These are my personal notes that I made when I read: Mike Comins (2010) Making Prayer Real: Leading Jewish Spiritual Voices on Why Prayer Is Difficult and What to Do about It, Jewish Lights. When I make notes, they are just to jog my own memory of the book, so I am aware that they may not always make sense to the general reader. However, I hope they are of some use to you, and perhaps also inspire you to read the book itself. The ideas that I put in square brackets do not come from the writer of the book, but are my own responses as I read; references to ‘Zalman’ mean Rabbi Zalman Shachter-Shalomi (z’l).
Preface
- Prepare for the service – get in the mood
- Make the space simple
- Connect to the body
- Empty and open the mind
- Bless God’s, my and others’ presence
- Shema – listen to what God is saying to me
- Mi chamocha – last week and next week – what is redemptive
- Open my lips – let my Godself speak to God
- No Shabat requests – just be
- Amidah – thanks for all that is
- Absorb the Torah reading, as if for the first time
- After Torah sacrifice – what will I pledge this week?
- Aleinu – for peace
- Slow down, make space for God, listen, respond, commit, act
- I must be a participant, not a consumer and critic of services
- Break from trad formats
- Lay cantor
- Rabbi, cantor and leader not responsible for my inner experience
The problem with Jewish prayer
- Unknown language
- Lack of belief in the God of the siddur
- Little belief in the power of prayer
- Speed davennen – all talk and no listening
- [prayer needs to engage the whole person]
- words touch intellect first
- music engages mind, emotion and body
- mind-heart-body connection
- body affects mind and feeling
- use your own voice and song – don’t be an audience
- siddur is a useful recipe book – but can’t replace a good creative cook
- “to whom am I praying, and what good is prayer?”
- developing personal prayer skills helps us appreciate the siddur
- [like shamanic journeying …] prayers must affect action in the world [restore and sustain conscious God-connection]
- enable personal encounter with God that can inform action and transform the world
- diverse reasons for attending shul – all valid
- the less confident or knowledgeable need clergy, structure and environment
- communal prayer is necessary [but not sufficient …]
- do what works for you
- feelings of inadequacy in knowledge
- expect a spiritual high that doesn’t happen (unlike in nature)
- don’t feel at home
- God of the siddur is disempowering
- [prayer leader can suggest a kavanah for standing]
- [make communal prayer a God experience]
- make shul a place for vulnerability & transformative experience
- modern values have eclipsed the value of humility before God
- engaging with what prayer is opens Pandora’s box on issues of faith
- “every step brings its own reward”
- improvise – have fun
The efficacy of prayer
- “I call out because I need to call out.”
- No need to hide anything – God already knows
- Call out my truth, in order to encounter myself
- Berkovits: “tumble into the presence of God”
- “put down the prayer book and open the inner chamber of my being”
- keep a current mi sheberach list
- formal prayer = score without rests; meditation = score without notes
- silence and talk are both true – don’t be attached to either
- prayer strips us of our ‘story’ we are attached to
- shul is too scripted, and therefore not ‘present’
- Ps 42:7 deep calls to deep
- Connect to nature and body [God through the senses]
- Nigun to focus, open us to holiness [separateness and transcendence]
- Mochin d’gadlut = big brain [mind]
- Buber I-You —- ‘Between’ is authentic relating God is here
- [My inner state — my body state. My body state thru body, sound and breath can change the space around me, and affect others]
- [My thought affects my material body-self … and beyond?]
- [How to compare effect of my mind on self with effect of the collective culture of millions of minds on myself?]
- objection to ‘God’, redeemer prayer impacting God or reality
- Mind may argue, but heart yearns and opens
- Avoid fanatic and New Age notions of prayer
- I want to yearn [and be grateful]
- Surrender my sophisticated resistance, my demand for coherence, my ‘I’
- Jacob’s wrestling is One with the One
- No separate God
- No manipulation or bargaining magic
- No intellectualization
What is Prayer?
- Prayer can change people [the new mind leading to new action]
- Prayer is truth-speaking
- Praise-thank-beseech-spur to action-comfort [confess]; improve traits; bond with Jews; develop awareness; develop compassion; disturb
- “if you pray well, you pull yourself to God” Rabbi David Wolpe
- prayer closes the circle – when we allow God to speak thru us to God
- prayer is ‘mental floss’
- liturgical text is not informational but evocative – David Wolpe
- prayer establishes and reinforces relationship with God and community
- Cantor Ellen Dreskin: prayer comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable
- Change yourself to change the world
- When you walk out a better person, prayer works
- There is something bigger than us – we are not alone
- [l’hitapallel – judge self]
- sharpen ethical self
- praise; sharpen ethical self; thanks
Yearning
- “I don’t let my spirituality get in the way of my spiritual life.” Rabbi Lavey Derby
- yearning for wholeness is itself wholeness
Gratitude
- prayer uncovers the heart
- Zalman: gratitude enables us to ‘log on’ to God anywhere
Kavanah
- God & method; attitude and attribute; sincerity, intention, focus, concentration, purpose
- Archery: kavanah = aim, chet = missing the mark
- Turn myself towards
- Prayer is continuous focus
- Non-judgment improves focus [but shoresh ‘root’ of t’fillah is judge, and what about Yom Kippur?]
