In this week's allotted pages we learn several things about prayer - it's importance and our attitude toward it when we pray. Here are some of those highlights:
1. The rabbis teach us that even though they taught that we must pray 3 times a day, therefore making it routine, we must not treat it like routine when we fulfill that mitzvah. By routine - the Hebrew word is "keva" - they mean: a task that we want to get through quickly, or when we don't pray plaintively, or if we're not trying to make the prayer experience new, or if not praying at the earliest possible moment. All those are aspects of "keva" which we must try to avoid when we pray.
2. To add to our ability to make our prayers fresh and meaningful we must pray toward Israel (thus thinking about our eternal connection to the land of Israel), we must not laugh during prayer (though we must be happy to pray!) and we must pray in a room that has windows. All of these increase our chances that prayer can be a spiritual experience.
3. The person leading the service has to have extra abilities not only to make his or her prayer meaningful but to make the experience of the congregation meaningful too. In the rabbis' time, there were no books as we know them. There were manuscripts and they were expensive to produce. When prayer was performed, either on one's own or in community, it was mostly done by heart. The prayer leader then needed to know the words by heart and if he or she made a mistake s/he had to be replaced. Though we have books today and therefore mistakes with the words would be reduced, the requirement to make the service meaningful is still in force.
4. Though the rabbis encouraged us to add our own private prayers to the set service, they emphasized that we may not be impertinent with God. Though Moses was impertinent concerning the golden calf (a lengthy story of how Moses blamed God for the people having had the gold to make the calf!) we may not be impertinent! We may be tempted to blame God for the bad things that happen in our lives, but the rabbis insist that we may not do so.
5. The Talmud also includes several stories about the saintliness of Rabbi Hanina ben Dosa. He was so righteous that his prayers would always be answered. He prayed for the healing of several rabbis' children and miraculously they were healed. The rabbis ask how it could be that Rabbi Hanina's prayers would be answered but not the great Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai (president of the rabbinical academy)! They answer that Hanina was God's servant and was allowed in and out of God's presence all the time. Yochanan was a minister in God's court and would need permission to gain entrance. This teaches us that anyone with the appropriate knowledge and religious attitude, no matter one's status in society, has access to God.
These main points help teach us how we can make prayer into a meaningful experience and how we should approach life every day - with an attitude of gratitude and a recognition that we are in God's world.
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