for me too.

The God I choose not to pray to is the source of the infinitely vast and the impossibly intricate—of the Spiral Nebula and the double helix; of redwood trees in nature and the dendritic trees in my brain. We stand in relationship to each other, this God and I, but we don’t have a relation-ship, any more than one of the cells in my liver could relate meaningfully to me.

It’s not that I don’t feel the breath of the eternal when I look at a sunset or into my children’s eyes. I do. But if I prayed, I don’t think that I would. ■

Why i Don’t PrayBY arthur golDwag

rABBi continued from page 2

week. If we do it the same way every time, we will quickly grow bored. But if it is too different each time, we will be confused, unmoored. This dance, as all dances, needs balance, and it is the prayer leaders’ job to provide it.

I am excited at the chance to try out three new siddurim, three new kinds of outlines with new prayer and song and meditation offerings. We all need some help to renew what we have done for many years and this process offers one such help. Rachael Bregman suggests that prayer is like climbing a mountain. She is a moun-tain climber, I am a cave dweller, as I hope to go inward deeper and deeper, not up and out, as I enter into prayer.

As we explore these siddurim, I try to read under the familiar and unfamiliar words, to hear the voices of those who prepared this particular book and those who will be using it. In the prayer called the Yotzer, which leads us toward the Sh’ma, and which focuses on God’s creation of the

natural world, of light and darkness, we are allowed the chance to hear the voices of angels singing God’s praises. In a note in the siddur Kol haNeshama, the first of the three we are trying out, Rabbi Sheila Peltz Weinberg wrote:

Who are holy beings?They are beloved, clear of mind and courageous.Their will and God’s are one.Raising their voices in constant gratitudethey marvel at every detail of life,Granting each other loving permission to be exactly who they are.When we listen for their sweet voices, we can hear the echo within our own souls.

With the angels’ voices echoing, I am still sure that God speaks to me when I study. But Shabbat after Shabbat, weekday after weekday, holy day after holy day, as I pray in this community I can also – from time to time – hear God speak to me. ■

stAffRabbi Ellen Lippmann, Founding RabbiLisa B. Segal, Chazzan/Music Director

Ora Wise, Director of Education Diane Kirschner, Administrative Director

Molly G. Kane, Student RabbiRonda Zawel, Shabbat & Facilities Coordinator

Efrat Baler-Moses, AdministratorDaniel Halperin, Custodian

BoArD of trusteesAdrienne Fisher, President

Seth Borgos, TreasurerCindy Greenberg, Secretary

Rachel Hyman, Vice President [on hiatus]Margie Fine, Exec. Committee

Phyllis ArnoldSally CharnowAdam DeixelEllen Garvey

Ellen HonigstockGrace LileJosh Rubin

Shira SameroffLaura SrebnikRobert Usdin

teAChersSarra Alpert, Assistant Director

Jenny AisenbergJesse Ehrensaft-Hawley

David FainsilberAram Rubenstein Gillis

Leah SchwartzShalva Wise

Jaime Leah WynnRyvka Bar Zohar

VoiCes stAffTrisha Arlin, Editor

Sarah Sills, Layout & Production

KoLot ChAyeinu

1 3 V O I C E S

I am searching.Last week I wrote some lines for this

essay on prayer in a notebook and I have no idea where it is. I look in all of the obvious places first, and then in the not-so-obvious. No luck. It’s gone. I’m on my own.

In the midst of my searching, a realiza-tion begins to arise in my awareness, like sunshine breaking through clouds: I don’t need the notebook. I remember, not exactly the words I wrote, but the awareness I’d had that I drew those words from, and I know that I can begin writing from this aware-ness, which I feel again now. I experience this shift as a change in perspective and a change in my feeling state: I feel lighter, relieved. And I experience it as a change in sensation as well, as a feeling of unwind-ing at the base of my skull, like morning sunshine streaming through a window.

