A New Prayer for the 2012 Olympics

The soon to be unemployed Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks has composed a Prayer to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the massacre at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich.  While it might be his job as a chief rabbi to compose new prayers, I think it is a tough task.  What do you think of it? 

Additionally, I would encourage those of you on twitter to share #JustOneMinute as a way to spread the word on the efforts to have the Olympic Committee hold a moment of silence for the murdered athletes. One final recommendation is to read Professor Deborah E. Lipstadt's recent article in Tablet Magazine Jewish Blood is Cheap. 

Routine Prayer in a Routine Place

There is the Hasidic tale told about the Rabbi who went to a special place in the forest and said a special prayer, and as a result his people were blessed. In the next generation, when times were hard, the new Rabbi knew to go into the forest, but did not know the place, yet he did know the prayer, and that was sufficient. And later still, in times of trouble, the newer Rabbi did not know to go to the forest, though he knew the prayer, and that was sufficient. Until finally, it was not remembered to go to the forest, nor where the special place was, and the prayer had been lost, but the story was told, and that was sufficient.

 I want more than just a story....

Shared Post: Engaging (young) Souls

The following is a post published last summer on the Lookstein website. I reviewed Saul Wachs' approach in January but I think Golombek does a phenomenal job of drawing out his key ideas.  This essay is targeted for elementary school teachers and expresses a sincere desire to hedge off a potential davening crisis or drought for older students.  If there is scholarly or otherwise eloquent article that explains best practices for engaging high school students and tefilla, please share. Golombeks and Wachs' approach might help our tefilla situation in a few years, but I fear that the "autopilot tefilla" continues to quietly spoil the davening atmosphere.  

Engaging Souls: Bringing Elementary Tefillah to Life by Eric Golombek

Ask a teacher to teach the same short story to children every day for eight or more years, and they will likely look at you like you are crazy! Yet, in a sense, that is the challenge of teaching tefillah. We have the same tefillot, more or less, that we use with our children day after day for their entire school career. Unless there is a conscious effort to create a rich tefillah experience, group prayer is at risk of becoming a mindless task, with children (and adults!) on autopilot.

In truth, “autopilot tefillah” can appear good in elementary services because of the natural love of young children to sing. Tefillah expert, Saul Wachs, calls this “the Trap” of elementary tefillah (Wachs, 2009). This is because autopilot elementary tefillah leaves nothing in place when children get older and singing does not have any appeal. It is critical that elementary children form a relationship to tefillah so that by the time they get to middle school, they understand it and value it.

In my opinion, a successful elementary tefillah program depends on how well it addresses the three questions of the davener:

How do I pray?
What do the words mean?
What do the words mean to me?

The first question we address when we teach children to pronounce the words of the tefillah properly, to utilize nusach appropriately, and to be knowledgeable of the choreography of the service (eg. when to stand). The other two questions are often neglected in the elementary tefillah service. When we address the second question, we are teaching children to identify key lines and important vocabulary in the tefillot. We are also teaching them to identify the big idea of each prayer.

The third question is even more complex because it asks us to foster a relationship with the tefillah. We need to have children create personal meaning of the various prayers that they read. The arts are a key avenue for developing this relationship because personal meaning emerges from personal engagement with a text. The arts invite that engagement. Through soul stirring music, through story telling, through movement and through the visual arts, doors into the prayers are opened and children are invited in.

Let us examine these four doors in depth. In the following sections I will share successes I have had using the arts in teaching tefillah to elementary students at Associated Hebrew Schools in Toronto.

Mix up the music: Elementary children love to sing, so it is a mistake not to make the most out of this avenue into the elementary child’s spirit. Take a look at the tunes being used for tefillah—are they the same as last year’s and the year before that? A great way to breathe new life into any elementary tefillah service is to change up the tunes. Search through YouTube, talk to the musical leaders from synagogue and camp, and talk with children. Do not be afraid to adopt an inspiring tune to new words. But, choose tunes that your kids will like as well as you. Look for jazzy beats and music that speaks to kids. If you can bring musical accompaniment to tefillah, it will add an incredible dimension.

One cautionary note: more is not necessarily better when it comes to introducing new tunes. I find that I can introduce two or three new tunes each year. I teach the tunes slowly, with children mastering one part at a time. I make sure that I connect the teaching of the song to overall learning about the tefillah. By moving slowly, children develop a relationship to the specific prayerthey are learning.

One underutilized musical tradition is niggunim.  Niggunim are wordless tunes that are chanted communally. They are from the Chassidic tradition and can be an incredibly powerful tool. Because niggunim are wordless, anyone can participate—even teachers who are nervous around Hebrew or who may even be non-Jewish. The chanting of a niggun can build the energy in a room and transform individuals into a community.  

