I’ll begin with something counterintuitive to most people: the rabbi does not lead services. That is to say what a rabbi does in most synagogues is not what leading prayer is about, nor does the rabbi do what leading prayer is indeed about unless she or he steps out of the role of announcing pages and telling people to stand and sit.  More to come.
 
I have learned a lot about leadership over the past number of years.  The most important lesson is about the distinction between leadership and management.  Leadership, suggests Marty Linsky (who is a real expert – look him up), is about change; it is about delivering disappointment to people at a rate they can tolerate. Leadership is about testing boundaries and making things different, ideally for the better.
 
Management is about maintaining the status quo. A good manager reassures people by keeping them dependably within a familiar system.
 
Synagogue worship is the ultimate in status quo, and rabbis are, therefore, the ultimate managers.
 
I should have learned this lesson early in my career when I was the rabbi of an intimate congregation with devoted regulars.  One of the “shul kids” had her bat mitzvah and asked to conduct the whole service, almost always my role.  I worked with her on the prayers and the melodies.  And when the morning came, she did a spectacular imitation of me.  Not only had she mastered the Hebrew prayers, she had mastered the exact wording and phrasing of the pulpit announcements I made each week.  My instructions to turn to this page, turn to that page, stand up, sit down, fight, fight, fight were parroted with precision.  It was the ultimate in status quo.
 
It is the sh’liach tzibbur (messenger of the community) who is the rightful leader of prayer.  Often, this person is a hazzan (cantor), a person professionally trained in both music and liturgy, charged with the responsibility to draw collective devotion out of the community.  But in many synagogues and many more minyanim (prayer quora), the duties are assumed by a lay person or the rabbi.
 
If leadership is delivering disappointment, what is the disappointment the prayer leader is to deliver? If leadership is promoting change, what is the change?  If leadership is testing boundaries, what are the boundaries?
 
You won’t be surprised to discover that the targets are not the liturgy or even the collective experience, in my opinion.  The targets for change are in the internal landscape of the individual Jews. If collective prayer is not encouraging the participants to consider their inadequacies, showing them a way to change (for the better) and testing the boundaries that prevent them from being better selves, then it fails miserably at everything other than management.
 
Yet, most rabbis treat public worship not so much as an opportunity for that kind of leadership as a long-running theatrical production, even (perhaps especially) in innovative circles.  The script is inviolable, unless it calls for guest stars – people called forward to recite their lines.  The fourth wall is maintained, all of the action taking place in the front. The people in attendance are spectators, dependent on announcements and (God help us) over-dramatic hand gestures to know where in the libretto to look and what position to assume.  Even though the voice of the sh’liach tzibbur is guide and goad for the real prayer experience, we have imbued the role of the rabbi with a distracting authority that maintains the status quo and feeds the rabbinic ego. I’ve been there.
 
As my appreciation of my need for prayer deepened and expanded throughout the years (to my great surprise), my realization that it was frustrated by my pulpit role became clearer and clearer.  I tried hard to model prayer rather than manage it, leaving the heavy lifting to the person whose role was the true practice of leadership – the hazzan.  I tried to break through the fourth wall.  I never waved people up or down.  But with all that, the role of prayer manager still intruded on my prayer life, especially given the fact that so many people scrutinized my behavior as a model for their own.  Eventually, in public circumstances, even when I was allegedly just a Jew in the pew, my spiritual life atrophied.
 
It is a fact, not a complaint. Don’t feel badly for me, and please don’t roll your eyes.  I found a remedy for myself that involved disappointment, change and pushing boundaries – I left the pulpit!  But I would like to think that there are other responses.  I spent so many years talking and singing in front of people that I now find the deepest gratification and inspiration in listening quietly to others.  My praying in private is aloud and animated.  My praying in public is silent.
 
But here’s the deal: leading prayer must be an extension of a satisfying personal life of prayer.  The person for whom prayer doesn’t work or who spends no time off the pulpit praying cannot lead prayer.  Such a person can manage worship services, direct and host a weekly production and even make it onto a list of inspirational rabbis. But prayer, praying and leading prayer are, in the spiritual realm, far too important to individual Jews and to Judaism to be satisfied with the ultimate in status quo.

[Before I dive into part 2, a comment on some of the responses I received to Part 1.  The general reply to my column, which began “prayer doesn’t work,” was essentially “then you’re not doing it right.” Without going into a history lesson, Jewish prayer has been the same for most of the last 2000 years when it evolved to take the place of Temple ritual.  Its purpose was to repair the breach with God caused by sin.  Its content, as I wrote, was to create a universal credo for the far-flung and diverse Jewish community. Those purposes, I contend, are unrealized among contemporary Jews. Prayer and its traditional purpose have not changed.  Jews have, as the commenters illustrated.]
 
