I remember hearing somewhere in my past that when babies are born with certain kinds of gross motor disabilities, sometimes they are rehabilitated by a painstaking process: therapists actually move the baby's arms and legs in a certain repetitive pattern for six or eight hours a day every day for months or years, hoping to wear new and more favorable tracks in the brain. I've found myself thinking of this reprogramming process lately when I davven on Shabbat.
For most of my praying lifetime I have fought with the siddur (prayer book.) Even while I'm davening I'm often thinking: I don't believe this line; this image is weird; the whole service seems so @#$% repetitive… Or I'll think, this whole thing we're doing here is so odd -- does God really need to hear me tell Her that He is great? Especially a hundred times in a single morning? At times I, like a lot of modern folks (especially women), have rewritten prayers to suit my own sensibilities. Or I'll change a word here and a phrase there as I go, or psychically cross my fingers at certain especially troubling places. I'm not sorry about doing this at all -- far from it. I love questions, doubts and different ways of seeing things -- my own and other people's. And I think that Jewish tradition does too. That's how the siddur was created in the first place, through a long and messy process of different versions and ideas getting negotiated into some kind of form, which itself changes and grows (and sometimes shrinks) through time. We're all in good company, in our own generation and throughout history, when we duke it out with the siddur. I don't plan to cave in easily.
But recently I've been thinking that the distance between the way I see the world and the way the siddur does might not just be an accident or a defect. It might be exactly the point. Maybe the point is that I don’t see the world how the siddur does, and I might be happier or wiser or saner or more effective if I did. Maybe the point is to reprogram -- not my brain exactly, but my world view, my sense of life. Maybe that's one reason that the service is so repetitive, why it changes so little from one day to the next, why we chant it rather than reading in a more cognitive way. At some level the tradition must know that I -- most of us -- don't think about the grandeur of God when we're crawling behind a Winnebago on Highway One or hearing about the day's catastrophes in the morning news. Maybe the point of this liturgical kind of praying -- or one of them, anyhow -- is to re-form my inner life, so that I become more optimistic, more generous of spirit, more appreciative than I would be without repeating those phrases hundreds of times a week. When we find ourselves at the beginning of nishmat during the Shabbat morning service -- which is four pages of God's greatness, goodness, kindness, lovingness, redemptiveness etc. -- I've found myself saying lately, "With this prayer we're swimming in God. God is lapping over us here. Dive on in. Enjoy!" We're being reprogrammed to perceive the breath of all life singing praises to God's Name. Nice.
All of this is by way of talking a bit about the ways that our recent change of siddur has quite unexpectedly blown me away! At the end of 2005 we purchased a stack of Kol Haneshamah, the Shabbat siddur put out by the Reconstructionist Press. For me at the time it was largely a practical move. On Shabbat morning we were juggling two and three books at a time, between transliterations and songbooks and the siddur itself. Half the service was me fumbling with page numbers. Nicer translations would be nice, but mostly I just wanted one book that most people could hold in their laps and not keep complaining about! Kol Haneshamah has transliterations to just about all the prayers and a couple of other neat little things too. It seemed like it would work…
Some of those little extra features were things like: the imahot (the mothers -- Sarah, Rebekah, Leah and Rachel) are added to all the prayers that traditionally speak of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. The mothers' names appear in the Hebrew as well as the English. In the end of the various kaddishes, which say "God will make peace for all Israel," Kol Haneshamah adds, "v'al kol yoshvei tevel," "and for all who dwell on earth." Maybe most radically, in places that traditionally say, "God chose the Jewish people from all the people of the world," our new siddur instead says things like, "God drew us close to the divine service." In translations in particular, this siddur uses a lot of different names for God, like "The Everlasting One" and "Source of Being." This has taken me a little getting used to, maybe even sounded a little cheesy -- until I remember that otherwise I would be looking over and over at LORD and KING.
I didn't think that these things would matter so much to me -- after all, I was always retranslating in my head as I went in any case, whispering in the Mothers and "All the World's" I never just prayed the words in the book anyhow -- I was always working them through the screen of my own concerns. I couldn't really imagine any other way to pray.
The siddur is a human product. Even the traditional one (which is a lazy shorthand -- there is no one traditional siddur. In the traditional world there are and have always been variants) is the product of human -- and in fact male -- endeavor. It has been edited and redacted and spliced and diced over the centuries. No one claims that it is inerrant. Specifically, in the last thirty years or so, my own formative Jewish years, the siddur has been reworked in many quarters to make more space for women. Even the Conservative movement's Siddur Sim Shalom, which we were using here, came out a few years ago with a version whose translations were mostly gender-neutral.
When you look at some of the pages of Kol Haneshamah, the words are in shreds! Prayers are cut up and splayed out -- here are three ways to say Baruch Ata… Here are two different aleinus. Five meditations in case you don't want to davven the regular amidah, which itself has a beautiful Hebrew mandala that they suggest you might want to gaze at instead of any of the words. Biblical Selection One and Biblical Selection Two in the shema. You hardly have to pick a fight -- you can see all the fights laid out before your eyes! For me, there is something paradoxically relaxing in all this mess. I don't have to struggle so much (except, maybe to keep my eyes on the right lines) -- the struggles themselves are offered up by other wiser and more scholarly minds than mine. I can just pray and enjoy. It's beautiful!
What I am going to say next sounds hubristic, I realize, but here goes. I want to be reprogrammed to have more of the tradition's faith, wisdom and hope, but not to absorb more of its sexism or xenophobia. So it is a lovely relief not to have to keep vigilant to dodge the places that seem to care only for the peace of the Jews or to honor only the deeds of the men. I can swim in this world full of God, be reshaped to be more grateful, more heartful. I can let the siddur work on me like those physical therapists I once heard about, moving a baby's limbs back and forth, over and over -- and I can trust the therapists, for the most part, without having to shout back at them so much from my crib.
I love to think about Jewish practice as a technology developed over millennia to make more beautiful and meaningful lives. The siddur, and davvening, are arduous techniques. But maybe they need to be, in order to turn fearful, depressed, overwhelmed regular people into people radiant with love (for minutes at a time, at least!) It takes a lot of torque to refine the ways that we see and feel in the world. The machinery turns out to be more important than I thought.
© 2006 Rabbi Margaret Holub
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Updated 06/05/2006 (rge)