Prayer and Ritual Cannot Change God,
But They Can Change Us
Sermon for Yom Kippur 5776/2015
Rabbi Arnold S. Gluck
Temple Beth-El, Hillsborough, NJ
What do we expect to
happen when we pray? What are prayer and ritual supposed to do? Some think their
purpose is to change God’s mind; that if we pray sincerely, and are worthy, God
will grant our wishes. It’s an audacious proposition, if you think about it.
That we have the power to manipulate God?
It’s highly problematic
to think that religion works this way. How egocentric to imagine that God exists
to serve me? Am I the center of the universe that God should answer to me? If
we could control God with our rituals and our words, if we could have such
power, we would be God!
And there is another
problem with this view of religion. It is bound to disappoint, sooner or later.
As an old story makes this clear.
It was a hot day at
Jones Beach and Bessie Cohen was there with her three-year-old grandson. She
had bought him a cute sailor suit with a hat and she watched with delight as he
played with his toys at the edge of the water.
Suddenly a giant wave
swept onto the shore and before Bessie could even move, the boy was swept out
into the cold Atlantic.
Bessie was frantic. “I
know I’ve never been religious,” she screamed to the heavens. “But I implore
You to save the boy! I will never ask anything of You again!”
The boy disappeared
from view, and Bessie was beside herself. He went under a second time, and
Bessie began to wail. As he went under for the third time, she screamed
mightily, appealing to God to save the boy’s life.
Her final supplication
was answered, as the sea suddenly threw the child onto the shore. He was badly
shaken but clearly alive. Bessie picked him up and put him down gently on a blanket,
far from the water. After looking him over, she turned her face toward the
heavens, and complained loudly, “He had a hat!”
Bessie is an all too
familiar character. She has long since given up on religion because it doesn’t
work the way she thinks it should. Then in a moment of desperation she prays to
God to save her grandson, and voila! It works! It works, until it doesn’t work!
The boy came back without his hat! So Bessie goes back to being a skeptic—a
skeptic who is still clinging to a flawed theology!
Imagine that Sam is
praying for rain to water his lawn, and Joe is praying for a sunny day at the
beach. Which one is supposed to have God rearrange the laws of nature to make
him happy? So it’s no big deal. Today, God said “Yes” to Joe and “no” to Sam. Maybe
next time Sam will have his way. God gets a lot of traffic on the cosmic
hotline, you know, so who are we to second-guess which request was more
deserving?
But when God is too
busy to stop a three-year-old Syrian refugee from washing up dead on a beach in
Turkey, or God doesn’t intervene to prevent the rape of children at the hands
of ISIS, or a 45-year-old wife and mother dies of cancer, something is terribly
wrong. The idea that they weren’t worthy of being saved; or that God answers
prayer, but sometimes the answer is “no,” simply doesn’t wash. All these
rationalizations, all these attempts to justify God, strike me as obscene in
the light of real human suffering. As Harold Kushner asks, “When your reality
clashes with your theology, do you deny your reality or change your theology?”
Historically, we Jews
have chosen to change our theology, but many of our people suffer from what I
would call “arrested theological development.” Old ways of thinking linger on,
and bad theology has an afterlife. Consider all the anthropomorphic images of
God we encounter as we grow up. It’s no wonder that some get stuck on the image
of God as a great big man with a long white beard and flowing robes sitting on
a giant throne in the clouds, micro-managing the planet. Such images abound in
our culture, they remain in Scripture, and they certainly persist in our
language.
Some years ago my
colleague Rabbi Shira Milgrom offered a telling example of this from her own
life.
“When our youngest child was about two and a half years old,” she wrote, “my
husband, David, was giving her a bath. Out of the blue, she turned to him and
said, “Abba, God likes boys better than girls.” David, in one of his more
brilliant parenting moments didn’t say, “Oh no, honey, that’s not true.”
Instead he asked, “What makes you say that?” To which Liore answered simply and
directly, “Well, God has a penis and boys have a penis, so God likes boys better.”
Two comments,” adds Milgrom. “First, what would have made my daughter think
that God has a penis? Trust me, there is no picture of God hanging on the walls
of our home-- and certainly not one of God standing naked. So why would she
think that? Don’t under estimate the power of a pronoun,” says Milgrom. “Liore
had always—like you and me—heard God described as “He,” and having two brothers
and a father, she knew exactly what a “He” looked like.”
The second and more difficult part of Rabbi Milgrom’s story is the
impact this knowledge had on her daughter’s image of herself as a woman,
already at such a young age! “Because she imagined God as male, she thought of
herself as worth less in God’s eyes…”
That’s why the newer version of the machzor we use on these holy days, and
all of the prayer books we produce at Temple Beth-El, use gender sensitive
language to refer to God. It’s not a trivial matter. Words are powerful. They
paint pictures in our minds that can be highly problematic.
