C (5:07)

Just because I'm a rabbi and I love praying doesn't mean it's simple for me. I love the poetry of our liturgy, but I don't always connect to the sentiment of each prayer or the structure of every service. I love the routine of daily prayer, but don't always have the discipline to stick with it. I love praying with other people, but don't always feel at home in many, if not most, prayer spaces. And sometimes my prayers feel more rote or distracted than sincere. And even though I like the idea of directing my prayers to God or to someone, I'm rarely confident that they go anywhere outside of my own head.

B (5:40)

This leads to the theme of the first episode, Does Prayer Work? Our podcast, which is modeled on shows like this American Life, stitches together stories, teachings, and interviews to try to compose a narrative that can never fully answer the big question of each episode, but constitutes almost a curriculum of sorts on how to approach the topic. In this first episode tomorrow, Dr. Sarah Labaton, who's the director of teaching and learning here at Hartman, tells a captivating story of a disagreement between her beloved father and her beloved grandmother on whether or not we can rely on getting clear answers from our prayers in times of need.

A (6:32)

My grandmother called up my father frantically and she said, ronnie, I lost my ring. I lost my diamond engagement ring. And my dad said, okay, Mot, should I come by to help you look for it? And she said, no, but my friend said that you could say a prayer for lost objects, so can you come to the house and say that prayer for me? My father was a modern Orthodox rabbi, a Syrian pulpit rabbi who prayed three times a day, every single day with a minyan. He was passionate about God and halachah, but extremely wary of superstition. And he said, mom, you know I don't believe in that. God doesn't work that way. We pray as an expression of our relationship with God, but we don't try to manipulate God to do something for us. And she said, no, I want my rink. And then he said, mom, you have your health, you have your family, thank God. And she said, I want my rink now. If my father channeled all his energy into serving God and his congregation, my grandmother channeled it differently. She was up with the birds, scrubbing her windows and frying kibbeh. My grandmother, 101 years young futfut Fu grew up in Argentina with zero Jewish education. She may have even gotten herself expelled from Catholic school. The two of them respected each other. They loved each other, but she had her way of doing things and he had his way of doing things, and now she needed his help. And you don't say no to my grandmother. So he came over to her house and he said something, and I have no idea what he said, of course. A few hours later, my cousin found the ring in her Sugar bowl. And my grandmother said, you see, it worked. My cousin said, what are you talking about? I found the ring. No, My grandmother insisted it was the prayer. Uncle Ronnie said, so did the prayer work? A rationalist would say, no, it was a coincidence. A supernaturalist would say, yes. The incantation, the intonation, the intention conjured the ring. Did God reveal or produce my grandmother's ring to my cousin because of the prayer? My father said, I have no idea. What I do know is that saying that prayer was an opportunity for my father to. To honor his mother, for my grandmother to remember her late husband. So, yes, I think the prayer worked. Of course, the irony doesn't escape me that when it came to our deepest, most urgent prayer, my own, my father's and my grandmothers, God never responded. At least not the way we were hoping. My father died of cancer 15 years after his diagnosis and a few years after this incident. And maybe that was running through my father's mind as he argued with his mother about the ring. If prayers are that easy, why am I still sick? I guess that reality serves as a reminder that there is a push and a pull with God. For all that we can do, there are limits. And for all that we know, there are mysteries.

D (10:02)

Amen.

B (10:05)

I actually have a similar story to Sarah's. It involved my mother in law and her version of the special prayer that one recites over a lost object. I'll save it for another time. I think Sarah is a better storyteller. But I want to tell you I definitely related to Sarah's story about how it mattered less, stepping back about whether the prayer worked in any objective sense. What mattered more was the world of meaning and the bonds of relationship that were strengthened in this dialogue. I find relationships to be core to how I think about prayer. Over the years, I've become really lax about personal prayer, but have remained passionate about the experience of prayer in community. Showing up in community at sacred moments, leading community in prayer, being together with others in times of need. Those kinds of experiences help us differentiate between prayer as personal expression, prayer as dialogue with God versus prayer as an expression of our attachments and obligations to others. When I stand in front of my congregation leading services on the holidays, I feel acutely connected to the people around me. I'm reminded that the atonement we pray for is for our collective benefit. And I feel the weight of responsibility to help lead a congregation through a fraught moment. It's not that God is out of the picture, but a lot of the experience is for me about being Intimately connected with the hopes and fears and dreams of the people all around me. In the second episode of our series, my colleague Dr. Ilana Steinhein tells a shocking story about an intense moment of prayer in relationship that defused a dangerous situation. Following that, you'll hear the emotional story of Mayan Staatman Shah, a college student, an alum of our Havruta program, reflecting on what it meant to feel lost between communities of prayer during a tense moment on campus.

