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Jeffrey K. Salkin, "Inviting God In: A Guide to Jewish Prayer" (CCAR Press, 2025)
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Rabbi Jeffrey Salkin
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Rabbi Jeffrey Salkin
Hello everybody.
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Rabbi Mark Katz
Hi, and welcome to the Jewish Studies Channel of the New Book Networks podcast. My name is Rabbi Mark Katz, author of Yohanan's Gamble Judaism's Pragmatic Approach to Life, and I'm here with Rabbi Jeffrey Sulkin, who is the author of Inviting God in A Guide to Jewish Prayer, put out by CCAR Press. Rabbi Salkin is also the author of numerous works, including Putting God on the Guest List, how to reclaim the spiritual meaning of your child's bar or Bat Mitzvah, and the JPS B' ni Mitzvah Torah Commentary, among many other books. His column, Martini Judaism is published by the Religion News Service, and he hosts a podcast of the same name. And so today we're excited to talk about this really inviting and wonderful guide for people of all levels of Jewish knowledge to better understand how the prayer book is constructed and why it matters. So welcome.
- [03:03]
Rabbi Jeffrey Salkin
Thank you. It's great to be with you, Rabbi Katz.
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Rabbi Mark Katz
So we always begin the same way on this podcast. Tell me a little bit more about yourself, but more along the lines of the journey to writing this book.
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Rabbi Jeffrey Salkin
Well, you know, I've been a rabbi for about 45 years or so, and a large piece of my rabbinate has always been writing and communicating and going beyond the people that I see in front of me and to try to extend my pulpit. This is my 12th book. My first book, as you correctly mentioned, was Putting God on the Guest List. And that's a book about how parents and young people could reclaim the spirituality of bar and Bat mitzvah. And that's a perennial problem in American Judaism. In many ways, inviting God in a Guide to Jewish Prayer is the follow up to that many years later, or a follow up to the JPS B' Nai Mitzvah Torah Commentary, in which case I wanted to make it clear that these texts are for us, they're for everybody, and we need to understand them. Beyond that, I came to the conclusion, after many years of leading services, that many people feel clueless about what's going on, and as a result of that, they sit in the sanctuary almost as if they are, well, sitting in the waiting room of a dentist's office. And I wanted to open their eyes, wanted to open their souls and their minds to what I think the beauty and the poetry of Jewish prayer can really be.
- [04:30]
Rabbi Mark Katz
So let's jump right in. One of the things that I really admired about your book is the fact that it did speak on lots of different levels. I loved your voice and the way that you wrote, and I know this book is meant to be accessible for teenagers who are about to become B' Nai mitzvah, but I learned a tremendous amount from it with anecdotes that you brought in and ways that you talked about the prayers I'm curious if you can just tell us a little bit about the prayer book in general. Where did it come from, who made it, and how did it end up in the iteration that we have now?
- [05:03]
Rabbi Jeffrey Salkin
I like to compare the prayer book, the Sidur, the ordered structure of Jewish prayer, to a well, lasagna. It comes in different layers, and Jewish prayer and worship and ritual have been added onto over the centuries by every community and every group of Jews that has tried to encounter God in its own way. I think that it's fair to say that the Sidur as we have it today is really the product of the rabbinic period, the late rabbinic period, and there are no printed prayer books, as you can imagine, for quite some time. I think it's also fair to say that unlike the Torah, unlike the Tanakh, unlike the entire Hebrew Bible, also unlike, for that matter, the Talmud, the Sidur, the prayer book is something that's constantly evolving. So I prefer to think of it as a loose leaf notebook rather than a bound text.
- [06:04]
Rabbi Mark Katz
Now, one of the things that your book adds to the conversation is that it's a distinctly Reform commentary on the prayer book. And there's been lots and lots of commentaries over many, many years written. I'm curious what you think your book adds to the conversation and more importantly, if you can unpack a little bit, what makes it a quote, reform commentary, as opposed to some of those other commentaries that might be out there?