- Be honest and authentic [NB etymology of ‘sincere’ is ‘without wax’; Romans made wax copies of statues]
- Develop repeated prayer practices to cultivate “soul muscle memory” Rabbi Ethan Franzel
- Prayer is disciplined – do it anyway, whether or not external or internal circumstances are favourable
Engaging the body
- Prayer must be spoken and physically experienced
- Listen and feel the words you speak
- In Nature, rather than a building “the question of God is not contrived”
- Prayer is breath – Nature has the best air for this
- Find Presence somewhere, then bring it into everything
- Short phrase becomes meditative chant
- Embody meaning of the words
Listening for God: silence and meditation
- Zalman: we hang up before we give God a chance to answer
- [Close eyes to improve inner listening]
- Insight meditation à follow the flow of myself
- Programmatic meditation — focus on one thing
- Contemplation à wait for God
Discerning Divinity
- [I’m not happy about cause / effect, me-God dualities when it comes to question of God responding to prayer, or communicating in any way. That is when the concept of ‘God’ as a specific agent, separate and interacting with a separate me, breaks down. Perhaps the closest I can get is that this ‘communication’ is taking place when I do not feel separate, when I feel that God and I are One (though how to avoid self delusion and megalomania?)]
- Intuition, ‘universe telling me’ – less challenging than saying God told me
- [Why do I need to know an insight was ‘God’? Is it not just another way of asking if something is right / true?]
- [Beware equating ‘coincidence’ with God or a direct, unambiguous message from God – could be idolising coincidence.]
- [But wafty-squishy feelings could be a smoke-screen. And gevurah, ‘tough’ love is God too.]
- [Expansiveness is associated here with God-connection, or truth discernment. I think it might be just my own readiness to live with what I have discerned, or with the decision I have taken.]
- Rabbi Nehemia Polen: Presence, Resonance, Alignment, Yes – when done this way we always feel connection, intimacy [in-to-me-see] with God, ourselves, others
- Zalman: types of knowing – sensory (physical), emotional, reason (intellect), intuition (spiritual) – this last cannot be gainsaid by anyone else
Advice for beginners
- Let passion and wildness enter your prayer
- [Open to God-ness]
- be authentic
- just do it
- to appreciate prayer, you have to try it consistently
- find a rabbi and fellow student
- prayer is being with ‘what is’
- articulate truth
- express what is present
- attend to the quality of the space and awareness after prayer
- no one else is responsible for whether or not I connect with God
- [Speak, out loud, to God, whatever you imagine that to be, at any time you are moved or minded to do so.]
The power of You
- praying to God as ‘you’ creates immediacy not possible through abstract ‘it’ or affirmations [and brings me present]
- [Pan-en-theism: God in everything]
- Address everything as God, and you will experience God in everything
- God as river – the river and I act upon each other, the relationship dynamic with it is unique to me and I am always in it
Blessings
- Count blessings
- Gratitude to open heart
- [Blessed be, thanks be that this is so]
- ruach ha-olam (‘spirit / breath’ – as an alternative to the male-oriented melech ha-olam)
- blessing sets kavanah
- [just use 1st part of blessing as complete in itself]
- blessings bring us to expanded consciousness, and connect us to holiness [numinous]
Cultivating a personal prayer voice
- having a personal prayer voice adds to community
- What does your gut need to pray right now?
- [don’t be afraid of ‘ecstatic’ practice. Ex-stasis]
- verbalise the resistance till it passes [e.g the ‘expression’ exercises in the Hoffman process]
- my prayer hasn’t been written yet
Teshuvah: personal change, communal responsibility
- prophetic realizations are better than inner parental voices as agents for change
- prayer reminds me I am not God
- interrupt myself – importance, narcissism and self-importance
- to connect to God, I must hear the voice of the other
- in prayer we all breathe a bit of each other
- Heschel: “Prayer soothes and burnishes a being”
- Have an active prayer life
Coping with loss
- [when you lose everything, don’t let go of God as well]
- praying stops us being alone
Spiritual dynamics of the siddur
- siddur takes us to many important places
- siddur is web of connections
- community through time
- if prayer seems passé or irrelevant, look again
- a form of words when our own fail
- prayer as (training) supportive discipline
- regular time to connect
- Heschel: “wonder is a form of thinking” ie attitude
- Awe / wonder is a choice
Learning the siddur
- Individual
- Interact with others
- Inter-connected as interdependent
- One Being
Best practices
- Sound and rhythm
- Words to trigger heart and soul
- Know the meaning
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