20th Century Jewish Religious Thought: Original Essays on Critical Concepts, Movements, and Beliefs

Prayer

Prayer Michael Fishbane P rayer is at the heart of Judaism and its spiritual life, tied intimately as it is to its daily rituals and to its modes and possibilities of contact with God. "Prayer is greater than good deeds," according to an early rabbinic saying; another saying calls it "more precious than sacrifices" (BT Ber. 32a). With the assurance of mystical insight, Rabbi Bal;ya ben Asher, in a comment on Deuteronomy 11:12, stated that the sphere to which true prayer ascends is higher even than the supernal source of prophecy. And so it was that rabbinical Judaism considered the'practice and cultivation of prayer as "the core and mature fruit of one's time" (Kuzari, 5:5), and from the earliest periods gave the prescription of its times and formularies distinct preeminence: the first tractate of the Talmud, Berakhot, deals with prayer, and so, accordingly, do the first sections of the great medieval legal codes produced by Moses Maimonides and Joseph Caro. In its life of active service to the divine Presence, then, Judaism does not consider prayer to be either a casual or superfluous adjunct, but rather the nurturant wellspring of its entire active life and an inherent component of it as well. The duty of prayer at fixed times and 724 PRAYER seasons is thus one commandment among the many positive (rabbinical) commandments of judaism; indeed, many of these commandments have a traditional formulary whose precise recitation is essential for their proper performance. God-directed speech and God-directed deeds are thus closely related in jewish religious praxis-even as each also has its own separate realm. As in judaism generally, the scope and details of prayer life give expression to the essential realization that no area of human existence is irrelevant before God and no earthly pain or productivity is separable from divine reality. The cultivation of a personal consciousness focused upon the quotidian -the food that is eaten or needed; the distress that is present or relieved; the search that is spiritual or disturbed-as well as a diffused transpersonal realization of one's origin and end in eternity are, then, the dialectical poles and goals of jewish prayer. In the daily and festival services , the person concentrates upon all the yearnings and joys and even the many resentments and responsibilities of human existence and gives them verbal expression before God; and more than this, too, since in Jewish prayer the jewish person evokes the memories and hopes of past and present jewish communities as part of a living prayer quorum. The set order of the services is thus a historical-and so transtemporal-order linking the mortal generations to immortal divinity. The occasional eruption of a personal voice in this set communal service is, therefore, noticeably minimalized or regulated. Distinctively, for example, such personal expressions occur in the morning liturgy recited before one enters the social milieu of the common prayer hall, or as a meditative adjunct to Shemoneh Esreh-the "Eighteen Benedictions," that great collection of divine acknowledgment, praise, and petition offered at the apex of each service. Spontaneous individual prayer, on the other hand, has no fixed time or season, and no fixed language or place; it can be the voiced or voiceless longing of the heart, the cry for God's Presence of the mystic or the diffuse groan of the hungry, the scrawled note of the unlettered or the crafted work of the God-intoxicated artist-it is the language of the solitary self before God. The forms and formulas of jewish communal prayer, on the other hand, give the individual a mortal solidarity and an ageless voice before the terrors of historical existence . "Because the mind is unstable," suggested Ba1)ya ibn Paquda, "our sages ... composed the Order of Prayers" (The Duties of the Heart, ed. M. Hyamson, 4, 72). Looked at more typologically, the traditional and spontaneous prayers of Judaism, as of other world religions generally, fall into four categories: petition , intercession, praise, and contemplation. Each of these has, moreover, PRAYER 725 its particular subtypes, and emphasizes distinctive dynamics of the self's relationship to God. Concisely, the category of petition is a request, by the individual or group, for something needed by the individual or group now or in the future, and is therefore distinguishable from prayers of intercession that are requests on behalf of another-be that another person or a collectivity...