What is Prayer?

Prayer is not always easy. Not only can the language sometimes be challenging, not only can prayer’s concept of a caring and present God feel foreign, but prayer itself represents the sometimes-difficult belief that there is a brighter future ahead. But consider this: the fact that Jewish tradition has given these precious dreams words, language that evolves and grows through time as a living vessel for Jewish spirituality, notions of the Divine that grow and change as we do – all this can serve as a comfort and blessing.

Prayer is beyond language. Spontaneous responses to awesome and awful things are as authentic as any ancient or medieval formula. It can also be astounding to experience, during those intense moments, the kindred spirits of the ancient and the immediate, somehow seeming to already know each other, to speak each other’s language. We recognize that Jewish prayer is part of something eternal when a disruption in our time finds expression and stabilization in timeless articulation.

A good example of text born in one circumstance speaking to a moment its crafters could have never imagined is Hatikvah, the Jewish People’s national anthem. Its words, crafted as a poem in 1882, begin with the following phrase:

כֹּל עוֹד בַּלֵּבָב פְּנִימָה נֶפֶשׁ יְהוּדִי הוֹמִיָּה
וּלְפַאֲתֵי מִזְרָח, קָדִימָה, עַיִן לְצִיּוֹן צוֹפִיָּה

Kol od balevav penimah,
Nefesh yehudi homiyah,
Ulefa-atei mizrach, kadimah,
Ayin letziyon tsofiya…

As long as the inner heart
of the Jewish soul yearns
and toward the east, onward,
an eye toward Tzion gazes…

This intention has held us strong: as long as our eyes gaze and our inner hearts yearn. These words, written far earlier than the founding of the State of Israel in 1948, speak today with ongoing immediate resonance and as an echo of an ancient biblical recognition of the weddedness of Jewish identity and Jewish home:

אִם־אֶשְׁכָּחֵךְ יְרוּשָׁלָ͏ִם תִּשְׁכַּח יְמִינִי׃
תִּדְבַּק־לְשׁוֹנִי  לְחִכִּי אִם־לֹא אֶזְכְּרֵכִי
אִם־לֹא אַעֲלֶה אֶת־יְרוּשָׁלַ͏ִם עַל רֹאשׁ שִׂמְחָתִי׃

Im eshkachech Yerushalayim tishkach yemini,
Tidbak leshoni Lechiki im lo ezkerechi
Im lo a’aleh et Yerushalayim al rosh simchati.

If I forget you, O Jerusalem,
let my right hand wither;
let my tongue stick to my palate
if I cease to think of you,
if I do not keep Jerusalem in memory
even at my happiest hour.

(Psalm 137:5, 6)

Yearning hearts transcend the limitations of time. But toward what do our hearts, then and now, incline through this commitment to Jerusalem? What, through the fulcrum of our beloved homeland’s heart, do we pray for?

The end of Hatikvah offers an answer:

עוֹד לֹא אָבְדָה תִּקְוָתֵנוּ…
הַתִּקְוָה בַּת שְׁנוֹת אַלְפַּיִם
לִהְיוֹת עַם חָפְשִׁי בְּאַרְצֵנוּ
אֶרֶץ צִיּוֹן וִירוּשָׁלַיִם

Od lo avdah tikvateinu
Hatikva bat shnot alpayim,
Lihyot am chofshi be-artzeinu,
Eretz tzion, virushalayim.

…Our hope is not yet lost,
The hope that is two-thousand years old,
To be a free nation in our land,
The Land of Zion, Jerusalem.

This soul-song of Am Yisrael, the Jewish People, a nineteenth-century poem has become a prayer, with music sung by Jews whose freedom was robbed and by Jews who won back our freedom, whose shift from minor to major represents our response to history itself – Hatikvah’s theme is an “if-then” formula: IF we keep our inner hearts full of the yearning to be a free nation in our ancient home, the land countless Jewish ancestors remembered and prayed toward, THEN we will not have lost our hope.

Prayer is many things, primary among them, an eternal promise to nurture hope within our souls.

May the words of our mouths and the meditations of our hearts find favor with our Creator and with creation itself.

—

Adapted from the introduction to Siddur Leivav Penimah.