On Secular Prayer and Its Meaning (Column 97)
With God's help
Last weekend there was an announcement about a conference at the National Library devoted to prayer. I heard a radio interview with one of the organizers, who explained that nowadays we exclude secular Jews from prayer (or they exclude themselves), and the conference seeks to give expression to all shades of the population and all types of prayer.
And indeed, in recent years secular prayer anthologies, secular prayer books, secular communities with secular rabbis, and secular synagogues that devote quite a bit of attention to prayer have been appearing. If study enjoyed a revival a few years ago, then in recent years prayer too has enjoyed a significant revival. Thus, for example, the Nigun HaLev community of that fellow known as "Rabbi" Shay Zarchi in the Jezreel Valley is one of the better-known phenomena in this context. I have heard of quite a few religious Jews who go there in order to get a taste of and be impressed by the authenticity of their prayer (as distinct from ours. See columns 77–78 here). The same is true of "Beit Tefilah Israeli" at "Alma" College, and many others. You can simply google it and find quite a bit of material, sources, and places.
A remarkably endearing expression of this phenomenon is Kobi Oz's song (words and music, from Mizmorei Nevukhim), "The Secular Person's Prayer":
| Father, O merciful Father be to me a faithful friend of the soul line my heart with Your faith place awe in me at the sound of Your name |
I never chose myself a rabbi, and my laws are improvisation
When I am in distress I take a pill
I have progressed tremendously (descended from apes)
And for all my weaknesses the parents are to blame
And there is no furrow at all
Only a multi-lane highway
Leading to the generic mall
And if a miracle occurs, it is altogether, altogether arbitrary
It was not caused on my account
Father, O merciful Father
be to me a faithful friend of the soul
line my heart with Your faith
place awe in me at the sound of Your name
So I prayed in a minyan of Jews
Beside me a Haredi trembled, all churned up with fears
For Heaven's sake he is a methodical robot
Sweaty like me, blessed with children
Next to us a Religious Zionist worshipping the soil
And from so much wallowing in the past
The one belted for battle boasts as though loosening his belt
And we all live by his sword
An immigrant and a beadle, adorned with a hump
A Reform Jew, by changing the garb or changing the lady
A traditional Jew and his boy, a bar-mitzvah celebrant
Khazars deprived of sweets. Behind us there is rustling and free whispering
Headscarves and wigs and salon styling
For beyond the partition rises the sensuous voice
Rises the female voice
Of those not counted
Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai wept from above in sorrow, perhaps in joy
And the rain came down, or he wiped away a tear.
A sigh escaped my heart,
All are your disciples, mighty hammer, light of Israel, my right-hand pillar,
Bless your children of every shade, both religious and secular!
I get the impression that the prayer here is not exactly secular prayer but rather the prayer of a religious person outside the establishment (what Kobi Oz calls perplexed). But within his words secular prayers too are mentioned among other things. Shay Zarchi and his community certainly speak of genuinely secular prayer, even in the sense of prayer without God (and not merely prayers without organized religion or halakhic commitment). In such prayers one can find other texts (poems) that for them become prayer, but some of them use the traditional texts of the prayer book (it seems to me that this is even more IN). Here I wanted to touch on this interesting, challenging, and fairly fashionable topic.
A personal point of departure
I confess without shame that when I hear about secular prayer or about the exclusion of secular people from prayer, I get hot under the collar. I have no patience for this fashionable drivel. At first it seemed to me like a triangle complaining about the exclusion of triangles from the family of circles. The triangle too wants to be a circle, and cursed be the logic that excludes it from that. Who put it in charge, anyway?!
Some will say that the case is not analogous, since a circular triangle is an oxymoron on the logical-conceptual plane, but secular prayer is an expression with meaning. Prayer does something to us (or do we do something to it?), and the secular person wants that therapy too. Why shouldn't he be able to meditate to the sounds of "Modeh Ani," "Yekum Purkan," or
"Ve-Hu Rahum"? There is nothing to prevent anyone who wants to meditate from doing as he pleases. So really, why exclude him?! But still, even if it is entirely fine for him to do whatever he wants, what does he want from me? Who is excluding him? If this is logically definable (and even if not), the door is open to anyone who wants it. The chatter about exclusion is baseless. But is this really prayer? Despite the personal feelings I have described here, I felt it might be worthwhile to think about the matter openly and see whether perhaps something meaningful and valuable can nevertheless be found there.
