Episode 30: Not a "T'fillah Person" (with Maharat Rori Picker Neiss and Rabbi Shai Held)

6:52PM Sep 13, 2022

Speakers:

Eliana Light

Shai Held

Rori Picker Neiss

Speaker

Keywords:

words

feel

people

shai

jewish

community

shabbat

prayer

shul

rabbi

life

meaning

liturgy

daven

experience

kids

thought

question

conversation

bracha

Shalom, everyone and welcome to episode 30 of the light lab podcast. My name is Eliana, coming to you so, so excited that we've reached this milestone and very excited to share this interview with you today that we conducted back at Passover. But before we jump into that, I just want to remind you at the top of the show that show notes are available, just click the link wherever you are listening to this now, we make sure to make the show notes very detailed so that you can dive deeper into all of the texts and the music and the liturgy and the organizations that we mentioned in every show. We work really hard on those, and we hope that it can enhance your learning with the podcast. We also have full transcripts that are searchable. So if there's a part that you want to remember, you want to remember a quote or you want to share it with someone who would rather read then listen, that is an option for you as well. Both of those can be found wherever you are listening to this podcast right now. So it's August. It's a long time since Passover, but for the past many many years, at least seven though I can't totally remember. I have had the absolute honor of spending Pesach at Camp Ramah Darom. Ramah Darom is two hours north of Atlanta in beautiful Clayton, Georgia in the mountains. It's the camp that I grew up at, and it functions also as a retreat center year round. And their Pessach retreat, my friends, is just an absolute delight and a privilege. Imagine all sorts of Jews coming together to learn and study and sing and pray. Plus, you don't have to clean or cook for Passover. It's really quite a joy. And one of the joys is the amazing teachers that are there. And so today I'm sharing an interview that we did live from Ramah Darom with Rabbi Shai Held and Maharat Rori Picker Nesis. Rabbi Shai held is president and dean at the Hadar Institute, Hadar, he's taught both theology and Halacha at the Jewish Theological Seminary, and also served as Director of Education at Harvard Hillel. He's a 2011 recipient of the prestigious Covenant Award for Excellence in Jewish education. He has been named multiple times to Newsweek's list of the 50 most influential rabbis in America. His first book, Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Call of Transcendence, was published by Indiana University Press in 2018. The heart of Torah a collection of essays on the Torah in two volumes, was published by JPS and 2017, both on my shelf both amazing reads, and his next book Judaism is About Love will be published by Farrar, Straus, & Giroux in 2023. Already excited for that, but perhaps Rabbi Shai Held is most known for providing the interstitials on my album songs about G?d, which also came from an interview that we did at camp. Such an amazing joy to talk to Rabbi Shai Held and also it's a double interview, my friend so so grateful to also chat with my friend Maharat Picker Neiss. She's the executive director of the Jewish Community Relations Council of St. Louis. Prior to that she was the director of programming education and community engagement at Beis Abraham congregation, a modern Orthodox Jewish synagogue and University City, Missouri. She is one of the first graduates of Yeshivat Maharat, a pioneering institution training Orthodox Jewish women to be spiritual leaders and halachic Jewish legal authorities. She previously served as acting executive director for Religions for Peace USA, program coordinator for the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance, Assistant Director of interreligious affairs for the American Jewish Committee and Secretariat for the International Jewish Committee on interreligious consultations, the formal Jewish representative and international inter religious dialogue. Rori is the co chair of the North American Interfaith Youth Network of Religions for Peace, a klal Rabbis Without Borders fellow and C0- editor of Interactive Faith, the essential inter religious community building handbook. What an incredible joy it was to spend Passover with Rabbi Held and Maharat Picker Neiss, or as you will hear me refer to them Shai and Rori, to spend Passover with them, two people who were kind of surprised that I asked them to talk about T'fillah We'll get more into that in this episode. I want to give a big thank you to Eliana Leader and Rachel Herman, who make the Passover retreat possible. And Rabbi Abe Friedman, another amazing friend and teacher who figured out how to get the technology to work so that we could record it and bring it to you. So without further ado, here is my interview with Rabbi Shai Held and Maharat Rori Picker Neiss, live from Ramah Darom.

Well welcome everybody to the light lab podcast. Thank you so much for being here, Rory and Shai!

Thank you for having us.

It's nice that we all just happened to be here at this wonderful place, Camp Ramah Darom, for Passover, so many amazing teachers. And I thought I would corner you and talk to you about T'fillah. And the thing I want to note for our listeners is, when I talked to both Shai and Rori about what we would be doing today, they both said, really me T'fillah, I don't really have a lot to say about that. That's not my thing, really. And I kind of took that to mean like, not really a T'fillah person. Right. And I want to ask both of you. What was your reaction when you heard this was going to be talked about? And what do you mean by that, that this isn't for you? Where are you? Rori why don't we start with you?

Sure. Well, it's really great to be with you, Eliana, I'm not sure exactly what I think of when I think of tefillah. But I think in the general sense, I think of it in the kind of all encompassing of liturgy, community practice, ideally, transcendent experience, those don't all actually have to go together. But I think in our idealized state, or at least in my idealized state, I think of it in that context. And I just don't know that I have anything really profound to add about that. Certainly, I've, I've participated in all of those, I've even I think had some of those really profound experiences. And it's not something where I have any sense of creativity around or really profound thoughts so much as I sometimes find myself in the right space at the right time, where it feels like a deep connection. And other times where I feel really distant from the words from the people from the community. And so my first reaction when you brought it up was just, I don't have anything insightful to add, I don't have anything particularly new to contribute to the conversation. And I think also a little bit of shame around not feeling like it's more of a part of my life in ways that I think people might think of me as having more of more tefillah experience.

Thank you. Shai, what about you?

So, I think the simplest way that I would put this is that I am more of a Beit Midrash Jew than a synagogue Jew, I'm more of a study hall learn person, that I am a shul person. Now, as I've gotten older, I find myself thinking more and more about what I call, at least in my own head, prayer fullness, and what it means to take an attitude of prayer of T'fillah into different aspects of our life, the experience of teaching is totally an experience of T'fillah. And I think for some people, that's naturally intuitive. What that means. For some people, that might sound completely crazy, but it means I'm sort of trying to put my soul on the line in an act of worship. I honestly feel often more prayerful in teaching, or in learning than I do in formalized T'fillah settings. Like Rori, there are moments where I'm at the right place at the right time, and it works for me. But it's not the primary place where I feel like I do my worship and and also not the primary place where I feel most nourished spiritually.

And it sounds like this idea of prayerfulness is something that has developed over time as you thought more about your teaching and your learning in that way. I'm wondering if we take it all the way back? What was T'fillah to you, when you were a child? What was your relationship to T'fillah growing up?