Jewish liturgy is notoriously inflexible.  With minor variations, the prayers recited on the fourth Tuesday in November will not be significantly different than those recited on the third Thursday in May – just as true in 2016 as it was in 1716 and as it will be in 2316.  The comfort of that consistency has been noted by travelers to the farthest-flung corners of the Jewish world. But that comfort is sociological, not theological – closer to Starbucks than to spirituality.
 
Praying, for American Jews, has been Protestantized, with at least a touch of Buddhification thrown in.  That is to say, what we want out of our liturgy is new meaning that responds to our current circumstances in a spiritual sense, together with a certain mindfulness of the daily miracles we encounter.  It comes in various names and forms but, like most of the American culture in which we are marinated, it is very personal and barely collective. Is that a bad thing?  Far from it.  But, as Rabbi Lawrence Kushner says, if you are reading the siddur (prayer book) for new information, you will be sorely disappointed.
 
I was always intrigued by Christian prayer.  I admired the way writing new prayers and even improvising them in the moment supplemented the traditional hymns and readings that made up Christian worship. So I started asking about it.  I asked mainline Protestant pastors, African-American Baptists, students in Episcopal seminary, friends who are Evangelicals.  They all spoke about letting the spirit move through them.  It took me awhile to realize it was not the spirit, but the Spirit, that manifestation of God they identify with what we call shekhinah, the Holy Spirit.
 
I recognized that I had seen Jews pray like that already.  Young women in our youth group had developed a custom of spending some moments after their individual recitation of the liturgy to stand with their eyes closed, the siddur’s binding resting on their foreheads, and their heads slightly bowed.  There was a mistiness about them, especially when they opened their eyes again, that carried a certain holiness. I always associated that moment with Friday night candle-lighting, when my wife could escape into the twilight between the weekday and Shabbat and pour into it the praise, penitence and petition she accumulated from the previous days.
 
At the same time, I learned a bit about mindfulness practices, both the near-silent meditation of Buddhism and the practice of chanting designed to drive me deeper into appreciation of a single phrase attached to a consistent melody.  In a sense, they were the very opposite of davennen, the Yiddish word for prayer, which Leon Wieseltier defines as “saying very important things much too fast.”
 
The minimum content of any of the three daily prayers includes nineteen distinct and interwoven blessings, a long Biblical passage from the Torah or Psalms, and an extended liturgical poem that affirms our devotional obligations, our distinctiveness among the nations and our hope for the triumph of monotheism over paganism.  Practiced davvenners can complete all of that and more in ten minutes, a bit more in the morning when introductory readings and perhaps a Torah recitation are thrown in.
 
Preserving the communal liturgy remains, I believe, important.  I have always been reluctant to tamper with what I have received from long ago.  But spending as much energy on developing skill in “praying your heart” is the only thing, I believe, that will rescue this central Jewish practice from dissolution.
 
I experimented with it privately before going public in the moments before the Torah scroll was removed from the ark.  I opened my heart and opened my mouth, and I never knew exactly what would emerge. It was exhilarating for me, even as it was terrifying, like working without a net. More important, it replaced one of those few pieces of received liturgy I always wanted to erase: a nasty anti-Christian polemic that, were it inverted and recited in churches, would certainly prompt complaints from our many defense organizations.
 
Once, a group of congregants did an exercise in which they were asked to find their favorite spot in the sanctuary.  More than half of them chose the place I would stand and pray my heart.
 
But opening this ability is not so easy. Jews have a tendency to channel their yearning through learning.  They overthink their words, throw in a Biblical or Talmudic reference, structure their thoughts to refer back to something they read.  Spontaneity seems the enemy and cleverness substitutes for inspiration.
 
Music can serve the same purpose and present the same hazard.  The liturgical poem El Adon that appears in the Saturday liturgy has been set to melodies that reflect different aspects of the mystical tradition it celebrates. It can sound majestic, contemplative, anticipatory, almost-reachable.  The words and the melodies are symbiotic, and for the uninitiated, musically or Hebraically, they can be as effective apart as they are together.
 
But how often has the concluding hymn Adon Olam been set to a familiar popular tune for the sake of cleverness.  The plaintive expression of faith that is indeed personally addressed – “I place my life in God’s hand, whether asleep or awake, with my soul and my body, God is with me, I will not fear” – disappears into “The William Tell Overture,” “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do” or “Can’t Stop the Feeling.”  I am certainly guilty of this search for connection, but I have to acknowledge I put form above substance.
 
