Shabbat shalom.

My talk today is a hybrid, somewhere between a drash and a d'var tefilah. My topic is the relation between community and the individual in our tradition of prayer. I stand before you as a student, not an authority in any way. Many of you know more about these matters than I do. But even if you don't accept my answers, I hope you will think the questions I raise are worthy of discussion.

Let me begin by quoting Rabbi Neil Gillman of the Jewish Theological Seminary:

In Judaism, . . ., prayer is subjected to a rigorous discipline. Jewish law tells us when, where, and in what company we must pray, even what words we must use on each occasion.

We can all recognize--and appreciate--what Gillman is describing. This tradition can be a source of enormous solidarity and strength. But it also raises a question. For while prayer unites us, it does not dissolve our separate individualities into some mystical collective consciousness. We may pray together, but we still stand alone. So here is the question: If prayer is usually fixed, and almost always communal, what are we supposed to bring to it as individuals?

Many authors have noted that while the English word prayer comes from a root meaning to beg or entreat, the Hebrew word for "to pray" (l'hitpalel) is a reflexive verb meaning to judge oneself. This suggests an answer to the question I just posed: what we as individuals are supposed to bring to communal prayer is rigorous self-examination. Fine; but when we scrutinize ourselves, what are we looking for?

The classic answer is, of course, kavanah, typically translated as "inner disposition" or "directedness." There is a famous sentence in the Talmud: "He who prays must direct his heart to heaven." Maimonides writes: "Kavanah means that the worshiper must clear his mind of all private thoughts and regard himself as standing before the Divine Presence." This sounds wonderfully inspiring, but I must confess that on a practical level I don't find it very helpful, and I'll bet that many of you don't either. How can we clear our minds? How do we direct our hearts? And more to the point: Where do we begin?

After much searching, I have stumbled on an answer that I find helpful; perhaps you will too. When we awaken in the morning, our very first words are supposed to be Modeh ani--I am grateful. This suggests that kavanah begins where the day begins, with a specific sentiment--the sentiment of gratitude. If we feel grateful, we can continue on to other levels of meaning; if we don't, we can't.

At first glance, this suggestion may appear contrary to our tradition. Isn't the essence of prayer praise rather than gratitude? Isn't our liturgy filled with the language of praise? Well, it may surprise you--I know it surprised me--to learn that the rabbis raise serious doubts about the appropriateness of praising God, especially in an enthusiastic and expansive manner. In the Talmud we find the following story:

A certain man went down to the Ark in the presence of Rabbi Hanina. The man said, "O God, the great, the mighty, the revered, the glorious, the powerful, the feared, the strong, the courageous, the certain, the honored." R. Hanina waited until he had finished [and then] said to him, "Have you exhausted all the praises of your Lord? What is the use of all these adjectives? The three which we do say [great, mighty, and revered], if Moses had not used them in the Torah . . ., we should not have been able to say [them]; and you go on saying all these! [And R. Hanina continued,] A parable: The matter may be likened to a human king who possessed a million gold [coins], and people kept praising him as the possessor of a million silver [coins]; is it not an insult to him? (Ber. 33b)

For our purposes, this story does not require extended interpretation, because the basic point is clear: the problem with praise is that it implicitly places the one praising on a plane of equality (at least) with the one who is praised--which is precisely what prayer cannot rightly do.

This is why we find in the Talmud repeated injunctions concerning the limits of praise in prayer, coupled with dire warnings to those who exceed these limits. But I have been able to locate no such references to limits in the case of gratitude. Indeed, in one passage we read that "In the time to come, . . . all other prayers will cease, but thanksgiving will not cease." Gratitude is truly fundamental.

But what is gratitude, anyway? Let us return to the beginning of the morning prayer: "I am grateful to You, living, enduring King, for restoring my soul to me in compassion." This is a remarkable idea. We are invited to imagine that our soul in withdrawn from us each night, and returned each morning. So each new day is a gift, a small miracle of re-creation. We feel grateful to the extent that we can truly understand each new day as the gift it is. As the great Jewish philosopher and theologian Emil Fackenheim puts it,

A Jew awakens and is astonished and grateful: He is both because sleep has not been death. The Creation is renewed, every day.

Let me put this point a bit more generally. Gratitude requires imagination--the capacity to imagine that what exists here and now, what seems so solid, including our own lives, might not ever have existed and might be extinguished in the next instant. So the opposite of gratitude is the absence of imagination that leads us to take what we have for granted--starting with life itself.

This is why otherwise negative experiences--life-threatening illness, for example--can be so illuminating. When they occur, we see in a flash that what we foolishly take for granted might be taken away, and we are grateful when it is not.

