Chevrei:
It has been a true pleasure to find myself on our bimah once again. At a recent service, I shared an experience that I had while on leave from Adat Shalom and I would like to elaborate on it here in this column. It is about how we use our voices in various ways, to express ourselves, to comfort ourselves, and to focus ourselves.
Scroll back to August 16, 2002, Shady Grove Adventist Hospital, labor and delivery floor, about 4pm. I was well past my due date and in active labor — finally! As the contractions of the labor process built in intensity and duration, I found that if I connected my voice to my breath, I could manage each one and move through the pain in a productive way, rather than silently tightening and prolonging the labor. At one point during a contraction, as I vocalized my way through it, the labor nurse came to my side and asked, with a look of genuine concern on her face, "What are you feeling? Are you okay?" I said that I was in labor (as my son would say, "duh!") and feeling the pains of the baby descending. I was using my voice to help me concentrate.
It may be a bit of a stretch to compare labor and delivery of a baby to a prayer service, and yet in each case, we have the challenge of focusing our attention in order to achieve our desired goal. At least one part of that goal is entering a sacred frame of mind/heart. What does that mean? Perhaps one way to say it is that, upon entering prayer (and, one could argue, upon birthing a baby,) we are trying to step out of the pedestrian, the ordinary and into connection with The Sacred Process/Divine Presence/Shechinah/Adonai/HaShem/callitwhateveryouwant. Finding that place is not easy — if it were, we wouldn’t need a liturgical tradition! I believe that we turn to liturgy because, though we don’t always understand the deeper meaning of the words, or if we do, the words don’t always resonate with us, the structure and familiarity of the words are meant to help us stay focused. So it is true with the vocalizing that goes along with the words. When we chant the liturgy on our own, we connect not only in an intellectual way but also in a visceral way.
In Jewish tradition, our prayers are conducted in a post-hierarchical way. Until our own attempts to "modernize" our prayer tradition in the 1800’s, Jews prayed in a way that was much different from their gentile counterparts. We did not, as we do today, sing only in unison or pray in silence. We did not wait for the rabbi to call page numbers (we did not always have siddurim for everyone). We had another flavor which one modern cantor has called, "sacred murmurings." These are the sounds of people praying together, but on their own at the same time. It is a kind of quiet cacophony produced when different voices are moving through the liturgy on their own in the same room, at the same time. The voices are intermittently brought into unison by a leader, sometimes for a unison melody and then they disperse again. You would find this style in many traditional Jewish congregations, but for most of the liberal Jewish world, we have lost it. By structuring our prayer service with silence and unison singing, we have moved the ownership of the liturgy to the bimah, to the rabbi and hazzan and away from the community.
Part of the shift in our prayer practice is a result of shifts in Diaspora Jewish culture. My Polish grandfather, whose memory I have invoked here before, was only basically educated. I believe he made it through 8th grade. He was a refugee of World War I and the child of peasants. However, he could quote Torah easily and knew the prayer service by heart. He came from a time when Jews knew the "pshat" — the simple, basic layer of meaning, even if they were simple people, not scholars.
In our own time, we are a generation of Jews who have accomplished more than the American dream. Many of us have advanced degrees, speak more than one language, and lead very demanding lives, professionally speaking. Many of us attended the best schools in the country for our secular education. Our Jewish education, however, often pales dramatically in comparison. When we walk into a synagogue, we may have a Bar Mitzvah level understanding of what is going on — or maybe not even that. So we struggle with our highly accomplished adult identity in a place where we understand little and feel incompetent, or maybe just bored.
Some years ago, I chatted with a man in the Jewish community who complained about services in liberal Jewish congregations. "When I 'shuckle' [swaying or rocking along with the praying]" he said, "people stare at me and it makes me uncomfortable". Even though he had a liberal theological stance, he was much more comfortable praying with the Orthodox. There, he said, he could pray in community but on his own as well.
Our tradition has a saying, "naaseh v’nishma", we do it and then we hear or understand about it. I believe this applies perfectly to the practice of traditional davenning. This way, the leader might open a phrase by chanting out loud, signalling to the congregation, "this is where we are, this is the melodic pattern for this part of the praying, go off on your own and meet me at the end." Then he or she would chant out loud what we call the "chatimah" or "seal" of the section signalling the end. In between is the sacred murmuring — each person on his or her own, at his or her own pace, emphasizing the phrases that are most resonant to him- or herself. When we can find ways to allow ourselves to be one of the sacred murmurers, even when we don’t know the text so well, we will come to understand the liturgy, the tradition, in ways that are inaccessible to us when we follow only the academic or intellectual pursuit of the text. Using our voices to chant the liturgy —not just to sing along with the cantor!— helps us focus our minds. Then our prayer service can be a place not just for a few nice melodies, but for seeking the Divine.
I will continue my search for ways to put the words and sounds back in all our mouths. As our own shacharit service says, "let us have songs to fill our mouths as full as the sea."
B’Shirah,
Hazzan Rachel
March, 2003