Is this prayer?
On first thought there is something to these claims. If you ask me, I will tell you that of course everyone may do whatever he wants, but not in my synagogue. I certainly would not count him toward a minyan, and he of course is not considered to have prayed in my eyes, and certainly has not fulfilled his obligation. For me prayer is worship of God and not psychological therapy. Meditation is not prayer, even if it is very beneficial to us personally and psychologically (?). Prayer is standing (rather annoyingly, to my taste) before God, and one who does exactly the same thing before the holy vacuum has done absolutely nothing. Perhaps his soul has been cleansed and healed of all its ailments (and perhaps not), and perhaps he has undergone stirring religious experiences, and perhaps even exactly what is supposed to happen to the religious person who prays (religious experiences?) happened to him, but there is no prayer here.
The resurrection of the third Isaiah
Now someone will say: I am witnessing the resurrection of the dead. The Third Isaiah (known among our cousins in the centrist camp as Prof. L. Shari) is rising before our astonished eyes (as it is said: Isaiah did not die. Did the embalmers embalm for nothing…? — Isaiah did not die; did the embalmers embalm for nothing… ). As is well known, according to his approach prayer is basically mere recitation, something that could just as well have been done from the telephone book and not specifically from a prayer book; that is, a vacuous mantra with no content or meaning in itself. Its one and only significance is the fulfillment of the religious commandment and the discharge of one's obligation. Are my remarks here not identical to his? And if so—what is wrong with that? Is it really so obvious that he is mistaken?
The alternative presented against him is that prayer has value and content in itself, beyond the obligatory mumbling itself, or some arbitrary ritual. Some will say it has therapeutic value, or the value of personal and spiritual improvement. The fact is that the Sages did not ordain us to recite the telephone book (although at least nowadays certain parts of the service sometimes seem to me rather close to that). Clearly they intended prayer to have some content beyond the mere act of standing before God. And even R. Hayyim (of Brisk), patriarch of the Lithuanian yeshiva world, innovated in his book on Maimonides that there are several kinds of intention in prayer, in fact at least three (without getting into the Ari's mystical intentions): intention to the words, standing before God, and fulfilling one's obligation (at least according to the view that commandments require intention).
Intention to the words is not merely understanding the meaning of the words, but also directing oneself to what they say. As I understand it, the requirement of intention to the words is not a halakhic requirement that is part of the laws of prayer, but a requirement that belongs to the conceptual layer that precedes Jewish law. Prayer is a kind of speech, and speech is not the expelling of breath from the mouth or the moving of lips, but the moving of lips that expresses some content to which the mover of the lips intends. So if the prayer says "forgive us," we must intend that God forgive us; otherwise we have not prayed but merely moved our lips. And if we ask that God return to Zion, we must intend that in our hearts. Without this we have not prayed (not merely that we have failed to fulfill the obligation of prayer).
It is true that on the practical plane there are concessions. The required intention is indispensable only at the beginning of the Amidah, and the Rema waives even that. But that is only a concession to weakness, not an ideology. In the background there is probably an assumption that an unspecified act is presumed to be for its proper purpose, meaning that if a person says the prayer there is implicit intention here. But a nonbeliever certainly does not intend that God restore His Presence or forgive him. Such a person, even if he said all the words with devotion and danced while doing so in religious ecstasy, has not prayed at all.
As a side note, I will just remark that the third Isaiah is indeed right in what he says, but as usual he takes it one step too far. Indeed there is in prayer a formal halakhic dimension of fulfilling one's obligation and standing before God. But it is not true that this is all its meaning. Indeed worship of God and the formal fulfillment of the commandment in prayer (reciting the telephone book) exist, but that is only the first level. Above it are further levels of therapy and intentions and exalted meanings, up to all seven heavens of the Ari and beyond. Moreover, elsewhere I have pointed out that if a person prays without this first level, that is, does so only in order to experience or even to improve himself, he has not fulfilled his obligation. Commandments require intention. But beyond this level it is possible that there are many more levels still.