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Rabbi Jeffrey Salkin
Well, one of the things that makes it reform is that it is specifically a commentary on the evening Shabbat prayers and the morning Shabbat prayers in Mishkan Tefillah, which is the latest iteration of Reformed liturgy. Friends of mine who are Conservative rabbis have told me that they have read the book and they've gotten a great deal out of it. But those readers who really need to see a commentary on the Musaf service, on the additional service that brings back the memories of the sacrificial rituals, will be a little bit disappointed. The style is also, I think, reform. It is scholarly, and yet it is popular. The scholarly piece of it is not necessarily only about uncovering the layers of the literary creations that have gone into the prayer book, but has also been about what different people at different periods of time have tried to discern about the meaning of prayer. And what would distinguish it, I think, from a commentary on, let's say, the traditional prayer book, though certainly the commentary of the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks is the exception to the rule, is that while it is serious, it is not what you and I would call pious, which is to say, it dares to ask questions about the theology that is found in the prayer book. It relies on stories and legends, but also brings a great deal of history and critical thinking into it. In that sense, I think it really is a flourishing of the way that not only reformed Jews, but all non Orthodox Jews and many modern Orthodox Jews have chosen to read their sacred texts.
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Rabbi Mark Katz
So before we get into really the content of the book, let's start with the title, Inviting God in. What was your pathway to that particular title and why is it an apt one for your book?
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Rabbi Jeffrey Salkin
Well, it's funny, when I first started working on this book decades ago, I put all my notes before this book into a large file folder called from your mouth to God's ear. And that's of course a cliche, wishful thinking when someone says something from your mouth to God's ear. It became clear that that was not going to work for young people. In some ways, it is a follow up on putting God on the guest list, which is to say inviting God to a bar or bat mitzvah experience. But when we talk about inviting God in, I think what we're talking about is making space for the divine in our own lives, in our own prayers, and trying to push back against something that I have been pushing back against for my entire career, which is the growing secularization of American Jews and American Judaism. I wanted to restore the poetry, the power, the purpose to the potential for Jewish prayer.
- [09:31]
Rabbi Mark Katz
So you speak about a lot of different prayers. There must, you know, be somewhere in the vein of 75 mini essays in your book, maybe even more, because you talk about each prayer individually and you pick out one particular theme in that prayer to really concentrate on. I'm curious, now that you've written the book, what's one of those prayers or one of those themes that has been staying with you since you've written the book?
- [09:58]
Rabbi Jeffrey Salkin
It's funny that you asked that question. I've come to see each prayer of Jewish liturgy as a fractal. That's a fun word, fractal. It's a scientific or mathematical term. People get their PhDs in the idea of the fractal. The idea of a fractal is that something very small is really a model for something very large. In the pebble, we can see the mountain. In the leaf, we can see the entire tree. In the cell, we can see the entire body. In each prayer, we can really intuit the entire Jewish experience. I think what grabbed me first and foremost in my research here was the Shabbat evening hymn, Lechadodi. I've never loved the fact that in many Reformed synagogues it's abridged. We do verses 1, 5, and 9, though every time I go to a traditional synagogue and we do all of the verses, I come to intuit that it's really an opera about Jewish redemption. It is the product of the mystical Jewish community of Tzfat in the north of Israel in the 1500s. It is a tone poem, as it were, about an encounter with Shabbat, who was the incarnation of. Of the Shekhinah, of the feminine presence of God. Shabbat shows up as either a Malka as a queen or a Kalah as a bride. And that whole idea that we are praying for the redemption of the Jewish people, that while it was written in Tzfat, it very much has Jerusalem on its mind. There's this gorgeous, gorgeous phrase in there that I keep on returning to, that Jerusalem is in a city built upon its own tell, built on its own ruins. A number of years ago, I was in Warsaw, Poland. I was leading high holy day services there. And one of my friends was leading me around Warsaw and showing me around. He made it very clear that where we were walking was the site of the former ghetto. And he pointed to apartment buildings that were built on little hills, on little mounds. He said to me, those are not natural hills, that's rubble. This entire city was built on rubble. And that became a metaphor for me that what Judaism is, is a structure that's been built on the rubble of the past. So there's a takeaway in this, which is that I encourage prayers to find one phrase in every prayer that they want to sit with and stay with. And that can be a way of freeing their minds and their souls. For me, l' chadodi really does it.
- [12:37]
Rabbi Mark Katz
One of the things that I think this book adds to the conversation is a newfound way of describing the arc of prayer. Like often we talk about climbing a mountain or we talk about it, if it was a piece of literature, that there's a kind of rising until a climax. And then people over time are constantly trying to figure out paradigms. You know, prayer is, you know, oops, wow, thank you. We've got other paradigms that, you know, sections are creation, redemption, revelation. You come up with this kind of five fold paradigm. First preliminary material, then what we believe, then what we now need, then what we learn, and finally what we hope. So I want to go through each of those because it's a really creative way of understanding prayer. And it's the way you structure the book. So first, let's start with the preliminary stuff. Why do you think that the prayer book doesn't just jump into the most important material? Why does it have a kind of warm up section as you talk about in the book?
