RABBI LAWRENCE HOFFMAN, PH.D.: PRAYER IS AN ART FORM
Welcome to the College Commons Bully Pulpit Podcast, Torah with a Point of View. Produced by the Hebrew Union College Jewish Institute of Religion, America’s first Jewish Institution of higher learning. My name is Joshua Holo, your host, and Dean of the Jack H. Skirball campus in Los Angeles.

HOLO: You’re one of the great voices on prayer in Judaism today. And so, I want to ask you as a person who sometimes confronts impediments of my own in prayer, I want to ask you your opinion about what, if you had to reduce it to a single cause, what is the greatest impediment to praying or to prayer today in Jewish life?

HOFFMAN: First of all, thanks for the compliment. I think about it all the time, of course. It seems to me, actually, first of all it’s not the greatest impediment that people think it is. They think it’s God. They say they don’t believe in God. They don’t think anybody’s listening up there. And so, what’s the point of it all? But I think that’s actually a mistake. I take them at their word, to be sure, but I think that’s not the problem. The essential problem, I think, has to do with a misunderstanding of what prayer is in its form, and the contract that we have between the people who are providing the prayer experience and people are coming to it. I think of prayer as an art form. I think of it as the grand art form because it puts together music and drama and poetry.

HOLO: It’s almost cinematic, right.

HOFFMAN: Yes, it’s fabulous when it’s done right. The problem is on our side, I’m talking now as a rabbi, and I think I speak for cantors as well, I don’t mean to be just rabbis; all the people who are involved. It’s an art form that we don’t do very well. And there’s nothing worse than an art form that goes bad. So that’s our problem. But the problem of people coming is you don’t appreciate an art form unless you suspend your disbelief. Do you go to the opera?

HOLO: Of course.

HOFFMAN: So, did you ever go to the opera because you loved the story? No, who believes that stuff. Right? If I said to you, “Why don’t you go?” We’re going to talk about a demon and a this and a that. You’d say, “Thank you, I’ve got better things to do.”

HOLO: You go for the tenor and the soprano.

HOFFMAN: You go for the grandness of it all. I mean Faulkner had it right. It’s a complete work of art. So, I think of prayer as that sort of thing, a complete work of art. But you can only go if you suspend your disbelief. If I paid attention to the story, I wouldn’t believe a word of it. But at the end of it, all that music and so on and so forth, I’m crying at the end of it because there’s something about the human condition that gets touched. Prayer is an art form that touches the human condition. But you have to enter into it, suspend your disbelief.

HOLO: More than that, you’re saying that they have to be met halfway also by the artists, by the collaborative team that presents the prayer. Not just from the Middle Ages and from antiquity but also those who are the purveyors of it today.

HOFFMAN: Yes, exactly.

HOLO: The synagogue goer has to be met halfway by an excellent artful…

HOFFMAN: Yes, it’s a layered art form. It starts with the people who wrote the prayer book and gave you the music. That’s the first level of art. Then it’s the people who put it all together and the right prayer book and the right script. That’s the second layer of art. And then there are the people who do it. That’s the third level. And then the last level is the people who go and participate.

HOLO: You started off by saying, you know, a person might suspect that the reason people feel an impediment to prayer is because of the articulation of a God that, if broken down intellectually, they would have to arrive at the conclusion that they – or many of them don’t believe in. And you’re saying, “No, that’s not the issue.” Well, what about the argument that it’s not belief or disbelief or agnosticism that impedes them; it’s more affirmative than that. It’s that God, God language, faith styled words evoke notions of Christianity to them and feels off putting in a much more affirmative way than mere agnosticism.

HOFFMAN: Well, there’s something to that. But that has to do with the way a certain generation was raised. If you’re over 45, let’s say, you were raised largely in an ethnic Jewish environment, and you have a lot of baggage about the Christian environment around you. And you tend to associate a certain language as Christian. Fact of the matter is most of the Christian language started as Jewish language.

HOLO: Right.

HOFFMAN: If someone who talks about a game that Harvard football team plays against Ohio State or something like that, and they say, you know, they lost 55 to nothing but we’ve got all the good cheerers. The problem is that the Christian community got all the good cheerers, you know. So, we now take the old Jewish language but we say, “Oh no, it’s Christian.” Grace. That’s not a Christian term. That’s our term. You know, theology generally, that’s our term. Even the good news – even the good news is, Besorah Torah. We had it first so you know. But we have to reclaim it. And here’s why. If you can’t say it, you don’t know it. And we need a language that can say it and we don’t know it.

