(RNS) — Some of my favorite malapropisms have happened in synagogues during worship. For example, there was the bar mitzvah kid several years ago who stood up to give his speech, thanking everyone “for coming to worship me today.”
He meant “to worship with me today,” but perhaps he got it right. Over more than four decades of leading bar and bat mitzvah services, I found it hard to believe so many guests would come and just sit there – obviously too moved to even open the prayer book. Some would look like they were in the waiting room of a dentist’s office, waiting for it to be over.
And then there was the rabbi who gave a sermon about “our traditional Jewish lethargy.” He meant “liturgy,” but perhaps he got that right as well. The constant danger of the prayer experience, in whatever faith tradition you find yourself, is lethargy.
The biblical prophets recognized the problem of vapidity in worship. Isaiah (29:13) put it this way:
My Sovereign said:
Because that people has approached Me with its mouth
And honored Me with its lips,
But has kept its heart far from Me,
And its worship of Me has been
A social obligation, learned by rote …
According to the Pew Research Center’s Religious Landscape Study published in February, one-third of Americans report that they attend religious service at least on a monthly basis. The most avid attenders: Latter-day Saints, or Mormons. Seventy-six percent said they attend services in person at least monthly. For evangelical Christians, 60% do so.
“33% of Americans say they attend religious services in person at least monthly” (Graphic courtesy of Pew Research Center)
But 23% of Jews attend services at least once a month — the second-lowest for any American religious group (17% of Buddhists reported attending services at least once a month, the lowest).
Why? To quote the final moments of the classic film “Casablanca,” let’s first “round up the usual suspects”: secularism and assimilation, the sociological buzzwords that are becoming increasingly meaningless.
Now let’s go deeper.
One reason is society’s poetry deficit. Prayer is poetry that we believe in. Most Americans are poetry deprived, as in they simply don’t read it.
Then, there is a meaning deficit. Generations have constructed the Jewish worship service on the foundations of stories, images and longing. With a decline in Jewish education, the building blocks of that worship experience have become almost hopelessly arcane to many.
People study Torah, but they don’t study the words of prayer, showing a lack of curiosity.
In her poem “In the Synagogue,” writer Cynthia Ozick imagines the contemporary Jewish worshipper:
I do not understand
the book in my hand …
A memory of a memory
thinner than a vein.
Who will teach us to return? …
Our Jewish memories become thinner with each passing generation. How do we return? How do we get the lethargy out of the liturgy?
As we enter the High Holy Days season, I am calling upon American Jews to:
Know what and how to pray. Know what the words have meant to generations of Jews, to today’s Jews, what they could mean to Jews in the future, and what they mean to your own soul. Know the meanings, the stories, the melodies, the allusions, the poetry. It is all there, and it is richer than we imagined.
By the way, a quick fix if you are getting bored in worship services: Pray at your own speed. Linger on the words. Read the commentaries in the prayer book. Focus on one word in the prayer and go deeper.
Prayer is less of a skill than it is an aptitude. If you want to develop it, you can.
Feel it. This is about kavannah — feeling a spiritual intensity in which you connect to the words, and the words connect us to each other and to God. You want to da lifnei mi atah omeid, to know before whom you stand. It is about the search for God, and God’s parallel search for us.
Imagine that before there was God, the longing for God was already there — a longing for depth, introspection, creativity, connection, justice and compassion. A longing to return to a primal source that could not have been imagined. That longing created God.
The late Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai put it this way:
I declare with perfect faith
that prayer preceded God.
Prayer created God,
God created human beings,
human beings create prayers
that create the God that creates human beings.
Take it in. American Jews have three repair projects. First, tikkun olam, or repairing the world. Second, tikkun ha-am, repairing our people. But there is a third repair shop we need to enter — our own inner lives — tikkun atzmi, repairing ourselves.
One word for worship is avodah, which also means work. Why is it work, and why is it so hard?
This year marked the centennial of the birth of the late Rabbi Harold Schulweis. Some years ago, he asked why prayer is so difficult:
Why is it so hard? Because in the course of living, the image of God within you, the soul in you, becomes blotched, blurred, blackened, painted over, distorted, foggy to the point of non-recognition. You have to search for that image of God and that soul within you. In Hasidic thinking, this kind of work is called “arbiten auf zich,” to work on yourself. It is deep, sacred, necessary work.
This is why I wrote my new book, “Inviting God In: A Guide to Jewish Prayer,” released Monday (Sept. 1). It started as a way of teaching b’nai mitzvah candidates how to understand the words of the Shabbat liturgy to lead their ceremonies. All good, and all necessary.
“Inviting God In: A Guide to Jewish Prayer” by Rabbi Jeffrey Salkin. (Courtesy image)
I wrote my own commentary using stories, history, theology and popular culture, like Paul Simon’s new metaphors for God. I discovered that these words were more alive than I had ever known.
It turns out, I was writing this book for wondering Jews. And for myself, mostly.
As Amichai wrote in “Poem Without End”:
Inside the brand-new museum
there’s an old synagogue.
Inside the synagogue
is me.
Inside me
my heart.
Inside my heart
a museum.
Inside the museum
a synagogue
Inside it
me,
inside me
my heart
inside my heart
a museum
The Jew is all of that: a museum, a synagogue, a heart and a “me” — simultaneously.