E (11:58)

It's evening time. A man walks in to the synagogue seeking the counsel of the rabbi. So my father in law, of course, invites him into his study. Now the place is locked and there's nobody else in the building. And the guy pulls out a gun and says, rabbi, I'm gonna kill you. And he explains why his wife was a member of that synagogue and was going to leave him. And he felt rejected and angry and he needed someone to take his wrath out on and he chose the rabbi. And so my father in law, I'm always amazed by this. He kept his wits about him and he said, you know, before you do anything, why don't you come with me into the sanctuary so we can pray together for a few minutes? And that's what they did. They walk into the cavernous, quiet sanctuary, stand in front of the ark, my father in law recites a prayer out loud, and the gunman breaks down weeping.

F (12:56)

On a Friday night in my first year of college, I stood on the main green of my campus, shivering in a dress, an arguably ridiculous clothing choice for the middle of winter in Providence. My phone was pressed to my ear, the surface turned tacky by a mix of cold air and the tears running down my face. My mom was on the other end, her voice quiet, trying to comfort me and help me make what should have been a simple how to spend my Friday night. I was torn between three Shabbat services, two at Hillel and one with Jews for Ceasefire. Now, in the fall of 2023, I just returned from the Shalom Hartman Institute's Chavruta gap year, a place where pluralism wasn't just a word. It was real, messy and alive. During Chavruta, I was part of a community where I could learn, debate, explore and pray with my peers. I hadn't grown up with a strong Jewish community of kids my own age, and after finally finding that on my gap year, I was nervous about what kind of Jewish community I would find at Brown. For the first month of my freshman year, I was immersed in the kind of community I needed. September was filled with Hillel barbecues, meaningful Kabbalah, Shabbat services, and Torah study with friends. And then October 7, a day of horror and unspeakable grief for Israel and the Jewish people. Though the events of that day unfolded thousands of miles away, the reverberations were felt deeply on many American college campuses, including Brown. At other schools, Hillel grew and strengthened. In the months after the attacks. At Brown, the opposite happened. Students started walking away fast. They were leaving because of Hill's explicitly Zionist stance. These students weren't Hillel outsiders. They were the ones who had led services, taught Torah and built the community. And now they were gone. And the Hillel community felt their absence. For months, Hillel couldn't get enough people for an egalitarian minion. On Friday nights. The energy was gone. The room felt hollow. So there I was, standing in the middle of the main green with my phone pressed to my ear as I weighed the three options that I had for Shabbat services. One was the Orthodox service at Hillel, a lively prayer community with beautiful singing that was the type of praying I loved, but with a mechitza running through the middle of the room, separating me from my male friends and ensuring that I could never lead services. While the students there were always very welcoming, most had gone to the same Jewish day schools and sleepaway camps. They came from a different world, and that distinction felt clear when I was sitting by myself in services. Another option was Hillel's traditional egalitarian minion, a service where my feminist values and Jewish commitments would be recognized, but one with very few people, sometimes not even enough for a minyan, and as a result, lackluster tefillah. The third option was Jews for Ceasefire. Now, at this service, which was held in a student's home off campus, the davening was electric, the space was small, and the students were filled with passion. Coming to this service met my needs for an egalitarian and deeply rooted Jewish prayer community. But for all the ways, this felt like the right fit for me. Jewishly, this was an explicitly anti Zionist space. The front of their homemade sidor featured a disclaimer explaining that during their Kabbalah Shabbat service, the word Yisrael does not refer to the country of Israel, but but instead to the Jewish people and the biblical story of Jacob wrestling with God. That disclaimer didn't work for me. Many of my close friends were actively serving in the Israeli Defense Forces. Whenever I faced east to pray, I thought of the country and the time I had spent there. And my friends risking their lives to protect it. I don't remember what community I chose to join that specific night, because this wasn't just a decision I needed to make that one Friday. It's been two years of walking into rooms where different parts of me are half seen and half welcome. Two years of deep spiritual loneliness. Since high school, I imagine college as the place where I would find my spiritual home. Instead, I keep having to choose between pieces of myself. My commitment to gender equality, my love of communal prayer, and my connection to the state of Israel are all core parts of my Jewish identity. And after two years of this, I'm tired of choosing between my politics and my spiritual and religious needs. But here's what I'm holding onto. I keep showing up in all of these spaces, even when it's hard, even when the room feels hollow or I'm not sure where or how I fit. Because being a part of a community means showing up, and somewhere there is a space, or there will be a space where I can pray and be in all parts of myself. Maybe that space doesn't exist yet. Maybe I'll have to build it myself. But there will come a time where I won't be standing on that main green, shivering and lost. I'll be walking in the door, and I won't be alone.

