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The Art of Jewish Prayer
It’s never too late to learn how to davven (Yiddish for prayer) effectively. Prayer is our greatest opportunity to connect with spiritual energy, but unfortunately it’s seldom properly taught so that most of us go through life finding prayer unsatisfying. This chapter will attempt to make prayer meaningful for you. Many books have been written about Jewish prayer; many synagogues offer adult ed courses on prayer. They generally all emphasize the details of the prayer service—which occasions should certain prayers be recited, which prayers are to be included at appointed times and the biblical sources for a particular prayer. The “how-to” is rarely ever mentioned.

People claiming that they were never taught to davven (pray) throughout their Hebrew school education often approach me. “Standing up to pray in the synagogue seems to have no real purpose; we get nothing out of it”, the may say. They sometimes ask, “Is there something more I should know?” And I always respond, “Yes, there is a lot to know and it’s unfortunate you weren’t taught properly earlier on, but it’s never too late. Prayer is the foremost Jewish practice for establishing the spiritual dimension of your life. Judaism is based on cultivating a deeper relationship to God, from where all the beneficial values of life originate. That’s the heart of it; once we establish that connection, everything falls naturally into place—relationships, health, abundance, wisdom, all of it.

The art of Jewish prayer, the “how-to”, can be summarized in the following three steps:
1. The structure of the service
2. Cultivating faith
3. Making our hearts sing

Step 1. The structure of the service
We can’t learn to davven properly without knowing something about the structure of the prayer service as organized in the siddur (the Jewish prayer book). The word “siddur” means “order”, specifically the order of the service.  It matters little if the siddur is composed from a reform, conservative or orthodox perspective; the order is always the same except for certain inclusion or exclusions and how much English in included. All services, whether daily, Shabbat or Festivals or whether their designated as morning, afternoon or evening, all follow a similar format:

Opening Psalms
All services begin with a selection of one or more Psalms. Whether they’re called Kabbalat Shabbat (Welcoming the Sabbath) for Friday evening or Pesukei D’Zimra (Songs of Praise) in the morning service or sometimes even just a single Psalm, they’re like warm-up exercises before a workout.

Blessings before and after the Shema
It is said that the service actually opens with the “Borchu”, the call to prayer, which precedes a series of lengthy blessings before the recitation of the Shema (Hear O Israel), the keynote prayer in all of Judaism. Upon completion of another set of lengthy blessings, which follows the Shema, we come to the heart of Jewish prayer, the Amidah. 

The Amidah
The Amidah which is rooted in the verb “to stand”, also known as the T’filla (the Great Prayer) or the Shemonah Esrei  (the numeral 18 for it’s 18 blessings) is recited standing and in absolute silence. Often the Chazzan (the Cantor), repeats the Amidah for the congregation with a short insertion of exalted holiness known as the Kedushah (holiness). Even though 18 is the usual number of blessings, they may vary; there are much fewer on Shabbat.

The Torah Service
On the Shabbat and Festival morning service, the Torah is taken from the Ark and paraded in a grand procession around the synagogue for all to respectfully revere, and the weekly portion is read publicly. The Torah service also includes a reading from the Prophets, the Haftarah. It may surprise you to learn that the Torah reading is considered, in itself, a form of prayer.
After the Torah is replaced in the Ark, some synagogues include a Mussaf  (additional) service) which is essentially another Amidah with special text to commemorate the additional sacrifices required for Shabbat and Festivals.

That’s about it, except for a few closing hymns, the mourners kaddish and Adon Olam. Many people complain that with all the Hebrew they can’t keep up with the service or lose track of the page.   Don’t despair; this can all be remedied. First, there is no necessity to pray in Hebrew; the Talmud explains that Hebrew is the preferred language of prayer, but your everyday language is perfectly acceptable. Your siddur always provides an accompanying page in English, so you can pray according to your preference. Second, someone on the bima (the platform), usually the Rabbi or the Cantor will announce the current page, and finally you will learn how to locate the correct place by attending the synagogue regularly and getting accustomed to the Cantor’s melodies which clue you into the right page.

I recall an old friend who would proudly report how he disliked prayer services. “The prayer book has nothing to say”, he would comment, “and besides I read it countless times before”. What he didn’t get was that the text contains untold variations of praise and gratitude for God. What he also didn’t know was that the prayer book was composed by Rabbinic sages, throughout the centuries, with the prime intent to develop the one thing that spiritual practice requires—faith.

