The Magic Words of Prayer

This sermon began with a magic trick in which I had someone pick a card, which then appeared up on the screen on the wall. The trick did not work the first time, but then I remembered to ask everyone to say "Abracadabra" and it worked. As I came back to the amud, I said:

Let’s talk about magic words. Did you know that the word Abracadabra is Jewish? Some say it comes from the Aramaic, [SLIDE] Abara C’davra, which means something like, “I create as I speak.” What a Jewish concept! Our tradition teaches that God used words to create the universe. Psalm 33:9 says, “For God spoke, and [the universe] came into existence.” God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.[i] According to our tradition, words can change the very nature of existence. They can create life. Abara C’davra, “I create as I speak.” Speak the words, and the magic happens. Just like the magic trick. Abracadabra, and poof.

Except, that’s not what happened. I don’t want to ruin anything for you, but I kinda knew you were going to pick the King of Diamonds. And I kinda made sure the trick didn’t work the first time. Until we all said Abracadabra together. The magic word didn’t make the card appear on the wall. PowerPoint did.

There are no magic words. There are no words that change the nature of the universe. If wishing made it so, then we would speak and the universe would respond. And you know this. You know that magic words don’t make magic happen. You knew I was doing something to manipulate the cards. And yet, for some reason, you all still said “Abracadabra” with me. Maybe you were humoring me. But maybe you were also suspending your disbelief. Maybe, just maybe, we like to convince ourselves that magic words work.

To be fair, I set you up. I did a magic trick in the middle of services. And Jewish prayer is all about magical words. At least, that’s how it seems at first glance. [LOUDLY AND DECLARITIVLY] “May the one who makes peace in the high heavens make peace for us, for all Israel and for the world.” Come on. I’m waiting. Damn.

It’s easy, in services, to get caught up in magical thinking. To think that our words will shape the world, that if we pray hard enough, the blessings we seek will just appear. If we take our prayers literally, that’s the impression we might get. But that’s a tricky way to live. If we believed that God bestowed blessing based on the power or persuasiveness of our prayer, we might never leave the sanctuary. So when we say words like those of Oseh Shalom, we must mean something else. But what?

There is a Hassidic teaching from Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Kotzk which seems pertinent.[ii] He says that when the weather gets cold, one has two options. One can build a fire or wrap oneself in a big fur pelt. In both cases, you get warm. But in the coat, you only warm yourself, whereas with a fire, you warm yourself and those around you. The Kotzker Rebbe sometimes used to disparagingly call people “a tzaddik in peltz” – implying, how righteous can you be when you’ve chosen to go the “coat route”? Jonathan Slater explains this phrase, saying, “Constricted hearts limit our capacity to see beyond ourselves and diminish our ability to honor the full human dignity of others.”[iii] How do we unbind our hearts, and open our coats, and learn to build fires?

Perhaps the magic words of prayer do not transform the world. Perhaps they transform us. Perhaps the words of the prayers open our hearts and teach us to be tzaddikim who build fires, instead of turning our collars up to the cold… and to our neighbors.

The prayer book gives us a thousand opportunities for transformation. Let me offer two this evening, in the form of two questions: What can you stand up for? and, What can you bow to?

What can you stand up for?

The Amidah is the central prayer of our service. In it, we address God directly. Having talked about God – reflecting on God’s power to shape and reshape the universe through the Shema and its blessings – we now talk to God. But before we do so, we stand up. Amidah literally means standing prayer. We are asked to rise to our feet. Like a minister addressing a king or president, we do not lounge around. We do not slack, rather we lift ourselves up. We straighten our backs and hold our heads up, as if we are looking God in the face.

And then we recite these words: “Adonai s'fatai tiftach ufiyagid t’hilatecha” – “Adonai, open my lips, that my mouth may declare your praise.” These strange words are the first words of our Standing Prayer. We say, “God, force my mouth to speak your praise.” It is as if we stand up, look God in the face, and suddenly feel as if our words are not worthy. So we ask God to bless our words. We ask God to allow us to speak holy words. Struck by the awe of the moment of standing in God’s presence, we ask God to make our words worthy. When we complete the Amidah we say, “Yih’-yu l’-ra-tzon im-rei fi V’-heg-yon li-bi l’-fa-ne-cha Adonai…” – “May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable to you, Adonai.” We say, “I hope my words have honored you, God. Know that I am imperfect, but receive them in the spirit in which they were offered.”

So here is the tension of the first question -- What can you stand up for? The Amidah demands that we stand up, but the Amidah also recognizes that once we stand, we must seek to say something transcendent and truthful. Every time we say the Amidah, we are called to ask, “What is the truth that I must stand up for? What is the thing I believe so deeply that I would say it, even to God. When I stand up, and open my lips, what are the words I hope God will be saying through me?”

