Jeremy Rosen
Why Do We Pray?

Rabbi Jeremy Rosen - Why Do We Pray?

- Thank you and happy New Year to everybody here that I haven’t already wished Happy New Year to. I don’t know if any of you were watching the World Cup, but if you were watching the World Soccer Cup, you’ll notice how players come onto the field and they bow down to the ground or they make the crucifix sign. And when they score a goal, they point up to heaven and they both look up to heaven with two fingers, one finger. What? And I never know understand why they only point up because if God is everywhere, they should be pointing down as well. But that’s human nature. And I wonder, poor God, who does God support? And do they really think that God cares whether they win the game or the other religion wins the game or the other political party wins the game? And yet what is clear from all this is that praying to God is a universal, almost visceral response. And the fact is that most of us, at some time or another have prayed to God for something or another and I wonder what we actually mean and what do we actually think? Do we think that God listens to us? And if God does listen to us, what about all the millions and billions of others that God listens to? And can God possibly answer them and please them all? And yet, prayer is an essential part of every religion, whether you call it prayer or meditation or whatever it is, it plays a crucial part.

And I wonder if this is just a passing phenomenon, so that just as once you wouldn’t have thought of having a religion without sacrificing humans or animals, and now we wouldn’t think of having, once upon a time we wouldn’t have thought of having a new religion without prayer. And now we might think of any religion that’s got to have meditation and possibly in the next generation, all religions will have artificial intelligence. So these are questions which exercise my mind and which intrigue me. And I’d like to address today from several different points of view. So what I have to say applies of course to all religions and to prayer in general. But I want to start off with Judaism of course. Now the word in English prayer, pray, means to ask for something, to beg for something. And yet that is not the Hebrew word that we use for prayer because the Hebrew word we use for prayer is Tefillah. And Tefillah comes from a Hebrew root, which means l'hitpalel to express oneself. It’s something one expresses because the Hebrew form of the word l'hitpalel is to express, l'hitpalel is to express oneself. But of course, if you go back to the Bible, you find in the Bible people all the time praying to God, praying for somebody, for something, and they are thereby expressing a human wish. As we say, there’s no such thing as an atheist in a foxhole. We all express wishes, what we want, what we fear, in our daily life. So the first thing one has to differentiate is between personal prayer and communal or public prayer. And I’m going to come back to that public side later on.

But make the point that you must differentiate between prayer in the synagogue or the church, or the mosque, and personal prayer, a personal expression of what we care about and what we want. And there are various words that are used in the Torah to express this. There is, to speak out something I want to happen. There is to appeal to somebody. There is, which basically means to use words, to express words and of course l'hitpalel to express a hope. And so when Jacob wants to say, I never dreamed that I would ever see my son again. It says, I never dare to express the hope that I might see you again. And none of these in a sense are the way that we use prayer in the common usage nowadays in terms of specifically asking for something and expecting to be responded to. Not only that, but there’s another word in the Torah of l'hitpalel to express, which also ironically is used of judges. Frilim are judges. So what is the root of this? Is the root meant to mean that when we pray, we judge ourselves, are we worthy of being answered, of being responded to? This idea therefore, that prayer can be not so much asking for something as examining ourselves to see who we are, what we might deserve, what we might expect. They are all beautiful nuances which make the simple overview of prayer seem rather in a sense banal.

The main source in the Torah for prayer as we understand it comes in the book of Samuel, where Hannah, who is barren, goes to the tabernacle to pour out her heart to God because I want to have children. And Ellie, the high priest who’s there at the time, sees her praying silently and he assumes she is drunk and he reprimands her and she replies and says, “No, you misunderstand me. What I’m saying is an expression of my pain.” And Ellie then acts down and says, “Look, I realise I’ve misunderstood you and don’t take me wrong and may God answer your prayer.” And when she does give birth, she expresses herself in a beautiful poem, one of the most beautiful poems in the Torah, which is used as the basis later on for rabbinic discussion about what we actually mean by prayer. But clearly in the Bible it is something that people do when they feel moved to do it and when they want to do it. So there is no command in the Torah to pray at all. No command of course, they didn’t have synagogues at those days to go to a synagogue and to pray. And what you had was coming into the temple regularly. It was a temple based religion where you felt part of a community. You watched the ceremonial rather like watching television. It was a form of entertainment in those days and feeling part of the community. It was a community event, but the community event was coming together and not necessarily praying. Much later on, it appears that in the temple they did.

