Spirit and Story Archive

Welcome to Spirit and Story, where you will find the latest thoughts and reflections by CLAL faculty and associates on the contours of our contemporary spiritual journeys. Every other week you will find something new and (hopefully) engaging here!

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Foreplay in Shul

By David Nelson

Veteran CLAL-watchers will be surprised by the following musings, accustomed as they are to seeing CLAL “takes” on the spiritual aspects of balancing checkbooks, receiving a driver’s license, and similar topics of apparently “non-religious” content. If I may be permitted to buck that trend for a few moments, I’d like to reflect on a consistently ignored aspect of American synagogue life/prayer.

Imagine, if you will, a typical Conservative American synagogue. Imagine it’s Shabbos morning. Maybe there’s a bar mitzvah, maybe not. The service “starts” at 9:00am. But you wander in at 9:05 and are startled by the huge number of empty seats! In fact, the 300 seat room contains six or eight elderly men, scattered throughout the pews.

This observation represents neither age-ism nor sexism – it’s just overwhelmingly the case that, in the first half hour or so, the vast majority of the tiny crowd tends to be men over 70 years of age! The cantor is nowhere in sight, and the rabbi is shmoozing with a congregant near (but not on) the bimah.

What’s going on here? It’s called “The Preliminary Prayers,” and without getting too technical, we may summarize their content as follows: First comes a series of morning blessings, followed by more blessings, some study, and then a series of Psalms. These elements of the liturgy are seen in many (perhaps even most) synagogues as unimportant. How do I know that? First of all, by looking at the number of people who show up for these prayers. And don’t start with “Jewish Standard Time” because we all know that if the beginning was considered REALLY important, people would be there on time! (How many Jews would miss the opening pitch at a World Series game or the overture at the opera?) Secondly, by the observation that the rabbi and/or cantor (the professional pray-ers) don’t get involved until much later in the morning.

I know what you’re thinking. Why am I obsessed with “preliminary prayers”? It’s NOT like the opening pitch or the overture, but more like the pre-game show which has the unenviable task of filling (or killing) time until the real action – the Torah reading or bar mitzvah speech - begins.

Prayer, the act of getting in touch with the very soul of the universe, of baring one’s own soul sufficiently to allow it to be touched and moved, is an excruciatingly difficult thing to do. It takes practice, concentration, the ability to close oneself off from daily concerns, and perseverance – and even with all that, it’s never a sure thing. To write off the first half hour of the service as an unimportant prelude is to mistake the recitation of prayers for praying.

Prayer is not about reciting words from a book, but about a relationship, “face-to-face” with that which is holy. To get ready for this task, we should muster our most inspiring teachers, or most soulful guides, to help us through those warm-up exercises. We should all arrive on time (and if 9:00am is too early, maybe we should shift the whole thing to 10:00! -- prayer is NOT supposed to be a dreadful chore!) and sit together for 10 minutes, just singing some nigunim (songs without words), calming down and trying to take a break from the hectic pace of life. Next we should study for a few minutes, focusing on the purpose of prayer and the ways it works. Then slowly, carefully, we should start the “preliminary prayers,” not rushing through them, but rather treating them as an opportunity to ease into the rhythm of prayer.

If all this makes the synagogue morning too long, then we should find other places to shorten the service. These preliminary spiritual practices, which have been likened variously to pre-exercise stretching and to pre-lovemaking foreplay, are far too important to hurry through or to ignore. In fact, they are vital to any spiritually charged prayer experience. Maybe those old guys have known this all along.

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