HOLO: And we have to speak it artfully is what you’re saying.

HOFFMAN: That’s right.

HOLO: You’re saying you can just drop a term. You can just expect people to open up a machzor or prayer book and engage.

HOFFMAN: That’s right. People make the mistake of thinking that they don’t know something or they don’t want to believe something, they can’t use the language. I’m saying if you use the language in the right environment, at that moment you believe it. I don’t pray because I believe. I believe because I pray. It’s an experience. After the fact, I can’t believe I was crying in that opera. After the fact, I can’t believe that I was moved to tears of joy in prayer, but I was.

HOLO: The way you’re casting it, it’s not even really about arriving at belief. It’s about allowing yourself to be touched and therefore enriched. And that somehow you come out better than you entered.

HOFFMAN: Yeah, that’s right. People think that ideas are what we make up. But that’s not exactly true. Even in English we say, “It struck me. It came to me.” The great ideas then hit us. I liken ideas to gifts. You know, you wrap a gift. And when you’re finished, what you discover is that the wrapping kind of impinges on what you put inside. And the wrapping doesn’t quite look the same. I consider worship a wrapping. It’s a wrapping of ideas which are the gift. But the gift gets wrapped in worship which is different than getting wrapped in an academic discourse. And, it comes out differently.

....

HOFFMAN: When I was younger and I was a rabbinic student, I had this great teacher who was reputed to know absolutely everything. Absolutely everything. And his name was Dr. Tepfer, alav ha-shalom. Came from England. He had this British accent so you could believe he knew everything.

HOLO: He knew everything, right.

HOFFMAN: So at one point, I don’t know why, I said to him I wanted to learn Yiddish. I think because I knew my grandmother spoke Yiddish and I had forgotten it. And I wanted to learn it again. I said to him, “Could you teach me Yiddish,” since he knew everything. And he said to me, “Yiddish Hoffman?” He said to me, “You don’t teach Yiddish. You just open your mouth and it comes out.” He was wrong of course, but that’s the attitude people have to prayer. You just open your mouth and it comes out. But actually, it doesn’t. It’s an art form and it takes the people who are involved, each at their own level, to come together and make it work in a group.

HOLO: You know, you’ve reminded me of what I think is a myth about Winston Churchill, of course who was known for his quips and his witticisms and his spontaneous wisdom.

HOFFMAN: I love Churchill.

HOLO: Right. Everyone loves Churchill. He’s great to quote. The mystique about him was that he was so quick and so attuned that all of this came off the top of his head. And this may be equally apocryphal and mythical but the myth is that in fact he would go home and practice his witticisms in front of the mirror. And all that which felt spontaneous and witty was in fact a practiced, highly developed art form. And you’re saying we have to not just receive the siddur but republish it, reimagine it, and reproduce it every time.

HOFFMAN: Not just the siddur. First about the art form though, it’s not just Churchill. It’s every art form. Van Gogh writes to his brother, and I forget how long he says, but he says it took him two days or 5,000 strokes to get the right petal on the flower. You know, he didn’t just do it. Nobody just does it. Maybe Mozart. They say Mozart could just write the music, but I’m not sure about that either. Anyway, back to the prayer book. I don’t think the issue is so much the prayer book. I like to say the prayer book isn’t really a book. Just looks like a book because it’s got two covers on it. But actually, we were praying long before anything was written. So, it’s not just a book. I think of it as a script. It’s an ongoing script. It’s a master script of the Jewish people. And whenever you hold it in your hand you’re interpreting it. So, what’s really going on is you have a script and if you don’t have the right music, and you don’t have the right environment, and you don’t have the people sitting in the right way, and you don’t have a connection between people, the script falls flat. We rabbis and cantors, we’re like directors of this script. And when we do the script right, it’s an art form that I call a great drama. But it’s a drama in, not to people, at people, but it involves everybody, you know

Rabbi Hoffman was introduced to his fascination with liturgy “via a dear and passionate teacher at HUC, Dr. Leon Liebreich, of blessed memory. He had a very thick syllabus, and our homework was to read the syllabus and look up all its references, not just the Talmudic, but medieval commentaries, and modern scholars as well. I discovered how liturgy cuts across all of Jewish history as a sort of Jewish diary, the soul of the Jew. I fell in love with the Jewish soul.”

