For many, prayer is a sort of language akin to poetry that expresses things of the heart and the human psyche that cannot be expressed otherwise. Prayer can be an expression of love and hope, a way of affirming core values and of connecting with God, however God is defined. Prayers for the sick are a way of expressing solidarity with the sufferer and hope for healing and recovery.
In Hebrew, the verb to pray is a reflexive verb with the core meaning of “to judge.” Prayer can be seen as primarily a way, not of informing God, but of changing ourselves and our orientation to reality. The practice of prayer varies widely across the spectrum of the Jewish world. Traditionally observant Jews recite a fixed liturgy three times a day. Some prayers in the liturgy cannot be said without a quorum of ten Jews, ensuring that prayer is a communal act. Observant Jews also make a habit of saying blessings for various occasions, for example, on seeing the ocean: Blessed are you, Lord our God, King of the Universe, who made the great sea. Many less traditional Jews pray only in communal settings or use prayer as a form of meditation.
Although Humanistic Jews have abandoned prayer directed toward a deity altogether, we certainly draw on the tradition as a source of inspiration. In our services, we use the poetry of the traditional liturgy as well as contemporary Jewish and non-Jewish poetry, music and song to connect with our fellow Jews and with all humanity. We reflect on and affirm our humanistic values and embrace the central Jewish value of social action to make the world a better place, thus expressing the same hope as those who pray in more traditional ways.
But in Judaism, prayer cannot be substitute for righteous action. After one of the countless mass shootings in the U.S., a cartoon appeared showing a large, empty truck and the caption: “The first shipment of thoughts and prayers arrives.” Thoughts and prayers—especially when the senders are elected officials-- are a painfully inadequate substitute for the enactment of actual policies to deal with gun violence.
The Talmud, that vast compendium of Jewish law, commentary and lore, mentions a category of vain or pointless prayer and gives the following examples: “If an man's wife is pregnant, and he says, God grant that my wife bare a male child, this is a vain prayer. If a man is coming home from a journey and hears cries of distress in the town and says, God grant that this is not in my house, this is a vain prayer.” These prayers are pointless because in order to be granted, God might have to undo what has already taken place or reverse what is already in progress. This concept of vain prayer is a clear rejection of prayer as merely a form of magic that changes situations or circumstances.
In facing our crises today and drawing on Talmudic realism, perhaps we need some new examples of vain prayers:
If a man returning home from abroad hears reports of a deadly virus overwhelming hospitals and says, God grant that this is not happening in my community, it is a vain prayer. If he hears of families evacuating homes to flee burning forests, devastating hurricanes destroying towns, and rising sea levels submerging islands, and he says, God, grant that it is not my planet, this is a vain prayer.
But prayer that inspires, fills us with hope, and gives us the courage to face tragedy and disaster, will ultimately lead us to actively seek solutions. Such prayer is never vain.
Alan Rutkowski is a member of the Victoria Society for Humanistic Judaism and a founding member the Victoria Jewish dialogue group, If Not Now, When? He has contributed articles to the online edition of the American Journal, Jewish Curren
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*This article was published in the print edition of the TImes Colonist on Saturday, November 7th 2020
Photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash
