Boker Tov. What a Wonderful Morning It Is to See All of You Here Today and to See So Many

Boker Tov. What a wonderful morning it is to see all of you here today and to see so many familiar faces.

As Chair of the Institute I am particularly pleased that we have convened this conference. We devote a lot of time and energy at the Institute to prayer. Rabbi Nancy Flam's passion for prayer was clear to me when I met her 14 years ago when the Institute was started. Her spirit, intelligence and compassion in this work is extraordinary. I would like to thank her for creating an inspiring Prayer Project and Yom Iyyun which deeply explore what we mean by prayer, how we pray and the obstacles to prayer in our contemporary life.

I am also pleased to be representing one of the co-sponsors of this conference----Romemu. The first time I stepped foot in a Romemu service the davenning touched my soul deeply. David you had me as soon as I walked in. Prayer is so central to what Rabbi David Ingber has created on 105th St. I am inspired by his vision of creating a community of deep practice of prayer, mindfulness, learning and tzedakah. Shuls serve many purposes but it is important to realize that they are the only Jewish institution organized around prayer. Both Romemu and Bnai Jeshurun are two examples of communities that have thrived by creating meaningful experiences of prayer. They both illustrate how important prayer is for our synagogues’ health. Unfortunately in the broad Jewish community as our prayer lives have declined so too have many of our synagogues.

In true Institute fashion I’d like to briefly share some personal reflections about prayer. I have loved, struggled with and abandoned prayer over and over again in my life. I grew up in a Conservative shul in Long Beach LI where I had a wonderful cantor as my mentor Sol Mendelson. As a 7 year old I would follow him around before minchah on Shabbat learning the melodies for various Shabbat services and would also repeat after him Mahpach, pashtah zakef katan--- learning the cantillation of the trope. I was enthralled. So began my love affair with prayer and layning. I can remember walking to shul in a couple of feet of snow with my dad during a blizzard one Shabbat morning because I didn't want to miss the service. I also remember Sol's son's bris on a shabbat morning when I was 15. The bris was at Sol’s house and we had the most amazing davening. The singing, the emotions the kavvanah were like nothing I had ever experienced. After Shacharit and the bris were over we had to go back to shul to finish the services with the community. I remember asking Sol on the way back to shul----why couldn't services be more like what we had just done. Why did we have to go back to the staid and more formal service which evoked so little from its participants? That question still haunts me today.

At college I studied philosophy and Jewish studies and became acquainted with Biblical criticism that rocked my world. Questions about God and Torah were raised that affected all of my observances---especially davening. I started questioning for the first time---what was I really doing when I davenned. With little answers available to me----and really no place to even ask the question I eventually stopped davening for a couple of years.

I fell back in love with prayer at Havurat Shalom in Somerville in the late 70s where we experimented with the service and liturgy. We were part of a community that cared about each other and creating davening that was alive and rich. But alas that community was transient and when I left to go into the "real world" many things were lost---including prayer.

This cycle of falling into and out of prayer continued for the rest of my adult life. I helped start and was part of many alternative minyans and several shuls over the years. There were some heartfelt moments of prayer-- but many dry periods. By my early 40s I was going to services pretty infrequently and when I did go I went out of a sense of obligation and looking for community----not for the experience of praying. Through my years at the Institute I realized my deep ambivalence about prayer. I was sometimes moved when there was good singing during services but it was time to face head on what prayer might actually mean to me. I had developed a consistent daily mindfulness meditation practice so I began to wonder if/how prayer could be a regular practice for me.

As I started to focus on prayer I had to acknowledge I really didn't know what prayer was. What was I supposed to be doing? Was I praying to God? What God was I praying to? I didn’t have a clear notion of the Divine let alone one I could pray to. What was the goal of prayer? What was my intention during prayer. What could I feel in prayer? Nobody ever spoke about those things. I had learned ---very well-- the mechanics of prayer: the words, the traditions, the melodies. But I had never spoken to anyone about what we were really doing and how to do it.

Joining the Prayer Project gave me an opportunity to directly examine my prayer life (and at times my lack of it). I was able to take a hard look at my questions, my assumptions and experiment with different forms of prayer and practice them with some regularity with a dream team of prayer leaders. It has been an eye opening and transformative experience for which I am tremendously grateful.

Through my investigation I have realized that the most important component for me in prayer is opening my heart. Melodies and singing help me generate heartfulness but I was surprised to experience that there are words in the liturgy that evoke love and compassion when I opened myself to them. This heart opening, avodah shebelev, leads me to what is larger than me in the universe. It connects me to all creation and helps me focus beyond myself. I truly cherish prayer as a means to open my heart and it is the single most consistent intention and aspiration for my prayer.

I also learned through my explorations that I have been limited by my exclusive association of prayer with the siddur. Because of my training and experience of siddur based davening and services whenever I would think of praying I turned exclusively to the siddur instead of being present to the state of my mind and heart. Furthermore when I tried to daven regularly I would always base it on the siddur and try to do some “full” service based on the matbea or the tradition. I just couldn’t do it. Widening my definition of prayer to include mostly niggunim or chanting with a minimum of text helped me tremendously. Walking outside and singing spontaneously was powerful and doable. Recently my practice has included meditating and contemplating what is larger than me in the universe. I have found that in general when I could allow myself to have a prayer practice that was informed by the liturgy but not limited to it I was better able to practice more consistently.

Finally I have learned that I need others to help in this exploration. That while the search for prayer is incredibly personal I need to share it with friends and teachers. That we need to create safe spaces for this exploration to occur. We need what I like to call “reverse minyanim.” Where after we pray -either privately or with others- we come together in groups together to share our experiences, our questions, our yearnings with one another. We created those shared explorations -those reverse minyanim in the Prayer Project. They were helpful in expanding my understanding, ability and desire to pray in a multitude of ways. It helped address questions we all had about God, the meanings of prayer in our lives and opened opportunities for new ways to experience prayer.

My hope and prayer is that this gathering will create a space for rich learning and sharing about the state of prayer in our communities, in our synagogues and in our hearts. Thank you all for being here.