This world needs us to stand up. It needs us to declare truth and speak out against injustice. But that is scary and hard. How will we know what to say? How will we know the right moment to stand up? And more importantly, how will we learn to stand? It is not our nature to stand in the face of the powerful and declare our truth. It is easier to sit back passively, to let others stand up for us. But the magic words of the Amidah call us to stand up and declare truth. And through them we learn how it feels to stand.

Question two: What can you bow to?

We do not just stand in the Amidah. We also bow. Bowing is somewhat foreign to us moderns. We do not have a king or queen or a master that we might bow to. Those of us who do not practice yoga may find the physical sensation strange. We are not used to bending this way. It is not how we hold ourselves in the world.

In his book, After the Ecstasy, the Laundry, Jack Kornfield tells the story of learning to bow when he was becoming a Buddhist monk in a forest monastery in Thailand. He writes:

After I had been in the monastery for a week or two, one of the senior monks pulled me aside for further instruction. "In this monastery you must not only bow when entering the meditation hall and receiving teachings from the master, but also when you meet your elders." As the only Westerner, and wanting to act correctly, I asked who my elders were. "It is traditional that all who are older in ordination time, who've been monks longer than you, are your elders," I was told. It took only a moment to realize that meant everybody.

So I began to bow to them. Sometimes it was just fine—there were quite a few wise and worthy elders in the community. But sometimes it felt ridiculous. I would encounter some twenty-one-year-old monk, full of hubris, who as there only to please his parents or to eat better food than he could at home, and I had to bow because he had been ordained the week before me. Or had to bow to a sloppy old rice farmer who had come to the monastery the season before on the farmers' retirement plan, who chewed betel nut constantly and had never meditated a day in his life. It was hard to pay reverence to these fellow forest dwellers as if they were great masters.

Yet there I was bowing, and because I was in conflict, I sought a way to make it work. Finally, as I prepared yet again for a day of bowing to my "elders," I began to look for some worthy aspect of each person I bowed to. I bowed to the wrinkles around the retired farmer's eyes, for all the difficulties he had seen and suffered through and triumphed over. I bowed to the vitality and playfulness in the young monks, the incredible possibilities each of their lives held yet ahead of them.

I began to enjoy bowing. I bowed to my elders, I bowed before I entered the dining hall and as I left. I bowed as I entered my forest hut, and bowed at the well before taking a bath. After some time bowing became my way—it was just what I did. If it moved, I bowed to it.[iv]

Just as we must learn to stand up, we must also learn humility. We must learn to lessen ourselves in front that which is greater. And we must learn to see greatness in everything around us. In this way, we begin to see ourselves as a part of a system. The universe does not exist to serve or needs. Rather, we exist to serve the universe. In Jewish prayer, we do not just learn to rise up. We also learn to bow. Jewish prayer is the practice of both Audacity and Humility. We rise to address our Creator, and then we humble ourselves before that Creative Force. And through the magic process of saying the words and of enacting them in our bodies, we learn a way of living that opens us up to others and to the world.

Prayer is a series of magic words. But perhaps those magic words do not act on the universe in the way that Abracadabra does in a magic trick. Rather, the words act on us. Rabbi Jonathan Slater says, “All prayer—when we pay attention, whether personal or liturgical—is ultimately a form of speaking the truth. It makes us aware of what is going on in our lives in this moment—so that we can see clearly and respond appropriately.”[v] Prayer calls us to rise towards our best selves. The words of our prayers serve not so much as a request to God for blessings as they do a promise to God that we will live in a way that makes God’s blessings manifest in the world. Through the words of our prayers, we learn life lessions about how to live gratefully, humbly, and generously. Yih’-yu l’-ra-tzon im-rei – may the words of my mouth change me, oh God. May they make me into the kind of person who can make your world into the kind of world that both You and I dream it will be. Let that be my prayer to you. Amen.

[i] http://www.reformjudaism.org/creative-power-words

[ii] http://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/258534/jewish/A-Tzaddik-in-a-Fur-Coat.htm

[iii] Slater, Jonathan, Mindful Jewish Living, page xx

[iv] Kornfield, Jack, After the Ecstasy, the Laundry: How the Heart Grows Wise on the Spiritual Path, page ix-x

[v] . Rabbi Jonathan P. Slater, quoted in Comins, Mike, Making Prayer Real: Leading Jewish Spiritual Voices on Why Prayer is Difficult and What to Do about it, page 41