There was, and we have this on the day of atonement, when the high priest is the only person to express a prayer on behalf of the community, that the community should have a good year ahead. And that there should be plenty for everybody and everybody should be blessed. You do have the idea of the priests in the Torah giving a blessing to people. And so we already have to differentiate between a blessing, a Beracah on the one hand and filler a prayer on the other. A Beracah is a thanks for something, thank God or thank life or thank nature or thank whatever it is for the wonderful things we can experience. And Beracah is going to be used in formal prayer, but still in the early biblical period, Beracah was the good I wish for you. And so you have Isaac giving a Beracah to his son Jacob, even though he intended to give it to Esau. And that was the hope that you will carry on my tradition and be a good leader. And you have Isaac himself giving a Beracah to his sons, in a frame and hoping that they will do well. But these are again, personal and unstructured expressions of humanity. All this began to change when the temple disappeared and when the temple disappeared and it was replaced by the community centre or the synagogue, they were faced then with what do we do now inside the synagogue or the community centre?

And this was where the idea comes in of community prayer or community study. And during the Talmud there’s a debate, what is preferable, what is the priority? Study is very important ‘cause it keeps the tradition alive. It’s something we can all participate in to different degrees. And there’s a text and a structure. Prayer on the other hand is very, very subjective. And some rabbis say prayer is more important. Others say study is more important. And this is where we come roundabout 2000 to 1000 years ago. And I want to quote to you from Maimonides, the great first millennium leader of Jewish life in Egypt, in the oriental world and the first comprehensive compendium of Jewish laws as opposed to discussions and debates about them. And in them he says this, it is a positive command in the Torah to pray every single day because it says in Exodus, you shall serve God with all your heart and with all your soul. And what is the service of God in your heart that is praying, expressing yourself to God, which you do privately. And as he says, the number of prayers or how you pray or any of these things is not prescribed it any formal way. But there came a time when Jews lost the art of expressing themselves, lost the art of expressing themselves in the Hebrew language and therefore it was decided at some stage to give them the language of prayer to help them cope with this skill which they had lost in exile. And therefore prayers were created for them as a sort of a menu, he doesn’t use this language, I’m paraphrasing him as a menu and a suggestion of ideas for us to choose.

So when we are in pain, we will choose a prayer that reflects pain. When we are in joy, we will use a language of joy and delight. But initially this too was left flexible. In fact, the rabbis like to say that prayers initially began with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, one of them praying in the morning, the other praying in the afternoon, the other praying in the evening. So if you like, they developed the idea even though it wasn’t structured. Now, there was and is and remains a debate in the Talmud as who then set about structuring the prayer and when. Some people say it was Shema, some people say it was. There were lots of different candidates that when the temple was destroyed, they needed to have a structure. And this was when they introduced the idea of morning service, the afternoon service. And initially they introduced these two to replace the communal sacrifices in the temple, one first thing in the morning and the other thing at noontime in the afternoon. And there was a debate as to whether we should have an evening service as well because there wasn’t an additional evening service. And yet, because the Shamar in the Torah says you should mention the words of God in the morning when you wake up and in the evening when you go to sleep, they decided to institute an evening prayer. But even this evening prayer was debated about and one rabbi said it’s an option. Another rabbi said, it’s an obligatory one. And because he was the top dog, he won the debate. And so you have the three prayers that were introduced. And these three prayers contain the one common link. And the one common link is what we call now the Amidah, the 19 benedictions during the week that are whittle down on Shabbat festivals but start and end in the same way.

