Over the past four years, I have read an average of 100 books per year. As someone who loves stories, I am struck by the conundrum of wanting to take in as many of them as I possibly can while knowing that the more I read, the less time and attention I give to each particular work.
It is a blessing and a curse to be afflicted with the kind of enthusiasm for reading that makes me want to dive into every book that crosses my desk. It makes the times that something sticks in my head all the more powerful. Last week, I was reading an anthology of the writings of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, one of the greatest Jewish thinkers and leaders of the 20th century.
Heschel’s works are deeply immersive and profound, which has led many to try to put together collections of the most digestible, most accessible concepts he offered. In preparation for the High Holy Days, I imagined that perusing some of Heschel’s “greatest hits” would help me get in the right spiritual frame of mind.
In her introduction to the collection, the sage’s daughter Susannah framed how we can make use of the insights that her father had to contribute to the world of the 21st century. I was cruising along, enjoying some pleasant ideas, when I got knocked out of orbit. I read this:“The synagogue, he said, is where prayer goes to die. Congregants sit back in their pews and let the rabbi or cantor conduct ‘vicarious praying.’ Sermons are superficial, failing to recognize the genuine anguish of those who come to pray. Too many people leave the synagogue just as they entered, feeling good about themselves, whereas prayer, he wrote, should be subversive. We don’t pray in order to achieve something else, he said, ‘we pray in order to pray,’ to open a door to God, who is ‘a refugee in his own world.’”
As a congregational rabbi, I chafed against the idea that our houses of worship were undermining our goals of true connection with the divine. How could it be that the exact place where we were meant to convene space for sanctity were, in fact, choking off our ability to do so?
And yet, I couldn’t help but feel the undercurrent of truth. I have felt firsthand what it is like to go through the motions of prayer to accomplish the task because it is what we are “supposed to do” rather than what we are privileged to do. And I was unsettled by the idea that Jews around the world are preparing to invest significant time and energy into their Judaism in the coming weeks and that we haven’t always demonstrated our worthiness.
Communal prayer, at its best, offers us supportive environments to engage our spiritual selves, but it can also be an easy distraction from our individual needs. In crafting a service, how do we put together an experience that tries to be everything to everyone without risking being nothing to anyone?
The Abraham Joshua Heschel that Susannah describes is a man who is deeply invested in offering true connections to God to a population in desperate need of care for the soul. This is perhaps even more true today than when Rabbi Heschel originally offered us the idea. At a time when our lives move at a break-neck pace, we need our communal expressions of worship and reflection to, as he said, “recognize the genuine anguish” of our reality.
We need prayer opportunities that center the needs of the worshiper over the dogma of static tradition. As I prepare to help facilitate these opportunities for my congregation, I am so grateful to both Heschels for reminding me of the sacred obligation that is spiritual care.
There is a poem in the Reform Prayerbook, Mishkan T’filah. It reads,
Either you will
go through the door
or you will not go through.
If you go through
there is always the risk
of remembering your name.
Things look at you doubly
and you must look back
and let them happen.
If you do not go through
it is possible
to live worthily
to maintain your attitudes
to hold your position
to die bravely
but much will blind you,
much will evade you,
at what cost who knows?
The door itself
makes no promises.
It is only a door.
The door, described by poet Adrienne Rich, is much like the synagogue. It itself has no inclination, no bias, no motive. It is only how we choose to engage and how we choose to operate within them that matters. During this High Holy Days season, we get to choose what will happen in the synagogue.
Will we allow our prayers to flounder and die, starved for the creativity and authenticity required to connect with something bigger than ourselves? Or will we find a way to craft worship experiences for ourselves that are the antidote to a world a crisis, a safe harbor in the storm of our reality? It is at this time in the year that more Jews than ever ask, “How can my Judaism make my life better?” I am excited to see the beautiful, creative, and worthwhile answers we come up with as a Cincinnati community.
Austin Zoot is the Rabbi Educator at Valley Temple in Wyoming, Ohio.