- [13:44]
Rabbi Jeffrey Salkin
Well, if we expand the metaphor even more than that, I compare the entire worship experience to a theatrical experience or a concert. And so the preliminary material becomes the warmup. It becomes, as it were, the stuff that we do before we do the stuff that we do. I could also compare it to something that I really don't know much about, which is hanging out in the gym and exercising. You really have to warm up before going right into an intense experience. So I think that this poetry is intended to basically move our souls in a direction so that we're ready to access the entire experience in a way that's powerful and deep. I have not figured out, however, though others have, what the internal moves are in that preliminary material. I know that, for example, in the Kabbalat Shabbat service, the service that prepares us for the full experience of prayer on Friday night on Erev Shabbat, there is a progression to the Psalms, and they're all about making God into king or God into sovereign. But I. I don't go as deeply into that as I might have. I just view this as something that we do to get ready for the principal experience.
- [14:58]
Rabbi Mark Katz
You bring up a really interesting point. And before I move into those other sections, I'd love for you to reflect on this a little bit. I was reading one of Art Green's most recent books, not his latest book, but a selection of his essays from jps. And one of the things he talked about actually, is that section, the Kabbalah Shabbat section, is almost a printing accident. This is what he believes that if you look at different manuscripts and things like that, and the Psalms and Psalm 92 were all used disparately, and then once they ended up kind of getting crammed together in a prayer book, that then became the opening section of our Friday night service. So in a way, the flow is an accident of history. Now, there's a lot of examples of the accidents of history. You, as a someone who I know loves humor, I'm sure, know the joke about, you know, the rabbi who gets to the new synagogue and notices that everybody bows low on the way to go up for the aliyah, blessing the Torah, only to find out that there used to be a chandelier there. Right. And so I am curious. We have these Two ways of seeing a prayer book. On the one hand, it's this finely constructed script of how to live and believe Jewishly. On the other hand, there's a lot of accidents of history that led it to be the way it is, and later we found tremendous meaning out of it. And I'm curious, how do you balance those two things, as you think, both as a religious person and a scholar about the prayer book?
- [16:41]
Rabbi Jeffrey Salkin
It's funny that you mentioned that I go back and forth between those things as well. One of the things that our teacher, Rabbi Larry Hoffman, taught us is that not only are there accidents of history, but also there are, in fact, accidents of language. I came to this conclusion recently while being in a traditional synagogue and being present for the massive quantity of prayers that praise God in every single way. It's like a thesaurus of praise. And I was talking to someone at the coffee hour afterwards at the kiddush, and this person said to me, do you really think that God's ego is that fragile, that God needs all of this? And then I took the humanistic point of view, which is that maybe we need to be grateful. But then I remember really what Rabbi Hoffman said, that much of this is meditative. It's rhythm. So I think what's important to know is that this prayer experience, this literature, this liturgy, this theater exists on many different levels. And what I love about it is because of that, it can be accessed in many different ways, unlike almost any other work of Jewish literature, which, by the way, gets me to one of my pet peeves. And I've been talking about this. You probably have Torah study on Shabbat morning at your synagogue. I used to as well. I still teach Torah once a month online to people all over the country. In fact, all over the world. Torah study has been a big thing in American Judaism for the last 45 years or so. Rare is a synagogue that doesn't have Torah study on a Shabbat morning. But one of the things that has made me really very curious is a curious lack of curiosity about prayers. I know of no prayer study group, and I don't know many rabbis who actually stop the service at certain points and allow people to ask questions about the prayer experience. Now, I know that there's a danger in that because that interrupts an emotional and spiritual experience and makes it intellectual. I'm just basically noting that we don't think much about it and we don't teach much about it either.
- [18:57]
Rabbi Mark Katz
That's really interesting, which is why I hope a lot of people listen to this podcast, because I'm about to ask you to teach a little bit. So we had the preliminary. Now, the what We Believe. Can you take us through that section? What are the major themes of that section that we are supposed to quote, believe, or at least assess in order to decide whether we believe?
