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What in us makes us pray? Why do we pray
as Jews?
There are no wrong answers,
but sometimes finding any answer is hard enough. In
our busy lives we don't often take time for prayer -- once a week if
at all. When we do, it's often because we feel some ineffable call.
That call might emanate from someplace deep inside us or from
someplace outside, like our community. But why the call?
Here are a few thoughts:
Prayer is praise. Rabbi
Abraham Joshua Heschel said, "Judaism is a religion of time
aiming at the sanctification of time" (Sabbath 8).
Thus, Jews use rituals to commemorate important moments in our
communal history. But, it's not only history that's special and
sacred. Take a look at what Rabbi Harold Kushner has to say on the
subject,
Many of us tend to see the world as
divided into the holy (the realm of the religious) and the profane
(the ordinary, nonreligious, meaning everything else)...theologian
Martin Buber taught that the division is really between the holy and
the not-yet-holy. Everything in God's world can be holy if you
realize its potential holiness. (Kushner 49)
One mode of prayer in Judaism is called
brachah (plural, brachot). There are literally
hundreds of Brachot, which translated literally means "blessings."
We say brachot at happy moments -- from seeing a rainbow to
lighting the festive candles on Shabbat -- and we say brachot at sad
moments -- upon hearing of someone's death, for example. We say
brachot before and after we eat. We say brachot when we wake up and
go to sleep.
The brachah is designed to take an
"ordinary" or "not yet holy" moment in our lives and transform it
into something special, to "realize its potential holiness." We do
many ordinary things that when you stop and think about them, you
realize they're really amazing: We eat food and get strength, we
make a new friend, we learn something new, etc. Brachot those
"prayerful wake up calls" that allow you to acknowledge how special
the life God gave us really is.
Prayer is petition. There are
times when we want something so bad it hurts, and it's often in those
times that we pray. In the traditional prayer service, in the daily T'fillah,
there 13 prayers of communal petition. We ask God for things like
justice, freedom and health. Take a look at this prayer for health:
Heal us God and we shall be healed; save
us, and we shall be saved; grant us a perfect healing for all our
infirmities.
But Judaism also has a rich tradition of
personal prayer. Take a look at one of Rabbi Nachman of Bratzlav's
famous prayers:
You are the One, for this I pray,
that I may have the strength to be alone
To see the world, to stand among the trees and all the living things
That I may stand alone and offer prayers and talk with You
Your are the One to whom my I do belong
And I’ll sing my soul to You and give you all that’s in my heart.
Prayer is thanksgiving. Genesis tells us that the whole
universe and all life was created by God and therefore we call God,
HaMakor or "The Source." Our lives and the world we inhabit
is filled the beauty and wonder which flowed out of God in the days
of creation. We use prayer to thank God for that beauty and wonder.
Here's one of the simplest prayers of thanksgiving:
Blessed are You, Adonai our God,
Ruler of the universe, who has granted us life and sustenance and
permitted us to reach this season.
We say this prayer, the Shehecheyanu,
at joyous occasions and at "firsts" as a way of thanking God for
giving us the opportunity to achieve what we have achieved and for
allowing us to live in such an exciting world.
Prayer is ( _____ ). Sometimes we
pray, but we can't pinpoint a particular reason beyond a particular
feeling (maybe it's sadness or joy or loneliness). Moments of prayer
comes to us. These can often be the most intense and passionate
moments of prayer that we can have.
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