The Call Back Home in Jewish Prayer

Over on Base, I started a thread for people to join me in reading the book of Tehilim (Psalms) in the traditional 30-day cycle for reading them over the course of one month. This reading is showing me something (not for the first time) about my relationship to sacred texts that is a bit more meta-level than my responses to the psalms themselves.

I get these callings back to liturgical Jewish texts — like Tehilim to some extent, and certainly also to the siddur, which is of course densely populated with tehilim — when I am feeling far from home, spiritually. Sometimes, I see my tallis bag or daily driver siddur sitting on their shelf, and I just pick one of them up for a moment, and something stirs in a way few other objects in my life can cause.

This form of daily prayer is not for me. I know this. I tried it. But what is it here that is so resonant that it drowns out all my wandering and dabblings with the resounding call back home? How do I harmonize with it?

That call-back-home feeling makes sense to me because the liturgy is intended to be a virtual-reality home for the Jewish people in exile. It’s a place you can live, no matter where you are. And that idea calls to me very strongly, and there have been multi-year stretches of my life where I did live there, and I often miss some feelings from those times.

But to religiously go there every single day draws me back into the halakhic sense of ritual obligation, and I do believe in that, but nowadays it raises what feels like an urgent and valid question of what my actual obligations are, and frankly obligations to liturgical texts fall pretty low on the list. It feels like I have to put off other obligations to make time for the liturgy, and those obligations call to me as more important than sitting and reading something I’ve read many times before for a few minutes.

If I connect this to the ways other committed daily ritual practices have gone in my life, I start to feel like this is the teaching of daily religious obligation — that one must be religious about one’s daily obligations whatever they are — and I learned a lot about how to do this from Jewish liturgy, but since my religious community doesn’t observe these liturgical obligations — at least, not in this way — these textual practices don’t seem to help me get better at it anymore.

A comparison has come to mind for me:

“I need to ritualize x in my personal practice” is a thought that objectifies practice and leads to nothing.

“I need to ritualize x in my communal practice” is a thought that instrumentalizes practice and leads to beneficial changes.

I have written before about how one might go about making changes to the liturgy for communal purposes, but it’s drastically easier said than done. I hope I can look down from Heaven in 500 years and see what daily Jewish practice has become.

(Side note: I’m pretty sure all my traditional streaks are in areas in which I was not parented traditionally.)