You know, it's interesting because I grew up in a non-observant home, going to Yeshiva Day School in Muncie. So I davennned a lot. But I got no reinforcement around its value for my family. So I actually, the truth is, and I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing, but my memories of T'fillah as a child are basically about learning a tremendous amount of liturgy by heart becoming fluent knowing my way around the Siddur you know, being able to just kind of you know, if I don't have a siddur, being able to dive in in that way. I don't really remember it being kind of spiritually uplifting until later in life when I was a - couple things ones went one one being in yeshiva and learning some different tunes for Kabbalat Shabbat and feeling like everyone was really there, you know, in a way that a spiritually intensive community is there. And then for reasons I can't really explain, Yamim Noraim as an undergraduate at Harvard Hillel is very, very, very, very moving to me. I felt connected to something or maybe better, Someone transcendent in a way that was not routinely available to me.

Do you find that having really learned the liturgy how to daven, quote unquote, as a child - do you think that made it so those experiences were more possible? Or in some ways, did they hinder those experiences?

I would say actually, both. On a good day, I'm not busy stumbling, trying to follow what's going on. So I'm able to sort of jump in. On a bad day, the words are overly familiar. And when the words are overly familiar, that's always an obstacle. Right? I you know, I often talk in my teaching about I one of the prerequisites for learning Torah, in a serious way is to defamiliarize oneself with what with what you think you already know. And I find that in davening, too, I've been trying lately, to just sort of like notice phrases that I think I know, and sit with them. Heschel talks somewhere about prayer as lingering upon a word. I've been trying to sort of do that more, as a way of rediscovering words that I seemingly know so well. But maybe I haven't heard all that they might have to say to me.

100%, right before this session that we're recording in this time at camp, we just spent an hour talking about betzet yisrael. And we probably could have spent the entire time on the first four lines. There's so much depth in there. We're gonna get back to Psalms in a second. But I want to ask you, Rori, what was your relationship to T'fillah growing up?

So I grew up in an orthodox household, I went to orthodox day school my whole life. And so T'fillah was a very, in some ways, rote. It was, it was a required part of our life. It was something that I think similar to what Shai described, it was something that I needed to learn. Interestingly, there's sort of a tension between, you're supposed to know it by heart, even though you're always supposed to use the book. But there was something about kind of you showed you accomplished it if you knew how to do it, even in your own head. And what's interesting is I'm reflecting listening to what Shai shared, we started going to an agudah, a very traditional kind of more Yeshivish right wing congregation when I was probably about 10. Most of my memories, though, were are really being there for prayer. And it was it was not a very songful community, it was a lot of kind of muttering it was a very insider community. No one ever announced page numbers, you would just kind of hear the mumblings. And that told you what section had just been finished, or what was just beginning. And that's how you knew what you were doing. And so you said it, because you were supposed to say it. And it was interesting for me when I went to college, going to a different congregation, an orthodox congregation near my dorm in Manhattan, and hearing them sing, and realizing that I knew the songs even though I had no memory of ever having sung those songs. And so there was something for me in that experience of kind of like a connection to history or a pull to both a history that was my own and maybe a history of a of a deeper past, I definitely have felt something really significant about what it is to go into a new space and suddenly still know all of the words, even. I don't just mean the words, because I mentioned memorizing liturgy, but being able to sing along to the songs, kind of finding yourself that everyone in the community is able to participate together. That's something that has been really meaningful for me. But in my family, when I was growing up, it was really much more about, did you say the words correctly in the right order in the right amount of time? And less as if there was some kind of ontological change that we were creating in the universe if we said this magical formula, and less, what was the experience for me, or what is the emotional reaction that I'm having to this process?

Yeah, that's kind of how I learned about the blessing formula. I think my teacher actually used the words, abracadabra, like this is the magic thing that creates it. So I kind of want to turn that on you. Let's use the blessing formula as an example, because that's very wide reaching and covers a lot of ground. What do you think is happening there? When you say a blessing, I know only light questions on this podcast. What is happening when you say a blessing or what could be happening?

I think in some ways, you know, one of the most beautiful teachings that I think of out sometimes for blessings, when I think about it, as a kid, we would talk a lot about blessings over food as the reminder that we don't, we don't totally own this, that there's whether it belongs to God. However we want to, I think that was the formula when I was a kid. But I'd like to think about it as something more broad than that. But also thinking about it in the sense then, when we say, the bracha over mitzvot, that there's also something about what it is to realize that we are accessing something that's bigger and broader than we are. I think for me, there's a certain sense of kavanah, of intention that should come with it of, what is it to say, I am preparing myself to engage in this mitzvah, which again, for me, I think, I think the deepest connection that I have is really to history, this feeling of I'm participating in a ritual or process that so many other Jews do today, but have done for so many millennia, in whatever version that looked like, and whether it was specifically my family or just this broader sense of family that we have. And so I think for me, the the intention that comes with that is this idea of, of accessing both something deeply sacred. I don't know if I know what that means. But I'm gonna use that term anyway. And also accessing a long history that I get to be a continuation of.

That's beautiful, wondering Shai if you have any thoughts on what we're doing when we make blessings.

You know, I think a lot about how in 20th century Jewish thought one of the things that happens is commonly a shift from what will happen as a result of my praying to what happens, potentially, to transform me through the act of praying itself. You know, Heschel has a passage in the preface to his book, Man's Quest for God, where he says, prayer may not save us, but prayer will make us worthy of being saved. That's an example that Rabbi Soloveichik talks in one famous essay about how the very act of speaking, my needs is redemptive, the redemption is not what happens as a response, the redemption is the verbalization of need. So I think about brachot in a similar way, and in a way, it's connected to something Rory said, which is, what is the kind of consciousness that it instills in me of God's presence of God's authorship of my life and of the world. And of that which nourishes me. It's definitely not an abracadabra that is not how I experienced what behold are about it. Really, brachot are a kind of Jewish mindfulness, mindfulness of God. And also, it's simply the fact that there are different brachot for different kinds of food is an invitation to certain kind of mindfulness about what I'm eating. Ideally, I think, you know, the Gemara says, somewhere that I've time when I forget now, where this is about how, just as you think the cook, you also thank the waiter, so who are the people? I wish I thought about that more when I make brachot to be honest, but who are the people who are responsible for my having the food, that I need something there that I think is also really powerful. It's it's, it's a kind of mindfulness and gratitude practice.

I want to connect these two threads. The idea that liturgy connects us to our past and to the Jews around us. And the idea that liturgy, can also connect us to God and connect us to source and be a mindfulness moment. And the fact that it sounds like the Jewish education that you both received didn't necessarily go down that route. Both of you have children. And I'm wondering, how have you? or have there been conversations around T'fillah? And what the role is, with your kids? How are they learning about T'fillah? And maybe even in an ideal scenario, what T'fillah education might look like, for kids, something I think about a lot. But I don't have any kids. And you do. So I'm really interested to hear what you have to say.

