Authentic Prayer
by: Rabbi Rami Shapiro
Despite the hours of repetitive liturgy that is at the heart of Jewish worship, I am not much for formal prayer. This is true for three reasons: I don’t believe in the God to whom these prayers are addressed; 2) I find the words of the prayers parochial, patriarchal, and largely irrelevant to my life; and 3) I find reading aloud in community boring: no matter how beautiful the words may be, reading them in unison (or worse responsively) robs them of all value. Given this, it should be no surprise that I rarely attend formal Jewish worship services. This was true before Covid-19 and is all the more true when services are conducted via Zoom where you can see that the vast majority of people on–line are not paying any attention at all.
I prefer Anne Lamott’s notion that there are only three kinds of prayer and that they arise of themselves in response to reality happening in the moment. Her three categories of prayer are “Help!” “Thanks!” and “Wow!”. That’s it. Frighteningly simple.
I say “frighteningly” because these are authentic prayers arising naturally in the moment rather than liturgical prayer which allows us to hide from what is happening in the moment behind a deluge of words written in moments long past. Reciting a prayer from a prayer book isn’t praying; it is reading. Reading isn’t a bad thing—on the contrary, reading is among my favorite activities. It just isn’t prayer.
When my dad died, an Orthodox rabbi joined us at my sister’s home for the first night of Shiva (the seven–day period of mourning). He gathered our family together in a small room off the kitchen to pray. He was young and very pleasant. He admitted that, not having experienced the loss of a parent or spouse himself, he had no idea what we might be feeling and could not compose a prayer worthy of our feelings. Instead of praying for my dad, he suggested we pray for the welfare of Jerusalem.
Really? Jerusalem? I spent a couple of years living in Jerusalem and I have a deep love for the city, but at that moment Jerusalem just wasn’t a priority for me. I doubt the welfare of the city was on the minds of my mom or my sister either. Yet, this is what the rabbi asked us to do because while we each have our own way to grieve over the death of my dad, we all have the same feelings regarding Jerusalem.
What he really meant was this: “There is no prayer I can recite that will speak honestly to your loss, so let me pretend to do something meaningful by praying for Jerusalem in hopes that this will distract you from my incompetence and Judaism’s irrelevance at this moment. Let us pray…”
Authentic prayer speaks out of the moment; liturgical prayer speaks to the moment at best or to some past the moment at worst. When your life is crumbling all around you, your heartfelt cry of “Help!” is more authentic than any official reading. The same is true when you are overwhelmed with gratitude. And when it is awe and wonder that overwhelms you, words themselves are a distraction and your prayer of “Wow!” often takes a nonverbal form.
When asked if I pray, I ask what the questioner means by prayer before I answer. If they mean reciting the official prayers of Judaism, my answer is “no”. If they mean giving voice to the horror or hope of any given moment, my answer is “yes”.
Often this question is accompanied by a second and then a third: “To whom do you pray?” and “Why do you pray?”
I don’t pray to anyone. God for me isn’t a being or a Supreme Being but YHVH, being itself: the infinite dynamic Aliveness (Chiut in Hebrew, Tao in Chinese) in which we live and move and have our being (to borrow from Rabbi Saul of Tarsus in Acts 17:28). I don’t pray to Chiut, I pray as Chiut.
And I pray for no reason—no “why”. My prayer is simply a deep and unfiltered affirmation of the moment regardless of what that moment brings.
This kind of prayer—unfiltered, unmediated by tradition, and embedded in the moment—is what I call truly spiritual prayer. Part of the work of spirituality is to free you to utter it.
Happy New Year,
Rabbi Rami Shapiro