On the contrary
Many people point to the absence of content and meaning in our prayer. People pray three times a day by rote, and in fact prayer does nothing for them. If prayer really has meaning beyond fulfilling the commandment (reciting the telephone book), then presumably it is supposed to do something to us, that is, to change something in the one who prays. The more refined version adds that God Himself certainly does not need it, and He of course knows our needs on His own. Prayer is meant to change us, and to make us a vessel for the abundance He will bestow upon us. If so, the essence of prayer is its meaning and what it does to us. The commandment to pray, which indeed is part of Jewish law, is not a commandment to move one's lips but a commandment to perform spiritual and emotional work that will change and improve us.
But if so, then this is exactly what happens with these people (the secular people who pray). They do not believe in an obligation to pray. They want to pray, and they do so because it benefits them. For them prayer is therapy. It leads to change and improvement in personality and soul. They pour out their hearts before the holy vacuum, and that apparently really is meaningful for them and changes them. So is it really correct to say that they have not prayed? On the contrary, one could argue that it is precisely they who are actually praying. If religious people do it because of religious obligation and find it very hard to pour emotional and spiritual content into the act of prayer, then secular prayer is in essence spiritual and emotional work. Seemingly this is the most authentic prayer. So what difference does it make if, in their view, they are standing before the holy vacuum? Does God need us and our prayers? If the change and improvement do take place, does that not mean that this is prayer in the fullest sense?
In fact, what happens among them is exactly what many religious communities are looking to make happen among themselves: shaking off ossification and dogmatism, and turning prayer into something spiritually and emotionally meaningful. That is exactly what happens there, and it is no wonder that religious groups seek contact with them in order to learn their secret. The encounters with them and the admiration they arouse in many show that there is really a kind of hidden envy here. They are doing what we would like to happen among us. If they pray without needing God to stand before them (or them before Him) in order for this to happen, is there not in effect fulfilled in them Would that they forsook Me but kept My Torah (Would that they forsook Me but kept My Torah; see, for example, Pesikta de-Rav Kahana section 15 and elsewhere)?
Well, not really
And yet, there is a clear sense that there is no such thing as secular prayer. Without standing before God, there is no prayer here. First, because as I argued above, the initial level of prayer is indeed obligation and the fulfillment of obligation. Even if it is true that this is not the whole of prayer, without this level there is no prayer at all. Some will say, beyond that, that the change will not happen and cannot happen if there is no standing before God. But I am not sure about that. The fact is that these people report significant experiences and changes even without faith and without standing before God (but rather before myself, or before the holy vacuum, blessed be it).
But there is something beyond that here as well. Even the further levels, those beyond obligation and the fulfillment of obligation, are not merely excitement and experience, or psychological change as such. That change is supposed to be connected to God. The required change is not just self-improvement or an experience. For change one goes to a psychologist or a hypnotist. Experiences one gets from LSD, from an interesting and moving performance, or from a trip to a beautiful place. The change and experience in prayer, even if they are required and expected, must be connected to the relationship between us and God. When I stand before the holy vacuum, perhaps a change occurs in me, but prayer is not a synonym for change or even for improvement. Even if one sees prayer as an instrument of change, what is involved here is change in one's relationship with God, and that cannot happen in secular prayer. Admittedly, it may be that the person praying will suddenly discover that he believes, and then the prayer apparently did do what it was supposed to do. But when the secular person, while still secular, speaks about prayer and its value, he is certainly not speaking about that. In his present phase he is not praying in order to become a believer, but is speaking about an act of secular prayer without any relation to God. What will happen to him afterward is not initiated by him, and therefore that is not what he is talking about.
On hidden faith
To conclude I will suggest one more layer of relating to the secular person who prays. It may be that a hidden faith stands behind this phenomenon. True, as I described in the previous section, the secular person who prays does not intend to become a believer, and that is not what prayer is worth in his eyes. But perhaps implicitly and unconsciously he is in fact a believer. He intuitively grasps the existence of God and the need and meaning of standing and pouring out one's heart before Him, and therefore, even if consciously he speaks as an atheist, he is in fact not praying to the vacuum, blessed be it, but to God. And let this not seem strange to you. There are many people who believe things in a hidden way that is not even conscious to themselves (see about this at length in the fourth notebook. "Theological" proofs are based on such hidden beliefs).