It's a hard it's a hard question for me, because I don't know if my kids are getting the T'fillah education that I'd like them to have. I love that. Well, let me let me back up to say, my kids are in a community day school. And so a lot of the T'fillah education that they're getting formally is coming from a school setting. And the T'fillah that we maybe would do together is more at home around things like brachot and birkat hamazon after meals. Some going to shul together but even that, where are the kids and what's the education so most of it's really coming from school. They're in a community day school, which I love for the fact that it embraces the diversity of the Jewish community. And I think has really given my kids a deep personal connection to tT'fillah. Where starting in maybe even second grade or third grade, they get to lead parts of T'fillah and give some of their own interpretation of T'fillah, which I think is a deep sense of ownership. And then starting in third grade, they get to read from the Torah and also similarly have this deep connection themselves to the chanting and the teaching of the Torah. I think similar to what you said, Shai, I think also I relate much more to the, the engagement with the text than the rote words that are given. And I also do think of a certain sense of Jewish literacy. What does it mean, as I said before, to walk into a space and know what's happening, know what you're up to know the words that people are saying? I kind of love that, around holidays, when somebody will take a tune from a holiday and then put it to a part of T'fillah that I didn't know could go together. And I can sing along because I know the tune. And I know the words, even though I've never put them together. And I feel a bit at a loss because I'm not sure that my kids have that literacy. And so what I would like my kids to be able to do and what my kids are currently able to do, are probably disconnected and so I feel uncomfortable, really knowing how to properly answer that question. What I will just add to it is that one of the things we started doing much better during the pandemic is benching altogether. I'm saying the Berakhot hamazon after meals on Shabbat. And that's been like a really nice experience of realizing that my kids, I think we're only probably doing a truncated version at school. And, and again, where for me, I think the experience of it was helping them to learn the words, but more than that was actually building memories of doing this together as a family on Shabbat after a wonderful meal. And it's hard for me because I don't feel like I have the access to that to do that on a daily T'fillah way, in the same way. Which is probably on me of just feeling too busy in the mornings. I'm sure if I really was dedicated to it, I could. And so I feel guilty because we haven't built that in the family in the way that now you're getting me to think more deeply about.

I find this to be a very difficult question. And one of the reasons I mean, I can talk more, some of what Rori said, I totally resonates with me from my own experience as well. But one of the things I think it's okay for me to say this, my 12 year old son is a little bit of an extreme version of me, in that he, on his own voluntarily goes to Rabbi Bill Levin's lecture on Heschel as part of his experience of being here. But he said to me the other day, and my favorite part of davening is when I realize it's almost over. It's just not, I can't find an access point in him right now to connect to it. So then my hope is that he becomes literate in it. But he's in what effectively is a community day school and, you know, there are pieces he's literate in in those pieces he's not literate in. I mean, some parents would envy me during shul, this past Shabbat. He spent the entire two and a half hours reading chumash. He didn't daven, but he wasn't out running around with his friends, either. He was he was learning. And you know, this, I sort of feel like I've gotten my divine come up and says that my son is like a parody of me. So it's, it's really, really hard. I almost I wish I could depend on school, to give my kids what my school gave me. I didn't learn liturgy from my parents, I learned a lot of things about Judaism from my parents, but liturgy was decidedly not one of them. I never saw Shabbos Kiddush until I was 13. And yet, I'm not sure the school can do that, at the level that I'd like it to do it. And what the challenge there is, he's not motivated to own that, at this stage of life. Hs younger siblings, somewhat more so. But it's hard. There's there's not a seamlessness, the seams can be seen. You know, my youngest son is very sweet. You know, one of things I think that probably a lot of community schools do, which I certainly never did as a kid is they make their own Siddur. And he's very, very proud of his and he likes you know, Kabbalat Shabbat like he waits for the tefillot that are in there. And that's totally lovely. And we daven Kabbalat Shabbat at home, I hope, I thought what Rori said was very powerful. It's exactly how I experienced some of this, which is, I hope that I'm making memories for them. With daven and Kabbalat Shabbat with me of benching, you don't know what experiences your child children are most going to remember. That's part of what it means to raise kids is you just you cede control on some level. You try to instill what you value and what you care about. And you also realize that they're going to take what they take and leave what they leave, and you have less control over that then you might fantasize that you do.

Yeah, thank you both. It is a difficult question. I think it's one we don't talk about enough. When I work with schools, it's kind of obvious to them that T'fillah is something that they should be focusing on. In day schools, it seems to be as challenging as in supplementary schools where they only have a couple of hours a week. What do we do to balance the need for literacy, and the need for meaning making? Because I went to a day school as a kid, and there was davening every day. And most of the kids kind of knew the davening, generally. And then senior year, they decided on Fridays, they would divide the whole high school into groups, and we would each get assigned a judaics teacher. And we could just talk about whatever we wanted with the judaics teacher for 45 minutes. And we talked about God. And we talked about prayer. And we talked about what prayer is. Anyway, we talked about all of these incredible things. And at the end of the semester, I remember the teacher that had been assigned to my group saying, wasn't this great? Wasn't this great to get to talk about the meaning behind all of this stuff that we made you do for so many years? And there was a student in my class who said, it's too late. It was too late! It wasn't enough! For a lot of years, we just did the thing. You never told us why we were doing it. You're now after the fact you're gonna say this is why? It's too late.

Yeah, I I'm not so sure that things are always better in day schools, then in afternoon schools around T'fillah. I have never met a head of school, who has said, oh, yeah, we have T'fillah down. Everyone, if you get them in a moment of honesty talks about the same thing. I don't really know how to do this. I hear it all the time. All the time. It's probably exaggeration. But I mean, I, where I've taught a lot of educators, and it comes up a lot. You know? Okay, so in an orthodox day school, maybe you force the kids to say more words per day than at a community school. But there's a cost to that, which is often kids feel like they're being forced to do something that they don't find meaningful. And they don't really understand why they have to do it. Certainly think back on my experience as a high schooler at Ramaz. I mean, there were teachers who walked around, we experienced them as police officers, who forced us to have our eyes on the page. Never really talked about or put it this way. If we did, I don't remember it never really talked about what are you doing when you pray? I don't remember that at all. Well, I think that's a problem too.

100%. And that's exactly, exactly why but that's one of the reasons why these conversations, I think is so important to realize, T'fillah is one of those words, like prayer, or God, that we all say it, and we assume we know what we mean by it, when in fact, we either have very different definitions, or we haven't thought about it at all. And we make a lot of assumptions about, about what we're doing when we pray. I'm wondering, Jewish tradition is so vast and so deep, there is so much that a teacher or a school could decide to teach children about Judaism. And you're right, even though Day School technically has a little more time, it's still the same issue. Why do you think, then, that there are so much emphasis put on T'fillah education because we think of a regular supplementary school, maybe they have two hours a week, in a usual school half an hour to 45 minutes? Or even more than that, depending on if their Hebrew is T'fillah based, which is a whole other conversation. Why is there so much focus on T'fillah at all, even like, let's not take it for granted that we're doing this at all?

