Tefila On Demand

by Rabbi J. Simcha Cohen

As to whether Tefila is a request or a demand, the following related article published this month in my latest book, Jewish Prayer: The Right Way, Resolving Halachic Dilemmas (Urim Publications) suggests at times it may be a demand. (See pp.21-22)

Different Approaches To Prayer

Question: Are there different mindsets and approaches to prayer?

Response: Yes.The following response was culled from a taped shiur of HaRav HaGoan R. Yoshe Ber Soloveitchik,(ZL) Rosh HaYeshiva of Yeshiva University which was recorded over fifty years ago at Congregation Moriah in Manhattan, NY.

The Talmud (Berachot 34b) reports the following:

Rav Gamliel’s son was ill. To pray for his son’s recovery, Rav Gamliel sent two Torah scholars to Rav Chanina ben Dosa. Upon viewing the scholars approach, Rav Chanina went up to his attic and solely prayed for recovery. When they came before Rav Chanina, he informed them that the sick person was already cured. Subsequently, the scholars were able to substantiate not only the cure but also the time the cure took place.

Some issues of concern. Why did Rav Gamliel send two students? Why not one? Why the necessity to send Torah scholars? Also, why did not Rav Chanina wait for the scholars to formally make the request?

Subequently, Rav Chanina ben Dosa became a student of Rav Yochanan ben Zakkai. Once Rav Yochanan ben Zakkai’s son was ill and Rav Yochanan ben Zakkai asked his student, Rav Chanina to pray for his ill son. Rav Chanina ben Dosa put his head down by his knees and prayed and cured the illness.

At issue is the rationale for Rav Chanina’s bizarre mode of prayer.Why did he put his head down by his legs? What message did such a prayer impart?

Jewish Prayer: The Right Way, Resolving Halachic Dilemmas

by Rabbi Marc D. Angel 

Rabbi Jack Simcha Cohen has devoted many years to researching and writing on halakhic topics. His latest book is “Jewish Prayer: The Right Way,” Urim Publications, 2012.

This book is composed of a series of questions and answers on basic topics relating to prayer: general orientation to tefilla; the role of the hazzan; synagogue customs; the Shema; the public Torah readings; rules relating to Cohanim; the Kaddish. Rabbi Cohen offers concise and clear answers, drawing on a wide range of halakhic sources.

In his introductory chapter, he offers insights on the significance of public worship based on a fixed text. He explains how the halakhic framework of prayer underscores the value of time, and our ability to appreciate the significance of an ongoing relationship with the Almighty. The Amidah is recited silently as an indication of our personal connection with the Almighty. Yet, the Amidah is formulated in the plural to remind us that we pray not only as individuals, but as members of the larger community.

“To pray is thus not a mere personal dialogue with the Almighty. It is an opportunity to

Prayer for the Jewish Soldier

by Nathan Lopes Cardozo

 

Lord of the Universe:

We, the soldiers of the people of Israel

Come to You in humility

And pray for your help.

 

Once more we are asked to defend our

People and

The Holy Land against our enemies.

 

We ask You to have mercy on us and

Help us watch over our people

With clean hands

And with a heart filled with mercy.

 

Let our people have the strength to

Stay in good spirits

And live in unity and

Walk in Your ways,

The ways of justice and truth.

 

Let us not make mistakes

And hurt those who are not guilty,

Who do not understand

And have no part in this conflict.

 

Please,

Let our bullets not hurt those children of our enemies

Whose parents place them deliberately in dangerous spots,

Fire on us

And then shield themselves

Behind their own offspring against

Our forces so as to fault us when their children

Are wounded or even killed.

 

Remove the evil spirit of these parents

And make them realize the wickedness of their actions.

 

Stop their teachers from manipulating their students

With hate for us in their schoolbooks

On the radio, television and

The Internet.

 

O God,

You know what one of our prime ministers once said:

“We may forgive our enemies one day

For hurting and killing our children

But

We cannot forgive them for having made our children

Into those who needed to kill.”

