Category: Jewish Worship

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Teaching prayer

What Dr. Bruno Bettelheim writes about teaching young children to read holds equally to teaching prayer. Describing the need for the material or story to be interesting and enrich the child1s life.

”It must stimulate his imagination; help him to develop his intellect and clarify his emotions; be attuned to his anxieties and aspirations; give full recognition to his difficulties, while at the same time, suggesting solutions to the problems which perturb him.” (The Uses of Enchantment, page 5)

Teaching prayer must meet the same requirements that Bettelheim establishes for teaching reading:

“ In short, it must at one and the same time, relate to all aspects of his personality – and this without ever belittling, but on the contrary, giving full credence to the seriousness of the child*s predicaments, while simultaneously promoting confidence in himself and his future.” (op cit.)

Teaching Jewish worship as theater allows the students to take the prayers seriously without taking them literally. It means sensitizing the students to being actors working with a script, for which they are not always in the mood. Separating role as performer and performer as person is something that happens – and students come to recognize that at times the script can prepare them to pray, if they would  allow it that possibility.

Experiencing a prayer opens up to the student that area of life and human emotions that the prayer expresses, allowing  him or her to “try it on for size.” Reciting a prayer opens up with the worshipper these aspects expressed in the prayer by bringing those emotions into consciousness during worship.

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Preparing ourselves for Prayer

Richard Schechner suggests four steps he uses to prepare his actors:

  1. Getting in touch with yourself
  2. Getting in touch with yourself face to face with others.
  3. Relating to others without narrative or other highly formalized structure.
  4. Relating to others within narrative or other highly formalized structure…

For our purposes, the fourth step – ‘’Relating to others within narrative and other highly formalized structures” is our goal, and translates into being able to pray or worship utilizing the words of our script, the Jewish liturgy. All too often our teaching approach focuses on the goal and leaves out the important steps or process of opening Gates of Prayer,

Prayer and the script of our liturgy is perhaps the most difficult drama of all – and needs the greatest preparation. The first two steps for us is the process necessary to create community – a vital component to worship . Creating community is far from easy , as Schechner comments on the relation between steps one and two.

In elaborating the first two steps, Schechner relates:

”Once there is trust, almost anything can happen. Before you can trust others, you must first learn to trust yourself.

The first step of performer development takes the most time because it is so difficult for a person to learn to trust his own impulses. The second step expands the circle of trust to include at least one other person.” page 147-148

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Addressing Ourselves

Tony Schwartz , the Responsive Chord,

page 24.

“The critical task is to design our package of stimuli so that it resonates with information already stored within an individual and thereby induces the desired learning or behavioral effect. Resonance takes place when the stimuli put into our communication evoke meaning in a listener or viewer “

page 25 “A listener or viewer brings far more information to the communication event than a communicator can put into his program, commercial or message. The communicators problem, then, is not to get stimuli across, or even to package his stimuli so they can be understood and absorbed. Rather, he must deeply understand the kinds of information and experience stored in his audience, the patterning of this information, and the interactive resonance process whereby stimuli evoke this stored information. I

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The Purpose of Prayer – to Shock

Abraham Heschel wrote, “We have lost our ability to be shocked…the human soul is too limited to experience dismay in proportion to what happened at Auschwitz, in Hiroshima….” (”0n Prayer”, reprinted in Petuchowski, Understanding Jewish Prayer)

It is the purpose of prayer to shock the human soul into the awareness of the meaning of his or her existence…”Prayer should be an act of catharsis, of purgation of emotions as well as a process of self-clarification, of examining priorities, of elucidating responsibility ….”

“Prayer is meaningless unless it is subversive, unless it seeks to overthrow and to ruin the pyramids of callousness, hatred, opportunism, falsehoods. The liturgical movement must become a revolutionary movement, seeking to overthrow the forces that continue to destroy the promise, the hope, the vision.”

Prayer is not automatic, instant – the worshipper cannot be simply plugged in or “turned on.” Heschel writes, “Prayer will not come about by default. It requires education, training, reflection, contemplation. It is not enough to join others; it is necessary to build a sanctuary within, brick by brick, instances of, meditation, moments of devotion,” (op cit.)

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Environmental Theater

Schechner defines for us “Environmental Theater,” a more comprehensive and expansive conception of theater which we will find quite helpful in application to Jewish worship:

The first…principle of environmental theater is to create and use whole spaces – literally spheres of spaces, and spaces within spaces – which contain, or envelop, or relate, or touch all the areas where the audience is and/or the performers perform. All the spaces in a theater are actively involved in all the aspects of the performance

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