No Jewish teacher understood
this better than the Rambam, Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon, a k a, Maimonides, who was
born in the mid 12th century, in Spain, and died in Egypt in the
early 13th century. Long after the worship of physical idols and
statues had ceased in Israel, the Rambam understood that a more insidious form
of idolatry persisted, that of misguided mental images that foster wrong ideas.
Maimonides was a rationalist. He sought to reconcile faith with reason by proving that God must exist and that God cannot be limited to a physical form. Since everything physical is dependent on a prior cause, he argued, there must be a first cause. That “unmoved mover,” as Aristotle called it, is what we call God. God is not dependent on any prior cause, so God must be eternal and unlimited. God cannot lack, or need, or desire anything, because that would entail limitation. Step by step, in a logical and reasoned proof, Rambam demonstrates that God cannot be like anything else, that God is unique, in the true sense of the word.
Here lies the crux of
our problem. If something is unique, meaning it is absolutely unlike anything
else, then no language can describe it. Every attempt to talk about God must
fail, and every description is a false image, an idol constructed of words. Like
little Liore, who heard the pronoun “he” and intuited that God must be a boy,
our minds translate God-talk into false images!
So what are we to do
with the Bible? The Bible is filled with anthropomorphic images of God. It
speaks of “God’s hand,” (Ex. 9:3), “God’s eyes,” (Gen 38:7) “God’s ears,” What
are we to make of these? “The Torah,” say the rabbis, “speaks in human terms.” It
uses human language to refer to God because those are the only terms we
understand. They are all metaphors, says the Rambam. They should not be taken
literally!
“Neither sleep nor waking, neither anger nor
laughter, neither joy nor sadness, neither silence nor speech in the human
understanding of speech are appropriate terms with which to describe God. …were
God to at times be enraged and at times be happy, God would change. … God is …
above all this,” says Rambam. (Maimonides, Misneh Torah, hilchot yesodei
hatorah 1:11-12)
Returning to my opening
question, “What do prayer and ritual do?” What would Maimonides say?
If God doesn’t change. If
God is “l’eila min kawl birchata
v’shirata, beyond all the praises, songs and adorations we can utter,” as
we say in the kaddish prayer, why
should we bother to pray at all?
This is the perplexity
that Maimonides seeks to resolve in his magnum opus, The Guide for the
Perplexed. What is the purpose of religion if God is unchanging? How are to
understand prophecy if God doesn’t speak? What is providence if God doesn’t act
in history? And how are we to understand prayer if God is beyond our influence?
700 years ago
Maimonides offered an understanding of religion that speaks powerfully to us
today, maybe more than ever. Prayer doesn’t change God, it changes us. Prophecy
occurs when we use our hearts and minds to understand God’s ways. Providence is
when we live in harmony with nature and each other in accordance with that
understanding.
We can’t see God with
our eyes, or hear God with our ears, but we can feel God with our hearts, and
we can apprehend truth with our minds. And when we do, we will realize that God
is not revealed in miraculous events that disrupt the order of nature. The
order of nature itself in all its magnificence and splendor is miraculous,
wondrous, and amazing.
This is where the
religious impulse is born, in the realization that God’s infinite wisdom is
revealed before us to behold. And when we do, when we experience such awe, says
the Rambam, we “will immediately love, praise, and glorify God.” Prayer,
according to this understanding, is not an attempt to control God. It is a
response to the great wonder by which we live; to the realization that we are
not the center of the universe; that we are in fact tiny creatures who might
exclaim in the words of our neilah service
this afternoon, “O what are we that You have given us eyes to see something of
Your truth? What am I that you have given me thought to fathom something of
Your purpose?”
Prayer is not the
assertion of a proposition. It is an exclamation. Ma rabu ma’asecha Adonai, How manifold are your works, O God!
When prayer is the dry
repetition of words, it is lifeless. Prayer must be alive with emotion, with
feeling, with a sense of amazement. It won’t happen every time we pray. That is
simply too much to ask. But this must be our aspiration. As said Heschel, the
words of prayer must be a “challenge to the soul” that leads to “an outburst of
the heart.” Prayer is a call to remove the blinders that impede our vision of the
wonder of God’s creation.
But, “Prayer is no
panacea,” said Heschel, it is “no substitute for action.” On the contrary,
prayer is a call to action, a goad to conscience, and our rituals a rallying
cry to shatter the hardheartedness of our indifference to the pain and
suffering around us. God’s world is filled with such abundance, such beauty,
and such opulence. How outrageous then that so many of God’s children live in
squalor, plagued by war and discord and deprivation. “Prayer,” said Heschel, is
meaningless unless it is subversive, unless it seeks to overthrow and to ruin
the pyramids of callousness, hatred, opportunism, [and] falsehood.”[1]
Just before the
destruction of the 1st Temple, the prophet Jeremiah hears God’s call
to go to the Temple and warn the people of the calamity that is about to befall
them. They believe that they are immune to harm because God would never allow
the destruction of the place where God’s glory dwells. They think their
rituals, their sacrifices, will protect them. But Jeremiah says, “Don’t put
your trust in illusions and say, “The Temple of God, the Temple of God, the
Temple of God…” Rather, he says, ‘if you mend your ways and your actions; if
you execute justice between one person and other; if you do not oppress the stranger,
the orphan, and the widow… only then” will you have protection “will I let you
dwell in this place, in the land that I gave to your fathers…”[2] says
God.
