Finding The Words
Ask the average Jewish woman to define prayer, and you may get an apologetic, "I'm not the right person to ask." Yet with a combination of traditional tools and contemporary creativity, women today can fill the pages of prayer with their own personal texts.
By Rahel Musleah

Until she went into labor at 27 weeks, Stacey Mandel did not pray much. Her daughter Maxie, born a week later, was so premature that her nipples and ears were not yet fully developed. That's when I started praying hard to God, to a power above myself,” says Mandel, recalling her words: "This is not up to me. This is up to You. Please take care of this baby as You see fit."

Maxie is now two years old, but Mandel, 33, of Havertown, Pa., hasn't stopped praying. Today, most of her prayers reflect a spontaneous gratitude awakened by Maxie’s birth, “a true miracle.” Mandel, who founded a Jewish baby gift business, begins her mornings with a short prayer in English from the traditional liturgy thanking God for restoring her soul, and ends her day with another brief entreaty entrusting her spirit into God’s hands.

Sometimes, overwhelmed by the plethora of choices and plenitude of food, the need to pray descends on her even in the supermarket. But, says Mandel, praying “on demand” at fixed times in the synagogue, stymied by the Hebrew she does not understand, presents a more difficult task. “I don’t feel an intimate connection to God there,” she says.

Freddi Kadden is not religious. But the Great Neck, N.Y., mother of three boys finds the synagogue setting an opportunity to express her fears and hopes, and “singing together in one voice” spiritually uplifting. “When I think of prayer,” she says, “it’s structured, controlled, in the synagogue, in Hebrew, with a book and with lots of other people.”

Ask the average Jewish woman to define prayer, and you may get an apologetic, “I’m not the right person to ask.” Even for those who find meaning in synagogue services, praying can evoke visions of intimidating sanctuaries, unintelligible words, interminable services and a huge dollop of unexplained bowing. Talking to God through sincere, spirited prayer may seem more the province of a rollicking evangelical church than of the staid neighborhood synagogue. Intimate havurot and creative services try to bridge that disconnect, but many people continue to struggle.

Fixed vs. Spontaneous
Despite images of our ancestors wrapped in prayer shawls or engaged in Tevye-like conversation with God, the challenges of prayer are not new. The rabbis of the Talmud debated the role of fixed and spontaneous prayer, concluding that both are necessary and valid. They created specific places in the liturgy for inserting individual prayers. In ancient times, the average Jew didn’t even know the liturgy, says Rabbi Steven Brown, dean of the Davidson Graduate School of Jewish Education at the Jewish Theological Seminary and author of L’Ela, L’Ela: Higher and Higher: Making Jewish Prayer Part of Us. “That’s why the custom of saying ‘amen’ and ‘baruch hu u’varuch sh’mo’ (blessed be the name of God) developed,” he explains. “No prayer books existed. A knowledgeable leader would recite the prayers, and the people would answer ‘Amen,’ ditto, same for me.”

Because the Jewish community was already spreading around the world, the rabbis codified the prayers so Jews everywhere would be united by a common liturgy and could turn any place into a sanctuary, Brown notes. The danger, he adds, is the “message that’s come down through the ages is that if you’re not good with words, you can’t be close to God. Nothing could be further from the Jewish truth.”

A famous Hasidic story tells of a slow-witted child who didn’t know how to read. During Yom Kippur services in the synagogue of the legendary Ba’al Shem Tov, progenitor of Hasidism, the boy asked his father if he could play his flute. “No, for heaven’s sake, don’t do it!” the father said, holding the boy’s pocket to prevent him from taking out the flute. During the closing Ne’ilah prayer, the boy pulled his father’s hand away, took out the flute and blew loudly. The congregants, of course, were astonished, but the Ba’al Shem Tov cut his prayer short. “This young boy, with the sound of his flute,” he said, “has brought all the prayers to God.”

The English meaning of the word “prayer”—to beg or ask—differs from its Hebrew counterpart, l’hitpallel, a reflexive verb that means “to judge oneself.” To forge a personal stake in prayer, Brown suggests asking: How do I measure up against the values of tradition? Am I praying in order to become a better person? To be part of the community? To develop a relationship with God?