Step 2. Cultivating faith
Faith is something other than belief. A belief is an intensely embedded thought, to which, for one reason or another, we become firmly attached. But beliefs are subject to change. The one-time, commonly held belief that the world was flat was quickly dispelled by Columbus’ voyages, and so it goes like so many beliefs, which depending on the latest news releases may be subject to change. Faith, however, never changes; it is a kind of inner knowing that relates trust and confidence in God. To have faith means that we understand the universe with all its components to be of one essential quality, a wholeness. That means you and me, the trees and the stars, and everything else that exists is a manifestation of the One God. We have all been born with a inherent perception of faith, but like so many other qualities that we lost in the process of “growing up”, faith also went by the wayside.  Fortunately, we can learn to reestablish faith.

With faith we know that whatever crosses our path can only be for the good (the Jewish mystics tell us that God only delivers what’s good). Without  faith, prayer gets reduced to just mouthing the words. You might ask, where was the good that God delivered when six million were being murdered in the concentration camps? The answer is that we don’t know; we’re not God.
Some steps we can take to rebuild our faith is to:
Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan wrote in the introduction to Restore My Soul, the teachings of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, “It is very easy to live when things go right. But what about when things go wrong? What does one do when everything seems to go against him. From time immemorial, our sages have taught us that if a person trusts God, he has every reason to be optimistic. While troubles may come, they are only temporary—nothing lasts forever. There is the famous legend that King Solomon, the wisest man of all time, had a ring inscribed with the words, ‘This too will pass’.”

Step 3. Making our hearts sing
The composers of the siddur understood that the act of praying is not one we can do alone. A verse from the Psalms—“Lord, open my lips that my mouth may flow with your praise” (Psalm 51:17)—was placed before the Amidah to remind us that we do not pray alone. God prays through us! We provide the words, our deepest spiritual impulse makes the music. Two specific aspects of prayer that is inherently Jewish is the music and kavannah.

The first and best-known reference to kavannah in Rabbinic literature is in Mishnah's rules on the recitation of prayers in tractate Berachot. That idea is known as kavannah or "intention" in ritual performances. It implies the state of mind of the person engaged in a special mode of consciousness for religious ritual.

Kavannah signifies a specific meditative state of mind characterized by a heightened experience of truth, one more receptive to holistic images and associations. Talmudic evidence implies that the state of consciousness for Rabbinic prayer, expressed by the term kavannah, differs in logic and character from usual thinking. Sayings in Mishnah suggest that when we properly modify our consciousness for prayer we move into an intuitive mode, quite different from normal awareness. In this state we become more sensitive to impressions and imaginative images, and open us to receiving divine instruction. Several rabbinic laws address the ways in which the people engaged in prayer may respond during the prayer service. They suggest that a state of meditation is achieved that limits normal awareness and filters out much of normal, everyday consciousness.

Thus Kavannah is the effort of divesting ourselves of all extraneous thoughts and focus our entire attention on the prayer. An exercise: At key junctures during the prayer service, start by taking a few deep inhalations and feel your body relax with each exhalation. Direct the words you recite, whether silently or aloud, inwardly as if talking directly to your heart. Focus your conscious attention so strongly on the praise and gratitude for God in the text until all extraneous thoughts dissolve and you become one with the Holy One, blessed be He. The liturgy of the Amidah is to be recited just audible enough to hear, and in doing so, it also engages the body (auditory sense) in prayer. Some sway, bow and bend, to deepen their involvement with the body.  When we're connected to our bodies, and disengaged from our minds, we stand in the present moment, the gate of the Divine. Prayer is the heartfelt expression of our relationship to God and to all of life.

Music strikes a deep chord within our souls. It makes us more human and accessible to prayer. The roots of music in prayer reach back to the days of the First Temple when the Levites would sing the Psalms of praise.  Favorite or lilting music links us to literally millions of memories and meaningful stages of life. Sing a beloved melody while stuck in traffic and suddenly you feel less tense and stressed. Unconsciously your body may move to the rhythm. Suddenly, life seems a little less frenzied and frightening. It has been long known that prayers are carried to the divine realms on the wings of song.

Rabbi Zalman Shachter, the founder of Jewish renewal once conducted the most moving prayer service, here in Providence that I ever had the pleasure to attend. About twenty people assembled at about four in the afternoon on that particular Shabbat for minchah. Everyone immediately reached for a siddur when Reb Zalman announced that they would not be necessary. In a large circle, we stood hand in hand.  The diminishing sun cast graceful shadows on the oak paneled walls, as he softly chanted a lilting niggun (wordless melody) before initiating the recitation of the late afternoon service in English, punctuated with a few key berachot (blessings) in Hebrew. A mist of pure silence overshadowed the room except for Zalman's voice melodically davenning the Eighteen Benedictions. I felt for the first time what it meant to open my heart and feel the presence of God and myself concurrently. It was then I understood what prayer is all about--an encounter with the soul, that spark of holiness within. Since then I am always ready and eager to serve as a tenth man, or as it is said these days, a tenth person.