And this Amidah is the only part of the services that we have nowadays that we call Tefillah, that we call prayer. The services we have nowadays have expanded beyond the idea of prayer. And so the services we have nowadays in traditional services contain what we call the Shamar, the three paragraphs from the Torah that talk about the relationship with God and keeping up the idea of the commandments and doing the right thing. And these are called Kriah, reading the Shama. They’re not called fill our prayer. And they are there to make sure that every day we do a little bit of study, we take a little bit of the Torah, study and study is important as is prayer. And onto this, these two ingredients, the Kriah, shama and the Amidah, the official prayers in which we ask for things on a personal level and on a public level. But the Amidah starts off basically by talking about our background, our history, our traditions of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, what we expect from life in this world and maybe in a next, the idea that God can bring life back. But this bringing life from death back is in the context of reigns and nature. Bringing the earth back to life doesn’t necessarily mean after death. These ideas are then followed by the request for knowledge, for health, for doing the right thing, for the hope of having a just legal system, for the hope of having good government and for adding in anything else we might think we need. And so this became the official structure of prayer, the reading from the Torah and the Amidah.

Over time as happens, things are added, a preparatory prayer to get in the mood meditation beforehand, studying a bit more, adding more reading from the Torah, adding, adding on more Psalms and other things to help create a mood and to help to transition from the mundane world of trouble and difficulty into the spiritual world of connecting to God in some way. Of course what has happened over time is that the services have got longer and more has been added on. And part of this of course was a social phenomenon. Remember that for most of mediaeval life, wherever Jews were, they lived under pretty primitive awful conditions. They lived in hovels without sanitation, very often with animals roped in together and one family on top of another. And so the only building of space was the synagogue, the only place where you could escape from the noise and the trouble and the hassle and the anxiety and the pain. And so synagogues became places of refuge where people wanted to spend more time and to fill up time, they wanted to add on more prayers and more poems than many of those we have today are mediaeval poems particularly composed in Spain under the great tradition of Jewish poetry and under the mystics. And so time in and got more and more. And then there was another feature. The synagogue was a solid building, it was protection. And when there were attacks as there were throughout mediaeval period, both under Islam and Christianity, the synagogue was a place of protection and coming in and going out together in a group afforded one protection.

So for all these reasons, prayer transitioned very largely in the communal area to the sort of synagogues that most of us nowadays find both boring services going on for too long, not particularly attractive and not necessarily in the company of people who want to be in the company of. And hence you have this more modern sense of alienation from synagogues and we’ve assumed that that is the only place where we can pray him. And yet the fact is from a religious specific point of view, we can still pray anywhere at any time, in any form we want. We don’t have to follow the structure that’s been laid out for us. We can and it has uses, but the important uses of the structure are in the communal realm to give us a common language. Wherever we are, whatever part of the world we are in, we all know the service is going to be of the same format. So even if we are in China or Australia or the Arctic, we can go into a jury service and we can be part of it if we are familiar with it, of course, if we are not familiar with it and we feel alienated, there’s still the private attempt at both prayer and at about blessing. So therefore I believe it’s important for us not to take structures as though they are the only way, which is one of the reasons why I love the fact that there are so many different kinds of synagogues, so many different kinds of prayer. And we can make choices nowadays once we only had one in the city. Now in most places we’ve got options and we can choose.

And yet there is still a tradition and a strong tradition that most rabbis will not tell you of praying alone. And indeed some well known Hasidic rabbis used to prefer to pray alone without being distracted by all their followers making a noise in the same way that we often, I often can’t bear going to synagogues where people are talking all the time and distracting me from my prayer or indeed where people are listening to music. Because if you want to listen to music, you can always go to a concert on and listen to much nicer music. But this is a matter of personal choice. So I want to think for a moment about the actual mystical experience of what prayer is and what prayer does for me. So the first thing I want to say that when I pray there are two dimensions there, the God dimension and the personal dimension. And you can’t have one without the other. For me, the God dimension is a way of removing myself from the physical world in which I live with all its challenges, with all its delights and pleasures, it is still a physical world. And the mystical world is a world that takes me beyond that, whether it’s into an aesthetic world or an emotional world, it’s a world in which I can feel there is more to it than me. And if I have to boil down what I mean by the God experience, ultimately it comes to that so that when I meditate and I meditate in preparation before I come to prayer, I don’t use meditation as a replacement for prayer, but as a stage into prayer of moving away from all the concerns that are around me all the time. And so I shut my eyes and I can look into the space beyond me and feel I’m reaching out beyond the world in which I exist, which is one of the reasons why much as I love Spinoza’s idea of pantheism, God is nature. I want to try and go beyond nature.

