Nishmat

By Ann Kline

Prayers like Nishmat , according to Reuven Hammer, auther of

Entering Jewish Prayer, are designed to stir "the enthusiasm of

worship....the unrestrained affirmation of the beauty of life itself."

Certainly, the language of Nishmat asks for a kind of "passionate

involvement" in prayer:

Could song fill our mouths as water fills the sea,

and could joy flood our tongues like the countless waves,

Could our lips utter praise as limitless as the sky...

Never could we fully state our gratitude

for one ten thousandth of the...love that is your precious

blessing,

dearest God.

The ardent, breathless, unreserved language in Nishmat makes me ask -

Can I really pray like this? Can I say things like "dearest God - and

mean it?"

Rabbis Carol Ochs and Kerry Olitzky, in their book Jewish

Spiritual Guidance, describe two "roadmaps" for exploring spiritual

experience. One of them is Exodus. I can easily place myself in this

story, where I am a principle actor on a journey to freedom. This story

is one of discernment and analysis - I can do that. The God of Exodus

is familiar: God as King, God as Judge, God as Father - images that can

keep God comfortably remote, distant, Other. In forty years this God

never spoke directly to the Israelites.

The other roadmap that they use, however, is the Song of Songs. A

roadmap for entering into intimacy with the Divine. This is God as

Beloved, a God that would speak directly to our hearts:

I was asleep, but my heart was wakeful.

Hark, my beloved knocks!

"Let me in, my own, my darling, my faultless dove!"

I don't know about you, but in all my conversations with God, God has

never once called me a "faultless dove." A flawed but redeemable

pigeon, perhaps, but not faultless. I can find myself more

uncomfortable with this loving God than I am with God as Judge.

And yet, as Nishmat tells us, "the breath of all that lives

praises God...." Nishmat reminds us that God as Beloved is not a vague

fancy, suited only for mystics. We all live in daily intimacy with the

Divine. I think of holding hands with my husband, exchanging smiles

with a baby in the grocery store, watching an older woman's hand shake

as she holds a piece of paper and being struck by a vivid appreciation

of what it means to age. I go to another funeral for another hospice

patient. I look at the light in a soap bubble while I'm washing the

dishes, remembering the woman who shyly admitted that one of the most

spiritual things she had ever experienced was noticing the rainbows in

soap bubbles. I can't look at a soap bubble the same way now.

"The breath of all that lives praises God." Is God.

Nishmat describes a dynamic movement of spirit within ourselves,

within all people and within all the world. It tells me that to pray, I

need to let the experiences of my life deepen this sense of Divine

intimacy and love -- to let this love flow into and through my life.

This is a prayer in which analysis and ideas about God are of no help in

grasping its meaning. This is what Reb Nachman of Bratslav calls prayer

of the heart, that we can only experience by being receptive to the

touch of an invisible presence within ourselves and our lives.

Nishmat reminds me that I live in a "true companionship" with God

every day. It is both my invitation and my challenge to more fully,

deeply and willingly experience that companionship. Reuven Hammer calls

his book, "Entering Jewish Prayer." Nishmat, however, with its intensely

physical language - every knee bends, every back bows, every mouth

exalts - shows me that I don't just bring myself to prayer, I have to

let prayer enter me. Prayer is the language of intimate relationship;

it opens us to our place in the flow of life. We don't just pray to God.

If we are to be moved and transformed - which is just another way to say

if we are to love and be loved by God - we have to be alive and aware

of how God prays through us. Through the events in our lives and how we

respond to them, through who we are as individuals and as a community.

We have to be willing to let "every fiber of our being" be part of our

prayer. Ultimately, we can never truly pray unless we allow ourselves to

love and be loved by the One who prays through us.

Presented at Tifereth Israel, February 2001