Student Rabbi Lev | Ne’ilah 5787
“How do you pray?” someone asked me recently. After I clarified why they were asking, they said, “Well, I know what Hebrew words to say, but I don’t know what I should be feeling when I’m saying them.” I’ve often felt this way too. If I’m distracted, uncomfortable, or feeling disconnected for whatever reason, it can feel really difficult to access a meaningful prayer experience. For me, praying with a kahal (a community) can help a lot, but sometimes it adds to the pressure:
Everyone else seems so focused on their prayers. Why am I having so much trouble? What’s wrong with me? Am I doing this right?
One beautiful thing about our Jewish liturgy is that our prayerbook preserves snapshots of intense human moments when one of our ancestors cried out in spontaneous prayers of fear, gratitude, or awe. In our mishebeirakh prayer for healing, we hear the voice of Moses calling out to God when his sister, Miriam, becomes suddenly ill. El na, r’fanah la! Please, God, heal her! he cries. In Mi chamocha we can hear the giddy disbelief and gratitude of our ancestors as they cross the Red Sea, singing Mi chamocha, ba’elim, Adonai! Who is like you, Adonai!
The words in our prayerbooks might look fixed, but they represent thousands of years of human beings calling out to God when life throws us tragedy, chaos, danger, beauty, grace…
And there is infinite room between the lines in our prayer book for us to also cry out in grief, joy, and fear.
Over this past week, I have been noticing how our prayers and scriptural readings throughout the High Holidays teach us that there are many different ways to pray. We receive three models for prayer through the stories of Hannah, Jonah, and Elijah.
On day one of Rosh Hashanah, our Haftarah reading tells the story of Hannah, who longs for a child more than anything. Her despair is so heavy and all-consuming that she cannot even bear to eat or drink. And, she feels completely alone. Her husband can’t understand why his love isn’t enough for her, and her peers taunt her for being unable to bear children. Hannah pours out her despair in a fervent prayer to God, but she is so overcome that only her lips move. The priest Eli, seeing her mumbling and shaking, assumes she is drunk and chastises her. But, when he realizes that she is actually deep in prayer, he praises her instead.
Hannah’s prayer looks unrecognizable from the outside. The other people around her can’t hear what she is saying, but God receives her sincere outpouring of grief. Now, we tell her story every Rosh Hashanah. Hannah teaches us that our prayers don’t have to look socially acceptable. We can fall apart, shake, cry, and mumble, and our prayers will still be received—even more so because they are raw and unfiltered.
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On Yom Kippur, we read the story of Jonah: the reluctant prophet who tries to dodge his service but finds himself stuck in the belly of a whale. Trapped, terrified, and chastened, Jonah calls out to God:
You cast me into the depths,
Into the heart of the sea,
The floods engulfed me;
All Your breakers and billows
Swept over me.
The waters closed in over me,
The deep engulfed me.
Weeds twined around my head.
I sank to the base of the mountains;
The bars of the earth closed upon me forever.
Yet You brought my life up from the pit,
My ETERNAL God!
Jonah spends the first part of his story running away from his duty. He is disconnected from a sense of purpose and acting on fear and adrenaline. But, perhaps surprisingly, his moment of clarity comes when he is at his lowest point.
Jonah teaches us that transformative prayer and clarity of purpose can come out of the moments when we feel completely trapped.
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If Hannah and Jonah provide us with human examples for how to access and experience prayer, our liturgy gives us another, more abstract image: the kol d’mamah dakah, often translated as the still small voice. We hear this phrase in the second paragraph of the U’netanah Tokef prayer on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur morning, but the phrase comes from a story about the prophet Elijah in I Kings:19. In a moment of terror and grief, Elijah trembles on top of Mount Horeb. He is caught in the middle of a political struggle and he believes that he is alone in the world and will soon be killed. While on top of the mountain, his body is shaken by a divine wind so powerful that it splits rocks and sends them crashing to the base of the mountain; but, the text tells us:
GOD was not in the wind. After the wind—an earthquake; but GOD was not in the earthquake.
After the earthquake—fire; but GOD was not in the fire. And after the fire, kol d’mamah dakah.
Some sources translate Kol d’mamah dakah as still, small voice. Yet others choose a soft murmuring sound, or a thin voice of silence. However you translate it, kol d’mamah dakah communicates something powerful to us: in other places in scripture, God is present in fire, in lightning, and thunder, in dazzling metaphors of power and might. But here, God is present in the absence of all of these things, in the moments when the rubble stops falling and the dust clears.
Elijah teaches us that our prayers don’t have to be earth shattering. They can happen in little bursts, in microexpressions so tiny that we might miss them if we’re not paying attention. This is the beauty of Ne’ilah: we reach this moment physically and spiritually exhausted, and in this state of vulnerability and weakness, all that is left is the still small voice.
Soon, a final Tekiah G’dolah will signal that the gates of repentance are closing. But, we can carry what we have learned over these 10 days into Sukkot. As we sit under the stars, letting the rain fall down on us and the wind chill us, we can remember what it feels like to have our protective layers stripped away. The gates are closing, but may we carry with us the sincerity of Hannah, the conviction of Jonah, and the strength to listen to the still small voice.
G’mar tov, may we be sealed in the Book of Life.