We’ve been preparing for our Scholar in Residence next weekend by thinking about the experience of prayer and by analyzing our own prayer here at Kol Shofar, in the hopes of improving and deepening our prayer lives.
Last Shabbat, Shabbat Shira, the Shabbat of song, we read Beshallach, the song of crossing the Sea of Reeds. And we discussed the role of song in opening our hearts and pouring out our souls in prayer and how singing and music allows for prayer to be filled with true emotion, how it connects the right and left brains (Rhea).
This week, I want to go further with this into greater nuance about what we are trying to do when song opens up our prayers, and hopefully (along with our afternoon study sessions) get our ideas flowing so that we’ll already be thinking about these ideas and have a richer conversation when Rabbi Holzer gets here.
This week, we’re in parashat Yitro, the revelation at Mt. Sinai: the ultimate experience of meeting God, the moment that heaven and earth come together, and God emerges from God’s hidden realm to reveal Godself and God’s will to us in word.
Although you can say that revelation is different from prayer in its direction (revelation goes from above to below and prayer goes from below to above, so to speak), our parasha offers us language to consider what the experience of meeting God is like. It gives us a framework to talk about that moment of ultimate connection with the divine that we strive for in prayer.
So, let’s look at how the Torah describes meeting God, and let’s ask ourselves, what are we aiming for in prayer? If we want to improve our community’s prayer experiences, what are we hoping for? What would an experience of true connection, of meeting God be like?
Let’s look at what we experienced at Sinai -
First, there is an element of fear and majesty – the mountain is surrounded by a boundary so that none will touch it, or else they will die. Thunder, lightning, the sound of the Shofar, smoke and fire, people trembling, when God speaks the commandments, the people fall back and stand at a distance in fear. So, perhaps meeting God is a sound and light show, it’s fireworks only more frightening, it’s Burning Man, it’s an awesome cathedral that makes us feel tiny, it’s the glass shattering sound of a cantor’s voice that chills us to the bone. It’s the quivering that often happens when people come up here to read Torah.
Sinai is also an experience that brings us to an altered state of consciousness: We saw sounds, as the Torah says in 20:15. One hasidic interpretation is that all we heard was the sound of the first letter of the 10 commandments – the aleph, a silent letter. So, perhaps meeting God is a moment of mystical union in silence, it’s a meditation retreat, it’s being in the desert or under water, or it’s a psychedelic trip at a Grateful Dead show or an ecstatic sufi dance where we spin in circles so long we enter an altered state.
In contrast, in this parasha we have a different experience of God. In
19:4 God says: You have seen how I bore you on eagles’ wings, and Rashi explains: a mother eagle carries its young on her wings to protect them from the arrows of people shooting from below. It’s a maternal, protecting, sheltering, nurturing image. So, perhaps meeting God is being gently rocked by the liturgy like a baby held by our mother singing a lullaby, it’s finding the Presence of a loving being who cares for us and protects us.
Also at Sinai, there is communal experience in which the people are unifed. When they say “Naaseh” in 19:8, we will do whatever God commands, the Torah says that they spoke it as one. Similarly, Rashi says they camped as “one person with one heart,” 19:2, playing on the fact that the Torah uses here a singular verb. So, perhaps meeting God is a moment of the deepest connection with the people around you, where you forget you are a separate being, where our voices blend in perfect harmony and we feel totally at home in the world around us.
These are examples from our parasha, what the Torah suggests meeting God is like, but I want to ask you: what would a moment of meeting God be like? What are we hoping for in our experience of prayer? - I know it’s a very personal question, but I think it will help our discussion of what we mean by “meaningful prayer experience” to learn what is a meaningful prayer experience to each of you. . .
I’d like to ask us to think about these (your answers) and to consider – how does our current service allow for those experiences?
Reflecting on the examples from our parasha:
The Awesome (thunder and lighting)
The mystical altered state of consciousness
The personal nurturance of a loving God
The communal connectedness
Does the flow of our services allow for such experiences of God? In the reading that many of us did for today’s study session, Lawrence Hoffman, in the Art of Public Prayer, talks about the music of the liturgy as being performative, meaning, it moves us to a state of being, induces awe, evokes a hope, a vision, or a memory, it creates a sense of time in the calendar.
What do we want our music and prayer to invoke in us? We love singing at Kol Shofar, but I have to say, when I first came here, I was quite startled because what our prayer music invoked for me was: football game. Pep rally cheer. fight song. For example, “titbarach tzuranu. . .” It’s strong, often pounding, and full of male energy.
That kind of energy has its place, but we need more than that.
For example, sometimes we need music that allows for more inward focused, contemplative moments. For example, “nishmat kol chai. . .”
Hear the difference? Not all prayers should invoke banging on the table.
Hoffman talks about
Music of Majesty
Music of meditation
Music of meeting (where people connect with each other)
Music of memory
When we pray together, the music and the feeling within the music creates an entire world that we enter when we sit here and pray. Neil Gilman talks about entering the myth of Torah. Myth doesn’t mean that it’s a story that isn’t true. Rather it means, when we read about the revelation at Sinai, we step into another world where the story is true (whether it happened historically or not) and we stay there for a little while, and it creates an entire experience within us and among us. That’s what we need to do when we pray and when we sing.
We create a myth, a world that we enter fully into for the time we’re here. We all meet God in different ways and each one of us meets God in different ways at different times – sometimes we’re carried on eagles’ wings and sometimes we tremble from the thunder and lightning and the sound of the Shofar. So too, may our prayers allow for that.
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