Well, there I think, one one aspect of this is that certainly among more liberal Jews, shul is the Jewish thing they mainly do during the week. So if you want to prepare a kid to participate in their parents Conservative synagogue, which they go to on Saturday mornings, right, so you want to prepare them to, in theory, at least be literate in the central Judaic activity of their week. I think that's part of it. I'm not sure I would say that's the ideal centralized Jewish activity for their week in the 21st century, I would be more concerned with whether my kids want to learn with whether my kids make brachot. I think making brachot is an easier sell, even if it's harder to get to, to instill the habit is an easier sell than a full Jewish liturgy full of bakashot, right, full of requests. Right? You know, it's interesting, this is maybe too far afield for your podcast. But I recently had a conversation with a head of school of an orthodox school, Orthodox high school who came to talk to me about how he's come to realize reluctantly, that all the attention on Talmud, in Orthodox high schools, for 75% of the kids at least is misguided, and a terrible use of time. Because they don't actually learn the skills and they don't fall in love with it. And what is the universe in which he could convince the faculty and the parent body that the kids would be better served as they spent more time learning Tanakh and Jewish thought? And one of the things he said to me that was interesting was, it's a bit of a culture problem, because all the schools weigh themselves against each other by how much time would they cover? And he was like, I want to get off that train, and I don't think I can get the parents to get off it with me. That was really interesting to me. Because, you know, it's it's not like we your question, I think points to the fact that a lot of us are not really sure. Even even if we were not going to spend as much time on T'fillah, what will we do spend the time on? I mean, I would be inclined, the reason he came to talk to me is because I would be happy to do a curriculum on Tanakh and Jewish thought, that's my life. Right? But it's not so simple. And I think if you go back to what Rori and I both said, I don't think doing away with T'fillah is in any way an answer, you want kids to become literate at the central communal activity of the Jews. But I just think it's really hard. And maybe we need to be more experimental with what it is we're doing. And maybe we need to spend more time talking to kids about what's your experience of this? What happens? What doesn't happen, for that matter? You know, one thing I've wondered about a lot, I remember having doing a day of learning with the faculty at the Carmel school in Connecticut, which is now defunct, but one of the things that I talked to some of the teachers about a bunch of the teachers were like, I'm afraid to talk to the kids about God, because I'm confused myself about God.

Yeah.

And I said, you know, what, you're in a community school, if you are able to develop way to be articulate about your own confusion, maybe you want to share it with them, they might actually feel invited to be served searchers and seekers that way. Tell them about how, yeah, like, I reach out to God when I'm praying. And then there's moments when I don't know if there's, like, talk to them. I'm not saying say that to a first grader. But you could say that to some seventh graders, maybe that's a good thing, maybe actually, let them feel like, you're not just someone standing over them, you know, beating down on them saying this is what you must do, maybe you could say, let's try to figure this out together, maybe that would be a good thing, they would actually feel like they were in community with you, rather than being policed by you.

So what I want to jump on in that is I think, I think Shai is touching on something really important, which is, how difficult this is, and how scary it is for most of us to do this. And in many ways, how ill equipped most of our Jewish education structures are, I don't know how you measure that, right? People are gonna measure by the end, you know, you can test somebody on whether or not they can recite the Shema. But you can't really evaluate whether or not they've -

Excepted the kingdom of heaven.

Exactly, exactly. And so part of that, I think, is very much a culture shift within the community of how do we as, as the adults as the parents, also, right, what does it mean for me to know that my kid is going to come home from school, and that I'm not going to call the teacher really angry, because my kid doesn't know the words of Shema? Or my kid doesn't know, right? Whatever it is that I think of as my standards, or my kid came and sat next to me during services on Shabbat and asked me what was going on? And how dare I pay enough money? How dare they asked me a question when you should have taught them all of this. But I think that's very much part of the culture that we've created. I also think, part of T'fillah in my experience, and I'm grappling with how I want to say this, so I might say this incorrectly, but it is that not all of those experiences are going to be great experiences. And that part of the process is one of sort of investments so that, then when you have that really great experience, it's almost all the better. And so I'm also not willing, and maybe I'm clinging too much. And I'm part of that sort of path that we're also talking about. But I'm not willing to completely give up on wanting my kids to have some access point to the words as well. And what I'm thinking about in particular, Eliana, when you first asked about this, and you were talking about kind of different T'fillah experiences, part of what I started to think about what came to my mind, were situations where in St. Louis, we had crisis moments that we needed to gather the community. And usually, it was an interfaith gathering, we somehow felt like it was important to have other faith communities stand alongside us. But where it was very much a Jewish moment. And where I would work together with other rabbis to create some kind of ritual, there's no prayer that's formally for this moment, craft a ritual that would somehow be meaningful. And the truth is, is that the only reason why those rituals were meaningful was because we access something that in some ways people already knew. So for example, I remember after the horrific shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue and putting together a memorial service, so we're not we were in St. Louis, we're not in Pittsburgh, and lighting candles and other things that took place but particularly I remember having this kind of intense conversation about how we were going to end and talking about that we were going to do the Kel Malei prayer and that there wasn't because the funeral had not happened yet. We couldn't do a Kaddish yet. And sort of like all of this different talk. It was it was sort of interesting, there was kind of like there was like holistic aspect to it. But what I think touch people was that people had heard I mean for the Jewish people in the audience, they knew what the Kel Maley meant, even if they didn't know what the words meant, right? It evoked something for them. We had a cemetery that was desecrated, and we did like a rededication of the cemetery. And in that we used Kaddish, and what it meant to kind of use Kaddish to sort of evoke this feeling of like laying people. No one was unburied. But - But tombstones were destroyed, and people felt like the resting place of their loved ones was was upset, and therefore their people were not resting at peace, and what was it to kind of re-concentrate the space. And those things worked, because those prayers meant something for them at a different point in time, to the point where, for me, when I think about some of those, like really powerful T'fillah experiences, I remember being at the cemetery, and doing this program. And I remember going home afterwards, and I turned to my husband, I turned to Russell and I said, we finished it, we did it. Like I felt I felt like we had whatever had been disrupted, we had re-calmed, I don't know the right word for that. But but like somehow, like I felt the energy shift, I felt something profound that had happened. And I don't know what we would have used if I didn't have tools in my tool chest to access. Now, does that mean that we should have years and years and years of saying these words, mindlessly just for that one moment? I don't think that's the right answer either. But somehow there has to be a balance. And I don't know exactly what it looks like. But I think of giving people a chance to access this directly for themselves. I'm still not willing to throw it away. If they say, You know what, that's not my cup of tea. Because there's something bigger that I feel happens as a community when we have these words that bring us together. But I can't force people to like the words if they don't. And so I'm holding all of those.

