Sometimes the energy in the shul on Shabbat
morning feels to me like an exactly-perfectly warm shower (this despite
our perfectly frightful heating system!) Sometimes the
morning light through the east windows melts right through my closed
eyes and makes me feel like I am being washed in light from the top of
my head down. Sometimes a word or two in the service just
start to shimmer on the page in a way that they have never lit up for
me before, and I am transported to someplace I’ve never been.Sometimes I can hardly wait to sign a certain tune, and I feel like a child on line for a ride at DIsneyland. Sometimes I gaze at the people in the shul with me, and the sweetness of their praying faces brings me just about to tears. Sometimes -- often, in fact -- by the time we come to praying for peace at the end of the Torah service, I feel like we have been spun together into such a thick skein of peacefulness that we just need to unspool it from right where we are on Caspar Road and send it wherever it needs to go.
Often, just singing the words ma tovu -- the first three syllables of the service -- send me right to that peaceful, light-washed place. I’m not a natural davvener at all, and it’s taken me a long time to grow into one. Truth be told, if you would have told me a decade ago that I would someday write the above paragraphs, I wouldn’t have believed you. I don’t think I really knew what davvening is -- or can be. In fact, I’m realizing as I’m writing this that I don’t even know exactly what the word “davven”* means -- it’s Yiddish, I think, and it’s the thing we do when we pray together, especially when we do the formal services of morning, afternoon and evening, especially in that idiom of chanting and singing and moving about a bit as we do.
In the past I think I mostly looked at davvening as an exercise in competency, as something that people do if they know how to do it. I used to go occasionally to a minyan in LA full of rabbis and other people who seemed to know their way around a service. They could sling their big tallises over their shoulders, and they wouldn’t slide off. They chanted at lightning-speed. They marched firmly forward to lead sections of the service, chant Torah, give teachings. In those days I was thinking about becoming a rabbi myself, and then a few years later I was a rabbinical student, so I figured I should probably find it all more compelling than I did. It seemed like a show to me, and not such an interesting one at that.
Now, some thirty years later, the following definition just came to me: ‘Davvening is reciting a code which takes you into a world in which God is very present.‘ Our ancestors, in their funny, painstaking, slightly obsessive way, created a code for us, a kind of “open sesame!” a technique to bring us into a different consciousness. In that altered state, divine light, mercy, justice, love, healing, song, passion and ecstasy are opened for us. We are able to step in, as it were, among the mystical animals around the divine throne, and bask with them in holy presence. We enter Godful space.
One thing I wish someone would have told me a long time ago: you don’t have to believe any of this in your regular life to step into these possibilities in prayer. I don’t think that prayer is predicated on belief. Prayer is a tool, a code, to take you into a temporary state in which God is Source and Sovereign of the Universe, in which all your bones are singing and the bent-over are raised and the captive freed. You can enter, through prayer, into the possibility of Godly presence. When you take off your tallit you can ask yourself which reality seems more real: the reality of your prayer-world or the reality of your extra-tallital world (how about THAT word!)
What has happened for me over the years is that I now move more fluidly back and forth between my native skepticism and a kind of tried-on faith. I no longer assume that my weekday consciousness, which tends to be a bit critical and hard-edged, is more real than my davvening consciousness, in which divine presence feels quite real and light-ful and joyous. In my case one hasn’t supplanted the other. It’s more like both realms now exist side-by-side, and my experience of life is informed pretty equally by both.
The tricky trick is that part of the code involves using a minyan -- a quorum of ten or more adults -- to open the portal into that davvening world. You can certainly davven alone, or with a smaller group. But there is some kind of power to the voice of ten or more people that just makes it all more, I don’t know, whole or something.
We often don’t have a minyan on Shabbat morning. Many congregations don’t, especially little ones like ours. Others build their numbers through rules and inducements. Some require families of b’nai mitzvah students to attend a certain number of times, or they have different temple groups “host” the service, or they “draft” people to complete their numbers.
I’m not so crazy about all these machinations. Personally I’d just as soon assume that everyone present is there because they want to recite the davvening code and explore God-space. I find it uncomfortable to see people looking bored and disconnected, waiting for it all to end (especially if I’m responsible for making them be there.) Not that bored minyaneers are the worst thing in the world. I was one many a time, and look at me now...
In my mind there is very little “should” to davvening. It’s more of a possibility than an obligation. And it is definitely, for many of us, an acquired taste. So in writing this screed here, I am inviting you to consider whether you might actually be craving such a taste, even enough to go through all the attendant aggravations: the cold shul, the hot shul, the heavy prayerbook, the funny people, the wrong tunes in the wrong keys, too much Hebrew, too much English and all the rest.
If you are, I’ll see you on Shabbat!
© 2010 Rabbi Margaret Holub