Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel painfully describes the typical worship experience* “Our services are conducted with pomp end precision* The rendition of the liturgy is smooth* Everything is presents decorum, voice, ceremony. But one thing is missing LIFE. One knows in advance what will ensue. There will be no surprise, no adventure of the soul…Nothing unpredictable must happen to the person who prays. He will attain no insight into the words he reads. He will attain no now perspectives for the life he lives” (1)
Rabbi Heschel continues, “what was will be, and there is nothing new in the synagogue!” (2) How true are these words despite the countless hours spent in evolving “creative” or “original” services. Service innovators have tried creative writing, jazz music, rock music, acid rock music? dance, drama., multi-media, film, camp settings, retreats, and a wide variety of other creative tactics, including resorting to traditional prayer.
The failure of these techniques to be truly satisfying and therefore reused is understood by one reform rabbi who succinctly presents the underlying problem of all these creative attempts? “Our hang-up is that an experimental service can only touch the symptoms, but not the cause of our trouble.”’
By breaking into and disturbing the dulling routine of formal worship, these creative efforts provide momentary relief to the problem Heschel so acutely describes “people who are otherwise sensitive, vibrant, arresting, sit there aloof, listless, lazy. Those who are spiritually dull cannot praise the Lord.” (3)
The symptoms, however, are of the utmost importance to us. Indeed, at the present moment these data of our own experience are more useful to us than even thousands of pages written about what Jewish Prayer “should be” according to the texts. To start with what prayer or worship should be rather than to start with our own. experience? would’ be like a physician who refused to see his patients because they were sick, exhorting them meanwhile that they should feel better.
Using this medical-scientific approach, we must begin with the symptoms, probe deeper into the underlying causes, and then treat the disease. In allowing ourselves to get involved with such a task, we take on the responsibility of openness to recognizing and correcting whatever errors we might make* while searching for the underlying causes, we must be open to the validity of the symptoms and continue to treat them, for until we can eliminate the pain, we might certainly minimize it! Even the most superficial of the creative efforts confirm the experience of most worshippers, namely that something is not as it should be. To stop the creative efforts would be to deny the experience so many of us have, and it is the phenomena of the denial of experience – which seems the very basis of our problem.
Rabbi Heschel’s apt paraphrase of the psalms verse “the dead cannot praise the Lord1 “Those who are spiritually dull cannot praise the Lord” presents us immediately with two concepts , that must concern us, spiritual dullness, and praise of the Lord. -It is the contention of this writer that the spiritual dullness is the symptom of the problems involved in the whole matter of Praising the Lord. Indeed, in our contemporary world, the imperative of our traditional call to worship, “Praise Ye the Lord to whom All Praise is Due”, might well be seen as a prescription error.