Yeah, I think actually, something Rori already said just crystallized for me, something that I've been groping fora way to say, which is the negotiation between skills and meaning is extraordinarily difficult to negotiate. And in a lot, a lot of liberal settings, you end up erring on the side of meaning, but then there's no skill set there to work with. And a lot of traditional settings, you end up erring on the side of skill sets. But then there's not really an ability to have a conversation about meaning. And there's some kind of dance around those two axes, that ideally, we'd all be groping with how to quite, I don't know how to finish the sentence exactly. But how to have those two axes, live in some kind of relationship to each other that works.

Yeah. That's I think, one of the reasons that I'm convening these conversations is to be groping with them, to be talking about it. The story about the teacher who was worried about sharing what they thought about God, because they too, were wrestling with it, I hear that a lot from teachers. And the same thing is true with T'fillah. A lot of either young teachers or teachers who have been teaching for a long time, but who might not have a personal relationship with T'fillah. Also, it's interesting, you mentioned a family who may be their primary primary mode is going to show on Shabbat, in a lot of the congregations I work with, that's not the parents' primary mode at all. It is really only the child that is doing T'fillah on a regular basis. And that adds another layer of attempting to convey the importance of something to a child when they're not really feeling that important in the rest of their life. That's even another added layer.

Well, that's, I think, the great problem of Hebrew schools in general. And for that matter of community day schools. Kids always know what their parents do and don't really care about. I mean, I've I've said a few times, and I, you know, I've nothing empirical to back this up with. But if you want your kids to care about Hebrew school more, have them, have them see you reading a Jewish Book for 30 minutes every night. That will do a trick, right? In other words, it's the whole notion that you can get a school to instill a value that parents themselves don't have is, I think, a fantasy that we've seen in Jewish education again, and again and again and again. You can't do that just doesn't work.

Yeah, I totally agree. And with T'fillah, I think there's the added layer of B'nai mitzvah, in terms of getting off the train, right? Where for an orthodox day school that might be Talmud. For Hebrew school, it's T'fillah for the sake of having a B'nai mitzvah, and whenever I talk to a school and say, let's have a deep conversation about what T'fillah is for you, and how we can craft a curriculum that actually speaks to what you want to speak about with T'fillah. The pushback is always but what about B'nai mitzvah? And that pushback is but what about the parents? And I'm, I'm wondering then, in terms of the relationship between the literacy and the meaning, more about you personally now kind of bringing it back to that, the relationship between one might call it the kavanah, the intention, the prayers of your own heart and the word on the page, and the liturgy that we've been handed down. What are you - What are you doing with the words as you say them? Like if you had to use some sort of metaphor or idea of the relationship between yourself and the words of the Siddur, how might you? How might you say that? I know that's a complicated question. But what are the words do for you? Are they a conduit? Are they the things you were actually praying? What happens if you come across a line that doesn't fit with your heart at that moment?

You're not going easy on us.

No, never.

I don't know that there's one answer to your question. Because I think each experience of T'fillah can be different. And I think that's important also, I don't think that any of us should ever maintain only one experience of T'fillah. I think, for me, it's something I think about, interestingly, because a lot of my work is with Christian communities. And I always find it fascinating when somebody will want to start off even a meeting with prayer, and especially the want to be really polite, so they'll invite me like, like to be inclusive, which already, like, I don't do that, right. So like you're being polite. But the only way then for me to pray in that setting is to either like pick a part of davening that like is going to totally not make sense in this context. Or you're asking me to pray as a Christian, right? Because then I'm gonna say, like, Father in heaven, thank you for gathering, right? Like, like, then it's their words. It's not my words. But I say that because I do think it's interesting for me, I don't have spontaneous prayer. I don't insert my own words. I do have perhaps a meditative prayer, although I hesitate with that, because I don't think of myself as a person who meditates but in the sense that I think that having the words that I say, that are given to me, both helped me think about what it is that maybe I want to be focused on similar to even in this conversation, Shai says something, it reminds me of something and then I can build off of it. So now the rabbi's have given me words, that makes me think, yeah, I do want to actually ask for that, or reflect on that or be grateful for that. And that's going to be a place that's going to allow me to, in my mind, weave off from that. Sometimes it's just a place to focus myself so that then my mind can wander or I can think but I remain grounded in this particular text. And sometimes it just becomes a way to say, I need to maintain this because I'm not in what I would consider to be like a prayerful moment. But like I referenced before, they're not going to always come. And these words are sort of a way to maintain the relationship, right? Like not every text exchange or phone call with a friend is going to be the most insightful one. But sometimes it just kind of reminds each other that you're there. And then maybe next time, when we talk, we're gonna like really get into something deeper. And I think to realize all of those things at different times for me.

I don't actually feel I have so much to add to what Rori just said, honestly. I think there are times when I'm feeling an urge to express something and I find the words a good conduit or not for expressing it. There are times when I'm not feeling something, and I find the words an effective way of awakening in me there, for example, there are times I don't feel like saying thank you. And actually kind of waking up in the morning and saying modeh ani when I'm feeling kind of frustrated or resentful, is like an important practice for me. So it's, you know, it works in both ways, from me to the liturgy, and from the liturgy to me. There are experiences where I just think about what it means to be part of a covenant that goes vertically and horizontally through history. And that, you know, somewhere in India, now, and somewhere in Czechoslovakia, 600 years ago, someone was using the same words more or less, to try and be connected to God, I find that idea very moving, it doesn't always work for me as a experientially powerful. But when I think about that there's something really important there. I think, also, that some liturgical expressions are an attempt to transport ourselves for a short time into a different reality. I think about this in the context of Az Yashir, the Song of the Sea, which is I think, supposed to essentially, on some level, bring us back to the experience of having just been redeemed from slavery. And then you come back and it's Tuesday morning, and in some ways the interesting question is so what is Tuesday morning going to look like now that you've Just been redeemed from slavery. Now does that work often? It doesn't. One of the things not for me, at least. The idea is extremely moving to me, learning about that teaching about that is very prayerful for me to go back to where I started. I think, you know, anthropologists sometimes talk about this about how ritual gives us another world to live in. And those moments are rare for me. Probably I've had I've had the most often when I was younger, and I was in shul for Kabbalat Shabbat every week. And I actually felt, Oh, I'm being moved into a different order of reality now called Shabbat. That is not something that is as frequently alive for me anymore. At least not at this stage of my life. I think I've said this to you before, I joke that I sometimes want to write a book called daven before you have kids. You but you know, it's it's it's complicated. But - But I do think that there is something there, the aspiration to allow the words, to simply take you somewhere else, to a different order of time, whether it's having just experienced the exodus in the past, or entering the redemption of Shabbat in the future, and making the past and the future present.

