How God Gets in the Way of Praying
DRIESEN, GEORGE
How God Gets in the Way of Praying When I pray, I grit my teeth. I take prayer seriously, as I have for more than 40 years. My adolescent ambition was to become a rabbi; I spent several years...
...It exists as beauty does, as an abstraction wrought by our minds, vividly manifest in nature or art...
...Upon reflection, I have concluded that prayer is a form of poetry and the being of whose power and majesty we read in the siddur is a response of the poetic imagination to life and the universe...
...For me, communal prayer is the principal manifestation of the determination of American Jews to be part of the astounding march of our people through the millennia...
...And therein lies my dilemma...
...Others prefer to obscure it with unanalyzed assertions...
...I hope it will help to structure and enrich the lives of those who come after me, as the inheritance of previous generations has enriched my life...
...But the great Jewish romance with history and its God will go on...
...Yet I have no wish to stop praying...
...I do not find that in the siddur...
...And so when I begin to pray, I invoke the divine metaphor and ask myself, "How long, 0 Lord, how long wilt thou suffer this people to live"—in hypocritical silence...
...No matter what our virtue, death will take us in the end...
...The act of prayer makes the inescapable reality of my mortality more bearable...
...If we are to pray with a whole heart, we need new poetry, new forms of observanqe that speak the idiom of the modern mind and give voice to its noblest hopes...
...Hear, 0 Israel, the unknowable, our God, is one...
...We believe it is possible to increase it incrementally by our efforts because no matter how dark the moment, our experience has been that at least sometimes succor has come from the unknown—from beyond the calculations we have prudently made and the resources we counted on...
...That dilemma does not yield to such practical devices as learning liturgical melodies, improving one's Hebrew, studying other texts to relieve boredom during the service or using an annotated prayer book...
...Since better and more subtle modern minds than mine have successfully bridged those conflicts, I hoped one day I would also...
...Instead, it assembles in one focus of the mind's eye disparate memories, thoughts, hopes and feelings that lie at the root of our efforts to shape our lives and to locate ourselves in the continuum of space, time and existence...
...Religion was holy in part because it undertook to encompass the whole of human experience, not some arcane lacuna of it...
...Even if we knew it, we are forbidden to pronounce it...
...Since the basic text of the prayer book was determined, our experience and the structure of our beliefs—even the process whereby we form and validate beliefs—have changed...
...There is a hint of this reading (but no authority for it) in one of our holiest and most enigmatic traditions: The name of God is unknown to us...
...it enshrined them...
...I am grateful for the affection I feel for and from the men, women and children with whom I have shared these ceremonies over many years...
...I clung tenaciously to the idea of the transcendent being pictured in the siddur, despite my beliefs...
...I recently attended a memorial service for a promising, popular teenage boy who had died in a freak accident...
...blessed be the (unknowable) name of the Lord" comforts us because it whispers that we are not alone in our grief...
...That forces me continually to confront the substance of the siddur...
...At various times it is movingly apparent, it is a haunting memory or a hope...
...We 20th century American Jews confront a much greater challenge: to integrate our religious life with the beliefs we know in our hearts...
...My life would be much poorer had my people not provided rituals to mark births, bar/bat mitzvahs, weddings, anniversaries, illnesses, deaths, as well as the moments, exalted and terrible, in our people's history that we have chosen to hallow...
...I regret the all-too-frequent occasions when conversation or noise distracts me or when I am absent altogether...
...Our ancestors and men and women everywhere have grieved, and in time they regained their capacity to bless life...
...to grasp a prayer's meaning I must concentrate on its words...
...The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away...
...The worldview and the view of divinity the siddur depicts comes from a time far distant—at the latest the late Middle Ages...
...Until our time, religion did not contradict or ignore the beliefs and knowledge of a community...
...I spent several years preparing to meet the tough admission standards of the Jewish Theological Seminary and studied in its rabbinical department for a year...
...Thus, a metaphoric view of the divine does not mean we are without faith...
...So it is with justice...
...It forces me, when I try to sanctify my life, effectively to profane it, for "The seal of the holy one, blessed be he, is truth...
...Many prayers, though they depict a being imagined by our ancestors rather than one cognizable to us, open our imaginations to the majesty and beauty of the earth, to the cosmos and to the potential for goodness all around us, even when, for the moment, death and destruction obscure them...
...It is less of a leap to point out that one who has known goodness in the past may find it again in the future...
...Similarly, I have at times found the dialogic mode of prayer profoundly moving and sustaining, despite an ever present recognition that the prayers are an exercise of the poetic imagination rather than statements of a literal truth...
...I rarely find services "boring" or "too long" and prize them highly...
...However paradoxical, confusing or threatening reality may have been, we have always believed that we can reach out beyond the confines of the moment...
...Many fellow observant Jews and I share a benign secret...