Are our prayers answered?
Absolutely! A quick scan through the Amidah, starting with the fourth blessing, points out that we petition God for our real needs—wisdom, repentance, forgiveness, healing, abundance, etc. We always receive what we need, even though we don’t necessarily approve of our gifts. We may think that we need more love, or more money to make us happy. God may not agree and consequently sends us something to the contrary.  Sometimes, we’re dealt illness, something we definitely don’t want, but God is sending us a message that some aspect in our lives is out of balance or in disparity with the universe; an explicit message to repair the spiritual damage. At other times, we may lose our jobs or important relationships—a clear signal that some aspect of our lives need fixing and from those shattered dreams new possibilities will arise. We have to learn to listen carefully to these messages. Through prayer we both ask and receive.

Personal prayer Vs fixed prayer
The Rabbis decided at one point in Jewish history that “keva” fixed prayers should be the established norm, but they did not rule out personal prayer. Specific requests can always be made, and God hears you even though you may get what He determined, not what you requested.  “Speaking your heart out to God”, a Chassidic meditative technique has been brought to full attainment by Rabbi Nachman of Breslov. He suggests that we find quiet seclusion and tell God exactly what’s on our minds; God is a great listener. It’s only when we lose faith and think that no one is out there that we lose the benefit of the prayer. You may even find quiet moments during a prayer service where you can insert your own personal prayers.

Making prayer simple
By its very nature, prayer is simple; let’s not overcomplicate matters. Prescribed times can add to the complexity. Jewish tradition prescribes fixed prayer three daily—morning, afternoon and evening. All together this could amount to two hours a day in the synagogue, every day.  Most Jewish spiritual seekerstoday would find this much too time consuming. An option would be to review the prayer book, scanning through the sections outlined above (in the Structure of the Service), and determine a reasonable amount of time that you can devote to prayer daily. The object is to pray daily (it's quality not quantity that counts) which ultimately leads to a prayerful life, a life dedicated to nurturing the soul.

Another thing is to approach prayer with humility. Be honest with yourself. Don’t allow yourself to feel inadequate because of lack of learning; criticizing yourself is contrary to spiritual development. Instead, congratulate yourself for getting this far and realize that wherever you are is the right place for you right now.   This is perhaps best illustrated by a simple well-known story: There was once a simple man who used to address God in prayer and say, “Lord of the World! You know that I have not studied, that I cannot even read the holy words of Your prayer book. All I remember of that which I learned as a child is the alphabet itself. But surely You, Lord, know all the words. So I will give you the letters of the alphabet, and You can form the words Yourself”. And so he prayed, reciting the letters of the alphabet, Aleph, Bet, Gimel…”.

Some final thoughts…
Taking notice of the symbolism of holiness that we find in the synagogue can intensify prayer. The Ark and its artistically pleasing, visual representations of the Ten Commandments and the Menorah that were found in the Holy Temple are suggestive of the holiness of the priestly caste.  The frequent instructions to stand up for certain prayers teach us that there are higher levels of reality, and the ritual of rising on our toes thrice, upon hearing to Kadosh, Kadosh, Kadosh (holy, holy, holy) takes yet even higher.
Gazing upon such tokens of holiness takes us out of ordinary time and transports us to a world where people’s faith brings the covenant of joyous life that God promised to Abraham and Moses.  Recognize that the synagogue in not merely a place for communal meetings or rite of passage celebrations, see it for what it really is—a gym to stretch our spiritual muscles.

Exercises to intensify your prayer
1. For a while, especially for beginners, try praying without a prayer book. Close your eyes for a while, listening to the music of the hazzan and the voices of the congregation. You can add body movement by gently swaying from side to side. Notice what feelings are being generated by the sound of the prayer. See if you can find something special that your silent prayer is relating to you.

2. Shabbat is an ideal time to carry out a workout for the soul.  At key junctures during the service, start by taking a deep breath inward and feel your body relax with each exhalation. Direct the words you recite, whether silently or aloud, inwardly as if talking directly to your heart. Focus your conscious attention so strongly on the praise and gratitude for God in the text until all extraneous thoughts dissolve and you become one with the Holy One, blessed be He

If you have any questions or comments regarding this section of  Jewish Spirituality 101, drop us a line by clicking here or addressing your email to jewishealing@yahoo.com

This area is reserved for additional  readings, useful web sites and recommended books to help you along your spiritual path. The links below  are several additional readings; future sections will contain much more, so be sure to come back to us every month.

Ten Minutes Towards Jewish Spirituality
A Service of the Heart
Swinging On The Bima
Friday Night Live
Prayer: A Prescription for Healing
In God We Trust?
Outpourings Of The Soul
Count your Blessings