I'm thinking about what you're saying, and I can't help but wonder if, I started off by saying that I had a certain sense of shame when you asked me to do this, because I don't feel like I have this deep prayerful experience. And hearing you talk about that. While I love what you said, and I find it to be incredibly beautiful. The thought that went through my mind was, you can't do that every day. I mean, because to do that -

You do that every day in the hopes that sometimes it will do that for you.

Exactly. But but you actually can't transcend every day. Because you have to go to work, or you have to, I mean, I think about this a lot like with with Yamim Noraim, like, we're going to take off this time, and we're going to try to create the most intensive, immersive, prayerful physical experience. And we're going to pick particularly with Yom Kippur, we're going to pick one day to do this. Because if you actually thought about your mortality every day, you'd never do the laundry, right? Like, if I thought today was the last day of my life, I wouldn't be spending it buying groceries or making dinner. And, and you have to, you have to do all of those things. So yes, I, I, I'm just reflecting even in within this conversation. I mean, I agree, I think part of it is that you're doing it so that you can open yourself up for those times. But I'm thinking about the ways in which even in this conversation we're grappling with, how do we give this over to our kids in a way where they have a sense of meaning? Or what are the ways that I feel at a loss because I don't always find that meaning. And also now recognizing just in this conversation, that it's not sustainable to live your life with that meaning at all times and actually exist in the world in any productive fashion.

Yeah. Well, I, I totally agree about the Yom Kippur piece. I feel like I've heard many rabbis over the years, say things like you should live every day as if you know, it would be our last, which I think is impossible and undesirable. I totally understand the impulse to say that, I think you should have built into your life the reminder that today could be your last day of your life occasionally. It will keep order being the most dramatic example. I mean, imagine wearing a shroud every day, you can't live your life that way. Right. So but wearing a kittel once a year is a totally different undertaking. I agree with that. I think that my response to what Rori has just said is, the funny thing is that intellectually, it's convincing to me, and experientially it's not convincing at all. Intellectually, what's convincing to me is, is is the reality that if you don't do it regularly, you will never have the experience right? You need the keva for the kavanah to happen. You need kind of fixity for spontaneity to emerge. I don't love the percentages in my experience. Right. It's like a lot of fixity for not that much kaanah, that's the struggle for me. I mean, I am not blaming that on liturgy. I've that's my own shortcoming I think, but or maybe it is, maybe it isn't. I don't know. But it's one of the reasons why I would say I'm sometimes a little skeptical of the way in which people often talk about, it's a very American way of talking. I only do liturgically, what's meaningful to me. First of all, you can't have a community or a structure if it's only based on what's meaningful to you. And second of all, if your search is for meaning, you need structures in your life to make meaning possible. You can't say I'm going to pray only when davening is meaningful to me because how will davening become meaningful to you? Right? It's It's a kind of paradox here that I think it's actually really important. This even the rabbi's were onto something with keva and kavanah. Even if someone wants to argue that there's too much keva not enough kavanah. Right? They were on to some kind of insight here about, you know, I think what - Heschel has this sentence somewhere: spontaneity is the goal, but continuity is the way. And it's precisely in the in the, in the comma, between those two clauses that so many of us struggle so much. It's not that the point is false. It's just that it's hard.

So it's part of what we need to think about more how to be more okay with an okay davenning experience. I guess, I guess, like, that's part of what I'm sort of asking in this is that it seems like we're sort of, we aspire to these transcendent experiences, but we set them up as the goal. And you're right, I think the percentages for me as well, they're, the odds are not always they're not in my favor, very frequently, they certainly happen, but they're not in my favor. But if if that's - if we're only going to dvaen when we're going to have the transcendent experience, we never get to the transcendent experience. And we don't know when we start often where we're going to end up. And so maybe part of this conversation, particularly around education, and I'm thinking about my kids who try something new for the first time and get enormously frustrated with it, and I have to keep on reminding them, no one is great at something the first time they do it, and that these are all learning experiences. Just sort of how do we also instill with this balance to say, also there is there's something that's meaningful, not because it's ontological, not because for me, I don't It's not like if I don't say the prayers in the morning, the world is going to stop turning on its axes. It's not like my words are what's, you know, keeping God going or anything like that. I don't have enough ego to think that that, like my davening is necessary in that way. But but somehow to find meaning also, in the davening, that doesn't feel meaningful. Like, how do we get comfortable to say, in the way that it's okay, right, like to kind of you finish and you sort of go Okay, today, today? That's fine. We're good. We'll see what tomorrow brings.

Can I add a layer on to that? Because that's really interesting. I would want to counter that with, well, especially if we're thinking in a communal context, what would make davening more meaningful? Is there anything that we could actually do as communities to make davening, quote, unquote, better? Whatever that might mean? Which is already a loaded term? Are there things going on? And you can think about personally in the communities you're a part of, where it's okay, if you don't have an answer, because it's something really big? What might make communal davening better? And what does it mean even mean better?

I would say two things about to take an example of the synagogue that I mostly go to. One is, it must be shorter. You cannot have a Shabbat morning davening that is two hours and 45 minutes or more, you can't do it. It's not fair. It is basically asking people to be bored, nobody can pray for two hours and 45 minutes in a row, nobody. And also, a shul cannot be centered around Bar mitzvah kids. That has broken liberal Judaism, on all its forms, it is broken by the bar mitzvah cycle, totally broken. It's very hard, because that's what many of the parents who joined those shuls and who pay the rabbi's salary want the shul to be. But let's not kid ourselves. That's not what keeps people alive in some kind of spiritual practice or avodat hashem whatever language you want to use. That's just right off the bat. I would say, you know, in some ideal world, less narration, we don't have to hear from me, this is less true in orthodox shows, but we're gonna have to hear from clergy every three seconds, when there's prayer going on. It's just it's the mistake. It's it's, it's disruptive rather than inspirational at a certain point.

I agree with all of those things. I'm trying to reflect on my own experiences to think about what it is that makes them better. And I'm struggling with that question. I think there's something to be said also, in my mind about - Look, I think we have to think about what it is to pray as a community versus praying as an individual, or how we define even community, what is it to pray at home as a family, why are we coming together as a community, and that somehow that should be enhanced by coming together as the community, which I think is really at the core, a lot of what Shai is bringing up in terms of yeah, I don't feel like my prayer is enhanced when it is constantly interrupted. For me it is communal singing, many voices coming together, being able to then feel the words in a different way, because the tune might bring us to a different place or because just hearing the collective, the voice reminds me that I'm connected to some kind of greater whole. All of those things, I think do enhance the experience for me, certainly kiddush afterwards and gathering and being able to chat and all of those things. I mean, for me, I think it's it's deeply one of if I'm going to pray as a community, it's because I very much want a communal experience. And so what is it to actually feel somehow connected to the community in that process?

Beautiful. Friends who are here in this live podcast taping, wondering if anyone has any questions?