We beg You, do not let our Jewish souls have to undergo

 

This ordeal that we cannot bear.

We are the children of Avraham, your servant, who

Prayed for the evil people of Sedom in the hope that

They would repent and live decent lives.

 

So, we beg you:

Make our enemies repent.

Make them understand that

We are good people

Who wish to live in peace with

All our neighbors.

 

O Lord,

Remove from their thoughts atrocities such as those

In which they dip their hands

In our blood.

As Jews, we

Cannot fathom

Doing this to even our worst enemies.

 

You commanded us to live in a country that

Is little more

Than a tiny island.

Our population is smaller than that of

Many single cities.

 

You asked us to live there so as to send

Your holy Word to all the corners of the world.

But

We are surrounded by many nations who

Contain more than a hundred million people.

They inhabit one of the largest regions of the world

But deny us the right to live in even the smallest corner of the world.

They do not want to listen

And only wish our death.

 

Give the Arab nations

Leaders

Who pursue justice and who really

Care for their people

And do not wish to bring their own brothers to despair

And unbearable pain

With the intention

Of accusing us

Of grave injustice.

 

Now,

After thousands of years of our dwelling

In this world and after many exiles, tortures, pogroms,

Expulsions and Holocausts

We finally found our way back to our

Small homeland

That You promised to our ancestors.

 

Yet once more our dreams of peace

Have gone up in smoke

While we try, at the risk of our own lives,

To find a way to

Allow our Palestinian neighbors to

Live their own lives.

 

While we were prepared to make sacrifices

For the welfare of these people

As no other people ever did

While we offered them land, peace, finances

And even firearms so as to defend themselves,

We once more pay the price for being a people

Who believe in the honesty of another nation and its leaders

And once more we feel misled.

 

Oh Lord, remove the evil intentions of the

Security Council, which distorts the truth.

Remove the deliberate lies

From the hearts of those who head the

Media.

Why do they want to portray us

As an evil people?

They do so

To deny Your existence and Your moral

Demands.

They hide behind their own wickedness

And cover up their own and their ancestors’

Immoral acts that they committed against us

And our ancestors for thousands

Of years.

 

O God, You know

That

No army in world history has used as much restraint

As ours.

No army is so careful not to hurt or kill

As ours.

But what shall we do when they are not even prepared

To give us the option

To prove this to the world?

 

Please, God,

Bring peace into the hearts and minds

Of our enemies.

Let them be uplifted with a spirit of righteousness.

Stop them from hating us because we are Your people.

Let us sanctify Your name as this is our

Mission and our dream.

Give us the possibility once more to teach

Your ways to the peoples

Of the world

And make them hear and

Understand.

 

We hate war as nobody else does.

We abhor the need to wear weapons.

We cannot stand the sound of our own artillery

And our tanks.

 

We are the people of the Book,

The Book that demands holiness,

Kindness

And integrity.

Our heroes are not the generals or the marshals

But our prophets and our sages,

Righteous people.

So deliver us from this anguish.

Bring peace to the nations.

Let us not be forced to use our strength against them

For they will have no escape.

But

Let the blessing that you gave to Avraham come true –

“Through you all the families of the earth will be blessed” –

For this is our hope.

 

–Chapter 34 from Cardozo’s For the Love of Israel and the Jewish People: Essays and Studies on Israel, Jews and Judaism.

Review of The Poetry of Prayer: Tehillim in Tefillah

by Gil Student

The Poetry of Prayer: Tehillim in Tefillah
By Rabbi Avi Baumol
Gefen Publishing House
Jerusalem, 2009
100 pages

For a book on prayer to be successful, it has to be smart but not too smart. A book that is too intellectual may engage your mind, but as it delves into the details of history and philology it generally becomes a book that takes the mind too far from the heart. On the other hand, a book that inspires superficially may add to the power of the readers’ prayers in general, but it fails to educate the readers about what the prayer means. Rabbi Avi Baumol carefully treads that fine line. He analyzes the elements of Tehillim that can be found in five sections of the prayer service. His style is informed of scholarship, including the history of prayer and the literary structure of Tehillim, but the analysis isn’t too complex. Rabbi Baumol does an excellent job at making his study uplifting and relevant to someone who prays. After reading this book, you come away not just knowing prayer better, but praying better.