...Those imagined conversations, if not taken to excess, sometimes help focus or ease our minds and hearts...
...Experience suggests that seeingxGod as a metaphor, rather than as an existential being, is not inconsistent with prayer as dialogue...
...Thus far, I hear the answer only in the gnashing of teeth...
...A more realistic theological position cannot, of course, still the despair that lies behind the question...
...So when I pray, I understand much of the language and context of the prayers...
...A metaphor does not order the universe (if it is ordered) or mete out justice, even to the limited extent that justice is done in the world...
...I firmly believe that no prayer discipline can substitute for spiritual integrity and no learning can defeat the conspiracy of illusion and silence: "Words without thoughts never to heaven go...
...I am not convinced...
...Grounded in our experience, that faith reaches beyond it, teaching that we can discern connections—mathematical, symbolic, logical, intuitive, historical—between events that we could not foretell or understand...
...Communal prayer reinforces, sometimes even molds, our intent to live decent and honorable lives...
...If we are to continue to pray, we American Jews must build a bridge between the God our ancestors worshiped and the reality we perceive...
...To a modern mind that tradition suggests an equation between God, as our ancestors understood God, and that which is unknowable...
...To some extent, the metaphoric view of the divine simplifies the problem of faith...
...But belief in a transcendent God who randomly metes out tragedy for "good" reasons that are "beyond our comprehension" seems to add to the misery that grief brings...
...So I had to assume that the idea of God functions for me in some way that I had not articulated, serving as a bridge between the worldview of the siddur and my own beliefs...
...George Driesen...
...Not always, of course, and not everywhere...
...The service, with its roots in antiquity— and some of its imagery drawn from a past so remote that we cannot date it— surely performs that enrichment function...
...no matter how the righteous struggle, they may confront defeat and despair...
...Our faith is—as it always has been—that we can wrest from the unknown, from the unforeseeable, even from the darkness within ourselves, a far greater measure than we now have of the goodness and knowledge for which we hunger...
...God is a metaphor, a symbol for the vast portion of reality we can only partially understand and cannot control individually or communally...
...conventional faith may actually increase despair...
...Unless religion is about what we believe with our minds as well as our hearts, it is nothing but nostalgia—a fossil religion for a fossil people, God forbid...
...On the contrary, I continue to pray with all the concentration, intensity and feeling I can command...
...Until we embark on that task, largely neglected by the American rabbinate, no palliative seems likely to—or should—convince large numbers of us to choose prayer over a hundred other available, enriching experiences, let alone to pray with kavanah (devotion) when we do come to synagogue...
...It seems if one accept the conflict between the idea of God in the prayer book and the world we know as irreconcilable, one should in the name of integrity cease practicing the Jewish religion...
...Some of us confront it occasionally in conversation...
...This change is as profound as the one Abraham experienced when he recognized that idols were impotent and that of our people when they realized they could no longer invoke the power of Yahweh by slaughtering animals...
...I have not reached this conclusion easily...
...I had, without thinking about its implications, rejected the fundamental belief upon which prayer appears to rest, but not prayer itself...
...The common perception is that without faith in a transcendent God, disappointment and tragedy are harder to bear...
...For me, God is a metaphor for that vast, overwhelming realm that I do not know and cannot control...
...Because the prayer book's text remained fixed and we remained silent, when we pray we are forced to play a game of "Lefs Pretend...
...But the unknown remains and with it the possibility of regeneration...
...To heighten awareness or grapple with inner conflict and doubt, grown men and women frequently speak silently to an imaginary partner, an absent parent or a lost lover...
...It suggests a future equally lost in the mists of time...
...We can grasp anew the unity of feeling that keeps us from despair and madness...
...My life will end, and with it most of the dreams I dreamed, the songs I sang, the loves I loved...
...Some dominant threads of that intention are woven out of a shared experience that reaches back not just decades but millennia...
...We imagine that we see the world through the lens of another era...
...That makes many of us impatient and sets my teeth on edge...
...Yet prayer moves me...
...So will we...
...Still, I gnash my teeth when I pray...
...After the service in the family home, a friend of the family asked in anger and despair, "How can the rabbi talk about God's goodness at a time like this...
...Beyond that, I am grateful for the music that I have been privileged to sing, the poetry, the sagas and the sayings that lace the service...
...The metaphor of a benevolent creator symbolizes and reinforces that faith, provided we do not insist that it is literally true...
...Even so, Hebrew is still a foreign language to me...
...That great unknown does not exist in the sense that the earth or the sun or a table does...
...For the voice of my generation, the voice of the modern era, is virtually unheard in the prayer book...
...The secret is that the transcendent, active God depicted in the siddur—the being who creates and controls our universe and our individual and collective destinies, who punishes the wicked and rewards the just—does not and never did exist...
Vol. 15 • October 1990 • No. 5