I'm wondering how you all think the pandemic has changed our relationship to T'fillah both individually and collectively?

I know that I can just start by saying, I know the pandemic has changed my relationship with prayer. I mean, I think for me, I just started I just finished by saying that I think the communal experience is really significant. And so losing the community was very intense. And I think also, what is it to try to find the words to pray when we're all suffering, struggling, questioning, and we're doing that separately, and not, not quite knowing how to find that path, perhaps. I know, for me, there was a really big setback in just feeling like, these words didn't feel like they really had meaning if I wasn't together with others, and then transformed when I realized that it was then for me to create that experience with my kids. Um, so I mentioned earlier, a lot more of trying to both daven and learn together as a family and the memories that we built alongside it. I kind of love the fact that we started studying parsha together at lunch on Shabbat. And at some point, I was like, we're not supposed to be studying Torah until we make a bracha on that. And, and now like my kids will, you know, they'll, they'll remind me if I forget to start with the bracha. And it's cute, because at one point, I don't know if they intuited or somehow, right, I mean, the rabbi's when we say the bracha on Torah as part of the morning davening, they then give us some Torah that you're supposed to say immediately afterwards, I was just saying the bracha. And then we were jumping into parsha. But at one point, because one of the kids was studying, as I mentioned, in the school, they would leyn, and so one of the kids like as soon as we, we said the bracha, and then one of them started going, bereshit barah elokim et hahsamayim ve'et haaretz, and it was like this kind of beautiful of like, you know them kind of jumping in with some of their own Torah and things like that. So that really changed the way that I thought about it, realizing that as opposed to being just a consumer of the experience, that I could be a creator and a producer of the experience that in fact, I had to be a creator and a producer of the experience was really transformational. And I'll also say that now that we're in a space of, of coming back in whatever form that is, I'm thinking about it particularly like being here at this Passover experience with a few hundered people, like what it has meant to be able to daven together with a crowd is something that I don't take for granted. And and to hear the communal voices in a way that I think I access a deeper experience easier just because what it is to hear more than four voices at one time already just feels meaningful and maybe even somewhat miraculous.

Yeah, I think that's a beautiful answer. I don't have so much to add, maybe I'll just kind of come at this from a very different angle. Sociologically speaking, I worry. And I've heard many rabbis worry, at least in confidence, that many reform and conservative Jews who have not gone to shul in two and a half years are not coming back. That a lot of liberal synagogues are in for a very rude awakening. That is that people who often went to shul because they found it meaningful or for some other reason like that, but not because they felt it was an obligation that some of those people may be lost to shul. And that has implications not just for prayer experience, big cavernous spaces with very few voices. Right? But also for the reality of functioning of synagogues, budgets, memberships, I think, the implications of COVID for the long term health of non orthodox synagogues in this country. We're not going to know the answer to that for a while, but the answers will be felt for a very long time. I think also, one of the things that I think about just personally, is the sheer complexity of what zoom did. Because on the one hand, we all survived the pandemic because of zoom, in some really fundamental way. I mean, I spend a lot of time during the pandemic thinking if this had been 30 years ago, how much harder would it actually have been school-wise, community-wise learning-wise, connecting, even with friends or family wise all these ways, one of the things that Zoom did I mean, it's not, this is not something that I feel halakhically comfortable with. But one of the things that Zoom did is allow a lot of people to come together without coming together. And yet, one of the things that COVID reminds us of, I think, is or has reminded us of is how powerful it is to actually come together to be with other people who have bodies and spirits and are together. And I hope we don't end up permanently losing some of the ways we came together as communities. Because at the end of the day, at the end of the day, it's kind of an inadequate substitute. I worry about that I worry about what's happened. And even I am involved in running an educational institution. And on the one hand, the letters I've gotten from people about how COVID has ironically enabled them to be part of Hadar. People with chronic illnesses who say, you know, now I can take classes, this has been incredible for me. And I know, we can't ever go back to not offering that access. But I also hope that people don't stop coming to our in person experiences. Because something else is possible there that isn't possible on Zoom. And I don't think any of us knows yet what it's gonna look like. That's really hard. There's a lot of I think, uncertainty going forward.

We have time for one more question. Or two, if either if you want to ask a question, I bet we can squeeze it in.

I'm curious if there's a person or a resource that either I turn to when you're seeking inspiration, within a either a having more of a guide consciousness, or in immersive T'fillah.

One of the things that's been interesting for me to wrestle with in the last few years, is how formative Carlebach's music was for me, religiously, is for me religiously. And yes, I know, it's not the most musically sophisticated music in the world. And that's part of its power for me, because even someone like me who's not that musical, can actually learn the davening and right get inside the music. And I don't have any interest or expertise or clarity on a lot of the questions around should we shouldn't we all those questions, I think, are really important and difficult. I take really seriously the generation of my students that says we absolutely shouldn't be using his music anymore. I don't know if I agree, but I hear it loud and clear. But it is it is disorienting to me in a way that for so many years. Like if I was feeling disconnected from davening I would like listen to Shlomo - daven not the stories, that was never my thing with him. Just I just found some of those melodies. incredibly, incredibly helpful. I remember falling in love with Kabbalat Shabbat when a teacher of mine did Lecha Dodi to the to the tune of Carlebach's Eishet Chayil tune. Lecha dodi likrat kallah penei shabbat nekabelah. That was a really, I don't know what it was, I remember, I remember like it was yesterday, 35 years ago being a human being like - Whoa, I don't know where I just went. I don't know what just happened. I've been, I would say, trying to figure out what the substitute is. For me with that. Joey Weissenberg's music that's incredibly beautiful and virtually powerful. It's harder for me to learn because I'm not musical. That's complex music, or at least it's richer, musically, to be sure. And a lot of his niggunim are very powerful to me, but they require much more effort for me than Carlebach did. Yeah, I don't know. You know, it's telling about me, and it goes back to where I started that. I keep thinking I should say, oh, but what are the books that I'm learning now? What are the sefarim that are inspiring me? Because that's ultimately what makes me feel prayerful. But that's not I suspect what you mean by the question, you're talking about somehow liturgically. So I would say I'm trying to find my way into something to take the place that Shlomo 's music used to play in my life.