“Prayer is an inner expression,” explains Andrea Cohen-Kiener, rabbi of the Jewish Renewal congregation, Pnai Or of Central Connecticut, and the author of two books on prayer. “It’s humble, modest, invisible. Everyone feels the need to pray, but most of us press down on it, so that yearning, which is human and universal, is experienced as ‘I need a beer’ or ‘God, I feel agitated; what’s wrong with me?’ That’s the unexamined, unexpressed need for prayer.” Though there is potential for a profound experience in the synagogue, she says, few people know how to use the tools in front of them. “That sets us up for failure, disappointment, and cynicism.”

“I was always taught, when you go to synagogue, you read the Hebrew. But I was never really taught what it meant,” says Trudy Turk, 21, a political science major at Binghamton University. “I still read it just so I fit in with everyone else in Temple. I like singing the Hebrew, but I don’t think about the prayer part of it.” Turk’s interest in the meaning behind the words deepened when she visited the Western Wall two years ago and found she couldn’t pray. At her request, her boyfriend is teaching her some of the prayers, in part so that she can keep up when she is with his family. Now that she is examining the concepts behind the prayers, she is troubled further: “Why, if there is a God, would there be cancer? So there’s no point in praying to Him to help people.”

Shira Fishman, 28, a doctoral candidate in psychology at the University of Maryland and one of leaders of the D.C. Minyan, does find prayer comforting. “The act of saying a prayer is reassuring,” she says. “Though I don’t expect anything in return, somehow prayer lends some calm to me. I struggle with the place of God, but I believe there is a higher being watching over me.”

Raised in a traditional Conservative home, a graduate of Jewish day schools and Camp Ramah, Fishman says that prayer was an important part of her growing up. She acknowledges an obligation to pray but says it’s almost secondary to her enjoyment of the experience. “There is some kind of belief during prayer that you are part of this reliance on God and the values that come with Judaism.”

Fishman cautions against the unrealistic expectation many people share that “every time you walk into shul you will feel completely connected and have an amazing davening [prayer] experience. That sets the bar really high. You have to spend a lot of time davening to get the few moments of meaningful experience.” She regularly adds personal prayers, usually at the end of the Amidah [the standing prayer central to the service], reflecting on the highs and lows of her week: a difficult conversation, for instance, or a moment of thanks.

When she finds it difficult to pray, she reminds herself that she doesn’t need to say the specific words, that just being part of a supportive community, the extended congregational family, can spark a senseof holiness beyond herself. “Sometimes it’s hard to feel a connection to God in the basement of a building,” Fishman acknowledges, recalling that some of her most intense experiences have been in awe-inspiring settings: davening alone in the middle of a forest at camp, or observing Tisha B’Av, the fast day that commemorates the destruction of Jerusalem, overlooking the walls of the rebuilt city. “I carry those moments within me.”

Timing is everything, as they say, and in prayer that couldn’t be truer. The confluence of keva (fixed prayer) and kavannah (deep concentration, spiritual intensity) is hard to achieve, says Cohen-Kiener. “When we are having a deep feeling, we’re not used to casting that into worship. We may have a deep feeling, but it’s not the time of shachrit [the morning service]. Or it may be time for worship, but it’s not necessarily a time of deep feeling.”

Cohen-Kiener teaches exercises to fuse those times, learned from the work of martyred Hasidic rebbe Kalanymous Kalman Shapira. One dramatic exercise: “Imagine the day of your death. Your children are crying, ‘Tata [Father], don’t go, don’t leave us.’ That will put you in the right frame of mind for prayer. When we face our mortality, it’s easier.” Every prayer moment has its own access point, she says.

To find the right words to pray at nontraditional times, she suggests “going inward” and asking yourself, “What do I need to pray about?” If you can’t answer that, recite the words of the Psalmist: horeini Yah d’rachecha: God, show me Your direction. Set the words to a melody. You don’t have to believe in God to pray, she notes. “It can be calming and revelatory and useful to develop those parts of our minds that are stilled and quieted during prayer—with or without a God concept. Often I invoke a presence of vastness more than a personal God.” Cohen-Kiener counsels others to find tikkunim, resonant phrases from the Bible or prayer book that touch the root of a personal issue and reflect the themes of trust, abundance, guidance or clarity.