True, such an act has no significance as a commandment, for a commandment requires belief and the intention to serve God through it (even according to the views that commandments do not require intention, they do require belief. See here). And of course he does not fulfill his obligation of prayer in this way, and therefore if he suddenly returns to religious observance and becomes a believer that very day, it is clear that halakhically he has not fulfilled his obligation and must pray again. And of course one cannot count him toward a minyan, since halakhically there is no prayer here. Still, all this pertains mainly to the first layer (that of fulfilling one's obligation and the religious value of the act). But if one looks at the further levels, that is, at what prayer does, then perhaps this does happen even in the case of secular prayer. The results of prayer may perhaps also be achieved in this way.
Summary: Secular Prayer and Its Meaning
In summary, one might have viewed prayer in a Leibowitzian way, as a formal act. As I explained, that is not plausible. Prayer has additional purposes, among them apparently spiritual and personal ones. But even if one accepts the existence of such purposes, this does not mean that every experience or personal improvement can count as prayer. Prayer is supposed to be connected to our relationship with God. Beyond that, the commandment of prayer requires intention and belief, that is, that we pray in order to improve our standing before God and our relationship with Him. When this happens in the mode of "mit'asek" (that is, inadvertently and without intention), it is doubtful to what extent the matter can be considered prayer. Bottom line: it seems to me that secular prayer, however religious it may be, lacks religious meaning, but is not necessarily devoid of religious value. We have seen, for example, that perhaps it may have results of religious significance.
As for the possibility of learning from secular people who pray and adopting their insights for ourselves, I am fairly doubtful, though I have no practical experience and therefore it is hard to rule it out categorically. It may be possible to draw from them new ways of creating religious experiences and feelings, but so long as none of this is connected to standing before God, it is not prayer. But perhaps when a believer, who does stand before God, uses such techniques (even if their source is secular), this will create closeness to God in him and improve his relationship and his standing before Him. In light of our wretched condition, it may be worth trying.
And still, talk about the "exclusion of secular people from prayer" is of course nothing more than fashionable nonsense.
Discussion
Regarding hidden faith, Rabbi Froman writes in Hasidim Tzohakim Mizeh, conversation 179: "Sometimes I think that all theology, all religions, all the talk in the world about God, etc., stems only from the need to explain the instinctive and simple human thing called prayer. A person prays. And he has to explain to himself to whom he is praying and what he is doing; he calls it by the name God and builds an entire religious world around it. But the core of everything is prayer."
Nice..
But there is one essential thing you didn’t bring into the discussion: what is “exclusion”? Who is excluding, and whom is he excluding?
And if we define what exclusion is, and identify the excluder and the excluded— is the exclusion a moral act or not?
In my opinion, it’s worth discussing in our public discourse.
I explained that it can have religious value in the consequential sense. That is, the prayer can bring a person to faith or reveal to him that he believes (raise his faith to the level of awareness). Clearly, the act of prayer itself has no religious meaning. That is what I mean by the distinction between value and meaning.
Hello Mario. This is part of the usual nonsense in those circles (Rabbis Shagar and Froman and the like).
According to this description, Rabbi Froman is basically an atheist who invents God for himself in order to answer his psychological needs (and Karl Marx, of blessed memory, already said of him and those like him: opium for the masses). I assume he wasn’t really like that but was just confused (= a Hasid). But one shouldn’t turn this confusion into an ideology.
I wrote that nobody is excluding anybody in the essential sense. As a believing person, I do exclude the secular person from prayer in the sense that I do not regard him as praying and do not include him in a minyan, and I also claim that he has not fulfilled his obligation (if he repents, he will have to go back and pray again that same day). None of this has anything to do with morality. It is simply a fact (that such a person is not praying). Facts are neutral on the moral plane.
Thank you for the fascinating article.