And this idea of transcendence is something very important to me and it’s an experience that I have that I can’t convey to anybody else the actual experience. In the same way, I can’t convey to you what love is, although we might recognise it if we’ve had certain experiences together or you know, I can’t tell you what the taste of butter is like, but I know what the taste of butter is, I can’t use words to describe it. And so prayer for me enables me to reach beyond this human world into another world, a world of what I call the God world where I feel comfortable, I feel at ease and I can go to places in my mind where normally I don’t even have time to or I don’t even bother to think about, which is why I value the idea of having set times and set services in order to force me out of my other worldly habits. And we are all creatures of habit. So the mystical side is terribly important to me precisely because it takes me away from everything physical around. And I find that it is almost like when one falls asleep and feels oneself drifting away into another world. Now that experience is not one in which I’m asking for anything, it’s something I am experiencing. It’s an existential experience that is not related in any way to what we call prayer in the conventional sense. And yet this is still something that asks me and invites me to challenge and to question. And it’s interesting that the Hebrew word Shamayim literally means heavens in the mystical tradition of the Zohar is played around with.

To say Shamayim is meant made up of the words, Who is there? What is there? And in asking it also asks who am I? So self-analysis, self-reflection is another dimension in this mystical idea of prayer, which is why very often when God approaches people in the Bible and tries to communicate their responses, here I am, here I am God waiting to experience what it is that I’m going to experience. But if you don’t open yourself up to the experience, you’re not going to have it. And so unfortunately most people don’t have it. But what most people do have is this need to ask, this need to both ask and this need to bless. And so what is this new other personal asking dimension? I don’t think rationally for one minute that I can expect any force to come to my rescue. Indeed the Talmud says, even if everything is in the hands of God, the things that are not in the hands of God are those things that we can control. And we can take precautions in our lives not to do stupid things and to make the right decisions. But generally speaking, when I pray, what I’m saying as the word lehitpalel means is I’m expressing what matters to me, what I care about, what I’m worried about. It is incredibly therapeutic to be able to say and to say sometimes in words what I care about just as we need to express love in words, not just feel it. So sometimes I need to express, I’m worried about my son, I’m worried about my daughter, I’m worried about my grandchildren, I’m worried about the state of the world outside, whatever it is. So part of it is this expression, this therapeutic expression of your feelings, which if I can put it in a banal sense, is rather like having a therapist in space and this idea whether it’s God who is the therapist, who you are talking things out.

And as you talk things out, things become clear to you, you can clarify what you think and what you might do in response or whether that’s just to a notional idea of Freud sitting on his couch. It is incredibly therapeutic and I find it therapeutic. And in the same way when you bless, there are two forms of blessing. There’s the Beracah which says, thank you God for this water, for this food, for whatever it is. I’m grateful for it. And even if I don’t have an idea of God at that moment, I can express my gratitude because it makes me stop and think before I shove some food in my mouth and think about how lucky I am to have food and that there are people around who don’t have food. So one aspect of a blessing is to say thank you. The other blessing is when you bless somebody else and when you express hope, that things will go well for them, that they will fulfil their potential, that they will be protected from some of the evil forces around. And this is the blessing, shall we say, that the priests give when they give a blessing in this synagogue on occasions. It’s not that they are giving the blessing as the Torah says, they will stand up to bless you, says God, but I am blessing you, not them, they’re just the vehicle in which there is this expression of hope. Now I know in our day and age it has become incredibly fashionable for people to go to rebels, to mystical rabbis and ask them for blessings and write their names on pieces of paper which either they stick in a wall or they give to the rabbi’s agent to pass on to the rabbi. And the rabbi will look at these and think about some blessing for you. And it may be therapeutic that you think that somebody is fighting for you. And these may sometimes be genuine men and not charlatans as too many of them are.