Prepare for prayer by closing your eyes, taking a few breaths and noticing how you’re feeling, she says. “Open your eyes, look around, and go inward again. It changes the second time. Bring an open-ended question. If there’s some agitation in your heart already, breathe into that agitation. Ask for guidance and opening.”

Personal Prayer Opportunities
Jewish law exempted women from fixed, time-bound prayer because of home obligations in the context of ancient times. The image of the biblical Hannah, praying to God for a child so intensely that her lips moved soundlessly, “set a precedent...for women’s prayer as private, spontaneous and separate from the male-oriented communal service,” says scholar Devra Kay. Centuries later, Yiddish prayers known as tkhines—composed for daily prayer as well as for women’s mitzvot like candlelighting and baking challah; purification, pregnancy and childbirth—provided women with alternative meditations “to be said with kavannah.” Kay has gathered and translated one 17th-century version that became standardized into a prayer book, Seyder Tkhines: The Forgotten Book of Common Prayer for Jewish Women (Jewish Publication Society).[see example of one Thkines below.]

“When non-Orthodox women took on communal prayer practice, we stopped looking in other corners of our lives for prayer opportunities like candlelighting, child soothing, relationship building, homemaking, life balancing,” says Cohen-Kiener. For women, the main obstacle to prayer might be simply to find extensive periods of quiet, especially in the child-rearing years with a five-year-old wrapped around your ankles.

“I make up my own prayers all the time, not poetic ones, but about anything and everything. My natural expression of myself is to turn to the siddur [prayer book] and talk to God in my mind,” says Arianne Slack, 25, associate cantor of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles. “I don’t pray about things like ‘Please, God, I don’t want to get a parking ticket,’ but to express gratefulness or the need for healing.” Slack, who grew up in a non-observant family, fell in love with prayer at the age of eight.

“I was required to go to services [for her bat mitzvah]. I got lost in a hallway, and the cantor found me. I was mesmerized listening to him singing. Something about it pulled at my heart. It felt important. When he called the children up to sing with him, I enjoyed it so much that I decided I wanted to come back every week and to become a cantor.”

Maintaining focus while reciting words that repeat in three daily services can be difficult, says Slack. “There are times I’m thinking of everything else I have to do. Even if I’m not successful [at praying with intensity], still the fact I’m doing it has merit. Davening ties you to the Jewish calendar, so when something is different you are aware of the changes.”

Slack recognizes that people can face a disconnect between what’s in their minds and hearts and what’s in the siddur. “If your child is sick, how do you say 15 words of praise to God? I suggest they express everything in their minds and hearts.” For those to whom the Hebrew is a barrier, Slack advises decoding the theme or mood of a prayer rather than simply reciting the translation, then adding your own spin.

On his web blog (http://biurchametz.blogspot.com), a thirtysomething, American-born software engineer in Israel, who declined to be identified by name, comments on the paradox of prayer: “Day after day I mumble through the same paragraphs, my mind rarely even aware of what my lips are doing... Shouldn’t I just spill my guts in the most intimate way...?”

But when he did decide to insert his own request in the Amidah’s Sh’ma Koleinu blessing (God, hear our voices), “my words came out sounding silly. Awkward. Either too conversational or too formal.... None of the grace and poetry of the rabbinically composed blessings, none of the fluency of reciting familiar language, none of the connection to generations past through unchanging texts. Who did I think I was, trying to pray in my own words? Would I stand before a king stammering and improvising?” The effort was “humbling,” he concludes, and renewed his appreciation of the fixed ritual.

“The liturgy has lasted because it’s classic, powerful, sublime religious poetry,” says Brown. “But most people don’t understand the power of poetry or the metaphors that are the cornerstones of Jewish liturgy. There are at least 157 names for God throughout Jewish texts and literature, written by Jews in their idiom, their time and place.” Modernizing metaphors like God is a king or a shepherd presents its own challenges: “You can’t substitute ‘president’ for king, because that’s absurd.”

