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Kol Nidrei 5777 On understanding prayer
Rabbi Lea Mühlstein 11 October 2016
Kol Nidrei… the haunting melody and the sacred drama of the opened ark so easily distract from the words that we have just uttered. As is the case also for many of the other prayers found in our High Holy Day liturgy, if we were to pause and look more carefully at the actual words recited, many of us would encounter challenges:
• Do we really believe what we are saying?
• And if not, how can we say these words nonetheless especially on a day such as Yom Kippur when we are asked to examine ourselves and our actions with great honesty to allow us to make amends?
• Can we really “lie” today?
• And if not, how then can we all be part of this community which repeats these words together over and over again?
Of course, these are not new questions, but rather a central aspect of the thinking of our forefathers of Liberal Judaism. In the affirmations of Liberal Judaism, Rabbi John Rayner, of blessed memory, writes:
We affirm the paramount need for sincerity in worship: we may not say with our lips what we do not believe in our hearts. To that end, though we retain much of the traditional Jewish liturgy, we have revised it, with some omissions and modifications, and many amplifications.i
While this might solve the problem for the prayerbook editor who is able to align the prayerbook with his, or rather more rarely, her, theology, it does not resolve it for congregants who each have varying belief systems. The approach of our forefathers was to judge prayers as true or false. We cannot imagine that prayer is fiction, so this approach is not altogether surprising because we are accustomed to judge non-‐fiction in that way. So if the text of a prayer turns out to be false, we cannot be faulted for dismissing it. Good fiction, like good poetry, never grows old, but we do not read yesterday’s science textbooks the same way. When a piece of non-‐fiction grows old, we replace it, treating the older version as factually misleading and even morally inappropriate because it seems to be passing on a lie. By approaching prayer as prose, then — prose that cannot be merely fiction — we automatically open it to the probability that it will sometimes seem like a lie that needs to be replaced.
So let me daringly suggest that our forefathers’ approach is actually not really helpful. Instead I would like to share with you another approach taught by the American professor for Jewish Liturgy, Rabbi Larry Hoffman.ii He says that we can appreciate prayers better if we look at some of the deeper ways that language takes on meaning. I want to share two different approaches with you tonight. The first is based on the work of the classic linguist Roman Jakobson (1896– 1982), who provided a fascinating model of six different ways in which language works. The first way is what Jakobson calls contextual or referential. In this instance, the point of speaking is to convey a message: for example, the cat is sitting on the carpet. The person making the statement simply wants to convey a reality to the listener. The appropriate response is therefore to confirm the factual statement or contradict it – “no, can’t you see the cat is sitting next to the carpet.” But when said in a slightly different tone, the statement “the cat is sitting on the carpet” might instead convey the dismay of the speaker who is seeing a cat sitting on his expensive carpet about to ruin it. The appropriate response in this case might be “Calm down, nothing is going to happen to the carpet” or “shall I get the cat off?” This is what Jakobson calls an emotive statement. The point of making the statement is not to convey a reality but rather an emotion. At times, the person speaking may not be trying to express their own state of mind but instead influence the mind of the listener. The person reassuring the owner of the carpet that all will be well is doing exactly that. This is what Jakobson calls “conative.” The fourth way of communicating is when we simply want to make sure someone is on the receiving end. When I think your phone might not be working, I say, “Hello? Hello?”— not to introduce myself, but to elicit your assurance, “I can hear you!” The response, as well, is not a “fact” about your ability to hear but rather a statement that you are listening to me. This linguistic function Jakobson called phatic. Sometimes, it is the very form of the message that takes most of our attention, and then we have poetry. If ordinary content-‐driven communication is judged by its truth, then form-‐driven communication attracts attention for its beauty. The final form of communication is when we use language as a code. Figures of speech and proverbs are the most obvious example. The statement “No man is an island” is completely nonsensical if we try to judge it in categories of true and false. Yet, used in the correct cultural context the meaning is absolutely clear. These types of statements Jakobson called metalingual. While many have suggested that prayers should be understood as poetry, Larry Hoffman is the first to apply the ideas of Jakobson more broadly, explaining that identifying prayer as poetry goes a long way in opening us up to find meaning below the surface, but we also need to understand when the lines of prayer mean:
• to make a statement about the way things are (contextual/referential);
• to express our own feelings (emotive);
• to influence God to act a certain way (conative);
• or to check in with God (or with the other worshipers) to say that we are present (phatic),
• and that we are all on message using the same understanding of language (metalingual).