A relative to the niggun, and an excellent accompaniment to the niggun, is communal drumming. Teach children to drum along on their laps, at tables, or on the floor. You can build unity by having children all drum the same patterns, or you can encourage individualism within the community by having them improvise their own patterns while maintaining a common beat.   After a drumming tefillah, I can often observe children drumming all day long.

Tell a story: Good story telling opens the minds of children to discussing difficult issues without it getting personal. It is much easier, for example, for a child to talk about a character in a story that should do teshuva, repentance, than for that child to share a time when he or she did a wrong that required teshuva. Of course, you need to choose stories with some meat to them—ones that require children to struggle with an issue and that connect to your learning objective for the prayer. Your sources for stories span the history of the Jewish people. I have used stories that range from the Tanach to rabbinic writings in the Talmud and Midrash to folktales to modern writing.

There are two keys to increasing engagement during story telling, especially with a large group. The first is to tell the story in a dramatic way. Regulate your volume to capture the mood of the story. Use voices for the characters that speak. Pause at dramatic moments. All of these techniques develop over time but practicing the story before telling it is an important way to prepare for good story telling. Also, inviting a “guest” to be the story teller can be a great way to engage teachers who are required to be at tefillah but often feel like their sole role is to police.

The second key to increasing engagement during story telling is to give children a task prior to beginning. For example, ask children a question that directs their focus to your objective for the lesson. This is the question that you will start your post-story discussion with. If tefillah occurs in a classroom with children at desks, you can have children actually write their answers as you are telling the story, or they can fill in a graphic organizer. If tefillah occurs in a large group such as in a synagogue, consider having children do something once they have an answer. I often tell children to put their hands together once they have discovered the answer to my question. Setting a task for children during story telling helps prevent most kids from zoning out during tefillah.

Movin’ Movin’: When you get kids moving, you are guaranteeing engagement. Dance and dramatic movement can be powerful ways of connecting children to tefillah. In this section, I would like to focus on one particular technique that I have found extremely powerful for engaging daveners of all ages. I call the technique the “human opinion graph”.   The idea is to pose a question and have children physically move to give an answer. One could argue that human opinion graphs are not really art. However, because human opinion graphs are a visual expression of the beliefs of the participants, I feel their inclusion here is appropriate.

Here are four versions of human opinion graphs that I use frequently:
            - Sit/Stand: This is a good technique for doing a quick survey. You ask a yes/no question like: do you believe God has a role in our day to day lives. If yes, please stand. If not, stay seated.
            - Corners: Set up four chairs in each corner of the makom tefillah. Put a sign (or have a child hold a sign) on each chair that is a possible response to a question. Daveners must then choose the response that most matches their answer. For example, if you had just been made king and God said he would give you any wish, what would you wish for: a long life, victory over your enemies, riches or wisdom? (I use this and the story of Solomon to introduce the blessing “Ata Chonen" in the amidah)
           - Human Bar Graph: Similar to Corners, in the Human Bar Graph, you set the chairs up in a row at the front each with a response. You ask a question and the children have to sit in a straight row behind the chair that matches their response.
           - Values Continuum:  The idea here is for the leader to make a statement that children can strongly agree with, strongly disagree with or be somewhere in the middle. An example of a statement might be: God is the source of all bad things in the world (I use this to introduce the blessing yotzer or). Children who strongly agree move to one end of the room, and those who strongly disagree move to the other end. Most children place themselves somewhere in the middle.

Visual Arts: There are ideas which are simply not captured through words. For this reason, artists throughout the years have attempted to express the meaning of tefillot through drawings, paintings, photography and other forms. At our tefillah, we can invite children to express their ideas about key lines in various prayers through the visual arts.

For example, when we studied the kedushah, I told the children the story from Isaiah 6 where the angels are calling to each other. But, what did this scene look like? What do angels look like? I challenged children to create pastel drawings of the line “kadosh, kadosh, kadosh”. In this case, my first step was to show children a wide variety of artistic depictions of this scene. I did this to open their minds to the idea that angels are not necessarily chubby, little boys with wings. The creations of the children were creative and imaginative. We hung the angel pictures in our makom tefillah and one angel image became the centre of the parochet our fifth graders were making as their “moving on” project.

Eager to try some of these ideas in your next tefillah gathering? Great! But, before you do, examine your school’s culture of tefillah.  Using any of these may require a shift in the adult understanding of children’s prayer at school. It is important not to underestimate the attachment teachers, administrators, parents and even children have to the way tefillah is done. In particular, many people have strong feelings about how much praying should be “sacrificed” for learning about tefillah.