But again, it’s a psychological process. And the truth of the matter is that for every case you have heard of somebody going to a rabbi and asking for a blessing to cure them of this, that or the other or to make them successful in business one way or another. You never hear about all those cases where it doesn’t work. It’s the 50, 50 chance anyway. But if it helps people, if it is therapeutic rather like a placebo one surely can’t complain about it even if one thinks it doesn’t work for them. And so I as a rationalist will say to people who fear that somebody has put a curse on them or that somebody has put a blessing on them or the evil eye or any of these other things, I’m happy to say to them, please pass them on to me. I’m perfectly happy to absorb them and take them away from you. And I’ve noticed how this often works with people. They feel relieved that they are sharing their problems with somebody else. And therefore in that sense prayer has an important modern psychological function, a function of helping us cope. Even if it doesn’t make sense to think God is going to intervene to help you win a football match, nevertheless it might give you a little inspiration to try a bit harder and to fight harder. But of course, on the other hand, if you don’t exercise and if you’re not fit and you don’t practise, no matter how many prayers you are going to make, you’re not going to pass that exam if you don’t have the information. And so psychologically it is incredibly important. But there is one other aspect to it that is linked to this and this is the idea of the Yiddish word based on the Hebrew word bitachon, bitachon is have trust, have faith that somehow or other you’ll be able to get out of this or that God will help you. Now whether God helps you or not being positive, being positive is so important to help one cope with the difficulties of life and the challenges that we face.

'Cause we all face challenges and having a positive attitude, I know it’s easier said than done, but having a positive attitude is incredibly helpful in enabling one to cope when everything around us is falling apart, some people fall into deep depression and need help coming out of that depression. And sometimes that comes in the form of some sort of drug or some sort of medication or some sort of placebo, whatever it is. But whatever it is, people need help. And therefore I see prayer as a useful help, a useful tool in the toolbox of what we have to help us manage and cope with life. But I don’t see it necessarily as something that guarantees a response, that guarantees divine intervention. After all, if one wants to be realistic about this, think of somebody in the Holocaust, in a concentration camp praying to God and asking God to intervene and God does not intervene. In some cases you like God did intervene and accident helped them survive, but in others it didn’t. And yet having the ability to be positive as so many psychiatrists who have gone through this from Adler and others have said, being positive and being able to have this sense of we will survive is what helped many if not all survive. And therefore I do think prayer has its uses and its benefits. And so while I encourage people to make their own prayers and to pray whenever they do, and yet at the same time encourage them to come into communities sometimes so that they’re not living in isolation and alienation, I still think that it is up to us to decide how, when and in what way we do it and not to try to impose what works for us on everybody else. So here I’m going to end the formal presentation and move over to the questions.

Q&A and Comments:

Q: So Alan starts off by asking, isn’t the l'hitpalel form of the root that we use for prayer to reflect upon oneself?

A: Yes, precisely so. It is self-reflection and that’s how I understand it.

Q: Mark says, I’ve always been taught that we should pray for strength to cope or endure with what life presents us and not necessarily hope for miracles. Is this generally true as a Jewish concept?

A: Absolutely. The Talmud says we don’t rely on miracles, but that doesn’t mean to say that we might not hope for. And it is this question of hope, which I’ve tried to say towards the end that is the core of what prayer is.