Smiling, I make my way to my computer and begin to write these words. The sense of the shining sun is still there in my head. I pause now to let myself feel that, to let my-self fully arrive in the moment. As our Jew-ish meditation teachers like to say: Hineni. Here I am. That which I was searching for was already present, waiting to be remembered.

. . .

Mystic teachers of all traditions talk about our relationship with what we call G-d, the Source of Being, in exactly this way. And they go further: the Holy One-ness is searching for us with even more fervor than we search ourselves. So, rather than straining to find connection with the Source of Being, why not ask ourselves how we can let ourselves be found? Can we just, for a moment, drop our agendas, our petty judgments, our attachment to comfort and certainty, and just simply be with the naked, unmediated fullness of what is real, right now?

What is it, then, to pray, if what we’re reaching toward is already present? For me, it feels most of all like aligning myself. But, with what? The Source of Life, the Absolute? These are BIG, by definition im-possible to imagine and conceptualize. For

me, when prayer “works” best, I’m aligning with an internal sensing/feeling state that I can somehow locate, like doing biofeed-back with a tallit and a siddur instead of a machine.

Jewish mystics speak of the dance between mochin d’k’tan and mochin d’gadlut. Small Mind and Big Mind. Small Mind is our everyday, egoic consciousness, our personality, through which we identify with our personal history and focus on our endless to-do lists. Big Mind is both the transpersonal dimension of ourselves that is connected with the entire web of creation, and the Source of that web. (This view is very similar to Buddhist ideas, which is in part why so many Jews find Buddhist practice so appealing.)

When I pray, a big part of what I’m “aiming for” is to open myself to Big Mind. Sometimes that means I’m in my Small Mind, reaching, calling, yearning toward a distant Source. Sometimes I’m dancing ecstatic, as if with a lover, a friend. Much of the time I can’t even slow down long

enough to listen for the invitation. And, once in a while my Small Mind relaxes so deeply that Big Mind’s energy seems to fill me completely.

. . .

I feel lost. I’ve been off work for a couple of days with a cold, and the head-fog, the loss of routine and the loss of the chance to practice my craft has left me un-railed.

As I sit, finally, to write, I bring more attention to this feeling instead of trying to wish it away. As I do, I notice that I’m not feeling lost any more. In fact, I feel deeply present - not exactly comfortable, but certainly here. And, if my life has taught me anything, I know I need to fully embrace where I am now, to say “yes” to what is – to feel my alignment with the Source of Be-ing, and what the Stream of Life that flows from that Source has brought me to - in or-der to begin to feel my way into what’s next.

Hineni. Here I am. Baruch HaShem. ■

Lost and found BY Stuart garBEr

God: Eternal, Infinite, Awsome, and Vast Unknowable!Is/Was/Will BeThat which is now whether I understand it or not.That which was before everything I think of as real was here. And that which will be left after everything that I think will last forever is gone.

The fruit fly lives a lifetime in a day and says its Shabbat prayers every half hour. We get our three score and ten and we say our Shabbat prayers once a week. The sun lives billions of years and we say a prayer on its behalf once every twenty-eight years.

So Eternal….how often do you say your prayers?

Speaking of which, God, if I haven’t mentioned it before? I’m really scared. I need some-thing to hold on to, something really big and solid. But also small enough for mortal me to comprehend.

So this morning I gratefully pray with the sun, precisely because, like me, it is not eternal.

It just looks that way to us fruit flies. Amen.

fruit flies – A Prayer for Birkat haChamahBY triSha arlin

1 4 V O I C E S V O I C E S 1 4

the Predicament of PrayerBY rachEl hYMan

I like to help make things happen at Ko-lot, and on many levels, for many years I’ve had the chance to lend my voice here and there and give what I could give. But, as much as I like to pray, I haven’t spent much time in front of the community in public roles, preferring to just sing from my seat, or from the back, or talk to people behind the scenes, one-on-one, panim el panim.

