A well-known parable that dates back likely to the beginnings of motorized travel (or at least to the time of Robert Moses) cites the tale of the driver moved to devout prayer in the sudden desperation for a parking spot. The motorist depicted is someone usually mostly secular in nature, but now immediately devout in their allegiance to God in their desperate wish for a spot. Invariably, the car does indeed get parked.
Unquestionably, prayer is proven to have its benefits. But to some still, even to this day, it remains a puzzle.
There seemed at one time to be just a little more breathing room in the world between humans. People had the personal space to believe and mentally function as they wished. In our "globally" connected world of social media, cellular communication and twenty-four-hour everything, that's just no longer the case. There is less synapse, less wonder. Evidence is all too present. In a world where life is only going to just present itself at every turn, more people need something unconditional to believe in. Something greater than all the real and virtual matter before us. That's prayer.
What better inspiration for prayer than imprisonment in a world too beset by the suffocation of reality, of imposed behaviors, of driven acts of retaliation...? And yet, even in a world where the greatest, most astute release remains readily available to all of us, some just won't touch it. Even if that mug of green tea is known to ease the stomach, cleanse the palette and serve to improve one's energy, one still veers in choice to the double-fudge latte. Presumably..? It's a matter of "comfort".
There are some that cannot find intellectual comfort in the act of common prayer. I'll hasten to say that I was raised among such heady and scholarly intellectuals. I was born into a nest of post-war New York Jews that somehow put intellect before prayer. No doubt, you've heard of those. I don't know if that qualifies as "agnostic" necessarily, but in my advanced years I'm not so sure I'm ready to dignify it with a title.
I'll never forget a memoir I once read by a successful bulemic, who spelled out brilliantly the mental madness of her teenage eating disorder. At one point she described the concept of a sandwich as being too "complicated". If you were hip enough to the whole thing at that point, you knew exactly what that meant. I know I did. I also know that to a Jew raised within intellectual secularist confines, that's also the lock-box puzzle of prayer.
Jewish prayer is not something you just show up at the place of worship point blank and join in on. It never has been. The Jews have been the deeply, famously and continuously the most persecuted tribe on the planet, and for that reason alone forced in many ways to pray in stealth. This would include a certain level of educated advancement, schooling and exclusion. And, to be clear about it, money: Paid membership. The famous story of the legendary Hillcrest Country Club tells of the creation of an exclusive social club designed by and created for successful Jews, in what proved at the time to be the unapologetically discriminatory environment of Beverly Hills. No bones would be made about this at any time. Jew vs.Gentile was, and apparently continues to be Romulan vs. Borg. Old Testament vs. New Testament. One heck of a division for a world supposedly manufactured by the same creator. And no possible better differentiation could exist than that which separates over-the-air TV viewers from cable subscribers.
I can certainly recall those early childhood years, High Holy Days meant trips with my uncle to the neighborhood temple, in that upscale village. When my mom decided to get it together as a single and move out of his suburban setting with her son, into sparer lodgings with only a finite patch of money in the bank, temple visits were very oddly a thing of the past. Prayer was, make no mistake about it, a subscription service. That very transition was the cornerstone of my ecumenical education.
None of the above of course is classified or astoundingly new information. Additionally, for those of The Faith in financial disorder, there are certainly avenues of organized worship. But it isn’t about that. Sometimes the medium itself is indeed the message.
I can’t think of a better reason for a Jewish kid growing up to have ambivalence about his sense of religion. My mother would instill in me the foundation which holds that one’s devotion relates to their actions, how they treat others, the respect they extend to even those they don’t know, and the self-respect with which they hold themselves. In other words, it isn’t about thieving, backstabbing, self-absorption, and showing up at temple on Rosh Hashanah in your best threads, hoping to out-style your cousin at the High Holy Services.. It isn’t about giving up your six-course Thanksgiving feast around the leaf-extended Ethan Allan dining room table to tie on an apron and spoon out some annual turkey stew at the homeless shelter for the evening. It’s about what you truly believe, and how closely you act on those humane beliefs in your dealings with others. It’s between you and God. What more pomp and circumstance doth one need..?