B (18:32)

The famous idea that Ma ion is channeling in this story is attributed to Rabbi David Weiss Halivni of blessed memory, who once quipped that the people I can pray with, I can't talk to, and the people that I talk to, I can't pray with. Halifni was a traditional Jew who was interested in more provocative ideas than he found in his prayer community, and he ultimately had to choose to live a bifurcated self, praying in the liturgy and framework that he preferred, but intellectually alone, and then living an intellectual life without the benefit of spiritual fellowship with his dialogue partners. This is becoming harder and harder for a lot of people to do, especially in our globally polarized environment, in which the religious and the partisan are getting hopelessly blended. You see, in theory, the stuff of religious life, spirituality, the mysterious, the mystical, the ineffable. That stuff should represent a way of being in the world that lives separately from the earthbound stuff of messy politics. We should be able to live religious lives with people that don't get completely confounded and confused by our politics all the time, and vice versa. But it's easier said than done. Americans are relocating to live in geographic areas together with people they vote with. And I can tell you anecdotally that plenty of Jews these days are changing their synagogue affiliations to pray together with people whose politics they share. Here's Jessica, our host in episode three on prayer and politics in America.

C (20:05)

The idea of starting each morning at my Jewish day school with the Pledge of Allegiance didn't faze me. When I was young. It didn't occur to me that under God wasn't necessarily the same God that I was learning about in my Judaic studies classes. I also didn't think about all the different faiths and those of no faith at all. That said, the Pledge of. Later, once I learned about the idea of the separation of church and state, I started to realize that this piece of our civic system didn't make sense at all. God shows up in many places in our government, and so does prayer. What did it mean when I, as a Jewish student, said that I was part of one nation under God? Whose God was I talking about? And why was I even talking about God and my country in the same sentence anyway?

G (20:48)

Until we all are free, we are none of us free. TEROHY KRA this prayer song I wrote is an example of the creative work I love of weaving words from our tradition with melodies that can move us to action, that can move with us as we act. I want non Jewish allies to hear our particular holy words surging with moral power and universal messages. I want the Jews who are there to feel permission that as we lay a path toward liberation, we can pray and protest with our whole neshamas. That showing up at rallies or marches or protests is as much a part of our Jewishness as it is part of our American ness. That we are as obligated to protest injustice as we are obligated to pray as we find the words and lift our voices so that we and all people may live fully and safely and freely. We cannot leave anyone or any part of ourselves behind. Until we all are free, we are none of us free. Until we all are free, we are none of us free. Until we all are free, we are none of us free. DE RO Y CR

H (22:22)

I wasn't up there giving any policy suggestions. That's not my expertise. It's not what I want to spend my life doing. I really felt that the words that I was going to use in that space were words that I would say in any space. Words that come from our tradition. Words about the downtrodden and caring, about the vulnerable, finding a path to take care of all kinds of people in our society. I would never say something that I feel like I couldn't back it up within the Jewish tradition. And my feeling was, like, I'm not up here asking people to believe in a particular policy. That's not my job. But I am up here saying that there is a religious, moral voice that is real in America. And I have a responsibility, I believe, to help be a moral voice, a religious moral voice of our time. And so that's really what I saw myself doing.

B (23:18)

