{"id":63671,"date":"2019-09-29T16:42:32","date_gmt":"2019-09-29T13:42:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/?p=63671"},"modified":"2019-09-29T16:42:32","modified_gmt":"2019-09-29T13:42:32","slug":"prayer-the-ax-for-the-frozen-sea-inside-us","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/en\/prayer-the-ax-for-the-frozen-sea-inside-us\/","title":{"rendered":"Prayer: The Ax For The Frozen Sea Inside Us"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\u2026[A]s the old Yiddish saying goes, \u201cIf praying was reliable, they\u2019d be hiring people to pray!\u201d<\/p>\n

Instead, a commonly held view in Judaism is that we pray not so much to please or change God, but to change ourselves\u2014not because God needs our prayers, but because we do.<\/p>\n

We all go through times\u2014maybe even most or all of the time\u2014when, as Rabbi Shefa Gold puts it, we\u2019re \u201casleep to some extent, lulled by the constant din of media and commerce . . . constricted by past disappointments, habituated to a narrow version of reality, blind to the unexpected.\u201d<\/p>\n

We might be numb\u2014not feeling much of anything, good or bad\u2014or feel as if we\u2019re living life through a veil, and there\u2019s a dimness and dullness about the whole enterprise.<\/p>\n

Or we may feel a bit lost, as if the life we\u2019re living\u2014while objectively fine, or even quite impressive\u2014isn\u2019t really ours, but rather the product of other people\u2019s expectations, or of our own ideas about the kind of person we \u201cshould\u201d be.<\/p>\n

Life might feel safe and manageable this way, but it can also be empty and isolating\u2014like an affirmative answer to the poet Mary Oliver\u2019s devastating question, \u201cListen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?\u201d<\/p>\n

To me, this feels like being far from the Divine.<\/p>\n

Judaism does not want us to be far away like this, sleepwalking through our days in an unfeeling kingdom of one. And a key purpose of Jewish spiritual practice is, to borrow a phrase from Franz Kafka, to be \u201cthe axe for the frozen sea inside us.\u201d It\u2019s designed to wake us up\u2014to show us how far we\u2019ve wandered from the Divine (or if that doesn\u2019t work for you, from your truest self, your soul, the universe, etc.)\u2014and to help us return.<\/p>\n

The word \u201creturn,\u201d or \u201cteshuvah\u201d in Hebrew, is one we use a lot during the High Holy Days, when we focus on atoning for our sins. But it\u2019s actually a key point of prayer all year round\u2014to bring us back into sacred intimacy. In fact, the Hebrew word meaning \u201cto sacrifice\u201d\u2014what Jews did at the Temple in ancient times to worship God\u2014is \u201ckorban,\u201d which is derived from a root that means \u201cto bring close\u201d or \u201cto come close.\u201d Prayer, which took the place of sacrifices once the Temple was destroyed, serves the same function.<\/p>\n

So how, exactly, does Jewish spiritual practice wake us up and bring us closer to the Divine? I think it does so by connecting us more deeply to others and to ourselves; helping us cultivate gratitude, awe, and humility; and spurring us to take action.<\/p>\n

Excerpt from Sarah Hurwitz,\u00a0Here All Along: Finding Meaning, Spirituality, and a Deeper Connection to Life\u2014in Judaism (after\u00a0finally<\/u>\u00a0choosing to look there),<\/em>\u00a0Random House, 2019, p.\u00a0127<\/p>\n","image":{"ID":63589,"id":63589,"title":"Sarah Hurwitz cover","filename":"Sarah-Hurwitz-cover.png","filesize":0,"url":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/09\/Sarah-Hurwitz-cover.png","link":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/en\/discovering-millions-of-pages-and-new-old-ideas\/sarah-hurwitz-cover\/","alt":"","author":"7","description":"","caption":"","name":"sarah-hurwitz-cover","status":"inherit","uploaded_to":63586,"date":"2019-09-26 15:33:44","modified":"2019-10-22 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