- [19:17]
Rabbi Jeffrey Salkin
Well, it really is rather clear. And these are things that Jews have debated for centuries. And the prayer book is as close to a catechism as we might find the ordinary Jew having access to. So we start with the idea of creation. In the evening, the master symbol of creation is the flow of light into darkness. And in the morning, the major theme of creation is the creation of light. We go from there from God creating to God loves us. Now, that's a phrase that you don't hear many rabbis saying. As a matter of fact, I once started a sermon by saying, I'm going to say three little words to you that no rabbi has ever said to a congregation. God loves you. And we often don't think of God loving us, even though we believe in a loving God. And the symbol of God's love is that God gives us the Torah. And that brings us now into the Shema, the declaration, as it were, of our faith in this one God, and then segues into the vya hafta that says that we demonstrate our reciprocal love for God by identifying our homes through the mezuzah, identifying our bodies through the wearing of tefillin, and then finally, that God will redeem us, that God will free us from whatever the present troubles are and will bring us into a better world. And the master symbol for that is the parting of the Red Sea or the Sea of reeds when our ancestors left Egypt. Now, one of the things I love teaching is that every act of the Sidur, every act of this theatrical drama must end on an up note. I invoke the memory of Debbie Downer from the old Saturday Night Live show, who, by the way, was played by Rachel Dratch, who grew up in a reformed congregation in the Boston suburbs, that you cannot end a part of the service on a downer. It always has to be either. We're getting out of Egypt, there's going to be peace. That no scriptural reading ends on a negative note. They all end on a note of Nehemtah, of. Of hope, of comfort. And then ultimately, at the end of the service with Olenu and Kadish, we're being brought closer to the time when God's kingdom is established on earth. So God creates. God loves us through the revelation of Torah God redeems us from Egypt. Now, I'll say one last thing. In those three statements, we have centuries of debate, arguing, and people stalking out of conversations. What do you mean God creates? No, the world was created through some sort of cosmic happenstance that God loves us through Torah. Well, show us some love. We don't always feel the love. And God didn't write the Torah. Human beings wrote the Torah over a period of time. And God redeems us from Egypt. Okay, yeah, maybe once. But when was the last time we got redeemed? Where was God on October 7th? Where was God's redemptive presence then? These are the things that people argue about, and I think that argumentation needs to be brought into our experience.
- [22:35]
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Rabbi Mark Katz
Of the things you do point out when you compare the the prayer book to the closest thing we have to a catechism is the tension between prayer as poetry and prayer as doctrine, prayer as theology. And you speak about this a lot in your book. The kind of poetic feel of the Torah, I mean, of the prayer book. When you assess the prayer book, how do you balance those things? Because often I think we do get into trouble when we see the prayers specifically as, you know, doctrine, as opposed to the poetry that they are.
- [24:04]
Rabbi Jeffrey Salkin
One great rabbi of a previous generation once said that when he prayed, he prayed that he would be able to believe the words that he was praying. And I think much of this is aspirational. I think a lot of it also is the walk through a museum of what our ancestors believed and certainly the genetic structure of not if their bodies could be present in one sense, but I think the genetic structure of their belief has come down to us. So I do view it as prayer. And there are moments in there where I say, you know, I believe this, or I'm struggling to believe this. Now, for example, in Alinu, that's probably the most controversial Jewish prayer of them all. It was so controversial that it was actually censored by official government censors who believed that the phrase who has not made us like the nations of the world? Was insulting to Christians. In fact, there was a verse that was actually pulled out of there because censors thought that it was insulting to Jesus. And I struggle with this all the time, that God has not made us like the nations of the world. Now, I cannot say whether or not God actually created us differently. But I will say this. With every passing day, I see that our history is unique, while it has echoes in other people's histories, our experience. And again, I go back to the post 10-7-JEW. The era in which we live does reaffirm that our experience is different, not better, but certainly has made us aware of that difference. And I teach that difference. I think that difference is important.
- [25:49]
Rabbi Mark Katz
So I want to look at the second section. We just talked about what we believe. Now let's talk about your paradigm of what we need, which is really the Amida, that central prayer of both the morning and the evening service. Can you speak a little bit about that section? Why you think that section is so important, and what does it mean to. To really yearn and to ask for something, even hypothetically, if many of your readers don't believe in a God who can hear our prayers, who might answer our prayers?