You just heard first from Rabbi Annie Lewis and then from Rabbi Lauren Holtzblatt, speaking in different registers about the delicate balance between the words of prayer and our political aspirations. Now, I think we can all agree, broadly speaking, that a lot of what is called religious in Judaism is also inherently political. The Torah instructs us to care for the vulnerable in our midst and to build societies premised on equal treatment under the law, and gives us a lot of rules on how to politically structure the camp of Israel and later its monarchic infrastructure. To divorce religion and politics in Judaism is to force a dichotomy on this tradition that's not there. But your mileage may vary on what the relationship between prayer and politics is supposed to look like and sound like. The space is very narrow and oftentimes idiosyncratically defined. I think where I personally land on this is that I tend to think of prayer as needing to extend beyond the limits of our daily needs. That prayer, in its most sincere form, has to stretch beyond us trying to get God to do our bidding. This should be true about us asking for material things. It should also be true about trying to resist the impulse to try to get God to shape the world in our interests. If prayer in part is about the courage of a deep dialogue with God, or if it's about a deep expression of suspending the self to live in community, or even when it's just an opportunity to penetrate deeply into ourselves, we should experience naked politics in our prayer as shallow and undeserving. I don't think either Rabbi Lewis or Rabbi Holtzblatt fall into this trap. I think they're both struggling with the same set of questions, trying to formulate a spiritual voice authentic to themselves and their understanding of Jewish tradition that also acknowledges the freighted nature of our political moment. It's enormously hard to navigate these questions in America right now, especially from the pulpit. Meanwhile, here's Rabbi Tamar Elad Applebaum in episode four, carrying forward this question into the context of the State of Israel, a place towards which Jews have been historically directing our prayers, the place of holiness for the three monotheistic religions, a place where God divides people and where people of faith like Tamar are trying to appeal to a shared language of prayer and spirituality to bring people back together.

D (25:52)

The very first phone call I received on Mutza isha bat of October 7th was from my beloved Muslim friend Ibtisam. She was sobbing and could barely speak. This is no Islam, this is not faith, she said, but only brings upon us all a world of death when we are either or. Yet in the world of God, it is never either your life or mine, but must only be me protecting forever the holy life you received from God and you forever protecting mine together. And so, she said that night I will raise my voice in action and in prayer, the one prayer for all. I know that so very many all around the Jewish world did not receive such phone calls, though they waited for them with trembling, breaking hearts. Rather, on that terrifying day, so many felt deserted by colleagues and partners. I know that this will forever be part of the trauma from that day yet. The first phone call I received was from Ibt Sam, followed by Father Beni, Father Alberto, Sheikh Khalid Sheikh Iyad. These relationships were not built overnight, nor were they taken for granted over many years and so many difficult moments for us all. Ibtisam and I had written together the prayer for the peace of the mothers, seeking words that could hold both our particular pain and our shared hope. Fr. Benny, Father Alberto and I had studied together and tended to our communities, finding pathways to understanding in the midst of trauma. Sheikh Khalid Sheikh Iyad and I taught the love of the holy city, speaking of the sacred responsibility we each carry for this holy place. These bonds, forged through years of hard work, were challenged and challenging in our context. They required constant tending and deep faith in the very possibility of understanding across profound pain and difference. Yet they remained essential, for they reminded us that even in our darkest hours, the choice between either or and for all remained ours to make.

B (28:13)

We'll conclude this introduction to Thoughts and Prayers with my favorite recurring segment in each episode, a meditation inspired by a text offered on the episode's theme by my colleague, Rabbi Akiva Mattinson. This particular one comes from episode five on Prayer and Peoplehood, an episode entitled Across Time and Space. Akiva's writing is like a mix of poetry and prose, and his teachings are not just contributions to our understanding of the subject, but they are moments in and of themselves that feel like the experience of prayer. Close your eyes unless you're driving, and listen closely.

I (28:56)