That is not to say that this will solve all our problems with prayer. For instance, our personal theology might suggest that we do not believe that God can actually “act” in history and, thus, requests to do so would clearly fall on deaf ears. Or we might not believe in God at all, making “checking in with God” redundant. This is why Larry Hoffman suggests that the linguistic considerations should be supplemented by a philosophical consideration — the second approach that I want to share with you. This approach is based on the work of the great twentieth century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. In his later years, he came to believe that language should not be judged by what it means so much as by what it does. He likened language to the contents of a toolbox — we learn as children how to use linguistic tools to accomplish different ends. In addition to some of the linguistic functions that we discussed in the context of Jakobson’s work, language does other things too: it may promise, hope, question, doubt, or engage in playful repartee. We run into problems when we misunderstand the goal of any particular utterance. Think also, said Wittgenstein, of language as a set of games. Misunderstandings arise when we do not recognise what game other people are playing: when (for instance) we think they are telling us a truth, but they mean only to tell us how they feel; or when they are participating in a ritual instead of an ordinary conversation — because rituals have their own peculiar ways in which language works, their own favourite set of linguistic tools. As a kind of ritual, Jewish prayer has its own language games that are just part of the way Jewish liturgy works. Instead of toasts, for example, we have blessings: not “Raise a glass to ...,” but “God bless you with....” At toast time, no one refuses to “raise a glass” to “long life and happiness” on the grounds that they aren’t thirsty or because the bride and groom already know how their guests feel, so why bother repeating it! Toasting is just part of the wedding game. Similarly, when we say, for those who are ill, “Blessed is God who heals the sick,” it is inappropriate for people to opt out because they don’t believe in God or have the experience of God not healing other people who were sick with the same malady last year. Invoking blessings is a language game that has nothing to do with belief in God or the likelihood that God will respond to what we ask. Objecting to God-‐language in a blessing because “I don’t believe in God” is a case of mistaking language games.
Another language game that Jewish liturgy often plays is “citing Scripture.” The point isn’t whether you believe in what gets cited. The point is simply to root the hope expressed by the blessing in a biblical context— the way a speaker quotes Shakespeare, not for the literal truth of what Shakespeare said, but for the imagery he offers and the connectivity to the greatness he represents. A keynote speaker at a conference arguing for a more compassionate nation concludes by saying, “‘The quality of mercy is not strained; it droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven upon the earth beneath’— let us revel in the possibility of harvesting the mercy that comes naturally from God but goes to waste if we do not collect it and disburse it in everything we do.” No one interrupts to remind the speaker that the atheists present do not believe in God or that mercy doesn’t really fall from heaven. Everyone knows that quoting is part of the “speaking game.” It adds artistry to what would otherwise be a dull lecture. The High Holy Day liturgy does more than make statements of fact. The decision to attend is tantamount to agreeing to participate in a language game (actually, a whole set of games) where the usual rules of speech no longer hold and to open ourselves to language that otherwise we would find questionable. Any given line in the prayers recited may be contextual, emotive, poetic, or conative, but it also may be the appropriate linguistic move in some other game such as expressing regret, community identity, or personal hope. I’m not suggesting that it is an easy task to look beyond the literal meaning of the words of our prayer, to look beyond true and false but what better day to give it a go than Yom Kippur?! i Rabbi John D. Rayner, Affirmations of Liberal Judaism, 1992, Affirmation 31. ii Lawrence Hoffman, “The History, Meaning, and Varieties of Avinu Malkeinu” in Naming God: Avinu Malkeinu—Our Father, Our King (Prayers of Awe), Jewish Lights Publishing 2015.
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