Small Children Learning to Be Pray-ers
(from Shma, February 2004)

Rabbi Jack Bieler

 

              Jewish prayer is clearly one of the spiritual dimensions of Judaism that must be passed along to subsequent generations if there is to be Jewish continuity and future. 

             While the mechanics of Jewish prayer are susceptible to relatively straightforward instruction, conveying and imparting the essence of prayer to a new generation is quite another matter. The Talmud (Ta’anit 2a) refers to prayer as Avoda SheB’Lev (service of the heart). While all religious expression ideally should engage not only one’s body, but also one’s mind and spirit, this is acutely true with respect to prayer. Jewish prayer is designed to provide a platform from which the believer expresses his/her admiration, requests and appreciation regarding past, present, and future interactions with God. Directed intent as well as deep emotional engagement including the sensibilities of belief, trust, love, and fear, among others, constitute the focal point of the prayer experience.

 Ironically, a small child is often more likely to fully empathize with and be receptive to  the dimensions of emotional engagement with the Divine that prayer assumes, than someone who is older and has been practicing Judaism within the context of day-to-day human existence over the course of a lifetime.  The older individual is apt to become periodically cynical and intellectually unsure of the unceasing veracity of Judaism’s principle tenets, particularly when it comes to the assumptions of prayer. Psalm 145 proclaims, “The Lord is near to all who call upon Him, to all those who call upon Him in truth…He will hear their cry and save them.” A child usually has not experienced a fervent prayer appearing to go unanswered, an urgent need going unmet, righteous individuals meeting fates that do not appear to be appropriate for the types of individuals they are and the manner of lives that they have striven to live. 

 And herein lies the rub with regard to the transmission of prayer as a positive, active value from one generation to the next. Unless young children regularly observe optimal, wholehearted prayer by those after whom they model their own behavior, the probability of their praying seriously even during their younger years, let alone when they become more mature and sophisticated and develop the typical accompanying questions and doubts, will be extremely low.

 In my own experience, the individual who had the greatest influence upon me in terms of Judaism in general and prayer in particular, was my maternal grandmother, Celia Katzman Stern, ZaTzaL, with whom I spent a good deal of quality time as I was growing up. In addition to lengthier stays, our mother would take my brother and me virtually every Sunday to visit her parents. My grandmother and grandfather were extremely pious albeit not particularly Jewishly learned, and unambiguously saw Judaism as the most centrally important aspect of their day-to-day existences. My grandmother impressed me in particular by fervently praying three times per day, by being among the first in the synagogue on Shabbat morning so that she unhurriedly could pray the entire liturgy with the congregation, by reciting Psalms daily in a slow and careful manner that conveyed to me deep devotion, and in general serving as a profound spiritual model for me. My own parents, ZaTza"L, who both had to flee Europe at a relatively young age, without expecting to ever see  their families again, were deprived of the opportunity to properly develop their respective religious identities, something that my grandparents, who were forced to emigrate when they were considerably older, had already established.

I am not sure that very many of the parents or even grandparents of the current generation of young Jews are able to convey these sensibilities to their children and grandchildren.  And as for transferring to professionals the responsibility to communicate and inculcate that which had previously been taken care of by home and family, unfortunately, contemporary synagogues and schools of all denominations are regularly criticized for their lack of serious prayer and spiritual atmosphere, leading one to conclude that at least with respect to prayer, these institutions will have trouble fulfilling “in loco parentis” responsibilities. Campers and travelers to Israel seem to report a higher incidence of meaningful prayer experiences, but I wonder if these take place regularly and often enough to create a model and experiential aspiration to last one for the rest of his/her life. 

Consequently, with regard to improving the quality of prayer for a new generation of Jews, the significant adults in their lives--be they parents, grandparents, Rabbis, teachers, youth leaders, or camp officials and counselors--must recommit themselves to engaging regularly, visibly, and sincerely in significant prayer experiences so that younger Jews have someone to look up to and model themselves after.