From the Cyber Torah Archives

The Holidays were wonderful this year at Rodef Sholom. I felt a spiritual energy and community warmth from Rosh Hashanah through Simkhat Torah. I know my family and I had a wonderful and meaningful experience - I know that many of your experiences were similar.

I missed being in touch through Email the last few weeks and am glad to be back on the once a week routine.

Please be aware that adult education starts next Tuesday at RST. I will be leading a class Tuesdays at 7:30 in the Library. For the first section, we will be looking at how Jewish ritual helps make meaning out of suffering, particularly in relation to illness and mourning ritual. Such experiences affect all of us, and I want to provide people with tools that will help at a time when people are healthy so that when difficult situations arise, the Jewish resources will be there to be drawn upon. I hope each of you can make it. I have found it very difficult to pray the last few months. I stand up at the head of the congregation and try very hard to experience kavannah, or spiritual focus. Yet I often find my mind wandering. I worry about what will happen next, who will be leading which service, what page we are on. I worry about how the experience is affecting each congregant, hoping that I am reaching people in a meaningful way.

More often than not, more prosaic thoughts crowd out my spiritual focus as well. I worry about paying our bills, or about Joshua’s sleeping patterns (or lack thereof). I think about my email letter for next, or the sermon I will be giving at the JCC Board meeting this month. The one thing I don’t think about enough is the words I am saying and the God to whom I am praying.

Part of my problem is typical for a new Rabbi. It takes a while before I can get comfortable enough with my new role to begin to re-establish my own spirituality. Yet this issue affects everybody who tries honestly to pray. The concerns of our day to day lives easily crowd out concerns of relationship with God. We all have an ideal of perfect focus that will create a powerful spiritual moment, but few of us attain such moments for very long at all.

I often make a mistake as I focus for praying. I attempt to remove all external thoughts and pray with 100% of my soul. Most often, this is unrealistic for me. I just don’t have the spiritual oomph to remove every outside thought from my mind. I need a different model that provides room for all my extraneous concerns. The story of Noah’s ark provides me with such a model.

Noah is commanded to build a wonderful, detailed ark. God commands him to then bring two of every kind of animal into that ark to preserve them from the flood. Noah has to take those animals and destroy the pristine perfect quality of the ark. Yet had he not done so, the ark would have served no purpose because the world would been an empty lifeless place after the flood.

Similarly, when we pray, we need to allow the animals in. We have to accept all the extraneous thoughts, concerns, and fears and try to find ways to refocus them. The point of prayer is to respond to our real lives; our prayers can only respond to us if we include every aspect of our personality in what we pray. We have to take those outside concerns and make them holy.

God tells Noah to include a Tzohar in the ark. No one knows what a Tzohar really was - some people say it was a window out to the world so everyone in the ark could see outside. Another tradition teaches that the Tzohar was a magical stone that provided a special holy light for all the creatures and people inside.

Prayer also needs this extra dimension. Just as we include the animals into our prayer, accepting and making holy those extraneous lights, we also need the light that comes from God and shines into our souls. When that light shines on our complete personality, on all our concerns, fears, stresses, and joys it reaches out to help make our prayers truly ascend to God.