- [26:23]
Rabbi Jeffrey Salkin
That section is really essential. As a matter of fact. Hatafilah, as it's called, the prayer, these standing prayer, that's what we stand up for. That is our way of voicing our needs, to be connected to our ancestors, to feel God's power. And once again, we have a controversy here which is played out even on the pages of the printed prayer book itself. Does God give life to everything, which seems like a very basic statement, or will God at some point revive the dead? What does it mean to revive the dead? Again, my own experience has confirmed for me why I love those words in a way that I never thought. When I was praying with the Jews of Warsaw, Poland, I really had a sense that I was participating in an act of the resurrection of a community out of the ashes of Jewish history, that we lie up to God, as it were, at the Kedusha. And then what's interesting to Me. And there's a point in here as well. On Shabbat, that entire section of requests of Bakashot is radically truncated because Shabbat really is a time when we are happy with what we have, where we get beyond the wanting. For me, this has translated over the years into an experiment that I keep on doing and failing at, by the way, which is that for a long time, I would absent myself from the commercial realm. On Shabbat, I would try not to go shopping, or if I went shopping, I would get food, stuff that I. Stuff that I needed, but I would try not to go for anything that I wanted. I wanted one day to say, I am not a consumer. And so this entire section of not wanting on Shabbat is, I think, very powerful. During the week, there's a laundry list of things that we want, but this is a big deal. It's not what I, Jeff Salkin, want and need, or what you Marquettes, want or need. It's what we as a people need. It's not about me and my needs. It's all in the first person plural, ultimately bringing us to a sense of being shalem, of being whole, of encountering ourselves as being enwrapped in the possibility of something called peace. So when we talk about what we need, we're also focusing ironically and paradoxically, on what we don't need.
- [29:02]
Rabbi Mark Katz
Thank you. Now, your third section is what We Learn. And of all the titles, that one actually might even be the most controversial. If you think about it, there's a lot of ways you could have titled the section of Reading Torah, right? How we recreate the Sinai moment together, how we connect with our ancestors and read the same books that they read. But you choose the kind of pedagogical moment of learning in reading Torah. I'm curious whether you struggled with figuring out that particular title and really what you think is going on at the moment when a person stands up there and reads Torah in front of the community.
- [29:44]
Rabbi Jeffrey Salkin
Well, it's interesting you mentioned the replication of the Sinai moment. You know, Rabbi Katz, I grew up believing that as well. I always thought that the Torah service was about the thunder and lightning of Sinai. And then I started reading it again, and I realized that in none of the texts does the Sinai event even get a mention. It's all about coming out of Zion. And I figured something out. I figured out that the Torah service is actually a replication of the moment when the Jews had returned from Babylonian exile under the leadership of Ezra and Nehemia. We find this story at the Very back of the Tanakh, by the way, which we never read. It's too bad, because it's a great story. And King Cyrus of Persia allows us to reestablish sovereignty. We rebuild the temple, a shoddy wooden structure that would soon be replaced by Herod's more glorious building. And they read the Torah for the first time to the entire Jewish people. Now, one of the things that's really interesting to note is that this happens on the first day of the seventh month. That was Rosh Hashanah. That's what they did. It was a time of renewing the covenant. It's a human drama. It's not God coming down. It's not Cecil B. DeMille. It's not the Ten Commandments. It's a very humanly scaled work. And so for me, that is a time when, yes, we do have the opportunity to engage our intellects by hearing what is being shared with us as part of the lection area. And I find a great deal of power and meaning in the fact that Jews, wherever they are, in St. Petersburg, Russia, St. Petersburg, Florida, in Bloomfield, New Jersey, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, we're all reading the same thing. We're on the same page. And for that week, we live within the text that way. Now, one of the things that I restore in this book, and I restored it also in the JPS B' Nai Mitzvah Torah Commentary, is what I would call the ugly cousin of the scriptural readings, which is the Haftarah, the prophetic readings, which are a mixture of both the words of the prophets and the historical books of the Hebrew Bible. But now, again, speaking as a reformed rabbi, we have always claimed that the prophetic mantle has fallen upon us. We feel very close to our prophetic ancestors. And so I take the opportunity to resurrect, as it were, the words of the Christian writer Frederick Buechner, who said there's no evidence whatsoever that a prophet is ever invited back a second time for dinner, that they were cantankerous people who spoke truth to power. And I also believe, necessarily speaking truth to culture itself. So that entire section is, yes, spiritual, but it's also intellectual. It brings us into the big story.