A good way of thinking about this issue is as a tension between kevah and kavanah. Kevah are those parts of the prayer experience which are defined and unchanging. Kevah focused tefillah is filled largely with the recitation of prayers from the siddur. Kavanah is the part of the prayer experience where daveners are engaged in understanding and relating to prayer.

There is no way to introduce arts-based learning to your tefillah without sacrificing kevah for kavanah. If this is an issue at your school, I strongly suggest having this discussion with your stakeholders before you shift the kevah—kavanah balance. You can introduce this idea of kevah and kavanah and you can even do a “values continuum” activity with them—although adults tend to prefer to do this on paper rather than with movement.

In the end, you should come away with an idea of how much time should be spent on kevah and how much time on kavanah. At my school, I spend a third to half of tefillah on building an understanding of and a relationship with the text. While this may seem like a lot, in a thirty minute time slot which includes getting settled at the beginning, I am left with ten to fifteen minutes.  However, with good planning, and by breaking activities into smaller chunks, it is possible to do great things in this time.

Through engaging our children in their tefillah, we inspire your children to be great daveners because they have a personal relationship with their prayers. And, we set the groundwork for the successful continuation of tefillah in middle school, and for the rest of our children’s lives. Truly holy work.

Reference: Wachs, Saul P.  (2009). Towards a theory of practice. New York (NY): The Solomon Schechter Day School Association.

Gaming, Willpower, & Davening

I hear that one of the biggest reasons that people don't daven more is that there just isn't enough time.  Who doesn't wish that they could have few extra 'bonus' hours in the day to sleep, read, relax or get work done.

I recently watched a TED talk by Jane McGonigal titled The Game that Can Give you Extra Ten Years of Life in which she discusses how her background in gaming, research in psychology, and recent illness brought her to a discovery of how to lengthen one's own lifespan.

The lecture is interesting and engaging and my motivation in sharing this speech was McGonigal's comment that "willpower works like a muscle; it gets stronger the more you exercise it".  Isn't this one of the basic tenets of teaching?  When I think of my personal davening habits, I often conceptualize it as a type of spiritual fitness.

One final teaser for those that haven't been convinced to take the 19 minute plunge, McGonigal explores the concept of post-traumatic growth, a psychological concept that often gets overshadowed by post-traumatic stress syndrome.  "Is there a way to get all the benefits post traumatic growth without the trauma - without hitting your head in the first place?" McGonigal asks.  She explores four kinds of strengths or resilience that contribute to post-traumatic growth - and shares exercises that you can practice (many of which are part of our normal tefilla experience).  One example is her advice to "not sit still" - seems like a good prooftext for shuckling (rocking in prayer)! 

Pslams by the Sea

I came across the following question answered by Rabbi Yaakov Cohen of the Beit El Yeshiva:

Question: Can I say Tehilim on the sea side without a shirt on?

Answer:  One should dress respectably when praying or saying Tehilim. But there is no Isur (prohibition).

I love this particular question and the response - which is totally appropriate and subjective. The questioner is comfortable enough to daven at a beach or felt moved to pray after bathing topless.  The rabbi recognizes that there is a need to promote proper decorum in prayer but that there is no real restriction to spontaneously say psalms.  

Think about it - who wouldn't be at a beach, pondering the eternity of the tide and not think to praise Gd and nature's amazing cycle?  Just to bridge to a post last week on davening on airplane - I am not sure I would recommend gathering a minyan of people to pray as it might bother the other sun worshipers.

Moving Davening off your Checklist

In a recent bookjed review of We're Missing the Point: What's Wrong with the Orthodox Jewish Community and How to Fix It by Gidon Rothstein, Franics Nataf writes:

In We’re Missing the Point, Rothstein correctly tells us that much of the Orthodox community has lost its way. Echoing A. J. Heschel's castigation of our community as pan-halachic, he writes that by becoming "checklisters and ritualists," we not only miss the forest from the trees but are not even able to differentiate between big trees and small trees. His answer is to try to identify a blueprint of the goals of Judaism and explain how various mitzvot connect with these goals. As he writes in his introduction, such an agenda should be obvious and to this reader it was. Yet I am reminded of the introduction of Messilat Yesharim which says the same and yet became a classic for much the same reason one would like to see the current work become a classic – because people often ignore the obvious.

I would go one step further and suggest that many of the fights that are raging between various sectors of Orthodoxy would be less divisive if halacha was viewed contextually as Rothstein suggests. By this, I mean that the community would do well to understand more overtly that we should not see our aim as doing a particular mitzvah per se, but rather achieving the goal it – as part of a larger system – is supposed to accomplish. Were that the case, Orthodox feminists would likely feel less desperate to legitimate women’s participation in all sorts of mitzvot that remain controversial. At the same time, more conservative elements would likely get less hot under the collar if certain communities struck a certain halachic position that allowed such participation.