And Esther says, we also pray to express our gratitude to God. Humans are in the image of God, have to act in the place of God. And yes, that’s precisely true when we talk of humans being in the image of God, what does that mean? God doesn’t have a physical form. So we can’t be in the image of God in a physical sense. In the same way we might say being in the image of God as some commentators say, is knowing the difference between what is right and what is wrong, an ethical point of view, which is something we have to try to discover within ourselves, which the Torah helps us with, but in the end we have to do it ourselves. So when we talk about God in that sense, each person has a different idea of what they think God is. Do they think God is something that immediately responds to them, in which case, in what way? Or do they think that God is an expression of the universe and beyond it and this force that we can relate to and it’s up to us to relate to him. So again, yes, we pray as gratitude and I hope I’ve mentioned that certainly enough in the latter part of my lecture. Esther says value in doing something Tamid of yes, of having a routine. I think routine is very, very important.

Mike Dahan says, King Hezekiah’s priests were responsible for the prayers. Well, Mike, it depends what the Talmud says that Hezekiah and his supporters, not necessarily the priests helped compose many of the Psalms and many of the Psalms that we use today. But that’s not the formal prayer we have, the prayer of the Amidah, which wasn’t created until much later. And of course the proof is that in that prayer it says, may God return the dynasty of David. And if it was during time, his dynasty was still going there. So that’s a distinction.

Q: Mark says, is communal prayer possible, the Amidah possible without a minyan? And if not, why not?

A: Now it’s true we should say the Amidah in a community because we need to reinforce the idea of a community and we need to have this idea of being part of something. But if you can’t pray the Amidah for some reason or another in a community, you can pray it privately. So if you are travelling and you can’t get to a million, you can still say the Amidah and you should say the Amidah. Even though certain parts of the service can only be said with a group of 10, they can still be said. There’s nothing to stop you saying them. In the same way, even if a Caddish, for example is normally said in the company of 10 people, there’s no reason why one can’t repeat the words. And indeed the Talmud says one can repeat prayers as a voluntary offering as an individual if you want to.

Q: Mark says this is a wonderful presentation. Does lockdown offer repository or library of where presentations can be used again? Please advise.

A: Yes, Mark, indeed. You can always ask Lockdown University for a copy of these and they’re in the process of putting them all online so that you can go back and see them whenever you want to.

Brian says, thank you rabbi for your presentation on prayer, which you stated is an essential part of Judaism. My belief in God as a creator leaves us humans with responsibility for looking after his creation, the planet and everything else. I don’t have a desire to communicate with God via prayer. I believe the parts of Judaism is based on study, tradition observance as well as the Kamar communal joy in shul. Yes, Brian, I completely agree with you. We do have a religious obligation to take care of the universe and of people in the universe. And that is a religious obligation. It’s not prayer as such, it’s an obligation. I’ve just been talking about one of the many different tools within the Jewish paint box or the religious paint box. And we certainly have a responsibility to the universe and to the community, but we also have responsibility to ourselves. These are all different elements and we have priorities just as we have priority in charity. This is another issue that I’ve often spoken about, the idea that we have a responsibility to the universe and we have responsibility to ourselves. And both the Talmud and rabbinic texts say yes, but you have priorities. Your family is a first priority, then your city is the first priority, and then the wider community is the priority. The non-Jewish world is a priority. We all have priorities, but there is a scale of priorities. And I like to say importance is giving to everybody. And importance is giving to the non-Jewish world is, one also should realise that there are billions of people who are able to help outside in the non-Jewish world, only a small number in the Jewish world. And therefore we should make that a priority even though we mustn’t make that an exclusivity.

Q: Oscar asks, why is it that some prayers Kurdish can only be said if there’s a miniyan? Can I choose to say Kurdish when there’s no miniyan, my nieces, if I’m in synagogue where the presence of women could cause you dominion? I cannot say Kaddish.

A: Well Oscar, first of all, the traditional opinion is that some things can only be said as part of a miniyan, which includes the khadusha, which is part of the Amidah and the kaddish, which is said as a mourning prayer. And there are things that can only be said as part of a miniyan, as part of fulfilling one’s obligation. But that doesn’t mean to say you can’t say them privately. Just as you can say the shamar privately, you can say an Amidah privately as a voluntary prayer anytime you want to. Even though by and large very orthodox people will say you can’t because they want to encourage you to come to the synagogue, that’s simply not true. A woman can say the Kaddish prayer. It’s true that in male orthodox communities they can’t make up the miniyan, but that can’t, doesn’t mean to say they can’t privately personally if they’re sinning in a synagogue, say a Kaddish to themselves or even out loud if they’re not disturbing anybody. So I understand that, might have a different point of view and they’re entitled to their point of view, but they cannot argue with the fact that you can say words in Hebrew that might be the same as words that are said as part of a formal service as a voluntary option.