This review appeared in Jewish Action Fall 2011.

Lookstein Bookjed Digest on Jewish Prayer the Right Way

by Marc Rosenberg

Davening is one of those things in life that definitely gets better with age. Teaching people how to daven is also easier talked about than practiced and is often left to modeling (watching how other people perform) or reading literature on tefilla. While there are many works that complement the siddur, reading Rabbi J. Simcha Cohen’s Jewish Prayer the Right Way: Resolving Halachic Dilemmas (Urim Publications 2012) one discovers an easily digestible resource and an important addition to an educator’s library.

Cohen’s style of writing is extremely clear and the queries presented on each aspect of tefilla lend to excellent trigger topics for formal and informal educators looking to prepare for activities. I could almost hear how such a book was developed out of a tefilla course given at a high school or from mini-lectures between mincha/maariv in a local shul. This work reflects both Cohen’s scholarly and rabbinic pedigree and his keen eye for what resonates with contemporary readers. Topics range from “The Chazzan’s Place” and “Prayers for Luxury” to “Kaddish for a Gentile Parent” and “Davening on the Airplane”.

One shortfall of this work, I found, was in the title. In proclaiming what appears to be his series of “the Right Way” Cohen seems to be espousing that there is a single halachic answer to each question presented, whereas in my personal experience and paying close attention to several excerpts in this book, there is sometimes no clear answer to conclude. As some of the questions do address issues of minhag I found the scent of this authoritarian angle to misrepresent what the goal of writing this was to do. This title clause does not however detract from the bountiful research within the binding but I would have liked to read more in the introduction from the author on this issue.

Another curiosity in reviewing this book was the quiet side stepping of clearly more controversial tefilla issues. The closest you get to a question in the neighborhood of feminism is “Women Davening in Synagogues”. Cohen does address, in the sub chapter on “Kavod Hatzibur”, of women being called up to the Torah but does not reference any possible impact or contextualization and concludes with a short one sentence paragraph stating that “it would be a breach of Jewish law and tradition for any congregation to assume that they have the authority to annul the ordinance of the Talmudic Sages prohibiting women from being called up for an aliyah” (241). In the most objective manner that I can write, I would like to have seen the issue addressed in a more practical application.

Overall, Jewish Prayer the Right Way offers a rich reading on the topic of tefilla and should be acquired by educators and readers who want to be enriched by the story of how religious law and life are intertwined.

Marc Rosenberg blogs about Tefillah at http://davenspot.blogspot.com/

Review of Daniel Sperber’s On Changes in Jewish Liturgy

by Dan Rabinowitz and Eliezer Brodt

Daniel Sperber, On Changes in Jewish Liturgy, Options & Limitations, Urim Publications, Israel: 2010

The ever prolific Professor Daniel Sperber’s most recent book focuses on Tefillah. This book, as some of his others, has drawn some sharp criticism, most notably from Professor Aryeh Frimer in Hakirah (available here). To be sure, this post does not attempt to defend Professor Sperber or the feminist movement with regard to these issues, but, in the course of our review we hope to offer some relevant comments that will further this important discussion. Our main interest remains the substance of the book on this important topic – changes to the Jewish liturgy.

This book grew out of a lecture given at the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance. Professor Sperber then decided to revisit the broader issue of the parameters of acceptable changes to the liturgy.

The prayerbook has become – and this is not a new trend – a battleground. In 19th century, the battle lines were drawn between Reform and Orthodox movements. Of course, earlier heterodox movements had also created their own prayerbooks, such as the Karaites, but in those instance, the prayerbook was more a reflection and outgrowth of the movement and was not, in and of itself, one of the wedge issues. In the modern period, however, the advent of the Reform movement argued for a variety of changes to the prayerbook to account and adjust for modernity. In this instance, it was both the substance of the prayers as well as their execution (Hebrew or not) that was at issue See generally, Jacob J. Petuchowski, Prayerbook Reform in Europe, New York, 1968.