Praying requires a personal investment in the endeavor. Liturgy accomplishes some of it, but I worry that those of us who are also invested in preserving the liturgy not only have channeled yearning through learning, but validated form over substance.
 
Guiding a group of Jews in prayer – ten, two hundred or a thousand – is daunting, but a rich and heart-rending prayer life is a prerequisite.  More on that next time.

Prayer doesn’t work.

That’s not a statement of faith or, more accurately, lack of faith.  It is a statement of fact. 

My assertion has nothing to do with whether prayer reaches the heavens or moves God’s heart.  I leave it to you to decide if prayer ever caused the phone to ring before homecoming weekend or got you an A on a test.  If you say that prayer has opened within you an experience of deep insight or inspiration, or brought you comfort in despair, or channeled gratitude for an undeserved blessing, I will understand, because it has done the same for me.  But that’s not what I mean.

I mean that for the majority of Jews in the world, prayer does not do what it is meant to do.  I have no scientific measurement of this statement.  Still, I challenge you to demonstrate otherwise.

For the greater part of two thousand years, prayer was meant to bind Jews together with a common value system and vocabulary.  We pray with a fixed liturgy.  Every paragraph, especially those that end with a brakha, a formulaic blessing, is meant to convey something we all believe about God and the way we see the world. But most Jews, especially in North America, only pray when they are told and what they are told.  Prayer, however transcribed by the variety of prayer books by the variety of communities, is rarely something a modern Jew does voluntarily or with intention.

(A quick word about the phrase “most Jews.” There are a little less than six million Jews in the United States.  A small minority attend synagogue, where they are most likely to pray.  A minority of that minority certainly prays enough to raise significantly the average amount of praying that happens.  But it doesn’t change the fact that most Jews pray only in synagogue, go to synagogue only when they feel they have no choice, like when they are invited to a bar mitzvah or Yom Kippur is on a federal holiday, and stand, sit or answer “amen” only when someone in the front of the room tells them to do so.)

I am one of those people who believes that prayer could work and should work, but I have to acknowledge that could and should, even when combined, do not equal does.

There is a lot more to being a Jew than prayer, but we spend more time rehearsing prayers than any other aspect of Judaism.  The official identifiable institutions of Jewish life are synagogues, where, as the prayer says, people enter to pray.  Seminaries and day schools set aside time for prayer.  We pray before and after we eat, when we usher in holidays and when we mark every life moment from naming to burial. We pray when we remember the dead (more on that soon).  We couldn’t even write a Broadway play without a prayer for the Czar.

But mostly we don’t mean it.  I was struck by three words during one of the holiest moments of prayer one Saturday morning.  The congregation sang with passion, “Oh when will You, God, govern Zion? Soon, in our lifetime, and then forever may You reign!” Even the most politically right-wing of my fellow worshipers do not yearn for a theocratic Jewish state without end.

Now, maybe that’s the proper thing to want.  But if that is the measure of faithful belief among most Jews, even the people who can explain away what they mean are in big trouble.

Is it any wonder that we do everything we can to distract ourselves from the text we recite? Most of our prayers contain admirable exhortations and exaltations, but they are expressed in a way that is incomprehensible unless, even as a native Hebrew speaker or inspired poet, you spend an additional amount of time learning the origins, meanings, inferences, interpretations, variations and applications of the roster of blessings, Biblical readings and devotional poems that form the infrastructure of our worship.  So we set them to music.  We translate them into a modern idiom.  We learn them by rote.  We teach our children to mimic them.  We publish prayer books that surround them with art, essays and enhancing commentaries.  We treat prayer-time as theater (more on that soon).

I am part of that conspiracy, and I confess it is motivated by my desire to bring prayer to life for my fellow Jews.  The ties that bind us, so eloquently expressed in our mother-tongue, have begun to fray.  They have been politicized: conservers of tradition vs. reformers; universalists vs. particularists; egalitarians vs. elitists; people who see gender in everything vs. people who deny that there is gender in everything.  I hope that just the endeavor will bring us together and transcend the particular meaning, thus opening the worth of prayer for its own sake. Even in my tiny corner of the Jewish world, I failed.

It is because prayer doesn’t work.  Perhaps “any more” ought to be at the end of that sentence, but as we look to the future, rather than the past, that point is academic. Where do we now find that set of values and that connection to God that binds us as a people?  And what is the best use of all that time we spend in prayer?  The rabbis who are the products of this lost generation have that challenge first and foremost.
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I have not stopped praying, though where and how I pray has shifted significantly.  Away from my perch at the front of the room, I have the chance to look for models of success for myself.  Sometimes I find them and sometimes I recognize my mistakes.  More on praying next time.

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