I don't know if I have a good answer to that. And maybe that also says something that I don't have a place that I feel that I turn to in those moments. I also don't know that I even think, in the context of your question, like I don't know that I think about having like a God consciousness that, that I'm looking to access more deeply not because they don't think about God. But I think for me, God is something so big and so abstract that I don't think I'm capable of comprehending in limited human capacity that I just, I don't try and so for me the way I try to access God is through, hrough text, through learning, through through words that the rabbi's have given us, whether it's liturgical words, or whether it's its words of teaching. And that gives me a space to maybe in the process, try to find myself more. There are people doing really good work in this. And I wish I had a list of people. And I think that again, that just says something about the rush of my everyday life, I don't take an hour out of the day to sit and think about this or reflect on it. And I don't even know that I have a daily, you know, kind of real davening process to attempt that, I wish I don't know if I wish. But you know, in this conversation, I wish I had a good answer to say, you know, when I'm feeling that distance that this is where I turn to the truth is, I think when I'm feeling that distance, I just probably go on with whatever else it is that I'm doing in my life. And I think for me, going back to where we had been, like the beauty of I think my feeling of comfort within Jewish space and Jewish literacy is that I also know that like for as much as I haven't actually gone to shul in months, none of it prevented me from then sitting at davening here at Ramah Darom and having an incredibly beautiful experience. And I still had all of the words and I knew all of the tunes, and maybe there was a tune I didn't know and I picked it up really quickly. And so I don't, I don't really worry in those moments where I'm I'm feeling that disconnect, because I think my life has been one of moving further away, and then coming back. And sometimes that's an intentional act on my part. And sometimes it's feeling pulled back in in some way or another. But usually it's it's returning to another space where I feel like I'm able to access it. And it's not something that, you know, I don't know if I could say like, in this moment, am I feeling particularly close to God? I'm feeling particularly spiritual, because we're reflecting on things. I'm feeling particularly close to all of you in this conversation. That really worried about what my relationship is with God beyond that right now.

Can I ask Rori a question?

Yeah!

Can I agree to that?

You don't have to answer it. I'm curious listening to you, because I asked myself the same question sometimes, but you're more engaged in it than I am. What's the relationship in your mind between activism and prayerfulness? Activism as a form of Avodat Hashem.

For me, I have a profound theology of belief that we are called upon to be partners of God in this world. You know, I don't remember who it was who first said it to me. But at some point, somebody said to me, everybody has the same sermon, they just give it over in different ways. Like my one sermon that I will give over 1000 different ways is, we are partners with God in creation, like everything flows out of that, and God is waiting for us to then be doing our part. And so absolutely, for me, it is that we are obligated in this world to be working to perfect this world, fix the mistakes we've built in this world, however, we want to use those verbs. And so absolutely, I find activism to be a deep part of, of my Avodat Hashem, probably some of my most spiritual practices and, and also some of I don't want to say prayerful experience in the way I'm not quite at the like, Heschel my feet were praying kind of point. But the ways in which I think particularly that my activism is a Jewish activism of trying to move the Jewish community forward, incorporating Jewish learning Jewish texts and Jewish liturgy into that activism, where very often, my testimony in the legislature will include Torah, or my speaking at a rally or my speaking at a press conference like that. That is, yes. I appreciate the question. Because I think your question, in many ways was maybe in itself an answer of words that I didn't quite have within this conversation. But yes, I do think that in a way that I think I'm struggling to verbalize because it's not something I think about consciously so much as it's just like, who I am and what it is that I feel that we're all called upon to do.

And I'm really glad you asked that question. I think it speaks volumes. And this really was the ulterior motive, that what is prayerful does not just have to be the moments where we are with the Siddur, that it can be learning and teaching, and it can be our activism. And that the Siddur is always there. You know, I host a prayer podcast and I also don't have a davening that I do every day, you know, I think it's, I think it's an important thing to name and to share. That yes, coming back to it over and over again, does build that relationship and build that core, and it's there. We can't take it for granted the community is there, like we were talking about, it takes building. But the Siddur, the liturgy, is there. That's a bit of a comfort for me. And I was hoping we could end. Well, I have two ways we could end we could either just end -

We could always sing more Carelbach.

Yes. I was gonna say I thought we ran it was beautiful. That was,

Yeah, and ended up happening

Very well. But thank you.

No, it was beautiful.

It's my usual problem added with my residual laryngitis from a cold that simply will not leave me alone. But whatever.

Oh no! Yeah.

I'm glad you liked it.

Either, with any sort of last words, anything you'd like to say, or if there is a particular piece of liturgy that is coming to you right now that you're thinking about, that you're grappling with, or that this is reminding you of.

I don't have a particular piece of liturgy, but one a story that's been sticking with me throughout this conversation, I mentioned that I do a lot of interfaith work. And at one point, I was participating in a conference. And somebody divided us up into groups, and we were all supposed to grapple with difficult texts. And I was with a group of Christians and Jews. Maybe they're even Muslims, I can't remember now, but particularly Christians and Jews, and we got the text from Matthew, where, you know, it's after the crucifixion, or before the crucifixion. And the people say, you know, like, the sin will be on us and on our children. And this has been used to persecute Jews for centuries. And, you know, the Christians in the group were like, no, no, we don't think about that as Jews. That's Pharisees. And I'm like, What do you guys think Pharisees are? And, and we ended up having this incredibly intensive conversation. And it was, it was, I mean, just that moment of like, kind of this person saying something that she didn't realize was deeply hurtful, and then the growth that came from it. And I mean, it's a relationship that we still maintain to today, this with this person, but at the end of this conversation, she turned to me and she said, how do we pray this text? And I said to her, I think we just did. And that's what I've been thinking about throughout our discussion.

I think we prayed a discussion. Yeah, perhaps.

I have so many different closing thoughts. I don't even know which one to share. I think you asked something about a prayer that speaks to us in particular, there's one line that I think about a lot I'm not even sure I could fully voice, give voice to why. But. Ha'arev-na adonai eloheinu et divrei toratcha b'finu. Make your words sweet. May they smell good. May they - There's something about that in a world that can be so cruel and so callous and so heartless, Ha'arev-na adonai eloheinu et divrei toratcha b'finu, make your word sweet. I don't know, it expresses something so raw, so visceral, so basic to me. And then I often find myself it's interesting. Whenever anyone asks me a question, like, is there a T'fillah or a song that is like important to you? For some reason, I ended up thinking of a song that I almost never think of, but I always think of this one. When, when, when when I get asked the question, which is the phrase ana avdah d'kudesha brich hu Right? I am, I'll translate somewhat freely, I aspire to be a servant of the Blessed Holy One. I often find myself wishing that I was more comfortable with my own voice. I sang that with my students more. Because it's like, so important to me. As a kind of like, I don't know what, a mission statement, a vision statement for life.

That's beautiful. Thank you so much for bringing that to us kind of ending with that as a prayer. I love how you translated it with aspiration. I think that that is a big role of our Siddur is to show us give us direction. Where can we aspire to what are we aspiring? How can we move forward together and I just want to say amen to all of your comments and questions and thank you so much for being with me this afternoon.

Thank you for having us.

Thank you!

And thank you so much for listening. Thank you Christy Dodge for editing. Thank you Yaffa Englander, we're so glad you're back from camp at Ramah Darom! Thank you for doing our show notes and for all that you do. Please follow us on Instagram and Facebook at the light.lab. Our theme song is A New Light by me, and we hope to see you very very soon.