Earlier examples of prayerbook controversy touched upon other theological debates; for example, some questioned the inclusion of Machnesi Rachamim as it can be read as a request for assistance from angels and not God (see here). Others questioned the inclusion of piyutim generally. Ibn Ezra’s critical comments regarding this topic are well-known. Sometimes prayer itself was employed for polemical purposes. Naftali Weider discusses a version of the blessing over the Friday night candles that incorporated a polemic against Karaism (see N. Weider, Hisgavshos Nusach HaTefillah B’Mizrach U’BeMaariv, Jerusalem, 1998, 329). And, of course, one must mention the oft-discussed blessing against heretics [in some versions] in the Shemoneh Esrei (see, most recently, Ruth Langer, Cursing the Christians?: A History of the Birkat HaMinim, Oxford Univ. Press: 2011).

Thus, it is scarcely surprising that discussing changes to the prayerbook might arouse controversy. That said, we must note – and this is the essential point of this book – the texts of the

Urim Publications Summer 2011 Catalog

Click the image above or Urim Publications Summer 2011 catalog for the catalog now available in PDF format.

Review of Innovation in Jewish Law in Shofar

by Daniel P. Aldrich

Innovation in Jewish Law: A Case Study of Chiddush in Havineinu, by Michael J. Broyde. Jerusalem and New York: Urim Publications, 2010. 163 pp.

The vast body of Jewish law—halacha—is timeless and unchanging, yet displays a dynamism that allows rabbinic scholars to respond to new social, technological, and economic situations over millennia. As the author points out, “Though the Torah is G-d given, halacha is neither static nor stagnant” (p. 133).

In this new, well-written book by Michael Broyde, the author takes a case-study approach to tease apart the interplay between the timelessness and dynamism of halacha. He argues that within the canon of Jewish law, the most “significant form of change is innovative interpretation,” or chiddush. To provide evidence for this, Broyde chooses to focus on a single prayer, known in Hebrew as Havineinu, which is an “abstract, abridged form of the Shemonei Esrei” (p. 5), literally “The 18,” made up of blessings set down by the Anshei Knesset HaGadolah (the men of the Great Assembly). While the Amidah (Standing Prayer) has become the standard text recited by Jews around the world, the Havineinu was a rabbinically recognized alternative. Beginning with the writings in the Mishna and the Gemara (Oral Law), through the Rishonim (later generations of scholars), the Rambam (Moses Maimonides, 1135–1204), the Rif (Yitzchak al-Fasi, 1013–1103), the Bach (Rabbi Joel Sirkes, 1560–1640), the Taz (David ha-Levi Segal, 1586–1667), and modern rabbis such as Rabbi Moshe Feinstein (1895–1986), Broyde traces how generations of poskim (halachic decisors) have handled this abbreviated form of prayer, arguing that decisors use two main methods—“harmonization” and “ruling”—in their interpretation of Jewish law. The ways in which rabbis interpreted the appropriateness of the Havineinu reflect a singular, unchanging law which is refracted through changing social and technological conditions.

While the law is unchanged, conditions allowing or dictating its use have, and hence poskim must understand both the law and their own times to illuminate the proper course of action.

Broyde begins with

Short review of On Changes in Jewish Liturgy: Options and Limitations

by Jennifer Stern Breger

JOFA Journal readers are very familiar with the outstanding scholarship of Daniel Sperber, whose writings have often graced our pages.  This volume, which explores the development of our liturgy, has its roots in a presentation at the 2007 JOFA conference and devotes much attention to the berakha in the morning prayers recited by men, she-lo asani isha (“who has not made me a woman”).  Sperber addresses the question of the permissibility of introducing the names of the Matriarchs into the opening berakha of the Amidah, and the difficulty of the phrase in Tahanun that refers to the nations “who abominate us as much as the ritual impurity of the menstruant woman.”