"Liturgy and ritual in Reform synagogues are “more central now than they were when I began,” he reflected. “I like to take some credit for it. Torah study is the Jewish mind at work, and ritual is the Jewish heart. I liken ritual to the Jewish sacred drama of the centuries; not the kind of drama you watch but a drama you’re drawn into. In a synagogue or seder your siddur or Haggadah becomes your sacred script; these are your ‘lines,’ the ongoing saga of the Jewish people. If you suspend your disbelief and get into the story, it comes alive for you."

“When you go to Shakespeare, you don’t have to agree with every word. But at the end of the play you’re moved to tears. If we reduce everything to what we consciously and rationally believe, we don’t have much left. Ritual moves you through the poetry, the music, the other ‘characters’ around you — everything, because if it is done right it is delivered in exclamation points, not just commas and periods.”

Within the cycle of the Jewish year these days hold a peculiarly spiritual place, for they alone of Jewish holy days are devoid of agricultural or historical significance.' Paradoxically, these most "Jewish" of all days are, at the same time, the most universal. They touch on spiritual values that concern us as humans. Only the Sabbath, the weekly celebration of creation, approaches the universality of the Days of Awe, since it imposes a spiritual meaning upon an otherwise meaningless span of days. The Sabbath, bath, however, is intended (in part) to be a commemoration of the exodus from Egypt,2 whereas the Yamim Nora'im commemorate rate no historical events. Instead, they deal exclusively with the fundamental questions of human nature and human destiny and with the connections between God and humans, sin and repentance, tance, and mercy and justice.

Rabbi Reuven Hammer. Entering the High Holy Days: A Complete Guide to the History, Prayers and Themes (Kindle Locations 115-119). Kindle Edition.

Main Themes of Rosh HashanahDay of Judgement
While the focus of Rosh Hashanah is on human responsibility and divine judgment, that of Yom Kippur is on human failure and divine forgiveness. We sin, but our failure can be mitigated; gated; we can attain forgiveness. By striving for forgiveness (which we do during Selihot), we gain atonement (kaparah). Judgment and forgiveness are connected by the possibility of repentance (teshuvah), which is emphasized in the interval between tween Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the ten days of repentance (aseret yemei teshuvah). Judgment does not lead to automatic punishment. The possibility of change, of repentance, allows us to achieve atonement.

Day of Remembrance
Judgment is an extension of the biblical term "remembrance" (ziharon), used in connection with the first of Tishrei: "In the seventh month, on the first day of the month, you shall observe complete rest, remembrance through loud blasts, teru'ah, a sacred occasion" (Lev. 23:24).

It is easy to misunderstand the idea of the Day of Remembrance, confusing it with a deterministic view of life, a fatalistic attitude that our future is preordained, that like Oedipus we are doomed to live out some preordained force of destiny. But the concept of "remembrance" means exactly the opposite: we have complete freedom of choice. God judges us on the basis of what we have done. As for our fate, we alone determine it. In the words of one of the piyyutim-the special poems compiled for this season-"the hand of every person has written it."

The Kingship of God
Celebrating God's ascension as ruler of the universe is one of the most ancient themes of Rosh Hashanah. Although in the pagan world such an event was celebrated as a ceremony of coronation, only traces of this rite were preserved in Jewish observance. vance. Such things were more appropriate for gods who attained power by overcoming forces of fate or other divine rivals, than for the God of Israel, sole and eternal ruler of the universe. Nevertheless, the concept of kingship, or sovereignty, remains one of the basic themes of Rosh Hashanah. Along with judgment, kingship ship is the major thematic focus of the piyyutim. One of the most popular refrains in these poems is "the Lord is King, the Lord was King, the Lord will be King for ever and ever."

Repentance, Forgiveness, and Atonement
Although rabbinic tradition has created a strong connection between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, there are major points of distinction between the two. On Rosh Hashanah we proclaim God King and acknowledge that we are responsible for our actions. Yet despite the day's solemnity, the over-all tone is positive and celebratory. The affirmative connotations of God's remembering and visiting outweigh the seriousness of judgment. The Rabbis deliberately decreed that the biblical verses to be recited in the three special prayers on kingship, remembrance, and shofrot should contain only positive ideas, and nothing indicating ing punishment.1° However, as we move toward Yom Kippur, even though we retain our basic optimism that the verdict will be positive (hence the wearing of white garb rather than black), the atmosphere darkens and turns somber. We begin to concentrate on the problem of sin, on the flawed nature of human beings and on the removal of sin and guilt through repentance, forgiveness, and atonement.

Rabbi Reuven Hammer. Entering the High Holy Days: A Complete Guide to the History, Prayers and Themes (Kindle Locations 351-354). Kindle Edition.