God doesn’t need our
offerings and our prayers. They don’t affect God. They are supposed to change
us, to make us more sensitive. God abhors our sacrifices when they are pompous
ceremonies of self-righteousness, says Isaiah. “Your new moons and festivals
fill Me with loathing,” he says in the name of God. “Cease to do evil; learn to
do what is good. Devote yourselves to justice; aid the wronged. Uphold the
rights of the orphan; defend the cause of the widow.”
In the haftarah we are about to read, God tells
Isaiah to cry out, to tell the people of Israel that they are completely
misguided in their religious practice. They’re doing all the rituals. They’re
praying and fasting on Yom Kippur, and it isn’t working! They don’t feel the
nearness of God. “Why, when we afflict ourselves” they ask, “do You take no
notice?”
The answer is
powerfully clear, says Isaiah. God is not interested in your self-affliction.
God wants you to care for the afflicted among you. “…unlock the shackles of
injustice, undo the fetters of bondage, let the oppressed go free… share your
bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house. … Then when
you call, God will answer; when you cry out, God will say: ‘hineini, here I am.’”[3]
Like Jeremiah who went
to the Temple to denounce the misguided practices of the Temple, Isaiah
condemns the self-centered rituals of Yom Kippur, right in the middle of
service of Yom Kippur! And it is in that very same spirit that the rabbis chose this reading for the
synagogue on Yom Kippur. Could there be any clearer, more powerful statement of
the purpose of our rituals?
Our hearts must break
for the pain and suffering, the injustice and unfairness of life. God cannot
feed the hungry and clothe the naked unless we join with God to do so. We were
created to be God’s angels, God’s messengers, God’s hands in the world. And so
we must pray, not to move God, or to move mountains, but to move ourselves!
If this day is to
fulfill its purpose, if it is to be the Yom Kippur that Isaiah envisioned, that
truck outside should be so heavily laden with food that we have to make two
trips to the food bank. And when we next host IHN, when we shelter homeless
families here at temple, we should have to turn away volunteers.
There is a crisis of
prayer in our day. Fewer people, Jews and non-Jews alike, are actively choosing
to engage in prayer, especially in communal worship. Could it be a coincidence
that we are also experiencing a crisis of compassion, of active care and
concern for others? I think not! When our hearts are open to God they are also
open to one another.
As Heschel said, “In prayer, in the turning of
our hearts to God, we seek not to impose our will on God, but to impose God’s
will and mercy upon [ourselves].” And God, says our tradition, wants us “to do
justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with our God.”[4]
There is much more that
I could and should share with you about the meaning and purpose of prayer and
ritual. Some of that will have to wait for another time. But there is one more
aspect of prayer that I must reflect on briefly, and that is prayer as the outpouring
of our souls.
In the opening chapter
of the Book of Samuel, Channa goes to the Temple at Shiloh to pray because she
is desperate to have a child. Eli, the High Priest, sees her praying with great
passion and he thinks she is drunk, because in his world, if you make the right
offerings to God, and you are worthy, God will grant your wish. Channa insists
that she is sober, saying, “I have had neither wine nor liquor, but have been
pouring out my heart before God.”[5]
Sure enough, soon
after, Channa becomes pregnant and gives birth to a son, who grows up to be the
great prophet Samuel. Are we to believe that Channa’s prayer stormed the gates
of heaven and bent God’s will in her direction? It is tempting to think so. But
it’s highly problematic. What about all those Channas who never became
pregnant? Did God turn a deaf ear to their prayers? I don’t think so!
Channa pours out her
soul before God, not because she thinks her words will change God’s mind. If
that were her intent, she would have taken the conventional route and offered
sacrifice. She prays because she must, because she knows God cares, that God
loves her. Eli, The High Priest, is literally and figuratively blind. He
doesn’t see true spirituality when it’s right before his eyes. He is so caught
up in the formalities of the rituals of the Temple that he fails to see what
the prophets saw, what our rabbis understood, what the Rambam taught, and what
humble Chana knew— that prayer and ritual are about intimacy with God.
Precisely because God is so transcendent, we must bridge the gap to feel God’s
nearness, by opening our hearts and pouring forth our souls. It is in this way,
through us, that God becomes an active presence in our lives, and in the world.
Prayer is an urgency. A
necessity. It is, as Heschel says, “the home of the soul, its place of continuity,
permanence, intimacy, authenticity, [and] earnestness.”
Our words of prayer
will not change God, but they do have the power to inspire us, to heal us, and
to move us to be healers. No, our words of prayer and our rituals will not
change God. But they do have the power to change us, and that can change
everything.
V’chein yehi ratzon! Amen!
