The
siddur is ironically both the most popular book in Judaism, and least
understood and studied.
While a synagogue might pride itself on having
three or even four copies of the Talmud, it must ensure that it has enough
copies of the
siddur for each and every congregant. If you multiply that by all
the synagogues, educational institutions and Jewish homes in the world, the
number becomes astronomical.
The
siddur consists of prayers that were
either taken directly from the Bible, or composed during the eras of the Temple,
the Mishna, the Talmud, the Middle Ages or the modern period. Sometimes texts
from different eras are interwoven within a single prayer. Although these
prayers represent vastly different voices, like a choir, they form one
song.
But why do we pray? The Jew meets God in prayer and has his day
revolve around the necessities of prayer more than is the case with most other
mitzvot. The sages have informed us that “prayer is more precious than
sacrifices,” and some go so far as to say that “prayer is greater than good
deeds.” Why? The truth is that asking why we pray is like asking why we breathe:
“The reason we pray,” says philosopher William James, “is simply because we have
to.” We pray because it is the natural reaction we have to the beauty of the
world. It is the reflex that pours forth from our mouths when we are in distress
or overcome with gratitude and have no one to thank. We pray because we have a
need to connect with our Father in heaven.
Since the very beginning of
our history we have prayed. The patriarchs and matriarch were all described as
people who pray. We seek to emulate them when we add our voices to the rhythms
and sounds they made in trying to create a bridge between the material and the
spiritual.
Still, perhaps the best way to answer the question is to
exercise some negative theology and examine the reasons we don’t
pray.
First and foremost, we do not pray in order to tell an All-Wise God
what to do, and we don’t pray to prompt an All-Good God to do good. “For
infinite wisdom does not need telling what is best,” says C.S. Lewis, “and
infinite goodness needs no urging to do it.”
Nor do we pray because it
“works.” If prayer always “worked,” it would mean that the power is not with the
divine, but with us and our ability to manipulate God to do our will. This would
be an example of magic, not prayer. Yet, sometimes, we need to pretend that it
works. “God,” said Pascal, “instituted prayer in order to lend to His creatures
the dignity of causality.”
Rabbi Louis Jacobs believed that prayer was
worthless without a belief that God was somehow really being addressed. The word
Jacobs uses is “accosted”; he says one cannot pray without faith in Man’s
ability to accost God. The Oxford English Dictionary defines “accost” as
“approach and address (someone) boldly or aggressively.”
Sometimes, the
purpose of accosting is not to achieve any other end save the confrontation
alone. We pray to approach and address God. Not to get what we want, but simply
to be heard.
In addition, Jewish prayer gives one the opportunity to
insert oneself into Jewish consciousness. One recites the same words that have
been recited for millennia and address the God of Israel in much the same way He
has been addressed since we first met Him. Through prayer we step into the same
roles in which we have been cast since the beginning of time.
Yet I think
one of the best explanations I have ever seen for prayer came from
C.S.
Lewis, who wrote: “Prayer is either a sheer illusion or a personal
contact between embryonic, incomplete persons (ourselves) and the utterly
concrete Person. Prayer in the sense of petition, asking for things, is a small
part of it; confession and penitence are its threshold, adoration its sanctuary,
the presence and vision and enjoyment of God its bread and wine. In it God shows
Himself to us. That He answers prayers is a corollary – not necessarily the most
important one – from that revelation. What He does is learned from what He
is.”
In other words, we pray in order to stand in the presence of God. We
make requests as the fig leaf for our meeting, but the real goal of that meeting
is just to spend time together. When a man courts a woman and asks her out for
dinner, or to go ice skating, the goal isn’t the need for food or fun; these are
just excuses for two people to be together. And that is the purpose of prayer –
to spend a few minutes with God, enjoying each other’s company.
The
writer is a doctoral candidate in Jewish philosophy and currently teaches in
many post-high-school yeshivot and midrashot.
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