I didn’t completely understand the connection to Leibowitz’s words. Did you mean to say that according to his view there is value to secular prayer???
I think that in his view too it has no value.
Leibowitz sees value in the act of the commandment in that it is “service of God,” regardless of what the act contains. In his view prayer is service of God, regardless of what is said in the prayer. But he also agrees that the commandment has to be fulfilled מתוך תחושת מחוייבות. Isn’t that so? Am I mistaken?
Regarding hidden faith.
There was a correspondence here on the site about this, which you did not address:
I copied there from the words of Minchat Shlomo (R. Shlomo Zalman Auerbach):
He wrote in Kovetz Shiurim (part 2, sec. 77, no. 14) that an unbeliever who performs a commandment has done nothing, since it is like mere unintentional involvement… (and R. Shlomo Zalman disagrees): It is nowhere mentioned that someone who is doubtful about his faith would be obligated to put on tefillin again, for anyone who performs the commandment with clear awareness, only being doubtful in his faith, is not considered merely unintentionally involved…
Someone who is in a place where it seems clear to him that this is not the first night of Passover, but he is in an environment where everyone says that it is Passover night, and out of embarrassment he eats an olive’s bulk of matzah with them—it stands to reason that at least in his heart he intends that if the truth is as they say, he will fulfill his obligation. And the same applies to an apostate or heretic: after all, there is some doubt in his heart. Therefore, when he does something commanded by the Torah, it is as though he intends that if the Holy One, blessed be He, did indeed command this, he is doing it for that reason.
The argument there was what he meant. I claimed there that in his view, even a Jew who defines himself as an atheist (and not as an agnostic), if he performs a commandment, it will count as his having fulfilled the obligation. And the practical implication is that if afterward he changes his mind and becomes a believer, he will not have to perform it again. (I brought proofs there for my words.)
In the article here you wrote the opposite, that such a person has not fulfilled his obligation.
Can you address his words?
Thank you very much
What I wrote is that according to Leibowitz it is obvious that this prayer has no value whatsoever. I only argued that even without Leibowitz this is correct, because his basic premise is accepted by everyone; others merely add further layers beyond the basic one he presents.
I did not get into the discussion that developed between you there. In general, it is as clear as day that an atheist’s commandment is nothing. As I read the passage you quoted (I didn’t see it there in the original), even R. Shlomo Zalman does not disagree with this; rather, he claims that a person is usually doubtful, and therefore sometimes fulfills a commandment conditionally, provided there really is such a commandment and that it is binding (like the condition of the Avnei Nezer regarding the afikoman, concerning which, as is well known, many disagreed with him). But I am speaking about someone who has decided on atheism, not someone who is doubtful, and therefore it has no connection to my remarks.
Prayer? Not prayer? Call it Yekum Purkan!
There is actually a lot of similarity between the quote and what you wrote at the end of the column. This is basically an argument from prayer. He is not speaking about a psychological need for God, but claims that everyone believes in prayer, and from this it is actually clear that he believes there is someone to pray to.
It is indeed very similar, and that is why I took the trouble to explain there the difference between the two similar formulations (to invent God in order to validate morality — pragmatism, or to infer the existence of God from belief in the validity of morality — a “theological” argument). If we are talking about a “theological” inference, then fine. But the formulation quoted here speaks of a pragmatist invention, and that is atheism, meaning confused nonsense.
Rabbi Froman follows in the path of Rav Kook, who held that faith and prayer are natural to man and were planted in him by the Creator. Revelation, according to this approach, was only meant to give this natural expression the proper context of worship of the Creator. There is no denial here of the Creator or of revelation, but simply a more general claim that there is a natural relation between man and the Creator, which revelation enables in the proper form.
Indeed. As I wrote, I assume that is what he means, and therefore only the expression (and the thinking) is confused. We can further discuss what “natural faith” means (it is not clear how much content there is to it at all), but this is not the place.
With God’s help, 11 Cheshvan 5778
I do not understand what practical difference all this discussion about secular prayer makes. Does any one of them need our halakhic approval? They are feeling their way toward prayer, as part of a universally human process of seeking closeness and connection to that which is above us.