When our father Yaakov was drifting toward death, he was brooding in his heart and saying, I've given birth to 12 sons. Maybe they won't serve the Holy One. Maybe there's foreign worship among them. So what did he do? He called all of his sons and brought them before his bed. When they had come to him, they he said to them, gather round and listen, children of Yaakov. They said to him, what is it that you want? He said to them, listen to the Holy, blessed One whom your Father serves, and serve him yourselves. They said to him, shema Yisrael Hashem Elokenu hashem Echad. Listen Yisrael Hashem Our God is one to this day, they say each day, listen Yisra' Il. Listen Yisra' Il who lies resting in mearat Hamachpelah Hashem Our God is one. Dvarim Rabba parashatva. Sometimes I catch myself brooding in my heart like our ancestor Yaakov, or Yisra' el, as he is sometimes known. Unlike Yaakov, I'm not led there through feeling close to life's end, but by weighty feelings of communal despair. Are we as a people coming apart? Will the fraying threads of rope binding us to each other finally snap? And what will it take to hold those threads together? When I feel saddled by these anxious questions, this midrash comes back to me. And in its depiction of Yaakov's sons, a microcosm of our people, it gives me hope and direction. On the edge of death, burdened by worries about the future, about whether his children will continue to care about the God he's loved and served, Yaakov Yisrael gathers them and asks them to listen. The line Yaakov's sons use in reply, shema Yisrael, might be familiar to you. It's the first line of the Shema prayer recited by Jews to this day. Yet through this teaching, it carries new meaning. When first uttered by Moshe in the Book of Dvarim, it is a call to the people of Israel to affirm their fidelity to God. Listen, Yisra' el Hashem, Our God is one. But here in the mouths of Yaakov's children, it is, as Rabbi Tali Adler puts it, not only a pledge of loyalty to God, but to their dying Father as well. Through the eyes of our midrash, our relationship to God and to our ancestors gets blurred together. Our love for one is tied to our love for the other. Our promises to one are the same as our promises to the other. What is still more striking, our midrash suggests that this new, earthy and familial meaning is there. Every time we recite the Shema, it is as though we are speaking to Yaakov or Yisrael, calling to him from his final resting place, telling him that we, his children, are still committed to the very same singular God that he devoted his life to. Every time I return to this Midrashik story, I can't help but imagine that Yaakov's children did not all agree on what it means to serve and love God, let alone who God even is. I can't help imagining that they might have understood God very differently than their father Yaakov did. But their willingness to say, listen, Yisra' el Hashem, our God is one, signaled that these differences were less important to them. In that moment. They were able to hear in Yaakov's faith a version of their own faith, even if not identical in every way. And they were able with integrity, to promise to carry on their father's legacy of faith. Imagine a grandmother on her deathbed, worried about whether her grandchildren will carry on caring about Judaism or the Jewish people or the land of Israel. Her many grandkids all have different relationships to these things than she did, and they disagree with one another deeply about what caring about Judaism could or should even mean. Some might even feel strongly that the idea of loving the land of Israel is dangerous and misguided. Still, if these grandchildren can gather round their grandmother's deathbed and together commit to carrying on her commitments to the Jewish people, it will mean that they manage to figure out how to see and hear their own political and religious commitments as an echo and continuation of hers. To say that Hashem our God is one is not to state a fact. It is to announce a task, the task of finding our way across our different words, concepts, and ideologies toward a sense of our shared human concerns, desires, and hopes. It's the task of learning to see ourselves in warm conversation with Jews across time and space, engaged in a shared project of service of God. Whether we would all call it that or not, in making that declaration, we aren't just committing to God. We're committing to each other, to figuring out how we, all of us can say with honesty that we do, after all, care about the same things. What the early sages called simply prayer and what we call shmona esre or the Amidah, begins by referring to God as our God and the God of our ancestors. This is the work. In some sense. If we can't learn to say our God in the plural, if we can't learn to say God of our ancestors, drawing together the past and the present, then we will have failed to make contact with the address of prayer. To pray first requires this work of becoming a people who understand one another, who appreciate one another's commitments. So Yisrael, if you're listening, Hashem is our God. Hashem is one.

B (36:07)

I started this episode with a critique offered by a friend about the stilted nature of prayer and its repetitiveness, its inaccessibility. Listening to Akiva, I'm reminded about how these very prayers came into being in becoming part of a canonized liturgy. Over time, Jews wove together their tragedies and their joys, their hopes and their fears into poetry that tried to create continuity between this extraordinary heritage of Jewish tradition that they had inherited over time and with the deep human questions that remained alive in them in the present. Akiva speaks of our ancestors as loving friends whose struggles echo with our own. Somehow how we think about our connection with the people in our own lives is helped by being in dialogue with those who came before us. I think this is a partial answer to my friend's critique. Is prayer a necessary good? I think some people think that it is, but it's a lot easier to think so if you are compelled by a rhetoric of obligation. But can prayer help us live lives of meaning? Can it be a means through which we excavate our souls, interrogate our world, and build a dialogue with the past, present and future? I think I'll say I hope that it can, and I hope Thoughts and Prayers, our new show from the Sholem Harmon Institute can help prompt these questions. It's available wherever your podcasts are found. Thanks for listening.

J (37:42)

Thanks for listening to our show and special thanks to all who lent their voices to thoughts and prayers. Identity Crisis is produced by me, Tessa Zitter, and our executive producer is Maytal Friedman. This episode was edited edited by Josh Allen with music provided by so called transcripts of our show are now available on our website. Typically a week after an episode airs, we're always looking for ideas for what we should cover on future episodes. So if you have a topic you'd like to hear about or if you have comments about this episode, please write to us@identitycrisisalomhartman.org for more ideas from the Shalom Hartman Institute about what's unfolding right now, sign up for our newsletter in the show Notes and subscribe to this podcast everywhere possible podcasts are available. See you next time and thanks for listening.