My good friend David, a retired Lutheran minister, goes nuts when I say, “My thoughts and prayers are with you,” referencing mutual friends of ours who may be ill or who suffered a loss. He says, “Stick with the prayers; who needs the thoughts?” I told him, “YOU stick with the prayers and I’ll stick with the thoughts. Of course, we pray for the sick, and I’m just pulling his chain, but I thought about this when I received a question from Arnie Kahn…
I’m a representative to Faith in Action, an interfaith organization to fight for social justice… I notice that every meeting starts and often ends with a prayer. Each meal starts and ends with a prayer. Furthermore…I belong to a group, Rockingham County First Alert…After an accident is listed, 20-30 or more people respond, “Prayers,” that’s all, just the one word. Finally, I notice non-Jews often post something like, “My mother is getting treated for cancer. Please send prayers,” and many people respond, “I’m praying for her.”
Arnie goes on, “Jews do not seem to use prayer in the same way. We give blessings before we eat. Our prayers seem to be mostly praise of God or for peace. Am I correct?.”
I told Arnie he was, for the most part, right on target. The key concept in our understanding of prayer is “communal.” While we might have been the ones who “invented” prayer – and a prayer or two can occasionally be found in the Torah and the other books of Hebrew Scriptures – we emphasize that which is said in a minyan, usually in either a worship service or in a memorial service. The Mi-sheberach is a perfect example of such a prayer, not just the Debbie Friedman melody, but the traditional prayer that asks God, “the One who blessed our ancestors, to bless so-and-so.”
Oops…”the One who BLESSED…to BLESS…” Sure we pray for good health to return but for all intents and purposes it’s not a prayer in the sense we have come to know in Western civilization, dominated by those who are not Jewish.
This communal focus has its roots in the sacrificial cult of mishkan, the wilderness sanctuary, and the two Jerusalem Temples. I’ve mentioned that before. Our ancients felt that the parts of the whole aren’t as important as the whole itself. As a matter of fact, we read in the Torah on a few occasions, that the entire people will either be blessed or cursed because of the right or wrong behavior. Truth be told, the individual didn’t mean as much then as now. Yes, there are numerous examples of individuals in relation to God, but even in those cases they have to do with the sacrifices and rarely with prayer as we understand it.
Tomorrow I’ll look at worship and how the prayerbook replaced the ritual of the Temple sacrifices. We’ll also see that nothing much changed as far as the individual was concerned.
(Speaking of prayer, a small child offered this before going to sleep…”Dear God, take care of mommy and daddy, brother and sister, grandma and grandpa, uncles and aunts; and please, God, do take care of Yourself, or else we are all sunk!”)