Still praying

During the Shabbat morning prayer service this past weekend, I sat in our synagogue and found myself uttering prayers whose words seemed to have lost their meaning. 

I recited the words on the pages of my siddur, and my voice joined the voices of the other worshippers. We sang the familiar tunes. We stood when we were supposed to stand. But it all felt like a sham, as if we were fooling ourselves, deluding ourselves to think prayer could change anything, or that God could hear us.

If God can hear us, why are bombs still falling in the Middle East and why are children still crying and why is hunger still unabated and why is there still no place to find safety from the war and why are people still being killed and why does peace still elude us? 

I thought about the prayers we were saying, and wondered if the words were worthless, if they had any meaning. 

I wondered if the prayers themselves were ineffective because we were doing something wrong or because God couldn’t hear the words. (Maybe God has become deaf, I thought, from all the bomb blasts and screams of terror?) 

I thought to myself, “What if there is no God?” And I found this thought terrifying because if it’s true, it means that we must find a way to solve this mess on our own, without divine intervention, stumbling toward a solution that no one has seen yet. 

This past weekend I sat in the synagogue on Shabbat morning unable to pray without seeing the images of kibbutzim shattered and buildings flattened into rubble and explosions going off in market places and rockets lighting up the sky.

I kept wondering how the earth can welcome so many dead, and how nothing seems to change the course of the war. Not the daily vigils. Not the weekly protests. Not the ongoing assassinations. Not the prayers. Not in Hebrew. Not in Arabic. Not in English. Not in any language. Nothing.

Leaders refuse to compromise. Hostages are still captive. Bombs keep falling. 

And yet, despite the ongoing conflict, I will attend Selichot services on Saturday night this coming weekend. I will keep going to shul to pray. I will keep hoping our prayers will be heard. I will keep hoping for an answer.