In the past they used to run to India and the like to seek connection with what lies beyond our grasp, and would get caught up in all sorts of strange sects that are very hard to get out of. Today we have merited that people seek the sublime also “right under their noses,” in the “bookshelf” and “prayer book” of their forefathers, or in direct conversation with the Creator, as it was before the Men of the Great Assembly instituted the prayers.
Most “secular people” are not atheists, and they believe in a “higher power” that created the world, and many of them believe that the Creator watches over His creatures. Even those who define themselves as “atheists”—most of them have not learned or known what it is they “deny,” and they merely repeat slogans dripped into them by one “scholar” or another. The very attempt to converse with the “non-existent being” teaches that they are not 100% secure in their “heresy.”
Either way, when one searches—ultimately one finds. Would that we all find our God and merit to cleave to Him with a whole heart.
Regards, S.Z. Levinger
And a note regarding the triangle and the circle. If the triangle is drawn on the earth, then it really is round 🙂
This is not about inventing. There is a first stage that is “instinctive and simple” (if he means instinct in the biological sense, it is meaningless; it seems to me he means something like intuition), and a second stage in which he “explains to himself” this intuition — a person explains to himself that the fact that he turns to someone to save him really means that he believes in some entity, and then “he calls it by the name God and builds an entire religious world around it.” There is no pragmatist invention here at all, only naming. From his point of view, God is not necessarily the Creator of the cosmological proof, and perhaps also not necessarily the commander of the proof from morality, but rather that entity to which we pray out of recognition of its superiority (and apparently also its ability to help us).
I think you have become too accustomed to accusing people of this. The only thing one can hang the stricter interpretation on is the word “instinctive.”
Shatzal
Even if you draw it on the earth, it still won’t be a circle
Yishai, this is a pointless argument. If he intends to bring a “theological” proof from the need for prayer, then good for him. It doesn’t seem that way to me, but it’s not really important.
Preface
I have not yet merited to stand in prayer before God. I have whispered, tried to concentrate in Gevurot, stood for the Amidah, bowed at Magen Avraham and at “and peace,” and prostration at Modim.
I am like one seventy-seven prayers old, with the prayer just a matter of routine speech. The problem is that before the fixing (rigidification) of the prayer text by the Men of the Great Assembly, let us say that prayer is supplication. I supplicate before Him (?) blessed be He (?) that my own speech and meditation be sweet to me. And perhaps prayer is at times tasteless, and it is clear to me that it is secondary to Torah study. To recite the same text for years—this is like the monotonous Sephardic penitential prayers.
R. M.A., may he live long, healthy, and well (whose mind I absolutely adore, and I am soaked with longing to read every one of his posts), claims that prayer = a religious act (ritual). So it is no wonder that your arguments are accordingly so, and the harmonization according to you is built in from the outset. And pagan or idolatrous prayer too was religious prayer. Your distinction between religion and religiosity is what gives a rationale to your orderly doctrine (?).
Everything, then, depends on definition and on the nature of the niche one seeks to fence off for oneself.
And when people say “If only” in longing, or “God!” at the time of coupling and orgasm, or the more fastidious “There is a God” when facing 22 hooligans and a ball (in Leibowitz’s phrase) — would you not count them for a minyan either, Michi?
I study a daily daf and do not (to my sorrow?) connect to Ma’ariv after “Rabbi Hanina.”
And above all, aside from the psychological explanation, over which you should not “get all worked up” — and by the way, why in “an eye for an eye” and “a tooth for a tooth” do we not say “under under under”? And perhaps because Isaac said “Am I in God’s place?” — why, for heaven’s sake (the great and awesome Name, who does not need human babbling), does a large part of the prayers deal with praising the Holy One, blessed be He?
In sum:
1. Who will teach me to stand before God — and what does it actually mean to “stand before God”?
2. Who will teach me understanding regarding the endless Psalms for the Infinite?
Amid all the prefaces and cleverness, I didn’t understand what you are saying. As for your first question, standing before God means fulfilling the commandment of prayer because of the commandment in it. When you do so in order to stand before Him, you are standing before Him. My claim is that no experience or the like is required. I didn’t understand the second question.