Beyond all that though, what is very often needed is a return to faith, a centering that comes only with the act of prayer. If, like myself, you have to go onto Google to look up the proper spelling of the word Berakhot, well then you’re probably not a very good Jew. You’re probably not very much in touch with your faith, and probably have no sense of devout practice, and you’re probably nothing but a hypocrite in all your spiritual convictions.
What I do know is that people much more successful, self-made and well-founded than myself, the likes of Bernard Madoff and Arnold Friedman spent plenty of High Holy time in prayer service. It was as much a social and sometimes business operation as a religious one. And they likely did the honors at home as well. You can’t have one without the other.
I didn’t come up from that packaged environment. The act of prayer was something for which I was, it was somehow conveyed, ineligible. Too poor for the synagogue clique, too astutely intellectual for any other kind of relative Bible Thumpage. My mother seemed to hold that organized religion of all kinds was generalized hype. We’d invariably find ourselves glancing at the TV during the Sunday morning public-affairs and religious-programming “desert”, and a lecture would erupt out of her on the greed-bound exploitation of “paid religion”. Active prayer on these terms was poisoned candy.
It would be many years into my maturity, and my mother’s departure from this world, that I would meet with some much more advanced minds, and acquire the realization of what prayer and devotion is really all about. Those advanced minds were not Harvard graduates, but some did emerge from the Seminary. Others were simply surviving churchgoers all their lives. But one active ritual related them all closely: The practice of prayer.
There remain too many ways to denounce active prayer as a rationalized cop-out in the defense of wrongful behavior. Certainly the misdeeds that have plagued the Catholic Church over time speak to this. But religious practice has never gone out of business as a result, and very likely will not. Because, as the fight against COVID has proven, for example, we cannot cease to step out of doors and breathe the air. In the same way, prayer is just too necessary. You could probably do yourself some serious damage with wrongful doses of Vitamin C. But that doesn’t prove it unnecessary to any metabolism.
I never did learn how to pray in Hebrew, and I’m afraid I’m not too versed in the ecumenical backgrounds of the Old Testament. I don’t really know the full story of The Ten Commandments. I don’t know the Passover Haggadah inside out, beyond a rousing chorus of “Dyaneu”. If I pray for a violence-stricken woman in Israel, it isn’t necessarily with the eye-for-an-eye anger held by the Jewish Defense League, as much as it is with the prayer for peace and survival I pray for that young Latino mother shot randomly in Crown Heights last night at 4am.
The practice of prayer I’ve self-cultivated, with the help of astute minds over time, has taught me much about self-centering, and keeping focus. Gratitude is the center of prayer. When I emerge from that subway terminal at night, on my way home from work, even in the most inclement weather, I’ll stand for just a moment, in the ice-cold wind, or pouring rain, to thank God for the safety and peace with which he has endowed me and my loved ones today. And that’s at the end of my worst days. The ends of the best only frighten me, with the gift I know I cannot repay.
My days have lots of humanity in them. Foolish conflict and inner struggle. Anger. Sleeplessness. Occasional lapses in judgement. Grumbled utterances of $%*^ in impatient frustration. Those are not impious moments. They’re everything Mister Rogers once reminded us he liked us for. Yes, Fred Rogers himself was an ordained Presbyterian minister. He wasn’t just a puppet voice.
One thing life in today’s world teaches more every day: Prayer is the best, safest and most reliable self-service going. My own practice of prayer may not meet with the approval of the Rabbinical League or the Higher Ministry. I don’t sing spirituals, I don’t get to catch too much religious programming on radio and TV, and I don’t find myself frequenting houses of worship. But I think I’ve got a pretty good relationship with God. We talk often, and he’s never met me forty minutes later with a curt “We have to stop for today…” That’s because those moments of self-conversation with some of those long-gone better ecumenical minds I have known keep me in the straightest focus I’ve ever maintained. It’s the guard rail I hold onto closely every night, as I ascend from that stairway, look toward that brightened night sky and say thanks, for the moment I’m blessed with, in ways I can't articulate. And at the end of that prayer, I know I have.
Noah F.
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