- [32:47]
Rabbi Mark Katz
Moving forward now to your fourth section, what we hope you spoke a good amount a few minutes ago about the Elenu prayer, but that's only one of really two prayers in that section. The other is what we call at this point the Mourner's Kaddish. I wonder if you can talk a little bit about the mourner's Kaddish. And where hope comes into your categorization of that particular prayer?
- [33:10]
Rabbi Jeffrey Salkin
Well, the hope is really twofold, as I point out in the book the Origins of the Mourners Kaddish, which is really a statement about faith in God and the hope that the kingdom of God will come. And I'll explain what that means. The idea that this is for mourners to say is medieval. It is related to a story about the great Rabbi Akiva, who is wandering in a cemetery late at night, and he sees this poor guy who's schlepping firewood, and he's covered with ashes. And Akiva says, what's going on? Why are you doing this? And I'm being punished. So what were you punished for? He said, I was a tax collector and I created policies that favored the rich over the poor. I'm not making this up. By the way, this is not a contemporary social justice text. This is real and it's old. And so Akita asked him, what do you got to do to get out of this? He said, look, do me your favorite. Find my son. Teach him how to say kadj for me, and it will get my soul out of this dark place. So the hope is twofold. Number one, that our loved ones will be redeemed from the netherworld. If we believe in the netherworld through our prayers, or to put it more positively, that the prayers of Kaddish will move their soul into olam haba, into the world to come. I have a distant relative, my father's, I don't know, fourth cousin or whatever, who was going to die childless back in their small town in Massachusetts. And he established a contract with one of his friends to say cottage for him when he died. And then he sent a note around. He said, I heard Shapiro Daven. He stinks. Cancel the contract. This idea that we want someone to remember us when we die is both humanistic and spiritual. But the big picture is the machut Shemayim is the kingdom of God. And that wonderful phrase in Alenu that God will. To repair the world in the image of the divine kingdom. We hear the word tikkun olam a lot. To repair the world, as if it's our job. In one version, it is partially our job. But in Elena, we're asking that God will repair the world. And what does it mean to do so and to bring the kingdom of heaven, God's kingdom on earth. I think that means a kind of perfection. But more than that, I have a very low level wish that everyone behaves ethically according to a higher ethical standard. Now, I realize I get into some very weird stuff here with my academic friends. Who are you to impose your standards in other people? But Judaism actually does believe that there is one big ethical standard. That's what the Shema is about, that it can't be okay in one culture for us to abuse people. And in another culture, it's not okay. There's a matter of taste and there's a matter of ethics. So I think what we're hoping for with this coming of the divine kingdom is a time when people will live in peace and will live in some kind of ethical covenant with each other. And that's what we hope for.
- [36:41]
Rabbi Mark Katz
Now, moving from the content of your book, I want to go to form. One of the things that makes your book unique is the fact that you, at the end of each prayer that you discuss, you have a series of questions that you want your reader to reflect on. I'm curious about the process of creating those questions. And what does it mean to ask good questions about the prayers in front of you?
- [37:04]
Rabbi Jeffrey Salkin
The questions had really two purposes. Number one, because as you rightly said, the book does have a pedagogical purpose. It is written for young people preparing for bar mitzvah, bat mitzvah, B' Nai mitzvah, B Mitzvah, this rite of passage. And I do hope that synagogues will use this as it's intended, which is a textbook on prayer for young people. More than that, I'm hoping that synagogues will buy this book and will actually put it in the pews so that people can read it during services and understand what's going on in this worship experience. The questions at the end of the prayers are intended not only for review purposes, not only for pedagogical purposes, but for something deeper. I've always believed that one of the purposes of prayer is we mentioned Tikkun olam, repairing the world. I wrote a book called Tikkun Ha' Am Repairing Our People. But prayer is Tikkun Hatzmi. It's repairing myself. It attaches me to my people and my past, my history, all Jews everywhere at any time. But it also attaches me to me. And so what I would want people to do is to ask prayer like questions, questions about what they're praying and asking, how does this prayer speak to my own individual neshama? And those prayers are, I think, perfect for the task of asking oneself these things. It's a good curriculum. And the questions, I think, are the directional Signals that will point people in that particular path.