The discussion around secular prayer is really a discussion of the concept of prayer: is it a religious matter or a human one? It is hard to know, because religion began with humanity. Every religion has a story about primordial first man. The ritual of prayer took shape and changed shape like many religious/human rituals.
The Sages saw prayer as the sole reason that rain fell after the creation of the world.
“For the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was no man to till the ground.”
The world is built of water and dry land. Rain is the ability of the earth to be fruitful and multiply.
But man stands in the middle. He prays that rain should fall, and thus the rain fertilizes the soil.
Prayer is built from the general stirrings of humanity. It speaks about the vital principles between God and His people, not between man and himself, and not even between man and his Maker.
Until the formulation of the Men of the Great Assembly, prayer was the stirring of the heart. They cast prayer into molds. The stirrings of our heart are not the main subject. Rather, the main focus is precisely the engagement with general social needs, such as healing, understanding, redemption.
And after the Sages came the halakhic decisors and established the first three blessings, or at least the first blessing, as the essence of prayer. And specifically in the place where the obligation of intention is indispensable, the person praying is forbidden to ask for his needs and speak about himself.
Prayer in this sense is religious prayer that is not connected to the mood of the one praying. It has no concern with the person’s progress. It is not on the emotional plane. It is a religious act and not merely a human instinct.
“Secular prayer” is a borrowed expression, because what is meant is meditation rituals or words of prayer, but prayer is a religious act and not the words. This narrows the discussion to an entirely different question: are words of prayer prayer or not? And that, of course, is a superfluous question.
How, in actual practice, halakhically speaking, am I to stand before Him in prayer? What does that mean? How does one fulfill “I have set”?
And why the hell, why do He (or I) need so much praise and reinforcement? Ah… blessed be He, He has been strengthened!
But Rabbi Yirmiyah the First loved prayer, and when Rabbi Zeira prolonged his lesson, Rabbi Yirmiyah asked to begin prayer, until Rabbi Zeira rebuked him (Shabbat 10a)
What is the problem? When you stand in prayer, you should think that this is standing before God and perform the prayer with such an intention. It does not seem especially complicated to me.
How did you get from here to the claim that He needs reinforcement? That is beyond me.
Interesting. I didn’t quite understand your intention in refuting the statement that prayer is for me, so that I should progress. You said that what needs to progress is the relationship between me and God. So in essence you agree that the change has to take place in me, only that it is not a “moral” change in the secular sense but a change connected with the service of God.?
For my part, I do not understand why this difficulty is so acute דווקא in prayer. After all, all our lives on earth are seemingly devoid of any meaning for the believer, since God does not change and He is everything, etc. So if you live, eat, drink, and act in the world, and hold that there is change in you and in the world and that your actions have meaning, then so too in prayer: when you ask for healing, God will heal you. And there is change.
Hello Eran. Are your remarks addressed to me? I didn’t understand your claim. It is indeed a change connected to the relationship between me and the Holy One, blessed be He (if at all). That is what I said.
This difficulty applies to any commandment that secular people do in a similar form without its religious content. In practice this occurs in prayer, and that is why I discussed it.
What I meant to ask was whether your understanding of prayer is identical to the secular understanding, namely that it is for the sake of the person’s undergoing a change and not that a real change should occur in healing and the like. From your answer I understand that it is, only that this change is not in the person in the simple human sense but in the relation between him and God (I do not entirely understand your intention in the reservations in parentheses).
On that I asked: why is it so hard to grasp prayer as something that really effects change, in the simplest sense, when the believing person lives his life with the consciousness that he influences and changes, while at the same time holding that there is no change in God, and that from Him come all life and the world? If it is hard for you to understand prayer in the simple sense, why is it so easy for you to live?
That is another question. Indeed, my view is that usually prayers are not answered (because in our day the Holy One, blessed be He, usually does not intervene in creation). But here we were dealing with the question whether prayer is supposed to change something in us, which is another question. I did not speak at all about change in the Holy One, blessed be He, Himself. How did that get here?!
Because I assumed that the reason you interpret prayer as intended to create a change in me is that you reject the possibility of a change in God as a result of prayer. Now I understand that this is not so, that’s all.