How do you talk personally to the ineffable? On the most basic level, Brown says, “we have to reclaim comfort with talking about and to God. How do you picture God? Does God answer your prayers? Does God intervene in the world?” There are no right or wrong answers, he stresses. During the High Holidays, think about which metaphors in the mahzor (High Holiday prayer book) resonate and which don’t. “Think about the nature of the life you want to live and create your own metaphors,” he says. “You don’t have to daven all the words. Slow down.”

When the printed page doesn’t inspire, music, dance, painting, yoga and other art forms might: Brown envisions a cello solo to accompany a daily evening service or a woodwind ensemble at Sunday afternoon minhah. Understanding the origins of prayer can also deepen kavannah, says Joel Grishaver, creative chair of Torah Aura Productions and the author of almost 50 Hebrew school texts on prayer. The Talmud and Midrash, he says, are filled with stories about the first time certain prayers were recited.

One of seven stories about the origins of the Shema, for instance, pictures Jacob on his deathbed, his sons gathered around him. “ ‘I’m not afraid of dying,’ Jacob says. ‘I’m afraid that without me, you will lose your connection with the one God,’ ” Grishaver recounts. “The sons say, ‘Shema Yisrael. Listen, Dad, God is one.’ Jacob answers, ‘Barukh shem k’vod malkhuto l’olam va’ed. God’s honored kingdom will go on forever.’

“This is a story of a father experiencing joy that his children will continue the tradition,” Grishaver concludes. “Instead of some strange theological statement, the Shema becomes a simple expression of continuity.”

Another easy entry into prayer, Brown says, are the one-line birchot nehenin, the blessings of enjoyment. He remembers when one of his colleagues fell to her knees upon hearing the news that the adoption for which she had been waiting for 10 years had come through. “I urged her to say hatov va-ha-meitiv,” the blessing for good news, praising God, who is good. “It brought God into the room. Blessings turn every mundane act into a sublime spiritual experience.”

With a combination of traditional tools and contemporary creativity, women today can fill the pages of prayer with their own personal texts. “We can pull words from other places,” says Cohen-Kiener. “But what to pray about comes from the text of our own lives.”

	Prayer Resources L'ela, Lela-Higher and Higher: Making Jewish Prayer Part of Us, by Rabbi Steven Brown (United Synagogue) Karov L'Chol Korav. For All Who Call: A Manual for Enhancing the Teaching of Prayer, by Rabbi Jeff Hoffman and Andrea Cohen-Kiener (Melton Research Center, JTS) Conscious Community: A Guide to Inner Work, by Andrea Cohen-Kiener, translated from Bnai Machshava Tova, by Rabbi Kalanymous Kalman Shapira (Aronson) Seyder Tkhines: The Forgotten Book of Common Prayer for Jewish Women, Devra Kay (JPS) Prayer: A History, by Philip and Carol Zaleski (Houghton Mifflin) A Guide to Jewish Prayer by Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz (Schocken) Voices of the Matriarchs: Listening to the Prayers of Early Modern Jewish Woman by Chava Weissler (Beacon Press) Entering Jewish Prayer: A Guide to Personal Devotion and the Worship Service by Reuven Hammer (Schocken) A Gift of Prayer: The Spirituality of Jewish Women by Women of Reform Judaism (URJ Press) The Merit of Our Mothers: A Bilingual Anthology of Jewish Women's Prayers by Ida Cohen Selavan, Tracy Guren Klirs (Hebrew Union College Press) Women Speak to God: The Prayers and Poems of Jewish Women by Marcia Cohn Spiegel, Deborah L. Kremsdorf, Editor (Womans Inst Cont Jewish Educ) Tkhine to be said when placing Sabbath loaves into the oven: From Seyder Tkhines (translated by Devra Kaye, JPS) Lord of all the world, The blessing of all things Is in Your hands. So I come to honor Your holiness And ask You to bestow Your blessing On this dough. Send an angel to protect it, So that it may bake well, And rise well, and not burn, In order to honor the holy Sabbath That You have chosen As a day of rest. So, I make this holy blessing As You blessed the dough of Our mothers, Sarah and Rebecca. God, my God, Hear my voice. You are God Who hears the voices Of those who call out to You With all their hearts. You are beloved forever.