I haven't read the original work by Rothstein, but I think that Nataf's comments must cause us pause about the trending over ritualization of our teffilot. I once heard it said that the conservative streams of Judaism overly emphasize structure and lack a proper teaching of the spirit while the liberal streams overly emphasize the spirit but lack the proper teaching of structure - how can we practice, teach and maintain this balance?  This is at the top of my checklist!

Guest Post: The Amidah Project

This post is originally from Chicago Carless, a blog by Michael Doyle, address many important issues for tefilla educators.

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For the past few months, my Reform synagogue has done something most Reform synagogues don’t: we’ve stood and recited a partially silent Amidah, Judaism’s sizeable central prayer. You find the Amidah–which means “standing” in Hebrew, because you stand when you say it–in every Jewish service, whether shacharit (the morning service), mincha (afternoon), or maariv (evening.) Tradition suggests most if not all of the Amidah is recited silently, and most Orthodox and Conservative congregations follow suit.

Yet even with the traditionalizing trend of the past three decades, many Reform congregations pray an abbreviated form of the Amidah, always out loud, and often seated for the prayer’s latter parts. Meaningful passages in Hebrew are often skipped in favor of English intepretations or, simply, left out entirely.

Aside from a few seconds for “silent prayer,” there isn’t often the same opportunity our Orthodox and Conservative brethren have to really be alone with your heartfelt intention.  In fact, a typical Reform Amidah can be far from heartfelt. It’s hard to really go deep with your tradition’s central prayer when your denomination seems afraid of it’s deepest parts.

When we decided to test out a partially silent Amidah (we still chant the first three, long blessings out loud), several people pushed back. Some were afraid they wouldn’t understand the “new” parts in Hebrew. (We use Mishkan T’Filah, Reform’s latest, fully translated and transliterated prayerbook.) Some were afraid they wouldn't know how long to stand or when to sit down. (We sit when we’re individually done.) Some said they’d miss formerly chanted or sung parts. Overall those who pushed back were afraid that they’d miss, essentially, meaning.

What we’ve found is instructive. Some people still want the “old way” back. And, frankly, I would prefer our newly silent Amidah to be one arrow in an overall quiver of ways to approach the Amidah–including our “old way.” Especially in Reform, there’s no reason to leave anybody out. (And I happen to feel quite touched when our cantor sings R’tzei.)

But overall, people seem to like our newly silent Amidah. Why? Because in those long, pungently silent minutes of silent prayer, we are finally (and in Reform, for once) rendered alone–with our thoughts, with our prayer, with our tradition. The experience has knocked many of us out, initially rendering some of us to tears. And that outcome was totally unexpected. Wonderful. Incredible. A blessing. But unexpected.

Maybe that’s how far as Reform Jews we’ve let ourselves become removed from the meaning behind the words we pray–no matter what language we choose to pray in. But the meaning is there if we just listen for it. For some in my congregation, taking ourselves off of our liturgical autopilot for a little while was enough to start to sense why we say the Amidah in the first place. The prayer is truly an emotional journey if you let it be.

I don’t blame any Reform Jew for feeling disconnected from an Amidah recited silently in Hebrew. It just hasn’t been our practice, and not a lot of us talk about our prayer experience publicly. So I will. Over the next few weeks I intend to post a series of blog entries that lay out the Reform versions of core Jewish prayers, beginning with the Amidah (both the Shabbat and weekday versions), in Hebrew transliteration and English translation, accompanied by my thoughts on my emotional experience during each specific blessing or rubric of the liturgy. (Perhaps with video, as well.) After all, I definitely feel an almost exhausting emotional journey during the Amidah. It’s a feeling worth sharing–and most of all, describing. As you may have guessed from the title of this post, I’m calling my new series “The Amidah Project.”

We can’t all be Debbie Friedman, z”l, able to find the most miraculous meanings in seemingly hidden Hebrew corners of the liturgy and set them to catchy modern music. But we can all pause, and read, and listen, and then write and talk about our experience. I invite all of my Jewish readers to do just that. Open your nearest siddur–on Shabbat, the one covered in dust in your closet, or online. Find a part where you always tune out. This time, though, tune in. Read it slowly. Sit with it. Consider what those words might really mean–from Deity, to you. You might come up with nothing. But you might come up hearing that still, small voice.

The basis for our entire tradition.

This post is part of my Amidah Project series–an attempt to examine my personal experience of the core prayers of the normative Reform Jewish liturgy. For more, please browse my Amidah Project archive.