In his wonderful book To Pray As A Jew, Rabbi Hayim Donin points out that the Hebrew word for gratitude or giving thanks also means "to acknowledge." To feel grateful is to acknowledge something. But what? Three things, I believe: first, that what we have is good; second, that we cannot claim it as something to which we are entitled; and third, that we do not possess it through our own unaided efforts.

This structure of acknowledgment helps us understand what can block the feeling of gratitude.

First, we may not experience what we have as good. We may have unmet (perhaps unconscious) needs that we have never subjected to self-examination. Self-pity is the enemy of gratitude. Depression blocks the experience of gratitude. And every kind of wanting more than we have--whether it is the desire for material riches or ambition for prestige and power--is potentially an obstacle to gratitude.

Second, we may take what we have for granted--and thus not feel grateful for it--because we somehow believe that we have a right to it. This is a particular risk for American Jews. The language of rights is very important to us. Our rights help us to assert our equal dignity as citizens, to establish what we may properly claim as citizens, and to defend ourselves against invasions of liberty, whether by other citizens or by public authorities. But it is important not to extend rights beyond the public realm so that they become the prism through which we understand our entire lives. It is wonderful to enjoy good health and challenging jobs, to have children who are flourishing, to have parents who enjoy a vigorous and satisfying old age. But these are blessings, not entitlements, and if they are taken away we cannot properly believe (although we often do) that we have been deprived of something we enjoyed as a matter of right.

The third obstacle to gratitude: we may believe that we are the sole source of what we value in our lives. Pride--the belief that one is "self-made"--is at odds with gratitude. Self-centeredness, which makes it difficult for us to acknowledge the full existence of others, is at odds with gratitude. And so is what might be called the "fear of dependence." There are those who resist acknowledging good things as gifts because (perhaps without understanding why the act as they do) they believe that to acknowledge gifts is to surrender control of their lives to external forces, or to incur responsibilities and obligations that they may not wish to discharge.

This three-fold link between gratitude and acknowledgment helps us solve an old puzzle. Prayer challenges us to live differently. But many philosophers and theologians have wondered, how can we be responsible for what we feel? What sense does it make to be required to be grateful? What control can we possibly exercise over such a feeling? But if gratitude is connected to acknowledgment, then the feeling has a rational content, and we can work on that, through study and reflection over time.

At this point you may be saying, Wait a minute, this sounds suspiciously like psychology, with a pinch of philosophy thrown in. But this talk was supposed to be about prayer. What happened to God?

I'm making a perhaps surprising, but not heretical suggestion: however we as individuals understand the relationship between ourselves and the source of all creation (and we differ among ourselves on this), there is a general stance toward our existence--namely, gratitude--that serves as the necessary condition for, and the gateway to, meaningful prayer. This attitude is something we can cultivate through self-examination and through the ceaseless effort to understand how much we owe to individuals and forces outside ourselves. We can feel gratitude, and even know what we are grateful for, without knowing for sure who or what is the author of our blessings. As Emil Fackenheim says,

In the presence of their newly born baby, any parent with a heart gives thanks, even if it be with the silent proviso "to whom it may concern."

But am I not presenting an overly benign, even pollyannish view of life? What happens to gratitude when disaster strikes? No one has raised this question more intransigently than Fackenheim, so let me quote him once more:

Even an agnostic or atheist can be filled with a deep--if unspecified--gratitude for good fortune, freedom, the gift of life itself. But how can anyone thank God for the evils that have befallen him? It may be possible to accept these, resignedly and with fortitude. But to thank God for them seems positively demeaning.

I have no conclusive answer to this challenge. How could I? This is one of the deepest questions that can be posed by, or to, any person of faith. But I can say this: there are many evils that have the effect of awakening us from complacency, and to the blessings we continue to enjoy. It may even be that, given the imperfections of our nature, it is only through the experience of misfortune that we can fully appreciate our continuing good fortune. Perhaps, then, it is the contrast that makes gratitude possible.

In conclusion, let us retrace our steps. We began by wondering what the role of individuals might be in our tradition of communal prayer. The tradition answer--kavanah--turned out not to be entirely satisfying. So taking as our point of departure the core meaning of the Hebrew word for prayer--namely, self-examination and judgment--we discovered that a particular sentiment of gratitude is fundamental to what we are expected to contribute as individuals to communal prayer. The sentiment is linked to three beliefs about ourselves and our relation to others that we are asked to acknowledge as true. When we deny the truth of one or more of these beliefs, we are unable to experience gratitude, and so cannot enter the gateway of prayer. Because the feeling of gratitude is linked to belief, we can exercise some control over it through self-reflection. And because gratitude requires the ability to imagine that the good things in our lives might cease, even ill-fortune can make us grateful, by refocusing our attention on the many blessings we continue to enjoy.

This completes my prepared remarks. There's some time for discussion, if you're so moved.

And there was considerable discussion.

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