But it seems that in order for certain things to happen in Judaism, a fair share

of people must be willing to take on more public roles too – and maybe the connec-tion between the individual and the group is strengthened when a person stands up, comes up, gives voice to this or that to the congregation as a whole. I was asked to come up and say/chant an aliyah, a blessing that serves an obvious liturgical function as the blessing before and after the reading of Torah. At Kolot Chayeinu we do aliyot in some kind of rotation, often as a chance for individual milestones to be recognized, or for someone who’s connected to an aspect of some element of the story of the parsha. At a moment when many of us here are probably more focused on that meaning, different people are brought up closer to the center of the action.

So here I am in front of you, not know-ing exactly why Ellen chose this week to ask me up to bless and to speak. But I do know that I value being seen and heard by the wonderful people in this community, even if it’s more often one-on-one. I generally like being of use, so I’m happy to be saying a blessing that keeps the service moving toward whatever wisdom we can gain thru Torah this week. And I’m happy to an-nounce by my presence in front of you that I am here, and part of this community where through our collective small acts we often do great things in the service of God. ■

A confession – I envy the believer, the one who can use the word worship and not feel self-conscious, the one who uses the word spiritual and it strikes deep meaning. But I am not that person.

Do I worship? I go to synagogue -- all the time.

I have co-chaired the worship and ritual committee many years, read countless books about prayer and liturgy, taken theology classes. Over the years and throughout all of this study I have tried mightily to overcome my childhood notion that God is the man with the beard and staff sitting on a cloud. He never did it for me. I used to think I just needed to get past “him,” past that image and it would all fall into place. Then prayer would be easy and worship would be a comfortable concept. Yet I can’t seem to get past him. So for now, I just ignore him. So what do I have to say about prayer if I have to ignore the man in the cloud?

It has taken me years to say that I pray. Mostly I say that I go to synagogue. Sometimes I pray - whenever I can I do. But I don’t seem to have much control over when I am actually able to pray as opposed to reciting words. I pray to call myself to conscience to keep me more generous and ethical than my small self slips into being without constant reminders, to be in the beauty of music and collective singing, to

embrace community, to shut the door on the mundane of the work week, to stave off the alienation that is often this city and this world. I leave him out of it.

Prayer works a funny way on my spirit – it lets me dial down my hyper vigilant ra-tional practical analytical busy mind and get a peak at peace, a flash of transcendence. Sometimes a solution wafts by to a problem I didn’t even know I had.

And on the usual Shabbat morning

when none of that happens, and I can’t seem to pray - I go to synagogue anyway. And I sit and fret and grapple. I realize how fortunate is my opportunity to help create a community where people can transcend and doubt all together and support one another. And then I come back the next Shabbat and give it a try again. Maybe one day belief will shower me and the man with the beard will finally vanish. But even if he never does, I have learned to accept my struggling and find joy in feeling embraced by a place that grounds me in the imperative of work-ing for peace and social justice. ■

Tashlich in Prospect Park. Courtesy of Kolot Chayeinu.

on Being Called for an AliyahBY StacEY SiMon

Congregation Kolot Chayeinu1012 Eighth AvenueBrooklyn, N.Y. 11215

Kolot Chayeinu needs your participation during this time of economic uncertainty.

Our members believe in living our ethical values in our own community. That’s why our High Holy Days services are free (like this copy of VOICES) and open to everyone and why our dues structure is flexible and does not bar anyone who cannot pay. However, a large percentage of our budget comes from contributions so we ask, if you are able, to pray with your donations and give whatever you can to the community.

Donate online at kolotchayeinu.org/donate/ or send your check to:

Kolot Chayeinu/Voices of our Lives 1012 eighth Avenue, Brooklyn, ny 11215 718-390-7493

www.kolotchayeinu.org

Cfor many of us the

march from selma to Montgomery was about

protest and prayer.Legs are not lips and

walking is not kneeling. And yet our legs uttered

songs. even withoutwords, our march was worship. i felt my legs

were praying.”

– Abraham Joshua heschel

c