Sperber demonstrates with great erudition and historical knowledge that it does not make sense to talk of a single crystallized version of the liturgy; changes have always taken place in the prayers Jews have said through the ages.  After discussing both Talmudic sources forbidding changes and the rulings and formulations of Maimonides, he concludes that it is quite permissible to make changes as long as one does not alter the overall content and structure of the liturgy or prayer.  The reader will learn a great deal from the richness of Sperber’s writing in this book, enhanced by its valuable footnotes and appendices, and the depth and breadth of knowledge demonstrated about the history of Jewish liturgy, including the introduction of new prayers, variants in liturgical texts, and the range of different views on the subject of liturgy held by scholars through the ages.

This review is from the JOFA Journal (Summer 2011).

Review of Why We Pray What We Pray

by Matthue Roth

I became Orthodox under the guidance of someone who advised me to run from it. Rabbi Dr. Barry Freundel, the rabbi of the Kesher Israel Congregation in Washington D.C. — whose name you might recognize from the 2000 presidential election, when he was constantly quoted as “Joe Lieberman’s rabbi” and asked deeply-thought questions like, “If a nuclear war breaks out on Shabbat, will Senator Lieberman be allowed to help out in the ensuing battles?”

In addition to being a rabbi, he holds advanced degrees in chemistry and biology, and is a fiendishly rational thinker. While many people are attracted to religion through mystical stories and supernatural powers, for me the draw was the exact opposite. I was already totally nuts. I needed something to ground me, a rational set of rules to lead my life by. I started by going to Rabbi Freundel’s weekly halacha shiur — a three-hour class about everything from washing your hands before getting out of bed to whether one needs to tie tzitzit on a rain poncho to what happens if you start eating a ham sandwich, realize it’s not kosher, then get a craving for macaroni and cheese — are you allowed to? (Yes: because ham doesn’t fall under the category of kosher meat.) “Run the other way,” he said. “We are competists.” I’m a masochist. It just made me hungry for more.

Anyway. Rabbi Freundel has a new book, Why We Pray What We Pray, and it’s a doozy. The book is an excellent field guide to Jewish prayers, perhaps the most well-conceived and fully-realized book on the subject in English to come out in years. (And just so you don’t think my opinion is weighted, he is also the man who forced me to type up 112 pages of notes about tefillin. Five times.) What the book lacks in scope, it makes up in depth — choosing just six different prayers, giving their history, previous incarnations,

Which might sound boring under someone else’s wing. The first chapter is dedicated to the Shema — and Freundel picks apart its history step by step, discovering that, in its 3000-year lifespan, the prayer once included several other parts of the Torah — and things that didn’t even come from the Torah, including the second line of its present incarnation — as well as one whole Torah portion (this part was ultimately excised, on the grounds that it would take too damn long for normal people to get through) and the entirety of the Ten Commandments. Later chapters go through other prayers, some of which (like “Nishmat”) have just become known as long and sort of meandering in the present liturgy, others (such as “Alenu”) have become sing-songy and equally meaningless for us. This book is an adventure in the best way, a book that makes us love words again.

Reading Why We Pray, I sometimes wished that Freundel, and not some boring dictionary-like rabbi, wrote the lines of commentary underneath the prayers in my normal old prayerbook. Then I changed my mind. Those little two-line insights are good for ignoring on a day-to-day basis, and jumping right back into the prayerbook. These stories are at their best for actual reading, for paying attention to and for diving into. As Rabbi Dr. Jonathan Lord Sacks says (in this superb video), Jewish people are great at being kind to others and at studying, two of the three pillars on which the world rests. The praying part — taking these words that we say every time we set foot in a synagogue* and giving our prayer meaning, a life beyond our lips, and a meaning above the dullness of mundane routine — is what we need to work on.

And here, folks, is where it starts.

____
* — every time we set foot in a synagogue and it’s not for a disco Bar Mitzvah party, I mean.

Original blog post.