Q: Mark, how is your example of a mystical transcendental prayer experience helped or hindered during the structured Jewish community service? When one’s not able to understand Hebrew and the English translation is preferred? Isn’t the noise of the service intrusive?

A: Yes, it is. Which is I think one of the reasons why one should be setting aside prayer for an atmosphere where you could either be alone and not be disturbed or find them in young where people are not talking and not distracting you. But yes, I think sometimes the community is distracting. On the other hand, if you only pray by yourself, then you are excluding this sense of community. So I think we need to balance the community prayer with private prayer. And again, with community prayer, you have to find someone which is conducive. I have a big problem. I find it very difficult in most synagogues to pray. But you know, even in New York, I’ve been around most synagogues across the spectrum and I’m not happy in any of them. I’ve happened to find a small little miniyan of unusual people that just matches my taste. But of course it would get too big, it wouldn’t match my taste anymore.

Linda says, I think personal present effort to touch the divine spark within yourself. Yes, I think that’s a very important way of trying to do it. But I think you can only do that when you are putting in your input, which is why I think meditation is so important and why selecting the sort of prayers that resonate with you rather than feeling you have to say everything is so important, but if you can do these things, that’s precisely what you should do. Now for some people they don’t have a divine spark. Some people are almost like colorblind. And indeed Maimonide says some people just don’t get it or just don’t feel it. And if they don’t, that’s their right and I can’t force 'them otherwise. But I do think that there is such a thing as a kind of a divine dimensional spark. And prayer is one of the ways of connecting with it as is meditation.

Q: Can you address the conflict of Zoom praying?

A: Whether it’s really a miniyan versus the, of synagogue getting conquered back into building. This is a very new interesting problem. And I think Zoom praying has a function, particularly for people who live far from a Jewish community or can’t get to a synagogue. It can’t, in my view, be a replacement for personal interaction. But personal interaction I suggest doesn’t always work in most synagogues. And if Zoom pray gives you a sense of something and sparks something off in you, then I think it’s very healthy. And I think it’s a valuable tool we should have. Not to the exclusion of synagogue, but in addition to it. But the sad fact is that it’s only with those people who make a point of going to synagogue that they can maintain that immediate connection with synagogue. One of the important things that the Zoom praying has done is it has made people realise, you know, I don’t have to sit through the whole of the service. I can sit through part and go for a cup of tea. And the other part if I don’t like, and in fact I think it one stage looked as though it was going to have an impact on those synagogues who were more kind of middle of the road, formal, less passionate. And synagogues were social events. 'Cause Zoom can’t replace the social event. And so I think it’s an important tool, but it’s not a substitute.

Esther asks to me, berakah and Rekah come from the same route. Flowers pool. Yes, no, that’s true. The term berakah for a blessing has several roots. One of them is berekhah, meaning a pool of water. The other is from, to bend the knee. It’s an action of worship. The other is rak is something very soft. A child who is born is rak, a child just after birth and therefore it means something you care about. So these are all aspects of what a berakah is.

This idea of caring, the idea of hope, the idea of experience, all things that I’ve tried to talk about today where Jack asked, does the idea of a miniyan come from and where does it fit in the dichotomy of individual versus communal prayer. Jack, the idea of miniyan developed when the idea of the community developed. The idea of synagogues developed after the temple was destroyed in order to create a community and therefore to encourage a community, you develop this idea well what constitutes a community? And what causes a community is a minimum of 10 because that’s the term used in the Bible in different types. When you talk about a community, Adah is a community and the minimum of 10 makes the community. And so it is an important tool in the distinction between communal prayer and private prayer.