- [38:39]
Rabbi Mark Katz
You raise a really interesting question about your vision of having this book in the pews. And I could imagine putting it in the pews and having people be engrossed in it because your writing is so accessible and your anecdotes are so wonderful. But it does, in a way, complicate something that you brought up earlier, which is, where should our heads be at when we're praying? Right. On the one hand, you do the work to figure out the meaning of the prayers, and then you lose yourself in the prayers as you're praying. Or should you be thinking and analyzing? Should you be in your head during services?
- [39:17]
Rabbi Jeffrey Salkin
That's a very, really good question. That's a very complicated question. And I'm going to give you a Jewish answer which is both. I think there is a great deal of value of getting out of your head and being into yourself and into your soul and into. Into the soul of the Jewish people. Knesset Yisrael, the gathering of the Jewish people. But where this is different from, let us say, traditional or even Jewish meditation, yoga, transcendental meditation, et cetera, any number of New Age practices, is that it does root us in a literature that is itself rooted in history. So I see this really being as an oscillation between the head and the heart. Sometimes you're there, sometimes you're elsewhere. And I'll be the first to admit that in the introduction to the book, I put together a 3H system of Jewish living. It's not that original. It's the same as upon three things. The world stands upon Torah, upon worship, upon acts of goodness. My three H's are the head intellectual, the heart, spiritual, and the hand activist. And I make a point that it's very rare for anyone to get all three of them down. In fact, I only know only one Jewish hero in modern history who was able to pull off all three H's, and that would have been Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. Most people major in 1H, they minor in a second, and they live with the certainty that there's someone sitting near them in synagogue who has the H that they don't have. I wrote this book as a partial atonement for the fact that my major H over the years, Ask anyone, has been the head about learning and about teaching. I've minored in the second H, which is the heart, the spiritual, and from time to time, the H of activism. The hand has to come in. But I wanted to bring myself back into that heart space. But going there means that I can't sacrifice what I know to be true about the world and about my people. So I'm back and forth between the head and the heart.
- [41:44]
Rabbi Mark Katz
So I have two final questions for you, one about your book and the other are standard question that we always ask on this podcast. So final question about your book. If your book works the way you want it to work, what will people have gotten out of it?
- [41:58]
Rabbi Jeffrey Salkin
Oh, they will have understood themselves better as being people located in a history that stretches out in front of them and stretches before them. And as members of the Jewish people at prayer, the worshiping Jewish community, if it works, they will be able to say, now I understand why this prayer is here. I understand what it means. I know a couple of stories about it. I may not agree with it, but this is my community and this is the person that I choose to be and show up as, as part of that community.
- [42:38]
Rabbi Mark Katz
And our final question that we always ask anyone on the podcast, what is your next project? What are you working on? What are you thinking on next?
- [42:46]
Rabbi Jeffrey Salkin
Oh, gosh, what a delicious question. I'm so grateful that you asked that. I've been wrestling with the idea of doing a book tentatively titled in my head, Jews on the Edge. I want to write a book about heretics, about free thinking Jews across the centuries, starting with, in mythic terms, Lilith, who questioned Adam's authority, going to Korah, who questioned Moses authority, going to Elisha Benavuya, the great Talmudic heretic, going to Maimonides, whose books were burned publicly, going to Shabbati Zvi and Jacob Frank, the false messiahs, moving to modern times, the Louis Jacobs affair where he was criticized for his views on revelation in the British Jewish community. Richard Rubenstein, the great heretical theologian of the Holocaust. And then bringing it into the present, looking at Zionist heretics, looking at people like Judith Butler, looking at people like Yeshayahu Leibovitz, looking at people who took contrary views on Zionism or different ways of viewing the Zionist project. And my basic thesis is, well, there's a poem called Outwitted. They called him heretic, a thing to flout. We drew a circle that kept him out but love and I had the wit to win. We drew a circle that drew him in, that we need these people as part of our story. The ideas that they taught, some of which were rejected, are part of our Jewish photo album and I'd like us to reclaim them. That's going to be a big project.
- [44:37]
Rabbi Mark Katz
I look forward to reading it when it comes out. So once again, I'm here. Rabbi Jeffrey Salkin, author of Inviting God A Guide to Jewish Prayer, published by the CCAR Press. I'm your host, Rabbi Mark Katz. Hope you have a great day.
- [44:54]
Rabbi Jeffrey Salkin
Thank you.