A-Z OF JEWISH VALUES -

P FOR PRAYER & PLURALISM

PLURALISM IN PRAYER

A few months ago the medical journal the Lancet produced a study on the effectiveness of prayer. To be more specific it was about whether healing practices, prayer and what’s called MIT Music Imagery and Touch can reduce pre-procedural distress and might affect outcomes in patients undergoing heart surgery.

It was of course carried out under the most rigorously controlled research conditions in the USA.

The results gave a thumbs down to prayer

Prayers by others did not affect patients' recovery from coronary artery procedures, but bedside therapies using music and touch before surgery reduced stress and offered a slight advantage in survival.

Patients randomly were chosen to receive off-site prayer, bedside therapy, both treatments or none. Christian, Muslim, Jewish and Buddhist congregations were given patients' names and prayed for them for five to 30 days. Survival rates did not differ among those who received prayer and those who did not, the study found.

The bedside therapy given to patients included listening to music, imagining favourite places, practicing so-called "yoga-like" breathing and being touched by practitioners of alternative medicine.

Researchers said the therapeutic benefit could have resulted simply from the presence of a caring individual that reduced patients' pre-operative stress. Stress reduction could affect physiological processes and improve survival.

As a rabbi I am occasionally asked to say prayers for people who are seriously ill.

I agree to it, there is a place for it in the daily Amidah prayers. I believe it might be of value if the patient or their relatives know that prayers are being said. That knowledge may bring them some comfort and or relive stress and anxiety.

On the whole our prayers are not what is called intercessionary, not petitions, not presenting God with a shopping list. There are notable exceptions such as the Avinu Malkenu on Rosh Hashanah/Yom Kippur which includes: shlach refuah shelemah lecholey amecha: send a complete healing to the sick of your people.

That’s what we wish someone who is ill – a refuah shelemah, a complete recovery. Maimonides says that when visiting a patient you should always say a prayer before leaving- and simply those two words – refuah shelemah could count as a prayer.

The question I want to ask is – what is the value of prayer overall for us Reform Jews.

We take a pluralistic approach to prayer. We recognize that in the Jewish world there are a plurality of prayer traditions – and always have been. Even after Amram Gaon produced the first standard Siddur, variations grew up, Ashkenazi differed from Sephardi, Western Sephardi differed from Eastern, and there were and still are regional variations such as the Yemenite and the Italian Minhag Roma.

And there are many non-Orthodox liturgies, Reform, Conservative, Reconstructionist…

What unites all together are a basic structures: Shema and its preliminaries, Amidah, Torah Service, Aleinu, Kaddish.

What about how we pray? There’s a telling line in our Family Service which the children read out: “We do not even know how we are supposed to pray”

It reflects the magnitude of the change in Jewish life from a community where everything was cut and dried, prescribed and everyone knew what was required of them, in every aspect of Jewish life.

Pluralism has changed all that.

We don’t davven. At least if some of us do it’s not too obvious. Incidentally Sephardim do it differently from Ashkenazim, quietly, standing still, no swaying back and forth or side to side.

Let me tell you, we differ slightly from most other Reform synagogues in the amount of silence we have, particularly in the Amidah. Many Reform synagogues read the whole Amidah out loud. The Amidah actually is not supposed to be a case of reading by sight alone. Let your ears hear what your mouth is saying – it is to be read in a whisper. That’s why it begins Adonai sephatai tiphtach ufi yagid tehilatecha.

Whole chanted paragraphs are not very common. This, by the way, is Sephardi. Ashkenazim generally chant opening and closing lines, and let everyone go at their own pace in between.

If we have lost the art of prayer in a Jewish way it’s because we never developed a means of instruction to replace or supplement or adapt tradition to what we feel comfortable with and meaningful. But it shouldn’t take great efforts to create an atmosphere in which everyone collectively and individually is engaged.

If you’ve seen the film ‘Keeping the Faith’ which is funny and moving and controversial all rolled into one (it was showed at the Hartington Residential) – you’ll remember the rabbi with the hand-held microphone getting nowhere with his chevreh – only his mother is singing- having to resort to a surprise visit from a gospel choir, in bright gold and blue vestments, bursting through the doors and doing a happy-clappy rendition of Eyn Kelohenu.

Small changes might make big difference. Amen for example. It’s one small word, but it brings everyone together. Amen is to be said or chanted (it doesn’t matter which) at the end of every berachah, which is said aloud. That’s to say every line containing the standard baruch atah.

It’s not said by the person saying the berachah – but by the person hearing it, who thereby affirms it. Amen means it is so, it is true. If you don’t say ‘Amen’ you are dissociating yourself from it. And conversely if you say it, you are associating yourself. And the more that respond, the more associative the whole thing is.

Similarly the second line of barechu.

It’s my view that Anglo-Jewish shulgoers are naturally low-profile, undemonstrative, not to say private. The more assimilated, the more low-key. This is not a criticism, it just is the case. It goes against the grain to make a big show of it all.

I am coming round to thinking that the quieter and more contemplative and personal our services are the better it would suit us. We don’t actually have to read whole passages together – as Sir Thomas Beecham is reputed to have said about his orchestra, (tongue in cheek) as long as they start together and finish together, who cares what happens in between?!

Prayer is service of the heart Avodat Halev. And it is service, it’s Avodah, (meaning work) I takes working on. Lehitpalel to pray, is a reflexive verb meaning more literally to judge oneself. The words challenge you inwardly, spiritually. It cannot merely be lip-service; it is certainly not magic.

Thanks to our value of Pluralism, of honouring many different ways of doing it we don’t have to be bound by one way, whether modern or ancient. Over the years I’ve been very encouraged indeed by the reception of innovations in the way we say and sing and chant our prayers.

There is still a great wealth of possibilities waiting for us to explore together – the more they stir our hearts, give us uplift, influence us in our daily lives

the more there is some sense to the blessing which ends blessed are you, who hears prayer – Baruch atah Adonai Shemeah Tefillah.