Q: Lawrence asks if after prayer circumstances approve, should one offer thanks?

A: Yes, all the time. One should start the day. I start every day by saying, thank you God, every day for everything. Even thank you for my bodily functions working normally.

Clara says, thank you very much. Thank you.

Q: Shera says, can action be a form of prayer? We wish a certain outcome, so we work for it. Is that prayer?

A: Yes, I think that could also be an effort to achieve something. It is part of the process of deciding on what you want on hoping you can achieve it and then finally putting it into action. So really life is like putting up a building. You’ve got a plan, you’ve got to start building the blocks in that pan. You go on building all the time. The house changes all the time. You change all the time. It’s an ongoing process throughout one’s life.

Jill says, we are told that Jewish prayer between man and God, not as in some religions prayer through an intermediary. And that’s absolutely true. We believe that prayer is a direct link to God. We do not believe in intermediaries. We do believe in great spiritual leaders inspiring us, but not replacing us. We don’t believe in intermediary. We believe in the direct. If I give an analogy I’ve often used before, I’ll use again. It’s like going into a building and first of all, you go through security, then you have to go up to the the person at the desk who has to phone up to the boss and find out if the boss’ secretary will recognise you. And if does does, you go in the elevator up to the secretary. Secretary will make make you wait in the waiting room. And then eventually, if you’re lucky, she’ll introduce you to the boss and you meet the boss. Whereas we have the idea, you can walk into the building, go straight into the elevator, go straight up into the boss’s room and have this immediate communication, we don’t need intermediaries. But if intermediaries help you again, if they help and inspire you, that’s all to the good.

Rabbi, thank you for empowering Elliot. Thank you. And not comfortable with Cohen’s blessings in shul because they may be not practising Cohen’s or Jews. Well, fair enough, I agree. And that’s one of the ideas why we’re not supposed to look at the priests. We’re not supposed to focus on them. If you focus on them, of course it’s going to disturb you. They’re imperfect human beings. They’re no better than you. Very often they may be worse with you, don’t focus on them. Focus on the idea, on the message. It’s the message that counts. Richard is the Amidah model for three aspects of prayer, praise, supplication, and Thanksgiving. Exactly, all three are there. And the idea of Kaddish, interestingly enough, and I’m going to have to make this the last question for today, because we are running out of time.

And therefore I would ask anybody who has any questions, who hasn’t been answered today, to email me at Jeremy Rosen, jeremy@jeremyrosen.com or Jeremyrosen@msn.com. Email me and I’ll answer your question. But essentially talking about the role of Kaddish. Originally, originally when somebody died, when somebody died, the community was deprived. And the idea was that one had to strengthen the community to make up for the loss. And the way to strengthen the community to make up for the loss was initially by prayer, by study. And so the term Mishnah study is the same route as Neshama the soul. So to help the soul in some way, metaphorically you study and that replenishes the community for the loss. And then people couldn’t study or didn’t have time to study or didn’t know how to. And so they then said, okay, then at least conduct a service. At least show you are part of the community. You are helping strengthen the community to cover up the loss.

So therefore just lead a service. But then most people don’t know enough to lead the service. And so they said, okay, so you dunno how to pray. You dunno how to lead the service. Let’s find an Aramaic prayer, an arame. ‘Cause at that time, 2000 years ago, Aramic was a language, everybody spoke in the Persian Empire. So everybody knew it. And they made a prayer which simply says, thank you God, thank you God for life. Thank you, thank you, thank you. And that’s in Arame, basically what the Kaddish says. And so the Kaddish came to be a way of enabling somebody to go into a service, participate in memory of the dead person. And then much later came the idea of doing it for a year because none of the laws of mourning are mentioned in the Torah itself. And that’s where the idea rose and it evolved and it came about. So that’s how the Kaddish came about. And therefore it is a way of doing two things, remembering the dead, which you can do without a Kaddish at any time. And it’s also strengthen the community as tribute to the person who has died.

So thank you everybody. Please send me your questions and I’ll answer you as quickly as I possibly can. Bye.