If you know how to write comments in my name, perhaps you can also pray in my place?
Regards, Shemashim Tzvaylig Levvinberger
With God’s help, 26 Cheshvan 5778
At first glance, it seems that there can be an “atheist” who prays, since prayer stems from the praying person’s intuitive perception that there is a master of the mansion to whom one can turn. But the person suppresses this thought, because standing before him is a whole battery of authorities, philosophers, and men of science, who have convinced him with arguments that seem to him like “proof beyond refutation” that faith is mere imagination opposed to reason and science, a primitive and dangerous illusion.
Since a person wants to be “rational” and not “primitive,” he will decide to follow the intellectual analysis and regard his gut feeling as “mere imagination,” but suppressing the natural feeling does not help very much, and it peeks through and bursts forth, and the person is torn between his atheistic reason and his believing intuition.
And perhaps God listens precisely to the prayer that comes from the screaming heart of man, from his soul that continues to be “a part of God above,” despite the decisive “reason” that tells him “absolutely not”?
Regards, S.Z. Levinger
S.Z.L.,
That is a very correct point, and I completely agree with it. In fact, I wrote it in the post itself. There are many people who are in fact believers intuitively, but recursive thinking leads them elsewhere and they fall into the error I discussed in the last column (100), and therefore abandon it.
The only thing I do not agree with is God’s listening. In my view, religious value exists only for acts that are done out of conscious thought and decision. Things that emerge on their own from all sorts of depths of the soul have no value in my eyes. That is instinct, and the person is not responsible for it and also deserves no credit for it. He did not decide on it; it simply came out of him on its own. It may be that the Holy One, blessed be He, listens and even responds (if He responds at all), but it has no religious value.
With God’s help, Wednesday, for the portion “And she went to inquire of the Lord,” 5778
To Ramda — greetings,
A person who defines himself as a “non-believer” and nevertheless turns to prayer is not acting out of instinct, but out of awareness, out of some “skeptical gnat” pecking at his mind and saying to him: but perhaps, after all, there is something or someone within the “empty space,” existent-nonexistent, called faith, something worth examining and experimenting with before rejecting it altogether.
If such a discourse can be defined, in halakhic terms, as “prayer,” meaning verbal address to God, that probably depends on the question whether we say (R. Shlomo Zalman’s reasoning cited by Aharon) that even the thought, based on the remote possibility that there is a God, that I am turning to Him, counts as intention. But one must take into account that even if we decide that such prayer has no “halakhic value,” it still has great religious value, for there is nothing greater than “to seek the Lord.”
Every prayer comes from “wrestlings of God,” a cry to God of “Where are You?” Ordinarily, the seeker comes from the certain starting point that there is a God and He guides the world justly, but he does not understand why God hides Himself and why justice and goodness are not revealed in the world, and he dares in his soul to present the question to his Creator. Abraham is certain that God is “the Judge of all the earth,” and from that certainty he expresses his astonishment at His plan to destroy Sodom.
In our generation we have merited that even people who grew up on self-confident disbelief, which imagined that progress and “enlightenment” render God superfluous, are no longer so confident in themselves, and are going “to seek the Lord” and to seek Him also in the “Jewish bookshelf,” which they had thought “fossilized and outdated.”
It is clear that there is also great danger in this process, the fear of distorting and corrupting the concepts of faith and Torah — and regarding this we must stand guard and say of such-and-such ideas that they are original and brilliant but are not Judaism — and on the other hand be aware of the great hope in the process of searching and clarification. There are things they will understand do not belong, and on the other hand there are things we will discover are not an innovation at all, but have long been found in our Torah.
Regards, S.Z. Levinger
Action on the basis of doubt raises other difficulties (I referred to this here in one of the responses). This relates to the dispute about stipulating conditions for commandments (such as the condition of the Avnei Nezer regarding the afikoman after midnight).
A new survey:
https://news.walla.co.il/item/3128018
The question is whether there is implicit faith here, or merely contentless habit.
If in secular prayer there is no standing before someone, why is it only devoid of religious meaning rather than devoid of religious value?