The Order of Prayer

I used to feel a weighty obligation towards the traditional formulation of the prayerbook — a faith in the sages that they had done their research and found the optimal formulation of Hebrew words to achieve the desired effect — and didn’t want to throw that out heedlessly.

But the more experienced I’ve gotten with the energetic texture of prayer and devotional ritual, the more I understand this 25,000-words-per-day configuration as more exhaustive — a communal insurance policy — than optimal.

That still seems like an eminently wise approach. It feels like an unfathomable gift to have this much vital ritual material from this vast a history to work with.

What occurs to me is that we’re in a historic period of transformation of media of transmission as profound as the one in which the siddur was set down, and it is natural for ritual — the discrete act and enactment of transmission — to transform and adjust to its medium, just like it did last time.

I wouldn’t want to change the textual foundation. That’s the received transmission. And that includes the containers of the ritual forms — what offerings are, what specific offerings there are, what qualifies as a complete offering, and especially when they happen.

What I want to change is how texts are sequenced and selected, what other kinds of ritual actions can be incorporated, and how much space there is for unscripted verbal offerings and nonverbal offerings.

If I may speak about this without any authority beyond having married well, I think the cautionary rabbinic principle about this is that it takes a lot of ritual experience and learning to do this skillfully, in ways that actually qualify for and meet the requirements of the ancestral forms from which the print liturgy is derived. This is the same thing the rabbis did, carefully virtualizing the Temple service in the prayerbook. I’m not talking about self-indulgently picking and choosing here.

But there’s a tractable number of components in here. Torah, psalms, poems, pseudo-scriptural ancient rabbinic texts, Aramaic prayers that were simply common-tongue public liturgy at one time, a smattering of more modern things that made it in over time in response to history, and all the accompanying customary choreography.

Learning what these components are, where they come from, and what else is out there that’s analogous can be pretty empowering for trying something out.