Meaningful Prayer: Focus on the Goal

Before discussing the goal of prayer for students, we must understand the goal of prayer for everyone.

The major goal is for tefillah be a significant part of one’s relationship to God. This relationship needs to form on different levels: as individuals, as members of the Jewish people and as part of humanity. It comprises the good times and the bad, the happy and the sad; it includes events on individual, local, national and international arenas. It needs to recognize that in all the stages of life listed by Solomon in Ecclesiastes chapter 3, God is with us, wants us to lead our lives in a certain way in order to connect with Him and will call us to account for the lives we have lived. This goal is the same whether one is 6 or 80, although how one channels the messages in tefillah will differ immensely from one group to another and one age to another. Someone is sick, one turns to prayer. Israel is fighting a war, one turns to prayer.

The rest is commentary.

If a school turns out students fluent in all aspects of tefillah who have no connection to God through prayer, it has failed in the ultimate goal. They might get turned on elsewhere, at which point fluency in Hebrew and tefillot will benefit them greatly. But as educators, we have lost a tremendous opportunity to send out graduates who will turn to our siddur for daily inspiration. Or if a graduate indicates that he has found his spiritual connection through Buddhism after spending many years in our institutions, we have failed in reaching the goal.

To achieve the meta-goal, one needs to develop a framework within which there are wide-ranging responses to the following questions: Why do people get sick? Why do we die? Why do both the righteous and evil suffer? What is the role of man in this world? Of the Jewish people? How does God act in this world?

To answer these questions, students need a framework that includes God and gives them tools and latitude to come to their own understanding. The building of that framework is the prime essence of all studies, Jewish and general, in God-centered day schools, whether pluralist or Orthodox.

At our school two years back, a non-Jewish lower school teacher died on erev Pesach. The fourth grade students who had had this particular teacher (both in kindergarten and third grade) discussed his death during services. While upsetting, it was handled within the framework that had been prepared for them. “Elohai, neshama” teaches us that we will eventually return our soul to God—that we all die. Students discussed the life expectancy of Americans. They knew that even though some people will die “before their time,” how we live is much more important than how long we live. The Mishnah passages studied after the morning blessings for Torah teach that we should choose to live a life filled with good deeds and mitzvot. There was general agreement that the teacher in question had led a good life replete with caring.

So, how does one set the stage? How achieve the goal? By incredible attention to detail. Here are some very simple prescriptions.

Change the lens.

The leader/teacher should show that prayers can accommodate changing events, by reading prayers as a lens upon the world around them. The themes of the Psalms and other prayers are wide enough to have different emphases at different times. During a particularly hard time for individual students or community (death or sickness in family or friends), or challenging times for our people (the war in Gaza), do we vary the inspirational message? Do we take the same rote prayer, frame it within the need of the students or group and thereby enlarge an understanding of the tefillah?

Some people and congregations err in trying to come up with new “gimmicks.” If we reflect on the role of ritual (think bedtime stories), that which is often repeated is much beloved. How do we make our repetitive prayers as comforting at the hundredth viewing of It’s a Wonderful Life? Ashrei, for example, is an oft-repeated prayer. Take the school newspaper or local or national new stories; look at the prayer through a myriad of lenses and themes that emanate from the psalm itself and relate to current events, and through those themes, to the prayer participants.

Develop particular goals for each student and class in the prayer service.

The more the leader knows about the individual students, the better he or she is able to plan for or respond to their particular needs. The cynic, the rationalist and the mystic all need different inspirational messages, questions, understandings, stories or melodies. If a class loves to sing, how is that love used as a medium to clothe the tefillot with meaning? These goals need to be formulated with the individual, class, division and school in mind. Even in denominational schools, where one might be circumscribed in certain ways of approaching tefillah, there can exist a multiplicity of options.

In traditional communities, the leader should not use the student service to fulfill the halakhic obligation to pray.

This is a cri-de-coeur against minyanim where no one speaks or inspires students because of various halakhic strictures. The leader requires the freedom to explain, to speak, to monitor and to inspire. There are going to be students who need to hear explanations, an occasional thought, a tune to have them connect. Leaders are handcuffed if they can’t speak from Barchu to the end of the Amidah or during Pesukei deZimra. They need to daven before or after they lead and make it clear to students why they are doing so. That explanation will both reinforce the halakhic prohibitions as well as the goals of tefillah.

Allow students to begin to own the services in whatever areas are personally meaningful.

Because meaning is so personal, the ownership of services or tefillah means something different for everyone. For example, teachers often assume that the slow enunciation of prayers is more meaningful; however, some students may well get more out of faster davening, while others may desire even more time. When analyzing student goals in tefillah, the key question to ask is, “What does a particular child need?” How do schools respond to students who say they need more time to pray on a particular day? How do we respond if we know a child is having difficulty with his family as a result of becoming more observant? How do we help him negotiate the challenges of meaningfulness in less than optimal situations? A student begins to own prayers and services when he carves a place for tefillah in his or her life, no matter what is going on. This ownership is not to be confused with leadership, although for some students those concepts overlap.

The expectations of the community should be woven into prayer and built upon where appropriate.

Community expectations are so often related to form: proper behavior in shul, knowing when to stand or sit, when to bow. While emphasis on the formal aspects of prayer does not generally speak to most students, having an aliyah or opening an ark might speak to students whose connection to prayer is the form. These are future minyan goers who have developed a connection to other people through prayer, perhaps to a feeling of community within ritual space, but not necessarily to deep and philosophical or even God-centered reflection.

Girls who value form over substance will have more challenges in traditional minyanim where they are not permitted to formally participate: opening the ark, having aliyot, reading from the Torah, or counting as part of the minyan. Boys who connect to prayer through forming the minyan see an intrinsic value to “just showing up.” In traditional communities, therefore, girls interested in “form” will need gender-specific prayer groups to achieve some if not all of their goals.

Suspend school enforcement of minor rules.

It should seem obvious that if our goal is for students to have deep connections, they are not met immediately in the morning with consequences for being “tardy” or being out of compliance with regards to the “uniform.” Getting told off first thing in the morning is a waste of precious prayer time that a student could use in the profoundly moving act of prayer. It will detract a student from the over-arching goal of prayer. The environment in which tefillah takes place needs to be a safe and caring one.

In the Gemara, the famous story is told of how God, upon hearing the rabbis rule in the majority and against the voice of Heaven, concludes with God triumphantly saying, “My children have defeated Me.” What are the goals which will inspire our children to the level of “defeating us,” so to speak? To be advocates for prayer? To insist on prayer?

I am reminded of one story in a community school I was heading where one traditional student wanted an Orthodox minyan. After he succeeded in getting a minyan and then some (up to half the high school of 60 students by year’s end), the gabbaim of the particular minyan one day informed me that they were tired of cutting out some of the prayers just to fit into the daily schedule. That day they were going to pray without a time constraint. While I hemmed and hawed outwardly, it was a wonderful experience to have been “defeated by our children.” Those “defeats” speak to successful tefillah.

Mark Stolovitsky